Response Paper: Deviance

This is my favorite paper that I wrote in college. I wrote it for my sociology class, and after taking the final, my teacher stopped me and told me that this paper was one of the funniest things he's ever read, and that he and his wife read it over and over with tears in their eyes. He said "You're a great writer. Genuinely." Not to oversell myself, but that was a very encouraging experience for me and it's why I care to share a random piece of writing from several years ago. I still think the conclusion is weak, but I wasn't trying very hard to write this, I just had a minimum page requirement to meet. So the fact that it was so well received was even more thrilling.

I am a goody-two-shoes. There's a part of me that feels very rebellious, but the rest of me knows better. My “rebellion” extends to listening to 90's punk bands and thinking about doing things. If I break a rule, it's because I think that a) I have a good reason to, and/or b) I won't upset an authority figure. I have always been that kid. I feel that if I get less than the highest possible grade on any assignment I have personally failed my teachers. They are authority figures, I did something bad, and I should feel bad. I also feel incapable of being deviant. If I have no respect for someone in authority, I will argue with and possibly disobey them, but that is the exception to who I am. I am not deviant. I have difficulty believing that a car can move without my seatbelt being buckled. It's kind of a strange kink of who I am. I will talk about doing rebellious things, but unless I am given the green light by someone in authority, I will rarely do those things. My kind of thrilling deviancy is walking on the grass. You aren't supposed to do that, you know.

When I got this assignment, I actually gasped. Out loud. I would never dream of taking anyone's seat, and I knew that I was having ankle surgery during the time we would be working on these papers, which complicates tall building escapades. This left me with imagining it, or using my hands to eat something. I chose the latter. I found it so devilishly exciting, because I am so profoundly vanilla. It is worth noting that I hate having things on my hands. I love me some french fries, but eating them means rubbing my fingers on my jeans to get the salt off. It drives me crazy. When I was very young I would tentatively play in the mud, and then run inside, frowning, to my mom, hold my hands out, say “dirty!”, and wait for her to clean them. All this added to my excitement to eat something with my hands. Most people don't do that, you know.

The night before I had talked to my sister about my plans, “I'm going to eat pancakes or something with my HANDS! Isn't that crazy?” as I grinned and told her of my planned deviancy, I started to realize how silly it was to get worked up about eating with my hands. How silly it is that someone my age considers syrupy fingers deviant and exciting.

So Easter Sunday, post-surgery, I wheeled into an IHOP with some devilish smirk on my face. Everyone was looking at me, because I was in a wheelchair. Some people kept looking as I very excitedly discussed Portal 2. But slowly, most of them started to look away, onto their own breakfasts or a child making noise. After our food arrived, I almost immediately had to explain myself to my breakfast date. I am completely transparent when I'm up to something. “Ok! So, I....nevermind.” I wanted to keep it a secret and get his response, but of course I suck at that. Some skeptical prodding led to me finally admitting that I had to be deviant for a class and was going to eat my french toast with my hands and wasn't that so crazy? The official response from my companion was a laugh and an eye roll. I tore my french toast into small pieces and dipped them into syrup. The whipped cream and berries caused me wide eyes and giggles because I had to directly touch things that were “messy”. Again, I received smirks from the other side of the table.

We continued talking as we ate, and I tried to surreptitiously observe anyone's reactions to me. Before I did this experiment, I assumed that everyone in the entire world would stare at me. Because who does something so crazy? Eating with your hands. Ridiculous. I looked around for evidence of that, and found the woman seated at the booth next to our table was giving me a disgusted look. Because I have poor impulse control, I loudly and immediately said, “I think that chick hates me.” in order to freak her out and/or make her stop looking. However, further investigation proved that that was just her face, and she was probably looking at me because I kept looking at her.

At the time, our server also seemed a little off-put by my shenanigans. However, looking back on it, I think I was just projecting my own feelings of doing something strange and being afraid of people confronting me.

Other than the wheelchair, I did one other thing that got me many more strange looks than eating without utensils. I stared out the window for a couple of minutes. People started to glare at me. No one was even sitting where I was looking. Why they cared about this, and not my attempt to be deviant, I will never know.

I had expected this assignment to be a great lesson in human behavior, and why innocuous things are considered deviant. For example, there is no law enforcing silverware use, but it is extremely strange for an adult to eat many food items with their hands. I was quite surprised that no one cared, but I think that had a lot to do with the fact that out at an IHOP on Easter Sunday, everyone had bigger things on their mind. Another thing that is frowned upon in society is staring at people who are behaving oddly, and so it is possible that some people noticed and discussed my behavior, but were just stealthy about it. I think that this would have turned out to be a little bit more enlightening if I hadn't told people beforehand that I would be doing this. But in my defense, I assumed everyone on earth would care, judge, and give me things to write about. I was also super excited about being “bad”, if only for an hour or so.

Despite the lack of response by my my fellow restaurant patrons, I did find this very eye-opening. Talking in elevators and eating without “proper” utensils are not inherently bad. They aren't wrong. They're just different. This means that the fact that my sister's boyfriend eats pizza with a knife and fork isn't bad, just different. I think it's weird. But why? It can be a messy food. I have just been socialized differently, and that isn't bad. Another implication of this assignment that I found was that I have no reason to not do some things. So why not talk to cashiers, or change seats? Being deviant is not always the same as being “bad”. If I'm not breaking any laws or moral code, then it is only my self-conscious, goody-two-shoes attitude that is stopping me from walking on grass and climbing trees and having adventures. Because when you are that strange way that I am, adventures can be found in things like french toast.

Greeting Death like an old friend.

Why do we, grown people who should know better, who should know what things make no difference, still hold our breaths when we pass graveyards and make wishes on the tips of our cheesecake?

Or is it just me?

All my life I have been extremely supersitious. I was that kid, battling my own obsessive need to put the arch of my left foot on the crack in the sidewalk with every step, with my terror that I was the reason my mom had back problems. I made wishes on every necklace charm, graveyard, and star that I saw.

As a child, of course, I thought I could pray to Santa. Now that I am an adult,  I have put away childish things.

Mostly.

I still make a lot of wishes, which I guess is silly. But only on things that really make sense, like birthday candles and pie slices and build a bear hearts. And more than anything, I ascribe power to words that they just don't have.

For example. As I'm sure many people have, I have spent the last few years of my life dealing with death. Not coping with the loss of loved ones so much as really wrestling with the idea that someday I am going to die, I and everyone I've ever loved and hated. For a while I chose to stare death in the face, looking at the morbid reality of it all and seeing my friends and family and being able to see that they were just fragile animals, sacks of meat and bone and blood held together by flesh.

My other main strategy was avoidance. Somehow being able to shut my mind to it all....but not quite. Because even with my eyes closed I could feel death looming somewhere. "It may not be today, it certainly wasn't yesterday, but someday when you least expect it, I am coming for you.".

The idea that someone could be unprepared for their death, that a sixteen year old can be killed by a drunk driver on a street I could have been on, is terrifying. I think about that girl all the time. She died one major street away from the street Dan lives off of. And I never take that street. I never have. I almost always turn to go to his house a block north or south of the stretch of road where she was hit. But I've taken it before. And I almost went to Dan's house that night. And there is a possibility, however small, that it could have been me.

I still hold my breath a little bit when I drive past the area where she was killed.

Sixteen is so impossibly young to die. She had plans. For college, for true love, for a family. She was sweet and everyone loved her and was so excited to see what she had planned for her life, and one night that was supposed to be so much like any other was her last night alive.

I always coped with death by telling myself that I would be ready, that we all would. But tragedy is tragedy because we aren't. The people in that awful, murderous plane crash screamed for several minutes before they died. And I bet all of them wished it wasn't happening.

If my coping mechanism, that death is something I will be ready for, is gone, what can I do? The obvious answer is to make peace with it in my life now, and I have. I assume I will be ready, or make peace with it very quickly, and either way the experience of dying shouldn't last too long. I had a near-death experience just after christmas last year. Dan was passing someone on the way to South Dakota, and the road had a weird dip in it. It looked like you could see for miles, but he couldn't see that there was a car coming straight for us. I looked up when he hit the brakes and saw the car and made a sad little noise. I blinked and my brain refused to accept what was happening for a second, and then I had a definite moment of "this is actually happening. That car is going to hit us, and we might die. Okay, God..." and braced myself emotionally.

The car didn't hit us. We both slowed down a lot and Dan pulled off onto the shoulder. I had panic attacks for the rest of the day. I wanted nothing more than to be done, to get into a bed and cope, but of course we still had hours to drive before we got to Rapid City, and that helped nothing.

The fact that I had a brush with almost-death and felt peace is one of the most encouraging experiences I've ever had. The day it happened I was upset and wished we had driven there as normal, but it was a really good experience for me. I feel like I have come to terms with the fact that we'll all die.

And that, dear friends, is where superstition enters this post yet again.

I have refrained from posting anything about death, or saying anything too ominous, out of fear that they will be my last words or my last post. Not because I'm afraid I'll die any day now and something has to be my last words and won't that be sad. Out of fear that the words will cause the death. I have seen too many reddit posts of "Look at this morbid thing my cousin said before she died in a freak accident". So I held off on finding real closure with death out of a vain hope that it would prolong my life.

But here I am now. Writing this with the intention of posting it.

I read an excellent book recently. It's called "Smoke gets in your eyes and other lessons from the crematory".

I checked it out from the library with that same dark, morbid fascination with which I read all those reddit posts. And at the start of the book, she is exactly that kind of person. She works in a crematory because she wants to be the person to look death in the face and not flinch. Over the course of the book, however, it becomes less about gory details and how unusual she is, and more about how unusual society is. Modern society is strange in the way that we want to sanitize death.

Nothing is scarier than a skeleton. When someone dies we need to remove the body right away. Bodies must be created or embalmed. Your fish is just sleeping.

We want to remove death from our minds, so we obsess over aging. One of the richest men in America is pouring tons of money into life-prolonging science because despite all his wealth and privilege, he is terrified to die.

But he will. And so will I. And so will you. And there's something beautiful about that. About clearing the world so that new life can explore and discover and care for each other. About how we have a finite amount of time and it's up to us to make it matter.

So here I am now. Posting a long, circuitous blog post about death. I feel pains in my chest. It's probably my heart. Or maybe it's just my constant anxiety about my heart. I'm about to drive to boulder, and I may get in to an accident.

Or maybe, just maybe, I will show this to my grandchildren someday.

Life is beautiful. Death is beautiful. And if this is my last post or not, I hope it encouraged anyone who read it. You are not alone, and it's okay to not be afraid.