Thursday 3 January 2013

Influences

I don't like to think of myself as easily influenced - none of us do - but when I look at it objectively, I'm pretty easy to push around if you know what you're doing. Take, for instance, my personal habits and state of mind compared to the TV shows I'm watching. When we were watching a lot of Psych, I was profiling strangers on the train, noticing things like cat hairs on their shirts, chipped nail polish, and cheap shoes with an expensive bag. When we were catching up on shows like The Big Bang Theory, Bones, Alphas or anything else with someone a bit socially awkward and literal, or flat-out autistic, I became much more stubbornly literal too. Now that we've started Burn Notice from the beginning, I'm eating yoghurt. When I first saw Terminator 2 in high school, I spent weeks perfecting an imitation of Robert Patrick's running style, and I learned the Verbal Kint cripple shuffle from The Usual Suspects, too.

So all it really takes is showing me something kind of cool, or some way to be different by copying something else. Sometimes it's as if I don't have a personality of my own, just a bunch of random habits and quirks that I picked up from TV, movies and friends. Even my writing style starts to take on similar traits to the authors I'm reading at the time. My love of movies and my zombie obsession were borrowed from coworkers and an ongoing office joke respectively.

Basically, sometimes I wonder if there's anything here that's really me, or if I am just a collection of social pressures and complicated tics.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm just wondering about individuality and conformity.
PPS - Of course, it's unlikely for me to have discovered anything I like on my own.

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