"Let The Right One In"
When I was about 12, I started to develop the personal and emotional skills, or rather, shortcomings, that paved the road to antisocial, Asperger-like behavior that I would soon awkwardly stumble on. I'm unable to pinpoint an exact catalyst that led me to this harmlessly deviant lifestyle, but I'm privy to a few reasons: First, my parents had just divorced, leaving me to choose weekdays with my mother and a lifestyle of guilt and torment with my father. Also, I was just starting intermediate school, a phase in my life that underwent the roughest of transitions by basically challenging everything I knew, or at least thought I knew, about my friends, and the circumstances in which a person was considered acceptable by pocket-social standards.
After encountering the unfamiliar spectres of friend after friend making the unsure attempt of reaching that little peak of mental acuity we Americans like to call "maturity", something in me snapped. Not "snapped" as in a seizure or any kind of breakdown, but just, I reacted. Subconsciously, now that I look back. As the people around me adjusted to their self-imposed new imagos of maturity, I regressed. I developed an interest in the strange labyrinthine lyrics of Smashing Pumpkins and Tori Amos. In addition, I started up a morbid fascination with the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, an author, apocalyptic at his worst and nihilistic at his best, who wrote about the uncertainty of that ultimate truth mankind is unable to face. Lots of his stories dealt with people going insane, or seeing weird shit, with most of the things happening to them being attributed to some sinister cosmic influence, incomprehensible in it's evil and scope. Some of his other stories were a result of his love of Lord Dunsany's works, long overblown couplets of fallen grandeur and ravaged splendor. Make no mistake, H.P. Lovecraft's writing was bat-shit insane. And I loved every bit of it.
I never openly shared my hobbies to the coterie of people I kept as friends at the time, because, honestly, I never saw the point. My friends were nice enough not to give me a hard time about my joys and hobbies, but they were never open-minded enough to not potentially shatter my little sphere of protection through constant teasing, should I had ever made my hobbies apparent. Through my books and music, I had a little escape, a getaway I could take in my best or worst of moods. Via Tori Amos' virtually impregnable stronghold of metaphors and H.P. Lovecraft's bleak viewpoint of man's fate written in the stars, I was both invigorated and isolated in this tiny imaginary multiverse of my own creation that I couldn't explain to other people. Then again, it wasn't anybody's fault that I couldn't do so: I had already rejected their truth just as I expected they would reject mine.
The interesting thing about my life, at the time, was the fact that I was a straddler of all lines. I was nerdy and geeky, but still had enough pop-culture savvy to carry on "meaningful" conversations with classmates. In the above example, my friends were neither the cool kids on campus nor the outcasts.
Conversely, I was never bullied at school, but I had a fair share of subtle tormentors, each of their minimalistic forms of cruelty coming and going as swiftly and surely as traffic on any other day. The person who knocked over my can of Cactus Cooler and heartily laughed, "Sorry, dude." The guy who bypassed paper towels in the bathroom and decided to use the hood on my sweater to wipe his hands. All of these nameless faces, each so careless yet seemingly calculating in their apparent meanness, all served to challenge my idealism, much in the way daily news does to me now.
I've always been an idealistic person from the onset of my mental awareness, as I am now. This is a dangerous thing. Idealistic people carry within their iron-girded minds a pitch-perfect worldview of how society and the people around them should act. This idea, in turn, emanates from a Sesame Street-engendered view of utopia, innocent yet deep in hope for a better world that stands a chance of not imploding on itself. And this view? It starts with our parents telling us to look people in the eyes and smile when meeting them for the first time. It is cultivated when our friend forgets to bring lunch money and we break off half of our turkey swiss sandwich without even thinking. It receives validation when we give up our seat on the subway to an elderly gentleman, and the gentleman smiles, nods, and graciously thanks us for our kindness. It is so goddamn fucking simple to the idealistic person, and unfathomable to various degrees: why can't other people be this way? Why?
It's the fixation on the "why?", and not the "how" that led me to numerous emotional pitfalls during the beginning of my teenage years. I felt alone in a world that operated on MTV and Airwalk sneakers, the headbanging youth of America in direct competition for individuality by scrambling to meet the same criteria of acceptance of those around them, and forever locked in a ouroborosian circle of eatting and then shitting themselves and those around their circle of destruction. It was when I articulated this thought in my mind that I suddenly craved karmic revenge on even the smallest of infractions exacted upon me in such precise, targeted measures all of those years by people I never crossed or said a mean word about. I craved blood.
I wanted to break the fingers that nudged me on the forehead because someone was too occupied to say "excuse me" or, even, "move." I wanted to stab the tender white-bordered flesh of those unprotected eyes that stared me down with such random hatred and menace, the glare itself an indication of someone doing something simply because he knew he could. On random occasions, I wanted to take a meat cleaver, cut through the spinal cord, larynx, and various strips of meat and sinew that attached the head to the neck, and stand in the middle of the quad with a random dipshit's head held firmly in my left hand and the still-bloody cleaver in my right. I was that precise in my revenge fantasies because that was how much I hated, and still hate, these people that made my world that much of a less nicer place to wake up to every morning.
I hated the people who took it upon themselves to brand people as "poseurs" and "dickless." I hated the senselessness of it. I hated the contagious effect it was having on people, creating new creatures that preyed on the suffering and inadequacies of others. I hated the lazy excuses people were using to mask cruelty and harmful insensitivity under the guise of reckless youth, and worse, phases. And most importantly, I hated that I could do nothing about it.
Now, as we fast-forward about 13-14 years in incoherent narrative, I'm in a different place. I'm more or less settled in my comfortable niche. I have a great family back home in the United States, and a pretty awesome family here. I deeply and sincerely love my wife, and she deeply and sincerely loves me. I'm not too crazy about my job, but I've since managed to use it as a learning experience in testing my limits and the things I am capable of even under professional duress. Also, to say that I'm now more emotionally stable and mature is an understatement. I managed to turn my antisocial and regressive behavior and turn it into this brand of wry, acerbic sarcastic cynicism that I have yet to make a cent from (see what I mean?). For the first time in my life, I can say I am happy, possibly blessed.
I wrote about the hopelessness of my teenage years under the guise of a movie review, but then again, that isn't entirely true. I was prompted to write this because, to speak in the frankest of terms, Let The Right One In, shook me in a profound way. I was moved to tears at the end of the movie, both terrified to a silent chill and comforted by that bittersweet nostalgia the pain of adolescence oftentimes brings. Beneath my horror and exasperation laid an understanding that could both relate to and support the passive rage boiling within Oskar, the troubled protagonist of the movie, as I could also share in the delightful, nightmarish pain of Eli's tormented isolation. Strip away the entire vampire element and you're left with a movie that is, at it's core, about the relationships that seem to spring even within our most hopeless of times. While the bleak violence that surrounds Oskar and Eli is anything but pure, I found it chillingly and soberly beautiful that the relationship, and later, love, between them is perhaps one of the most pure and innocent kinships ever committed to film.
This is where Oskar and I are different: I never had an Eli during my teenage years, and my wife is anything but. Nature and nurture are two seemingly important but ultimately random factors that decide a person's fate in an increasingly contextual world. I wonder, then, what kind of person I would've been like had had I met and bonded with a force of nature such as Eli in my youth. I wonder, what kind of expression would I have worn on my face as I emerged out of the swimming pool? My god. I can only guess.
When I was about 12, I started to develop the personal and emotional skills, or rather, shortcomings, that paved the road to antisocial, Asperger-like behavior that I would soon awkwardly stumble on. I'm unable to pinpoint an exact catalyst that led me to this harmlessly deviant lifestyle, but I'm privy to a few reasons: First, my parents had just divorced, leaving me to choose weekdays with my mother and a lifestyle of guilt and torment with my father. Also, I was just starting intermediate school, a phase in my life that underwent the roughest of transitions by basically challenging everything I knew, or at least thought I knew, about my friends, and the circumstances in which a person was considered acceptable by pocket-social standards.
After encountering the unfamiliar spectres of friend after friend making the unsure attempt of reaching that little peak of mental acuity we Americans like to call "maturity", something in me snapped. Not "snapped" as in a seizure or any kind of breakdown, but just, I reacted. Subconsciously, now that I look back. As the people around me adjusted to their self-imposed new imagos of maturity, I regressed. I developed an interest in the strange labyrinthine lyrics of Smashing Pumpkins and Tori Amos. In addition, I started up a morbid fascination with the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, an author, apocalyptic at his worst and nihilistic at his best, who wrote about the uncertainty of that ultimate truth mankind is unable to face. Lots of his stories dealt with people going insane, or seeing weird shit, with most of the things happening to them being attributed to some sinister cosmic influence, incomprehensible in it's evil and scope. Some of his other stories were a result of his love of Lord Dunsany's works, long overblown couplets of fallen grandeur and ravaged splendor. Make no mistake, H.P. Lovecraft's writing was bat-shit insane. And I loved every bit of it.
I never openly shared my hobbies to the coterie of people I kept as friends at the time, because, honestly, I never saw the point. My friends were nice enough not to give me a hard time about my joys and hobbies, but they were never open-minded enough to not potentially shatter my little sphere of protection through constant teasing, should I had ever made my hobbies apparent. Through my books and music, I had a little escape, a getaway I could take in my best or worst of moods. Via Tori Amos' virtually impregnable stronghold of metaphors and H.P. Lovecraft's bleak viewpoint of man's fate written in the stars, I was both invigorated and isolated in this tiny imaginary multiverse of my own creation that I couldn't explain to other people. Then again, it wasn't anybody's fault that I couldn't do so: I had already rejected their truth just as I expected they would reject mine.
The interesting thing about my life, at the time, was the fact that I was a straddler of all lines. I was nerdy and geeky, but still had enough pop-culture savvy to carry on "meaningful" conversations with classmates. In the above example, my friends were neither the cool kids on campus nor the outcasts.
Conversely, I was never bullied at school, but I had a fair share of subtle tormentors, each of their minimalistic forms of cruelty coming and going as swiftly and surely as traffic on any other day. The person who knocked over my can of Cactus Cooler and heartily laughed, "Sorry, dude." The guy who bypassed paper towels in the bathroom and decided to use the hood on my sweater to wipe his hands. All of these nameless faces, each so careless yet seemingly calculating in their apparent meanness, all served to challenge my idealism, much in the way daily news does to me now.I've always been an idealistic person from the onset of my mental awareness, as I am now. This is a dangerous thing. Idealistic people carry within their iron-girded minds a pitch-perfect worldview of how society and the people around them should act. This idea, in turn, emanates from a Sesame Street-engendered view of utopia, innocent yet deep in hope for a better world that stands a chance of not imploding on itself. And this view? It starts with our parents telling us to look people in the eyes and smile when meeting them for the first time. It is cultivated when our friend forgets to bring lunch money and we break off half of our turkey swiss sandwich without even thinking. It receives validation when we give up our seat on the subway to an elderly gentleman, and the gentleman smiles, nods, and graciously thanks us for our kindness. It is so goddamn fucking simple to the idealistic person, and unfathomable to various degrees: why can't other people be this way? Why?
It's the fixation on the "why?", and not the "how" that led me to numerous emotional pitfalls during the beginning of my teenage years. I felt alone in a world that operated on MTV and Airwalk sneakers, the headbanging youth of America in direct competition for individuality by scrambling to meet the same criteria of acceptance of those around them, and forever locked in a ouroborosian circle of eatting and then shitting themselves and those around their circle of destruction. It was when I articulated this thought in my mind that I suddenly craved karmic revenge on even the smallest of infractions exacted upon me in such precise, targeted measures all of those years by people I never crossed or said a mean word about. I craved blood.
I wanted to break the fingers that nudged me on the forehead because someone was too occupied to say "excuse me" or, even, "move." I wanted to stab the tender white-bordered flesh of those unprotected eyes that stared me down with such random hatred and menace, the glare itself an indication of someone doing something simply because he knew he could. On random occasions, I wanted to take a meat cleaver, cut through the spinal cord, larynx, and various strips of meat and sinew that attached the head to the neck, and stand in the middle of the quad with a random dipshit's head held firmly in my left hand and the still-bloody cleaver in my right. I was that precise in my revenge fantasies because that was how much I hated, and still hate, these people that made my world that much of a less nicer place to wake up to every morning.I hated the people who took it upon themselves to brand people as "poseurs" and "dickless." I hated the senselessness of it. I hated the contagious effect it was having on people, creating new creatures that preyed on the suffering and inadequacies of others. I hated the lazy excuses people were using to mask cruelty and harmful insensitivity under the guise of reckless youth, and worse, phases. And most importantly, I hated that I could do nothing about it.
Now, as we fast-forward about 13-14 years in incoherent narrative, I'm in a different place. I'm more or less settled in my comfortable niche. I have a great family back home in the United States, and a pretty awesome family here. I deeply and sincerely love my wife, and she deeply and sincerely loves me. I'm not too crazy about my job, but I've since managed to use it as a learning experience in testing my limits and the things I am capable of even under professional duress. Also, to say that I'm now more emotionally stable and mature is an understatement. I managed to turn my antisocial and regressive behavior and turn it into this brand of wry, acerbic sarcastic cynicism that I have yet to make a cent from (see what I mean?). For the first time in my life, I can say I am happy, possibly blessed.
I wrote about the hopelessness of my teenage years under the guise of a movie review, but then again, that isn't entirely true. I was prompted to write this because, to speak in the frankest of terms, Let The Right One In, shook me in a profound way. I was moved to tears at the end of the movie, both terrified to a silent chill and comforted by that bittersweet nostalgia the pain of adolescence oftentimes brings. Beneath my horror and exasperation laid an understanding that could both relate to and support the passive rage boiling within Oskar, the troubled protagonist of the movie, as I could also share in the delightful, nightmarish pain of Eli's tormented isolation. Strip away the entire vampire element and you're left with a movie that is, at it's core, about the relationships that seem to spring even within our most hopeless of times. While the bleak violence that surrounds Oskar and Eli is anything but pure, I found it chillingly and soberly beautiful that the relationship, and later, love, between them is perhaps one of the most pure and innocent kinships ever committed to film.This is where Oskar and I are different: I never had an Eli during my teenage years, and my wife is anything but. Nature and nurture are two seemingly important but ultimately random factors that decide a person's fate in an increasingly contextual world. I wonder, then, what kind of person I would've been like had had I met and bonded with a force of nature such as Eli in my youth. I wonder, what kind of expression would I have worn on my face as I emerged out of the swimming pool? My god. I can only guess.
No comments:
Post a Comment