Barbies and ducklings...

Pen and paper what an original thought, I started writing this on good old paper with a shiny black pen. The problem with pen and paper is like so many things in this world today, no one REALLY uses them anymore. Earlier this evening as I sat in my grey cubicle in my grey work environment, I wondered if other people feel like I do when they sit down to their cubicles full of germs and proceed to be someone else for 8 hours a day. Do they look at the people around them and think : How many of these people actually are who they wanted to be? Do they conclude each time, as I do, that in a room of 100 maybe 10 are actually happy and that those ten are only happy because they became part of the machine too long ago to remember who they wanted to be. Does anyone else wonder what the other 89 people are doing there?


On day one of this particular journey one of the 10 made the statement "You can always change who you are! So why not change?". With energy and true belief in what they were saying this person made this statement and had it not been in reference to using fake empathy and keeping a smile in your voice when answering a phone it might have been inspiring, refreshing even. In the context it was used it only made me sad to think that anyone could feel pretending to be glad someone called to pay a bill or sorry they we're having trouble with anything, was a good way to keep people happy. Realistically its just another way to keep people in their place. Not so much the smile in your voice crap, but the false empathy is a tactic that makes me vommit a little in my mouth each time I hear it, pretty much anywhere in life. In the context it was made this statement of change made me want to get up and run fast and far for something, anything a little more real and a little less bullshit, if only the bills paid themselves.

Apply this "Why not change" thought process to other things in our lives and suddenly we are the 8 hours a day we spend in someone elses crockpot. Suddenly we're all exactly the same, on the outside atleast and what good does it do any one of us if we all appear the same? This in itself spawns an entirely new dilema for me. If we all changed into the people we wanted to be, would we really be any happier? If the supermodel and the entrepreuner, the writer/worldtraveler and the dad and family man, ever became these people they so desperately wanted or claimed or wanted and claimed to be , what then? Would they be any fucking happier?

We've become a "why not change" society and this is not a bad thing. Unless you never do it for yourself, unless each change you make is to please the picture other people give you of yourself. Life has no easy fixes, no amount of money can buy you the life you wanted, nothing worth having comes just because you want it to and no one sticks around to watch the toilet flush a good life away. People pop pills to change their brains, their bodies their lives. People make drastic and permanent changes to their outsides. Quickly and quietly they "perfect" their imperfections and move further from who they were born and closer to who they are told by some voice in their head or some dozen voices in some magazine to become. Be thin, be feminine, be blonde, be brunette, have hair, have none, be masculine, be built, be tough! What the hell ever happened to just being yourself? Whatever happened to mind body and soul all working together and keeping us in our place as we were born to be? Not everyone was meant to be the people we're becoming as a society and where did our feet get off to because the ground seems so far from where these quick fixes and vane changes are taking us. While we're all so busy looking at the pretty pictures of who we could be, I wonder if anyone remembers who they ever wanted to be. I also wonder if we don't need to become who we wanted to be more than who they want us to be. If only to keep nature from crumbling from sheer lack of use.

I'm wondering how healthy it could be to change who you are, just because you can. After years of running fast and far from who I am just because it reminded me of who I was, I can't help but think who I want to be is exactly who I need to be. No amount of money or debt, pain or pleasure, love or loss can take away the picture of me I've found. Wherever I'm going, I'll get there eventually and it will be fucking beautiful, I will be fucking beautiful. I wonder will anyone else be there.