Cha-Cha-Cha-Changes
Nothing inanimate in our lives is static. Everything that isn't alive is always changing. The ocean waves, the air blows your shit all around, the tectonic plates slip and slide like the elderly on icy sidewalks. The earth is always changing. Living things change too, things grow, multiply, decay, etc. For instance look at caterpillars. They start as funny worms, eat some lettuce, then they form a cocoon, and inside it they change, and out comes a butterfly princess or a gay.
The same goes for other animals, like when a snake grows up into an eagle, or a whale into a bear. The miracles of nature. Anyway, so what I'm saying is things change.
Here's something I noticed. I can change the things I do, and sometimes I do. For about 10 years I smoked, then I quit. Boing. No more smoking. I used to drink 5 nights a week, but now I am down to about 2. Some people would say that 2 nights a week is still a lot, and there are a few people who might say 5 nights a week isn't really too much. To be honest I generally just agree with whichever opinion best suits whatever actions towards which I feel the most inclined or find the easiest to manage.
I can change my shape, my haircut(not really), my habits, it is just amazing. I will walk out of the room, you will count to 10, I will walk back in and abra-cadabra! you might not even recognize me. The same goes for all of us. We're one makeover, or somewhere between one and one million makeovers, away from being The Swan. Put me in a tuxedo and I'm James motherfucking Bond(not really), put me in a clown suit and I'm Ronald McDonald. We can all reinvent ourselves like the millions of Barbies. Drop 50 pounds, get new boobs, work out until your abs look like they were carved out of wood. A brand new you in the kingdom of Barbies.
Wow. But do people actually change? Can people actually change? We can all change the surface, but what about what lies beneath it. I can change my habits and my actions but can I change what makes me act the way I do?
Have you ever seen anyone change? I don't mean lose weight or learn something useful, but actually change their character. I can't think of one example. I have seen people not including myself grow up, learn to take things in stride, become more realistic about things, but I don't know if I have seen a single person change.
But now onto a totally new subject. I was having a conversation with someone the other day in which we wound up discussing some general qualities of popular people which I ordinarily choose to ignore. It is not always true, but it seems for the most part it is difficult to be popular and at the same time be a decent human being. Now there are lots of ways to be popular, but a general aid to popularity is to be socially ruthless.
You can become popular for all kinds of natural talents and personality traits, but eventually, one way or another you are going to have to choose your friends based on their coolness. The cooler your friends, the cooler other people will think you are as well. And that is how you climb socially. The other side of the coin is that you can't associate with uncool people since they will drag you down. They will harm your image as much or more than gaining weight or being honest. The other thing, and this is crucial, is to have no sympathy.
Truly cool people don't show sympathy because sympathy is a vulnerability. I know this because part of how I became popular was by suppressing my sympathy for losers who wanted to be my friend. Sympathy would have made me talk to them, give them time, and even care about them. But that didn't happen. And over time it got easy to turn away from people. Somehow I found a way to freeze the niceness right out of me. To be perfectly honest I am slightly appalled at what kind of callous things are coming easier and easier. The same thing goes for most of the people I meet. I sense that we all have learned how you need to act to be cool, its just that to pull it off is the hard part.
Its casual, its only a slight using and discarding of people that is sort of par for the course in the cool world. But I can't help but get the feeling that beneath the surface of this lifestyle lies some unrecognized hazard. Or maybe a hazard that's not all that hidden, like flying a kite beside power lines.
How is all this related to changing? Here's how. I think the notion of being cool* has run amuck and is ruining our brains as a civilization, and more specifically mine**. I don't want to think that way anymore. I want to be a decent human being. So the question remains, can people change? I really don't know. But I hope so.
*There are some things that are cool and should never change. For example, one of my neighbors has a sticker on his van that is a drawing of a parrot wearing sunglasses and underneath the parrot in big green letters is the words "Chill Out". That is pretty fucking great no matter what.
**To the extent that I actually ever use my brain, which is approximately never.