Sunday, January 20, 2008

Revelations while watching a DVD

So we were watching a Dresden Dolls DVD, and, per usual, Amanda was making all kinds of complicated grimaces while singing and playing on the piano. I saw her face, and said "I want to live there". However, I didn't mean it in the usual sense. She lives in a world of complicated, dark beauty where artistry reigns unchallenged and crazy is the law of the land. I want to just let my creativity and chaos run and see what happens. I want to live in a "world" where I can be me: dark, cynical, complicated and sparkly almost all the time. I want to know what I can do when I use everything I have and everything I am and don't accept anything less than 150%.
The real world has no time for 150% and doesn't understand people who strive for it above all things. It wants someone who can produce reasonable quality results as quickly as possible. It wants someone who will fill a mold.
I'm not that person, and, some days, I get tired of trying to be that person. I want to be me. I know most people just suck it up and live in the real world day to day and live in crazy-land as a hobby. I just want to know why I should strain and strive to be mediocre in a normal job and a normal life, when I could be amazing if I lived in a cave and worked on whatever idea came into my head--be it a dance, a song, a music video, a teaching curriculum, a form for an office, etc.
Yes, I sound like a whiny emo goth fag, and I won't deny it. I may sound like I want to be lazy and use being a whiny emo goth fag as an excuse to get out of doing any real work. This isn't true. I work really damn hard at everything I do. I want to be excellent at everything I do. However, this rarely works out because the task and I just don't fit. I would love to be able to say "Here I am and this is what I have, and if you don't like it, I don't care; I'm going back to my cave to make something else amazing." I just want to be able to say "here I am, and here's what I can do, and here's how I like to do it", and have someone say "wonderful!" instead of "okay, well that's not fast enough and we really don't like to do things that way and, by the way, do you have experience herding goats through the himalayas because we have to do that quite often here even though we're not goat herders and we live in the middle of Alabama."
I know that I can improve my skills and learn how to herd goats and stop being a perfectionist and stop being a whiny cunt when a co-worker points out a problem, but, all that aside, most days I would rather be a brilliant crazy person than a passable social worker who can herd goats.

Yeah, I definitely want to live there.

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