Well, ok, not really. Nermal, if you will remember, is Garfield’s nemesis. He is the self-proclaimed cutest kitten in the world, and Garfield hates him. I don’t blame Garfield, as I’ve always hated Nermal, too. However, he popped into my head the other day when I was ruminating over the word ‘normal’. See, I love words (as is proven by my new title of President Obama’s Word Czarina-ista), but the word ‘normal’ has always been an anathema to me. It, along with its cousins,’mainstream’, ‘traditional’, and ‘ordinary’ have always eluded my grasp.
As a child, I wanted to fit in and be normal. I lived in the suburbs of MN, and I wanted to be white and have blond hair. To that end, I wore a powder blue knit sweater and feathered my bangs for my senior year picture in high school. I looked awful, but I was too dense (and too desperate) to know it.
When I went off to college, I decided that I could be anyone I wanted to be. This included starting to dress more funkily and to wear mismatching earrings. I got my hair cut every break from college, and I started piercing my ears every time I was bored. I went to St. Olaf College, where you had to submit a picture to get in. It was white-bread in every way, and I mean every. I had no hope of fitting in, so I decided to not even bother trying.
When I entered St. Olaf, I had never drank, never smoked, never had sex, never toked up, never did drugs, and I was a Christian. So, despite the funky exterior, I was pretty mainstream inside. Except, I never really believed in the Christian god–no matter how much I tried to talk myself into believing a guy with a white beard sits up in the sky judging every thought I had and every action I did (or didn’t do).
I spent many years being intensely angry at god and religion, but I have made my (relative) peace with it. The other shit, however, not so much.
I had an interesting dream the other night about two mothers and their sons. Both the mothers are about my age, and both the sons are in their late teens. One of the mother/son combos, we find out at the end of the dream (and yes, my dreams are like movies) have had an incestuous relationship for many years. This is presented as an aside, right before learning that said son has just murdered said mother. The second mother has just opened the bedroom door to the first mother’s bedroom, and there is the son with a look of rage on his face. He turns to the second mother, and we know that he plans to sexually assault her and then murder her, too.
Pretty freaky stuff, right? Well, when it is distilled and broken down, the message is pretty clear. When you create a constructed ‘normal’ reality, it can get violent, ugly, and dangerous in the end. In other words, it’s like the last eight years of living under W. and Cheney. There was this constructed ‘normal’ reality that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, that there was a link between Hussein and bin Laden, and that we should shop to prove our patriotism.
When it was proven that Hussein did not have WMDs, everybody from pundits on down were crying out, “How could we have known?” Um, I fucking knew there weren’t any, and I don’t get paid to know these things. See, I never bought into that particular created ‘normal’ reality, so it was astounding to me when so many people did.
This is the same way I feel about Christianity, marriage, and much of American society in general. I don’t buy into the premise at all, so any time anyone wants to argue the merits of said issue, I can’t even get to the same starting point. Let’s take Christianity and morality. I don’t believe in the Christian god. I just don’t. So, for Christians to base all their decisions on the Bible and their belief in what God has or hasn’t said is meaningless to me. It would be like me saying I base my decisions on how my cats react in any given minute. It may work for me, but it’s certainly not universal, nor really viable to anyone else.
I also take issue with the idea that you need god in your life to be a moral person. I mean, if you need the threat of being punished foreverafter in order for you to do the right thing, then how moral are you, really? I will stack up my morals with that of any rightwingnutter, any day.
As for marriage, my mom is here on a visit. She asked me if I’ve reconsidered marriage. I looked at her as if she’d spoken Taiwanese (which she hadn’t). Reconsidered marriage? Why? It is so far outside my reality, I can’t even construe what a ‘normal’ marriage would look like.
Ok. This is getting long-winded, but I’m reaching my point. I wept for joy when Obama was elected for a variety of reasons, but a main reason was that for once, my idea of ‘normal’ was (somewhat) validated. Someone who wasn’t himself, normal, in several senses of the word, had gotten elected to lead our country.
The sense of isolation I’ve felt my entire life has been slightly mitigated with the return to the left of center for our society. I can use big words again and not be afraid! I can read my graphic novels because the president collects comic books. I can be a *gasp* liberal and not be hang and quartered for it. Granted, I am even further left than is Obama, and he is married and Christian, but it’s a start.
The ‘normal’ reality that has been constructed and ossified over the past eight years (really, thirty years, with eight years of a semi-break when Clinton was president) has been violently shattered, and we have to move on in a less ‘normal’ way.
Back to my intro using Nermal. First of all, I still hate him. Garfield still hates him. I love the strip because it shows how much Garfield ‘loves’ Nermal. I am nermal, however, which is as close to normal as I’m going to get. That’s good enough for my constructed reality right now.
P.S. I have tried to find the song, Freaks, from Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but I can’t find the video on YouTube. Listen to it if you have the soundtrack. It really fits.
P.P.S. If these women are how ‘normal’ women are supposed to act, then I want to revoke my gender membership.
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