am i doing this right?

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Sometimes i think i’m really not so well cut out to be a human being-like maybe this just isn’t the right gig for me. Maybe i would be better at, say, vampire or wizard or superhero. Something that comes with a tradecard-sized summary of strengths and weaknesses that will always hold true unless their very temporary failure is somehow essential to a brief and somewhat predictable plot; something with a clearly defined and reasonably, though not oppressively limited role in the big, but recognizable picture. i could have compadres with equally useful, but not overlapping contributions to make to the achievement of some finite goal that we would all feel good about when we returned to status quo to await the next big adventure. Our contribution to humanity would be clear and we would never have to ask ourselves whether we were doing the right thing because, obviously, if we were using our superpowers to promote good and defeat evil-which would come conveniently packaged in a villain or natural disaster and would NEVER encroach on our own beings-we would be on the right track and whatever Powers might be would be pleased with us and give us a High-Five.

Instead i’m here and regular human and all the things that define heroes and villains are all mixed up in my single self, avoiding each other at all costs, and, while i recognize that this is true for all of us, i feel from time to time like i’m just not doing it right. i can’t seem to distinguish anything and i’m never really sure whether i’m doing God’s will (the right thing) or if i’m really fucking something, or worse someone, up because i can’t see the big picture because i am just a silly, earthbound civilian. And while people around me seem to engage with this circumstance, albeit with widely varying degrees of cognizance and success, i am not really confident that i am engaging at all. i’m thinking about it quite a lot and i often get excited about the whole project, or the idea of it. But on the ground, few things really mean anything specific to me and i can’t seem to get a handle on the whole feelings thing. It’s not (as some might argue) that i don’t feel or that nothing means anything to me. Quite the opposite. Well, not the opposite, but i do have feelings, though they tend not to be strong enough to effect my behavior, and i find that people and some other things are very important in my life, but that importance doesn’t really seem to have any direct relationship to how i value them.

On good days, all this simply seems like a perfectly reasonable and balanced nature – laid back, detached, pragmatic – and i have often been praised for my ability to remain objective in almost any situation. On other days, i’m faced with the reality that, while i may know that i care about someone or something personally, when that caring does not translate into action of some predetermined kind, peoples’ feelings get hurt. It is on days like these that i feel most inept at being human. On the worst days, i long to be something else – a resident in some simpler and much more finely elucidated world. When i first started watching Dexter, i thought i might be a serial killer [objectively, i find the possibility of perceiving one way of being in so many different ways linguistically remarkable and hope to address it and Dexter further when my head feels a bit straighter]. But then i didn’t kill anyone and, more importantly, had no desire to do so. Even when people really suck, i would much rather them just stop sucking than fall victim to my inhuman wrath. As it happens, these things prove equally unlikely as sucky people rarely experience sudden turnarounds and i don’t think i have experienced even the preliminary stages of wrath in my adult life. Irritation seems to be about as far as it goes. Perplexity is far more common-as it is with Dexter the serial killer. But not to worry (about me killing someone, anyway), that seems to be all we have in common.

All this to say that i always feel a severe uneasiness whenever i post anything that addresses anyone besides myself (see: can we STOP?) because i’m not at all convinced that i’m any good at this being human thing and am exponentially unconvinced that i am in any position to suggest to others how they should go about it. Nevertheless, understandings seem to come that seem true and i am left with the literally agonizing question of whether and how to express them in the face of my experience of ineptitude. This seems to find two solutions – either i go back to writing about myself (as witnessed here) or i continue with uncertain nervousness to try to say what i think (John Amir Abbassi seems to fall victim to this method frequently. He humors me very kindly and doesn’t interrupt me when i get too busy tripping over my ill-conceived ideas to properly engage in conversation. Thanks, friend.) Ironically, it is probably only my desire to be something besides human that has me be so uncomfortable with the pitfalls of humanness in the first place. Just another way Buffy has led me to hell (see also “The Trappings of Fiction”).

i once hoped that all this confusion probably meant that i was a genius (which is a kind of superhero, hmm?) but having been in the company of geniuses i have had to accept that this is not the case and that i may simply be lame or broken or, more likely, cheating or misunderstanding the rules (i seem to score with inexplicable regularity). But then, maybe this is all just part of the game and i’m playing just fine, or even well.  If that’s the case, though, it sure would be helpful if i could sometimes just get that High-Five.

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