Competitive I ain't. Competitive is a word I would put on a list of words that least describe me. I have no problem letting other cats have their athletic prowess, their brown-nosing teacher's pet position, their wilding fantastic lives of promiscuous sex, or whatever else they can do better than me. A lot of people can do a lot of things better than me. Do I care? Not really. If I were a species being judged by you Darwinists I'd have gone extinct eons ago through sheer politeness--although pure Darwinism might have trouble explaining how guile and good timing fits into things. I used to care how I measured up to other people, but then I realized it was more entertaining to watch them do things. I feel confident about my own talents and the cozy level of them I've attained through years of careful dramatic poses. I am uncompetitive because I like that other people can do things better than me. The world goes around because a lot of people can do a lot of things way better than I can do them. I do not want to be an athlete, nor an electrician, nor a politician, nor any of a great many things. I already know that the things I do well I do very well, better than most people and not as well as I know I can do them, and that's enough for me. I have no reason to compete.
It turns out that there is one arena in which the talent of other kids has a rankling, scratchy bletch on me. (Shite, "bletch" is considered a real word. Heh.) I am unfamiliar with this bilious rise of "damn their eyes--curse them for breathing, slack-jawed jackanapes." What ghastly turving a feeling it is. And yet not unhealthy, perhaps.... That one competitive arena I have is in writing. And by Christopher Moore's beard, Scrappy the ruddy Bear can write. She's got a lot a damn irritating habits in form and style, sometimes she loses her purpose because she's getting bogged down in being dramatic. These things happen. They can be revised away. But by damn, the girl can turn a phrase, and she writes with soul. It is singularly irritating to me that she genuinely sounds like a human being when she writes her personal essays. A somewhat whiny human being, but that's a good thing. We're all whiny, so we relate to whiny, so it makes her writing real. Sounding real, sounding genuinely there and talking, is so damn hard that I feel compelled to promote her bloggy-wog. I don't like that she done good, because she done better than I think I'm good at doing. But she done good. Y'all should read her bliggity-blig. And nag her when she doesn't update often enough. She almost never updates it.
Nag, nag, nag! Write more!
Come as you are. She needs weird friends.
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