Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Lady_Snow
So what happens to the weirdos who are not mainstream? What exactly is mainstream? I'm trying to grasp. What makes a weirdo?
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Not sure. Not sure. Not sure. In that order.
Honestly, I'm not sure how to answer the first question because I'm not certain that I know what a weirdo is. I'm a nerd--as my signature and name show, I let my geek flag fly high and proud--is that mainstream? I would say no. My reading habits, my television preferences are not necessarily what I would call 'mainstream'. Even my choices of recreation--I am a player in one D&D game and I'm the DM in another, for instance--aren't mainstream. So am I a weirdo or am I mainstream?
Do people in the mainstream get all excited because there's some new book on, for instance, the ongoing battle between string theorists and proponents of loop-quantum gravity? Do people in the mainstream own *multiple* copies--in different formats--of just about every word Terry Pratchett has ever written? Do people in the mainstream have a shower curtain that is the periodic table of elements and a poster showing the entire electromagnetic spectrum in the same room as a poster of Audre Lorde and another showing the entire history of the Universe as a single year?
Are the favorite tee-shirts of someone in the mainstream ones that read:
98% Chimp
Come to the Dark Side, we have cookies.
Stand Back, I'm going to try Science!
May the Mass Times Acceleration be with you
I think mainstream and weirdo are rather nebulous terms. To the woman I was in 1991, I would probably appear horribly mainstream (I would still most likely have wanted the toys and would've thought the EMF poster insanely great and would have done just about anything for the tee shirts while feeling guilty for doing so). To most of the suits (read that as our marketing, sales and legal staff) at my employer I look so far beyond the mainstream that I am at the outer edge of what many of them consider to be human behavior!
Do *I* think I'm in the mainstream? No, for all of the reasons above. Would someone who is more radical than me think I'm mainstream? Probably not and might even put me somewhere in the neighborhood of, say, Dick Cheney on the scale of acceptability.
Cheers
Aj