This Is A Title.

First of all, I would like to agree resoundingly with everyone who has expressed confusion about the syllabus and what we are expected to do next. Every time I look at or think about that syllabus I get nauseous. That probably wasn't what y'all wanted to hear, but really, I hope you know how reassuring it was to find out that I'm not the only one who's confused. Moving onto Ramage:

As Jamie said before, reading the section on identity shredded my belief in individuality, but I'm used to that. There's this certain tone that will do it for me every time. The first time this happened, I had to think pretty hard about the ramifications, and what I could do about them, or accept the idea of myself as an easily manipulated drone. The thoughts I had then fit in with what I felt Ramage was saying now, so I jotted some of them down. (Apologies for any incoherence.)

The struggle between individuality and conformity plays out in how our society treats people perceived as going to too much of an extreme. If you are exactly perfectly normal, you are boring, and you should take measures to make yourself more interesting. But not too interesting, and not in ways that are not widely socially accepted. In other words, you have to assert your indiduality, just like everybody else. Diane Lane does this when she moves to Italy in Under the Tuscan Sun. Her friends are shocked, shocked, that she would buy a house in Tuscany, but the viewer is not. Nothing about the story is likely to challenge the viewer, or to geniunely offend. Movies written for a young adult audience often show bright-eyed young teens horrifying their parents by leaving the dry, unfulfilling world of chemistry or boxing or classical ballet to do something new, something different...like singing. Or playing in a rock 'n' band. Exactly like every other young rebel in every other young adult movie. Very few stories are told about bored teenagers who reject chemistry in favor of cults, or depressed women who leave behind their stuffy, proper lives to make extremely vague independent films about the mysticism of bees. We are not not supposed to root for people like this...they're weird. All that remains for the would-be rebel is doing safe, widely accepted things that will only be scorned by un-photogenic people that we never really liked anyway.

It was quite depressing for me to think that any reasonable way for me to assert my individuality (and most of the unreasonable ways as well) had already been done countless times before. Ultimately I had to decide that looking at your life relative to other peoples' was as depressing as it got.

Deliberately deciding to do something because everybody else is doing it is sad, but so is choosing not to do something because it's been done. I do try to live in a way that is palatable to the people around me, but I try never to pursue originality for its own sake. Of course, making this decision lands me squarely in another Cultural Readymade (what it's called, I'm not sure), but it's one where I'm comfortable, and it's where I want to be. That is what's most important to me.