RantSome: A Personal Soapbox Site

Trends annoy me. Well, it depends on the trend, of course. Ultratrendiness is irritatating and just sheeplike. Period. But general trends like the way colors come and go in current fashion, hair styles that come and go, things like piercing one's nose, etc., well, that's just the way society changes, and I can live with that. I'm conscious of trend changes and I no longer have Farrah hair, nor do I have a curly perm or a bi-level haircut (you know, a mullet) or a short cut with a tail, all trends which I observed at one time or another. I look around, I see what's going on, I adapt. I don't look like one of those women who hasn't figured out that the look they had in high school (ten or twenty years ago) is no longer hip and they look like morons now with that trendy 80s teased and mussed and sprayed glamrock big hair (the early MTV veejay look, you know the one I mean).

Everything goes in trends, of course. There's a reason that most Americans my age think that "Edith" and "Mildred" are "old lady" names. Those names were very popular and trendy at one time, and lots of little girls got them, and now all those little girls with trendy parents are old ladies. Someday, nursing homes will be filled with Courtneys, Joshuas, Jasons, Jessicas, Jennifers, (what's with the J names lately, anyway?), Michaels (not that the world hasn't always been full of Michaels, but the name was very, very popular in recent generations), and Robyns.

This is the way of the world. You can't escape it, but geez, do you really have to be captive to it? Jung (the 19th century psychologist and contemporary of Freud) theorized that there was a "collective unconscious" to which all people were subject, sort of a "mass mind" on a level we weren't consciously aware of. I think that may be not far off, but I attribute it to the general human tendency to just go with the flock. All my friends have permed hair. I need permed hair. We are Trend of Borg, you will be assimilated....

And what was with the "Information Superhighway" crap a few years back? First, the net was the ultimate source of all information and we were in the "information age". Then, suddenly, the net was the playground of pedophiles who recruited innocent children by pictures on their parents' homepages and the U.S. Congress, in their ultimate arrogance and ignorance, tried to outlaw things like saying "penis" on a web page. Well, penis, penis, penis, and balls for good measure.

My point (other than the fact that I like to say "penis") is that people are generally mindless. They know nothing and don't bother to learn, and let the mass media think for them. They call up technical support and try to get the techs to think for them (I worked as a support tech for quite some time, and while most folks just need a bit of information or guidance or have some questions, there are some major morons out there on the Information Superhighway™, boys and girls).

Another thing that pissed me off (yeah, I was in in a bitchy mood when I wrote this, as I just gotten off my job as a support technician and I talked to a number of total idiots that day) was the whole Y2K thing. Yeah, there were a few little glitches and a few problems here and there. Yes, older computers with very old bios configurations didn't work right. Some operating systems simply were not Y2K compliant.

However, I really got annoyed with the alarmist trend that said that the whole world was going to suddenly just END in a big puff of burning electronics and singed hair. (And hah! Looks like I was right!)

The Christian millenialists bugged me the most, I think. First of all, people, the calendar we use was invented by human beings. Christ almost certainly wasn't even born in the year zero, and there wasn't even a year zero anyway. The current calendar we use is not the first we've used since the beginning of the Christian era, you know. We invented it! And we didn't even get it right. I mean, come on, 30 days, 28 (or 29) days, 31 days, make up your mind.

What makes you think that God is constrained to do things according to a calendar invented by human beings? And think about it, why on earth would he choose a date so incredibly obvious? What's so bloody special about the year 2000 anyway, other than it has a lot of zeroes in it?

Also note that our system of counting in base ten (so we can have all those zeroes) is also invented and while it's the most common, you can also count in binary (based on twos) and trinary (threes) and so on all the way up to base infinity, although no one ever really needs to count that high unless they're calculating the national debt.

I could probably rant about trends and fads for ages. Don't even get me started on weddings. I used to work with weddings. I was a floral designer and I worked in the floral/wedding supply department of a big craft store. The colors for weddings are trendy, the styles are trendy, you can almost always tell the year someone was married by the style of the bride's outfit and the color scheme (hmmm... band of pearls on your forehead, must be early eighties, big pouf of tulle on your veil, must be the middle eighties, Queen Anne neckline, must be the late seventies, oh, gosh, a black, white, and red color scheme how original, you got married in the mid-eighties, and gee, sleeveless with princess seams, nineties... ad nauseum).

The same is true of web design (although with a lot of sites you can hardly call it design, maybe more like bandwitdth clutter). Frames. Yeah, I use them on a couple of my sites, but golly, I know how to make it so people aren't trapped in them forever and ever and how to use them for navigation tools, not Just Because I Know How to Do Frames. Haven't you ever wondered why there are sites designated proudly as Frame Free? It's because so many trendy people use frames stupidly!

I feel the same about JavaScript (I use it sparingly but but I do use it for some things), Java applets (I don't use them at all, as the majority of them are slow loading and stupid and overused, and if I see that stupid damned lake applet one more time and have to wait forever for it to download just so I can see yet another bad picture with a ripply bottom half, I'll scream... or maybe just bitch about it on a web page), animated graphics, Flash intros, whatever the newest bells and whistles are. It takes no skill at all to just throw as many kewl rad dancing baloney craplets onto a web page as humanly possible. I have news for you. That's not clever, it's not cutting edge. It's just mindless.

I don't think I'd better start on the whole lesbian chic thing and all the girls who suddenly think they're bisexual.... (Just so it's absolutely clear, I am not anti-gay, and I not only know but also like and even love persons who are bisexual or homosexual. I just happen to hate the "ain't I cool cuz I go both ways" trend, and so does at least one of my bisexual friends.)

You know, as I was writing this I was chatting with my sweetheart and sharing snippets of this fine bitchy rant with him and I noted that this could well get me flamed. Then again, I'm complaining about mindless sheep who blindly follow whatever's currently in style without thought or reflection, and if some moron writes to me to say, "Hey, look, I still have a mullet and it's damned cool" I can just laugh and say "Yeah, I'll bet you're so hip you can't see over your own pelvis" (many thanks to the wonderful Douglas Adams for that clever line, as spoken by one Zaphod Beeblebrox).

So. Do I think that all trends are horrible? Certainly not. Change is the one constant thing in this world, and I happen to like change. I observe trends. For my thirty-fourth birthday I got my ear pierced in a rather trendy location (up high, in the curve of the ear, yes, cartilage, and yes, it got wildly infected for a while). I have a thumb ring. I own my own personal domain and I have a weblog (how trendy is that?), and writing rants like this and putting them online as if someone's going to read them is pretty trendy too.

See, it's not the trends that bother me. It's trendiness. It's not going with the flow and adapting to the changing times, it's mindlessly going along with whatever all the other sheep are doing, bleating as directed, trotting along merrily at the same pace and in same direction as everyone else and thinking this makes you cool. If you're going to follow a trend, do it knowingly, do it deliberately, and not because you're too unoriginal and/or lazy to think of anything else to do or you're afraid you might not fit in with all your trendy little friends if you don't look like you were all made with the same damned cookie cutter.

And by the way, I hear that being bitchy, strong, and bitter is also currently really trendy...

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Trendiness