Positivity

You know what I like a lot right now? I like the Discovery Channel commercial -- the boom-de-yada one. I just can't get it out of my head.

What I like about it is it's nice to hear what someone likes for once. It's great to see some realistic positivity.

It's something I'm not all that good at. For whatever reason I tend to vocalize things I don't like a lot more than I praise things I do like. Sometimes I scare myself. I remind myself of Holden Caulfield quite a lot. There's this warning Mr. Antolini gives Holden, near the end of Catcher in the Rye, where Mr. Antolini says, "It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everyody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.' Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer. I just don't know. But do you know what I'm driving at, at all?"

I differ from Holden in that he tells Mr. Antolini that he only hates people for a short while and then he misses them. I'd have told Mr. Antolini that he's right and I'm terrified of turning thirty and only running into people I don't like, because there's no kind of people left that I do like.

One of my friends once called me "cynically optimistic" and I like that because it seems accurate -- I'm actually pretty idealistic about things, but then I have this cynical streak on the other side of the teeter totter, except that it's a portly little tyke and when he sits down my idealism falls off. The good thing is that the idealistic kid doesn't get flustered all that much. He just gets up and dusts himself off... I'm losing myself in this analogy.

The point is that even though I'm philosophically cynical -- by that I mean I really like to get to the root of things and pretty much ridicule anything that's veneer or superfluous or hyperbole -- even though I'm cynical in an optimistic manner, trusting the good in people and not locking my car doors, I hate myself when I disregard a person because they aren't as cynical as I am.

To tell the truth, I'm really bored by all sorts of scripted speech and I'll say obnoxious things just to say something original. Like Holden, I really can't stand what he calls "phonies" and I sort of say the exact opposite of small talk to avoid acting like a pretentious phony myself. And see there's the catch: when I disregard the phony, I'm being pretentious and phony, just at a higher level. I'm creating my own clique the phony can't join. It's like magnitudes of infinity. Even if somone's entirely exclusive, I can be more exclusive.

I really generally get along with me and like being around me, but the cynic in me sees no reason to exclude people or to waste energy deriding people.

I'd rather talk about what I like. And what I like a lot right now is this video. Watch it. You might like it too.