This week's Coffee-with-Mike-in-Stockholmhaven ended with me wandering around the store taking photographs of exclamation marks on various signs and notices.
"It's for something I'm doing on Instagram," I said, and then after a while thinking about it (and Mike asking me why) I heard myself say:
"I guess I just like to be a bit different."
Where does it come from, this desire to be different? And how can you tell it apart from someone who's just attention-seeking? And which one am I? And does it matter?
Actually, I think I've misunderstood myself a bit. What I would really like to be is me. And it just so happens that 'me' likes taking photographs of exclamation marks, among other things, and doesn't really care what anyone else thinks about that.
When I was about thirteen, Naff jackets were everywhere: I mean everyone had one - they were black, made out of shell-suit material, and on the back they had "NAFFCo54" printed in chunky coloured letters.
For about two terms, Naffs were in - despite looking like someone had embossed the dustbin liner and made a coat out of it. I'm not even sure anyone really got the irony of their name either, but I wasn't exactly in the crowd to know.
And that's the point. I remember walking to school behind a gaggle of Naff jackets, staring at those printed letters, amazed at how everybody was on some sort of quest to look exactly the same, and thought something like:
"Well isn't that silly?"
Never been one for fashion. Why would you want to look like everyone else?
Anyway, these days, in the ocean of digital media where we're all swimming in the tide, standing-out from the crowd is less 'ammunition-for-bullies' and much more 'the only way to be noticed'.
Well, that was always true of course, but finding a cool edge or a unique angle has somehow become the influencer's paradise. We celebrate difference so much now that we're actually encouraged to be weird and wonderful.
Don't get me wrong. Be weird and be wonderful - there is nothing at all wrong with that! I think what I've realised is that being weird and wonderful is good, but if it's artificial, it might not necessarily be enough. I mean it's hard to sustain. At least, that's how I find it.
I have a funny feeling that the first kid in our school to slip into a Naff jacket was weird and wonderful. The First Adopter. Just don't stand near any open flames - those things would have gone up in seconds.
It's much more important to be yourself, whether you're naturally a performer, an extrovert, a wallflower or a book-nerd who collects photographs of punctuation marks, or whoever you are deep-down. And don't let anybody tell you otherwise.
Mike thought it was funny, anyway. I'm still fascinated at how a line and a dot at the end of a sentence can change the sense of every word before it - it's powerful!
Just er.. just don't use more than one. But we've been here before, haven't we? And I know when to stop.
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