Archetypical

QOTE:

“What’s his type? Wilting flower? Bright and bubbly? Or smoldering temptress?”

- Nicole Kidman, Moulin Rouge!

Some of the more interesting templates for characters that I personally wouldn’t mind being:

1. The mysterious stranger who cryptically leaves messages and clues, giving the impression that he knows much more than he is letting on.

2. The dark shadow in an alleyway, always one step ahead of the protagonist and an ever present yet unknown threat.

3. The tormented anti-hero, tortured by his shadowy past and haunted by decisions he was forced to make in years past.

4. The starving generic creative mind, thrust from her mere struggle for survival into a journey that may decide the very fate of the world.

5. The genius criminal mastermind, able to elude capture and commit heinous acts of criminal activity through sheer intellect.

6. That girl in the last entry.

Present Predicament

QOTE:

“I’m not even supposed to be here. I’m just ‘Crewman Number Six.’ I’m expendable. I’m the guy in the episode who dies to prove how serious the situation is.”

- Sam Rockewll, Galaxy Quest

The other day I was contemplating buying a gift for a professor who’s had to put up with my lackluster performance in semesters past. Then I came upon the unfortunate realization that I didn’t really know anything about said professor’s interests outside of the course material. Now, I’m not above the generic “I-have-no-idea-what-you-like-so-here-is-a-random-stylish-yet-practical-mid-priced” gift, but I generally aim for “specific enough so that you know it’s personalized for you, but generic enough that you don’t think that’s the only thing I know about you”. That got me to thinking: I wish I were the guy in the story who pops up in the very beginning and gives the main character(s) some mysterious and seemingly random trinket, simply stating, “You’ll know when to use it”.

Around this point I asked a friend who happended to be with me at the time what character archetype she would be. She seemed a bit puzzled, so I had to explain the aforementioned train of thought to her. She suggested that maybe I should go ahead and do it anyway (in reference to buying a random gift and then telling my professor a cryptic message).

I never did end up getting anything for my dear professor, but I have thought about the whole character archetype thing quite a bit. You can only have so many combinations of personality traits and plot contrivances, yet somehow new bestsellers and blockbusters are still “created”. Of course, this isn’t due to new stories being told so much as old stories being told in different ways and the size of the budget for special effects. Besides, people don’t really want new stories; they want to see the same thing they’ve seen time and time again (*cough* Kingdom of the Crystal Skull *cough*) and read the same things they’ve before (I’d imagine this probably applies to any book in the romance genre; also, Jim Davis). Curse you, franchises!

Next time: Character archetypes I wouldn’t mind being

Drowzee

QOTE: “Fatigue is the best pillow.”

~ Benjamin Franklin

Yesterday I wrote and presented a report on two hours of sleep. The day immediately prior, I wrote 32 pages of gibberish on three. The effects of this haphazard lifestyle didn’t appear to be catching up to me… until I noticed my cell blazing a trail through the night sky. I then proceeded to spend several minutes waving it across my face just to bask in the afterglow of a screen as piercingly bright as a comet entering the atmosphere, leaving cosmic dust in its wake.

Then I got home, glanced over a text I got, and called someone else because I read in my mind a message I had received three weeks ago. The text I read in my mind told me to call the person up as soon as I got the chance, complete with name and callback number. The real text I got was from someone completely different and only had one word: “Bertha”.

Then I barricaded the cat in the laundry room and ate some three day old chunky peanut butter raisin honey oatmeal. T’was a good night.

Other things happened, but now that I think about it I’m not sure whether they occurred in reality or were pure figments of my imagination. It’s hard enough to tell what’s real and what isn’t without your brain randomly making stuff up and imposing it on your senses.

Andalusia by ~vitrolux on deviantART

Reality Check

The other day I was walking through a field and stepped into a hole in the ground. If my life were more fantastical, I would have lurched into another dimension… say, Wonderland or Narnia… where I would proceed to have many and extraordinary escapades with a peculiar group of helpful locals. If my life were more novel-esque, I would have (at the very least) caught my foot, fallen on my face, broken my ankle, and then conveniently met a main character or two. If my life were more science fiction-ey, I would have been grabbed by an as yet undiscovered symbiotic being that would proceed to bind itself to my big toe and bestow mutant powers while greatly amplifying aggression and initiating an exponential spiral into madness. Instead, I spent about half a second recovering from a stumble, and then proceeded on my way.

Every day is filled with little incidents like this. The potential for abnormality is there, but that alternative is rarely taken. The next time I trip, I’m going to see if I can’t charm a passerby into being my faithful sidekick.

QOTE:

“I don’t quite know yet,” Alice said very gently. “I should like to have a look all round me first, if I might.”

“You may look in front of you, and on both sides, if you like,” said the Sheep; “but you can’t look all round you – unless you’ve got eyes in the back of your head.”

- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

Unique Anonymity

QOTE: “anonymous:

The Prince of Thousand Faces,
The Unforgiving Demon of /b/,
The Vindictive One.
You got the point?”

- http://www.urbandictionary.com/

As a general rule of thumb, I don’t post anything that could potentially single me out from the crowd of thousands upon millions of anonymous names on this grand conglomeration of information known as the Internet. Behind your veil of firewalls and false proxies, you can impose your unique (…?) opinions and life experiences with impunity. With the Internet, you are who you choose to be.

I’ve realized that I have been guilty of these charges on more than one (read: very, very, many) occasions. Since then, I’ve realized that nothing in any given person’s life is unique. People want to be special; they want to feel as if they live life in a way known only to an elite few, if any. But how unique can one person be in a world of 6,648,921,407 (and counting) human beings? Similarly, coincidences don’t exist. Hear enough of a person’s life story and you will inevitably find strangely (?) overlapping events between your life and theirs. This in no way implies that you are star cross’d lovers or soul mates or any such similar idealistic predestined couple.

That being said, I think I’ll start breaking my rule of thumb with increasing intensity (read: more), starting with this fact:

People say I mumble some things. This isn’t entirely true; I am in actuality engaging in an aside. Pretty silly, eh? But hey, you never know. You could be on candid camera. You could be being spied upon. You could be living in a universe only existing in your mind. On the off chance that any or all of these are the case, wouldn’t you want your unique* (*see above) life to take the convenient form of a play so others can reenact it when you’re dead and gone? Of course, this doesn’t really apply to you if you’re reading this, seeing as how you can’t hear me mumble (but that’s what the parentheses are for).

P.S. The world population has gone up by 3,308 since I first typed it.

Foppotee

There’s a lot of pressure when starting a new blog. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, to reveal yourself in new and different ways. You’re allowed to establish afresh how you want to portray yourself, and (perhaps more importantly to some) how you wish others to perceive you.

Pretty heavy stuff to consider, eh? Especially when there are so many choices to pick from… should I go with the open source fanatic? (p.s. WordPress is open source.) Or the zany sarcastic one-line master? The deep and insightful erudite introvert? The confident confidant? None of the above? Verily I say to thee, there are as many facets to one’s personality as there are colors of the wind.

In the end, I’ve settled for what best describes me: a mere foppotee telling a simple tale. But in the end, aren’t we all?

Quote of the Entry (QOTE): “foppotee – n, 1663-1663. Simpleton. What a pitiful foppotee he was, always oblivious to our jeers!”

- http://phrontistery.info/, “Compendium of Lost Words”