Steampunk and Growing Up

Two weeks ago I promised you I'd post the whole playlist I built over the month of July.

Well, here it is: The Steampunk Playlist.

I am not going to give you the whole list of songs. That's on the blog. The tag is Road to Salt City Steamfest.

What I am going to give you is an explanation. Before you continue, however, the following post might offend you. If you like steampunk a lot and do not want to hear any criticism of it, please close your browser window and wait until I write a new blog post. If you choose to continue on, do so at your own peril.

A week ago I turned 26. That's the back end of my 20s. Two weeks ago I was at Salt City Steamfest, and I didn't want to seem like a downer then, but to put it bluntly now it was quite possibly the most lackluster event I've ever attended. The panelists were entirely comprised of whoever wanted to sign up, regardless of skill, expertise, planning, or personal time limits. Frequently, the panelists wouldn't take up the whole hour, so they'd simply stop and say "Well, that's it. Feel free to ask me questions." Worse, many of them would have nothing pre-prepared and would stand in front of a room and ramble on about their subject.

The opening ceremony was a joke. It was, overall, a poorly planned, under-attended event (probably with good reason if it was like this last year). I had such high hopes and tried to make it fun, but it was largely a waste of time.

That wasn't even the hardest part for me. The hardest part was the other attendees. Allow me to explain.

I knew a good sized number of people there (my mom doesn't even know - I could point out easily a dozen people I'd encountered before at various places), and I knew something about most of them: They were going nowhere in life and doing nothing with it. The people I knew were largely unambitious, having no jobs, living with their parents, barely passing in school (or, in one case, flunking out entirely), and generally not doing anything but going to fun events.

And here I was, doing the same thing as these people.

I may seem like a snob here, but with the growing popularity of steampunk there is a growing population who embodies a trait I don't respect. Steampunk was meant to be the best and the brightest. Those who were part of the subculture wanted to explore and learn and be the best at everything simply because they could. Those who truly understand steampunk understand that it is not about fun costumes and gears and steam-powered robots.

Steampunk is about striving to become enlightened. To enhance personal knowledge and think and discover. Not just to collect information, but to figure out what it all means. We are still obsessed with our own cleverness and we want to work and excel and be the best. We want to learn. We want to master everything.

We also understand that to do all of that is a lot of work.

What the popularity of steampunk has attracted is a group of hangers-on who want to be the best and the brightest without doing any of the work to get there. It's as if they are the moon, picking up on the glow that proverbial sun of steampunk's intelligence and hard work ethic gives off, doing nothing to contribute to that glow themselves.

I do not respect that. Not in the slightest. If you want something, you darn well do the work to get it.

With that said, I will not totally renounce steampunk, but I will back off in my obsession (trust me, steampunk is still very, very cool). Salt City Steamfest served as a sobering reality check. It's time for me to grow the heck up and stop with all the childish costumes and playing around.

A week ago I turned 26. A week ago I realized that I had spent so much time being part of a group that has started to become something I did not respect that I was in danger of becoming part of that group. A week ago I realized that having a label of anything is stupid.

A week ago, growing up went a little less awry.

Genius Pets and Sammy

I've grown up with pets. Before Jazzy there was Tigger and Sammy and PJ and before them there were guinea pigs and a rabbit and a hamster, birds, horses and other dogs and cats. What I have noticed is that there is a distinction. Some critters are smarter than others. 

A whole lot smarter.

Take Tigger, for instance.

That's him in the picture there. Yes, he's very skinny. Yes, he does not want for food. Yes, we've taken him to the vet. Yes, the vet says he's fine. Really. He's just skinny. Like that person you're required to hate because they can eat a whole cake plus ice cream and never gain weight while you can't even look at a slider without gaining ten pounds.

Tigger is a freaking cat genius. He sets traps. He knows exactly how to execute them. He (and this is important in some universe) profiles his victims! That's right. He knows exactly what his intended targets are going to do next and attacks them. And he's still a cuddle bug. 

Mom has the giant plastic tumblers and she fills them with water and leaves them all over the house. You'll never go a day without finding one. Neither will Tigger. 

Tigger had a thing for sticking his face in the water and drinking as much as he could reach. The second he couldn't get to any more, he'd crouch down and start batting at the cup. Bat bat bat bat. Then he'd knock it over. You'd think this was because he figured out that he could get more water out of the cup if it just wasn't in the cup anymore, but he'd walk away. Almost as if he was saying "Yup. I'm smart. Deal with it." 

When Sammy was a kitten Tigger sat down behind a wall in our open floor plan home. He started flipping his tail up around the corner. He flipped his tail and waited. And waited.

And w a i t e d...

Until Kitten Sammy came barreling down the dining room and pounced on his tail. The second he did so, 

POW!

Tigger bopped him on the head. This was all he'd intended to do in the first place. He'd intended to get that kitten and show him who's boss from the second he'd sat down at the wall. 

PJ is equally bright. PJ is a poodle/bichon mix. The poodle is an incredibly smart breed of dog, the bichon was bred originally as a circus dog, and then as a companion dog for sailors. This means that we have a super smart dog who loves to get attention. 

In that picture he's actually saying "I could calculate special relativity for you, but you need to be watching or I won't do it." 

PJ will only do something twice if you trick him into it. Like sticking his head into one of Mom's ubiquitous tumblers. He'll stick his head into an empty one a couple of times and shake it around trying to get it off, but then you try to get him to do it again and he shoots you a look. It says "I think we've established that there's nothing in the cup. You are aware you're being outsmarted by a dog, right?"

But Sammy... Sammy's a different story entirely.

Yes, that photo is of a different cat. That's Sammy, my mom's orange tabby. No, he and Tigger are not of the same litter. They are not brothers, and the did not come from the same momma cat.

The only similarities between Tigger and Sammy are that they are both orange tabbies, and they are both cats. 

You see, Sammy's really really dumb.

There was this line from a cartoon I watched when I was a kid and one of the characters said "If brains were gasoline, he wouldn't have enough to power a motorcycle around the outside of a penny." That kinda describes Sammy. When it comes down to it, he's not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree. When Sammy encounters the tumblers, he stares down into them and tries to figure out how to drink out of them. He hasn't learned how to bat them over like Tigger. So Tigger comes by and... bat bat bat. Water all over the counter and floor for everyone!

He's also really ornery. Okay, he's ornery to the rest of us. To Mom, he's Mr. Lover Cat. He absolutely loves my mother. The rest of us... well, we're obstacles in his path of getting to Mom. 

When we play with the laser pointers, Tigger plays for a minute, then realizes where the little blinky light is coming from. Sammy will chase that sucker for hours. The most fun thing to do with him is make the laser pointer light run under a bookshelf or the entertainment center or something and turn it off. Sammy will watch, intent on catching that darn light once it decides to show its stupid face!

Meanwhile, Tigger and PJ are looking at Sammy and going "Idiot." 

See, Tigger's like that kid you might have gone to school with who was four years younger than everyone else, but was also graduating class valedictorian and flat out didn't care. It's not like he was even trying. He just sat back and knew he'd get an A on that math test you'd studied your tail off for and were hoping for at least a B, and he didn't even crack a book. 

That kid was irritating, but you probably didn't have him in school. If you did, you hoped he'd either tutor you, or be the person you'd get paired with for the science fair project. If he was either one of those, that kid was your best friend. Mostly because now you got to mooch off his brains and if you were nice to him he might stick by you because you're his friend so you're guaranteed a good grade on every group project for the rest of the school year.

On the other hand, Sammy is like that one person we all know we're going to have in our class. We know after graduation they'll be either working at Wal-Mart or finishing every work sentence with "Ya want fries with that?" And it's not for lack of trying. They try hard to be smart and study for their tests, but the reality is that they're about as dumb as a bag of rocks but that's okay because they know it and they know it's probably funny. 

If they're nice, you don't mind because, hey, the world needs more nice people. If they're obnoxious and that person who doesn't know they're dumb and acts like you're the idiot in the equation, all you want to do is slap them or otherwise make them look very, very silly. You might have, I don't know.

It's most evident in their behavior when strange critters come to stay with us. 

A family friend's dogs came to stay for a weekend. They liked to chase cats. Sammy would jump up on to the ottoman and try to claw their faces. Since Sammy has no claws, it's pretty obvious how well that worked out for him. 

Tigger, on the other hand, realized that Mom had left a full tumbler on one of the tower cabinets of the entertainment center when she went to answer the door. So he waited until one of the dogs walked over and looked up at him from the floor. 

Bat bat bat bat...