In Which folks are probably not really 'Simple' (except maybe the simple ones)

Today, a friend of mine shared this article on twitter:
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-real-stuff-white-people-like/
which I encourage you to read, because seriously, you guys, this stuff is so fascinatingly ridiculous. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's basically an analysis of the dating site OkCupid with regard to what people list as their interests and how people describe themselves, as plotted against their self-identified race. And also, to some extent, their literacy, gender, and religious creed.

A lot of it is pretty fascinating, naturally, but the bit that really caught my attention was the "people describing themselves" trope. Apparently black dudes often use the phrase "I'm cool", whereas the latino dudes want you to know that they're "funny" and asians "simple".

I love the idea of bothering to say any of those things. Is there anything much less funny than someone earnestly telling you that they are a funny guy? I, uh, I'd have thought not. Surely you'd be better off just, oh, I don't know, being funny. Or better still, just writing how you normally talk and letting the reader judge how funny she thinks you are for herself? I suppose this is difficult if your particular brand of funniness is a response-type thing. Like you're quick with conversational banter or whatever? I don't know, I just think "I am funny" as a deadpan descriptor is unconvincing. Everyone knows that everyone wants a "good sense of humour" (but they all have different ideas about what that means, so just suggesting that you'll appeal to everyone is always going to be unconvincing), so it seems like it's on a par with "I am goodlooking" or "sensitive" or "like walks on the beach". "I am an oldfashioned romantic who likes giving flowers and thinks hand-holding is underrated". This sort of thing sounds like you just read an article on "what women want" and copied it out, a bit. (Although I do in fact like handholding and flowers and wordplay, I should mention. Also goodlookingness and sensitiveness, I guess?)

Next up: "I am cool". What. Who says that? (Well, I mean, black dudes apparently) This is like the "funny" thing, but turned up to 11. "I am cool" is only marginally cooler than "my Mum says I'm cool". I'll go further; it's even less cool than that, because "my Mum says I'm cool" has a higher likelihood of being an ironic joke. It's so earnest and foolish sounding, again. Plus, what the hell do you mean by "cool"? Do you mean "hip to the latest trends"; "I have an asymmetrica haircut"? Do you in fact mean "I wear a lot of Ed Hardy clothing"? Do you mean it as equivalent to "chilled" or "calm"? "Unheated"? Or do you mean it like you might say "Oh, Steve, sure, bring him to the party, he's cool"? "He's a cool guy, is Steve". (Note: no Steve I have ever met ever was this sort of cool in my opinion. Sorry if you're reading, anyone named Steve.) Like, he's a nice guy who is pleasant to be with? Doesn't "cool" essentially boil down to three completely distinct meanings?

If you are cool, you either
(a) share many of my interests: and are pleasant ("He seems cool")
(b) are trendy and fashionable ("look at that girl's cool boots")
(c) i: are calm and composed ("it was a bit hectic, but I stayed cool")
ii: are coldly dispassionate and frigid ("relations between North Korea and the US cooled this week...")

I guess we might conceivably add (d) literally cool; "I am an Edward Cullen type, cool to the touch, with icy lips and marble fingers", but that's just so deperately uncool according to all the other definitions that I'm not even going to think about it.

The problem is that the type (a) cool people are, in my case, practically the opposite of the type (b) cool kids. I think things that are a bit dorky are cool. Sometimes I worry that my appreciation of kitschy things is insufficiently ironic.

Anyway, what I'm saying here is: saying that you are cool conveys no meaningful information to me except that you probably aren't.

Lastly, the most complex one to broach: "simple". What does it mean to say that you are simple? I think we can discard the possibility that they mean it in the mental sense, like Forrest Gump is simple. Especially since it's mainly said by a demographic who rate "being a software developer" highly on their list of interests. But what does that mean, then? That they are simply a software designer, and have few or no other interests? That they have old fashioned, "simple" ideas (men should work, women should cook), the values of "simpler times"? Perhaps that you are caveman-like and are operating at a low level on Maslow's hierarchy of needs: "I'm a simple guy, give me food, shelter a lack of immediate danger, and I'm content"? Maybe it's like "crude", like toilet humour is "simple"? Maybe these people just can't handle "complicated" women, relationships, etc? I mean, that's understandable, folks are complicated and that crap can be tiring.

Maybe this is the thing; people describe themselves as "simple" either because they don't like the fact that people (including themselves) are actually complicated, or because they fear that they look boring on paper. (As an aside, I think that the more interesting people probably all look boring on paper. I am suspicious of people with a a super-diverse and super-exciting range of interests and activities. What are they up to? I suspect them of taking up wind-surfing and cliff-diving and merenge and safe-breaking just to look interesting.)

And this brings me to perhaps the most worrying part of this whole thing: what's the go with this contrariness on my part? Why is it that the more emphatically someone insists that they are simple and cool and funny, the more convinced I am that they are just the opposite? It seems a little harsh, really. And fairly unfounded, I mean, people haven't been attempting to obviously and systematically deceive all my life, or anything. My life has not been filled with betrayal or similar. It makes no sense that I should be so distrustful. I mean, yes, there are all the institutionalised deceits that we all deal with, like ads and stuff, but that hardly counts.

Maybe I'm just extrapolating from the people you meet who insist that they are "weird" and usual and "crazy"? I mean, those boring, predictable, ordinary folks are everywhere, and they are just deadset wrong almost all the time, because they've failed to notice that everyone else is all those things too.

Maybe this is the problem with Interesting Looking Girls? Like the love interest in 'Scott Pilgrim vs. the World', such girls are instantly and easily identified as different and interesting (and "cool") but this relies on the fallacy that everyone whose hair is a naturally occurring colour is totally uninteresting, which is clearly untrue.

I saw a poster the other day that said "A little bird told me that if I looked like the other girls, you might come back to me. I don't want you that badly" (or words to that effect) which is great and all and probably includes excellent subtext about body image and self worth and so on, but what is this implication that all the other girls look the same? Speaking as a girl other than the writer of the poster, I'm going to have to go ahead and say "way harsh". I mean, it was appealling, but it was obviously sort of wrong in its assumptions, and you can tell it's wrong precisely because of it's broad appeal. Also it had a cartoon of a dead bird, which seems like maybe an excessively aggressive response. Don't shoot the messenger lady! Especially if it's a talking bird, those things take ages to train!

Hmmm, I've ended up a bit off-track here, and I've run out of break in which to blog, but the important thing is that I've written something again, having been totally at a loss for what to blog about for ages. Sorry if you've been waiting on tenterhooks, obsessively refreshing or similar!