A couple of things have come up that in my friend circles that have made me feel like I don’t quite belong or am on the wrong side. Since I am not being social, I sort of feel like I am hiding these things instead of owning them so I get to admit to them here. With LJ, I feel that people know this is only a small slice of life and not to assume what is seen here is the entire story. For some reason, I don’t get the same feeling from FB. Also FB is much more open and LJ has always been more exclusive even though I pretty much limit both to people I know IRL.

#1. I didn’t vote. I take voting seriously and there were many posts reminding people to vote. But I didn’t have a horse in this race so it didn’t feel worthwhile to put the effort in to get the correct info to base decisions on. I figure if I am not going to make an informed decision, I shouldn’t vote. I will only be following the sheep and if I am going that way anyway, the rest of the sheep can do the voting, my vote isn’t needed. I didn’t care one way or the other about the measures on the ballot. I had some leanings but they weren’t based on real reasons, just wanting to go against where the money is being spent, which is pretty much the same as voting because of what commercials are telling you (which I don’t like). This was a primary so it just gets to choose who is going to run in Nov and I will vote then. It is hard to get information on a candidate and have them lose because you get invested in the process. I will do it but will avoid it as much as I can. So I didn’t vote but for very specific reasons as well as I was lazy. I did thing about it all day.

#2. I made no effort to view the transit of Venus. I just don’t care. I was working for NOAA when we had a solar eclipse in CO many years ago. I got involved and went out and watched. In those days we could use floppy discs to view the sun safely. I was bored by it. The most interesting thing to me was when I went back inside, there were little crescents all over the floor from the sun shining through the holes in the blinds. That was neat. I didn’t view the last eclipse and don’t have much interest to view a little black dot crossing in front of the sun. It doesn’t matter. It happens, it doesn’t happen, whatever. I don’t know if this lack luster attitude is from turning my back on space when the shuttle blew up in ’86 or if it is more than that. I do wonder if my head thinks it is boring but my emotions would kick in and I would find it valuable at the time.

#3. I don’t care that Ray Bradbury is dead. It has been coming and expected for a long time. I like some of his stories. The Velt has its hooks into me very deeply. But he just isn’t that big a deal for me. He is like Steven King to me, some of his stuff is my genre but I don’t consider him a genre writer. A factor in this might be the professor of a college class I had called Intro to Science Fiction. It was a lit class and was treated as such. We spend half of once class on Heinlein and half of one on Asimov. These are iconic sci-fi writers to me and I feel they were short changed. We reviewed their pulp work and called it high literature. Oh come on, it was written for the price per word for an audience’s titillation. Yes it had science and it was fiction. It contained novel ideas and an alternative view on issues but that is what science fiction is about. The writing itself was not “high quality” soaked with layers and layers of meaning which is how it seems to be treated in lit classes. If we covered it like it was the pulp/lowest common denominator it was and how this other stuff still came through it, that would be great. It would be like discussing how much character development there is in Sailor Moon with all of the stock footage and monster of the week in a half hour format with commercials. That is rather amazing. But treating Sailor Moon as quality drama is pathetic. Well, this prof was writing a book on Ray Bradbury so we spent two weeks on him. Since I consider him only marginally a science fiction writer it was very aggravating to spend so much more time on him than on those I considered to be architects of the genre. This might have helped put Ray Bradbury into the spot in my head that he has enough people being impressed with him that there is no need for me to join the bandwagon. Not to say he isn’t an important writer and the world has lost someone that has made a difference. Just that I don’t much care beyond it bothering others that are important to me.

So those are the current three areas that seem to be big things to people I like and I care about. I sort of feel like I do when I am a bad fan. The definition of a bad fan is when you aren’t a fan of something that all your fan friends love. It feels sort of like maybe I don’t share as much with these people as I think I do. There, now maybe I can get rid of the feeling that I am hiding these things just so I can fit in.