Carbon Monoxide

I'm actually posting.  I have hardly logged in in ten weeks, even, much less posted.  I have much LJ housekeeping to do.  BUT FIRST.  I came here to post this amusing reflection.

I scare boys.   :D 
Boys, not men.  I don't scare them.
Especially the kinds of boys who are like, "hahah, I'm going to act like a tough, 'masculine', egotistical male... not even because I'm particularly tough, but just because I'm male so I think I have the right to act like that.  And I'm going to treat people around me in accordance with traditional gender roles."

Because I come along and treat them like, "you're full of shit and I don't buy it."
And they don't expect it because I don't look particularly 'bad-ass.'
But rub me the wrong way and I get quite hostile and don't back down.

So I know at least two guys who appear to be very, very intimidated by me.  They don't act normal around me but it's not in the "I think you're cute" way - it's in the "I don't understand why you don't act cute" way.  Like, they try and act like they don't really notice I'm there so that they don't make an issue of it, but they get kind of stiff and awkward and are always a little afraid and apprehensive when speaking with me, like I'm going to eat them or something.

It's kind of funny because when people don't piss me off I am naturally kind of sweet-natured.  (It's almost annoying to me because people tend to get the wrong impression, that I'm just totally nice and sweet and simple and good-natured - so they sometimes write me off at first.  But that's just my natural, usual disposition.)  So the boys I intimidate think I'm sweet.  Until they start treating me like some sweet little girl.  And then I get super, super bitter and make them regret it.  I don't actually WANT them to fear me per se, I just want them to get the message - "treat me with more respect than that.  I am your equal.  I treat you as mine.  I expect the same treatment from you."

Ahaha.  This is one of those moments when I'm going to put aside all modesty and say, "I love myself." :D

I just watched a video in my Journalism/Media class about "marketing cool" and Mtv corporate-sponsored-cool of recent times (the video was a few years old though, so I don't think it's accurate any more as far as the influence of the internet goes, which it largely discounted).  It made me sick.  The attitude of "let's do whatever we can to sell shit!" and "let's manipulate the young, undiscerning (and admittedly, easily manipulated) teenager into buying stuff!!"

I missed out on a lot of the "Mtv culture" in highschool, and god, I'm glad I did.  One of the resulting key differences in my highschool experience and what this video described: my biggest interests were never really very marketed to me.  I had to find them myself and research them myself.  I mean, yeah, they were a little marketed - I first saw anime on TV and the first Jpop I ever heard was an anime ending theme - but really, most of my exposure wasn't from corporate media TRYING to sell something to the American teenager.  Just a few years later, and there's WAY more media trying to sell the same elements of Japanese culture to an American audience than there was when I was just getting interested.

That being said, I don't deny that pretty much everything I like is corporate-sponsored.  It has to be.  Most music artists, if they want to get their music out to people, they need to "sell out".

But there's a huge difference between a individual musician or a group of them, with TALENT and a MESSAGE, whose music has enough inherent value, who just happens to "get marketed" in order to get their music out there... and something that was taken from trends and corporate research and explicitly 'created' with clever marketing with the express purpose of making money, on all sides.  Example of the latter: Dir en Grey's unfortunate discography.  There's a girl in my Japanese class who has worn a Dir en Grey shirt several times and frankly, she seems in many ways to be a... tool.  Because why else would you subject your ears to that crap?  The irony is that tools such as herself think they're not tools, everyone else is.
And generally that key difference is revealed in the music itself.
Unfortunately, despite the way most people's daily lives are saturated with music, most people are still not critical listeners.

And, of course, it goes without saying that this attitude extends from music to pretty much everything in pop culture/mass media.  TV, movies, clothing, magazines, even books, I suppose.

Ugh.  I have a feeling my Journalism/Media class is REALLY GOING TO PISS ME OFF A LOT, but I'm going to force myself to take it anyway.

Note: I didn't edit this, just kind of type-ranted it, so... sorry for my incoherent thought processes and typos.  I'm too pissed off to fix it right now.  I'll do it later.