On the perks of being a wallflower

Ever since I was a little girl sometimes pretending to be a boy, I've wanted to love Westerns: to crave peace, until a war path was chosen for me.

My father, being a huge Luc Besson fan himself, encouraged me to observe the world as opposed to reacting to it in the most theatrical way, to moderate my swearing (I was five and he made me watch French movies, it's surprising he didn't ask me to moderate my smoking, too), to act calm and polite before firing the killer joke from a safe distance — and a really long gun — like Léon and Nikita.

But it wasn't until I watched Taxi (1998), that I realized that would never be me. I was exactly like Daniel. Armed with an exuberant, colorful personality, if challenged or inconvenienced, even to this day, I simply can't be stopped. At the expense of my sanity, with blood and sweat of my brow, I always find a way to make someone pay. And I never choose to be clandestine about it: I don't need the element of surprise if I'm always unpredictable.

To say I'm impulsive is to state the obvious, but that doesn't mean I have no discipline. Being petty, no matter how strongly you believe it to be a character flaw, takes effort. Most people consider fighting — even windmills the Cervantes way — to be challenging. So how come it's easier for me to commit all my energy to spite than to walk away?

I DON'T KNOW. End of blog, over and out.

Then again, the very reason I write is to know what I think about things I don't understand.

The most naive hypothesis is control. We've invented justice to conquer that which defies. Fighting at the right hand side of what is just gives you power and it is intoxicating. Looking at some powerful people of this age, I have something they don't posess: enough.

No, it can't be about control. I'm nothing like Batman, nor do I respect him very much. Primarily, because I think he's an idiot, but not despite of all the harm he's done out of ignorance. Batman is a relic that belongs to the past: a man obsessed with being right to the detriment of learning from his mistakes. If we don't yield dominance in favor of understanding, we'll perish.

Is it satisfying to prove someone wrong in an elaborate, unproductive way? Not really. I don't usually get the amount of groveling I consider to be sufficient. Nobody throws olive branches around anymore and there's no mention of a medal. All I get is the quiet satisfaction of a whole lot of work done, a bunch of learnings and a new threshold to what I'm capable of, subject to change at the earliest disagreement.

There's a tempting thought that maybe I'm just one of those people. After all, that's how Max Fosh makes a living: by refusing to accept someone's half-baked opinion of him.

The only thought I can be content with is that defiance is as much about scientific curiosity. The discovery of self goes beyond the conventional understanding of right and wrong. So if someone thinks they have me figured out, why not show them how little I know about myself?