Power to the Sheeple

The majority of you reading this know my opinions when it comes to freedom of thought and the meaning of status quo. Normal is a construct of society that is used to trap and confine us. As a definition, it does not exist, rather it is a spectrum of what has been deemed acceptable. The status quo is the agent and mandate of normal for without the idea of the one, the other could barely maintain existence.

I can't say that I'm always the best at living this, but I don't like following the norms. I'm not a normal person and I wouldn't be me if I tried to fit that mold, so it's big to me to train myself (or rather retrain myself) to think for myself. Certain kinds of rules, especially unspoken ones, are made to be broken, because let's face it, they're stupid. If they made sense and were anything more or less than defying the sum average of what everyone else is doing, they wouldn't be unspoken rules. They'd be spoken and written down (in stone. By God).

We're social creatures, it's one of the genetic reasons we think in terms of normal and status quo. If things are the way we want them, they're good. If they're different, something bad is going on and we're all gonna get eaten by the lions or whatever. It makes a certain kind of evolutionary sense for us to be distrustful of anything strange, and if we see an example being set we follow it because that's what we assume the normal is.

It is this mentality of following the example set for you that I personally find most satisfying to mess with.

I bring this up, because I inadvertently set such an example today whilst trying to check if there was a chance of recovering a textbook I seem to have misplaced (see lost, unable to find). My best guess was that I lost the book during class on Wednesday. Since my LGBT Lit class isn't in some big lecture hall, I figure there was a slim chance the book might still be sitting on the windowsill where I believe I left it.

I got to the room around a little after 2 only to find a class occupying the space. As much as I wish I were true ninja, I doubt I would have been able to slip in unnoticed and make my way to the far back corner, so I decided to wait, hoping the class was nearing its end. The time neared 2:30 and I realized it wasn't an hour and a half long class ending, but a class that had just begun.

I wandered the halls of Old Main, even pulled out a book I'd hoped to share with the Book Exchange operating out of OM555 and read for a while down the hall. No luck. 2:50 passed, and the class was still in session. It was an hour and a half long class that went until 3:30!

I decided to wait the remainder of the time outside the door, ready to spring in and out, fast as an assassin making a kill. So I took out my book, leaned against a wall, and began to read. The class across the hall got out at 3, they passed by me without seeming to even notice I was there.

I continued to wait, and soon a new class started to show up to enter the recently emptied room. The first saw the room was empty and entered, no problem, but as the room filled up, people began to get hesitant. With me standing right outside the door, they assumed I was waiting for a class to get out and so appropriately formed a line behind me.

Technically I was waiting for a class to get out, just not the one they needed to get into. I didn't know if I should laugh, point out I was waiting for the class across the hall where there was a professor lecturing, or keep my silence. I kept my silence and eventually one of the first girls to wait behind me asked me if the class had let out yet or what. I answered truthfully (a good policy to have) and she and her friends, followed by the rest of their class, filed past me into the room.

In short, I set an example by waiting and the sheeple saw sheeple did. And it took one girl who stepped out of the line and thought for herself to make a difference.

In case you were wondering, when I finally got into the classroom, my book wasn't there.