While packing my things for San Francisco, I put my few sexuality-oriented belongings -- books, lube, Fleshlight1, etc. -- into my baggage to minimize the frankly terrifying possibility of my parents finding it. I put them in little bags and sandwiched them between layers and layers jackets and ironic t-shirts, then departed in the early morning with Brian2 to the airport. It was a crisp autumn day in late spring, and I was transitioning from a beautiful old place in my life to a shiny new one.
Obviously, the airport people opened it and threw everything around in front of my father.
However, I did manage to board the plane despite arriving 20 minutes before the flight left by utilizing a mixture of bribery and swearing. I might be some sort of sexual beast, but here's to being a tenacious and lucky sexual beast -- in my mind, the best kind of sexual beast to be. I'm writing, as usual, from a plane. The sleeping man on my left is the long-limbed, sprawling kind, and I can feel the scratchy but strangely comforting presence of his hairy arm against mine. The pleasant fat man on my right is reading what appears to be an enthralling white paper about ligands. He's nodding along as he goes, and it cheers me to see somebody who appears to enjoy what he does for a living.
1 I don't really have a Fleshlight3. It just makes me giggle girlishly to write about it.
2 Brian Stack is my father. Yes, I'm one of those hippie kids who calls their parents by their first names.
3 This is basically a synthetic vagina-in-a-can.
On Inspiration, and the Ethics of Style.
Lacking anything better to discuss, allow me to return to canonical LiveJournal form, which is talking about LiveJournal. More specifically, I was thinking about the formation of my writing style. I feel no shame in saying that, while everything I write about comes from the fly-infested, overflowing trash can that is my mind, the way in which I write about it is thoroughly cribbed from other people. When I started getting into writing, I naturally followed the voices that I admired most. I absorbed their styles, employing the same constructions they did until they became part of the subconscious process.
So, I'd like to hear your writing inspirations, online and not. Who is it that you latched onto, limpet-like? Or are you really such a revolutionary that you have been influenced by nobody?
For my part, I remember being influenced hugely by Lex in junior high, then getting into Toastyfrog and SolidSharkey, then Erik from Old Man Murray. (The gamez crowd.) More recently, I've been stealing from Tim Rogers and Mario. Non-Internet people include Annie Dillard, John D'Agata, and, obviously, Dave Eggers.
Transitioning into my next topic a little bit here, each of the Internet celebrities above has their own little cult following. For example, everyone on Sharkey's forum writes exactly like Sharkey, except they're less good at being Sharkey than Sharkey is. I think the thing about having a "distinctive voice" is, actually, two things: you can either be born an extremely idiosynchratic individual, or you can be a sponge and soak it up from other people. In the latter case, you should be flexible enough to learn from several sources, or else you really do become a, well, a robot. There's a thick line between being a robot and being someone who can learn from a whole bunch of other people to make your life more interesting. In our postmodern world, everything is about remixing everything else.
A Moral Question.
I've got an extremely minor moral quibble that I'd like to raise for discussion. Is it fair for a liberal, freethinking person to cast judgment upon some communities but not others? For example, I'm always swatting down my AzIaN fRiEnDz' comments about gay homosexuals, and I make a point of arguing fruitlessly with my parents when they say something silly about black people. (It is a poorly-kept secret that Asian immigrants are moderately racist, although, in my experience, they're willing to make exceptions for their friends.) On the other hand, I think furries are deviants and I have a really hard time taking seriously anyone who uses *emotes*, or ::emotes::, or ^_^ faces, or, alternatively, [emotes], in their writing. On the other hand, we can't help who we are.
LiveJournal, am I a hypocrite? Please discuss.
Epilogue.
Back to real-life matters, then. Freshly graduated, I've spent the last whatever bumming around at home. I'm moving to San Francisco to work for a company you've heard of whose name I will not disclose for fear of being dooced. I'm living with a close friend from college, but we cannot move in until July; until then, I'll be bouncing between her parents' place and my brother's.
Dream catchers, I hope your life is eventful this week. |
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
kadigan's journal