Superstitious Kidiots

Hey kidiots!  Does that start us out on the wrong foot?  These days I’ve been feeling like my social filter is made out of Swiss Cheese, holes punched through with the heavy artillery of being “totally over it.”  I am frustrated with how seriously we take each other and bummed with how we casually we dismiss our own influence over each other.  You are kidiots!  And scummos!  But also fragile Jenga towers of Babylon!  And leavers of invisible legacies!  And so am I.  We are Taylor Swift-esque with the power to be a milli things at once.  We are simultaneously gross and arrogant and insecure and great and isn’t that pretty cool?

I want to introduce you to this column about anything that loosely has to do with this ambiguous idea I’ve termed “fake science.”  A boring example: I take my coffee with milk.  The only reason I do it is because once my mother told me that I’d get an ulcer without a splash of milk to protect the lining of my stomach.  Not true.  I realize now that she said it because she takes milk and kind of liked the idea of us taking our coffee the same, or just because she likes correcting me, but since then, I have taken milk in my coffee.  It isn’t out of some sort of familial loyalty, but because I half-secretly-out-of-the-corner-of-my-eye believe that I’m actually engaging in a kind of ulcer-prevention. Often our decisions are not based on any generally accepted truths, but are tics and tendencies and coping mechanisms motivated by irrational reasons buried in our formative years or rootless whims.

Fake science is folklore, magical thinking, misrememberings, superstition and myth: the correct cadence of spelling a word aloud, the order of your morning routine, fear of certain animals, debatable pop trivia remembered as fact.  It is small versions of what Danny Loehr articulated in his February Celebration address this past month: the stories we tell ourselves become our reality.  We adopt them and drop them, not realizing their groundlessness until years later.  Sometimes they stick and continue to manifest themselves in our preferences, actions and expressions in the long run.

Sometimes we are endearing.  One of my friends used to insist on only wearing cute pajamas every night in case there was a fire and she would have to evacuate the house in the middle of the night and the cute neighbor boy would see her out in the street.  Sometimes our fake science is sinister.  A different friend used to obsessive compulsively knock on wood to ward off danger; another had convinced herself that her eating disorder was a vegan diet.  Locating your irrationalities does not always end in exorcising them—the aim is simply to be more thoughtful. Thoughtfulness is critical because, believe it or not, someone out there is learning how to live by observing you living out a fake science, through your words or emotions. It is a very frightening and exciting responsibility.  Trust me when I say: You have an effect on other people.

I didn’t make up “kidiots.”  It was the name of a blog active in 2010 run by some funny Middlebury students, one who is still a friend of mine.  On the Kidiot blog, she wrote a short piece about turning 20.  I recently saw her and she’s doing really well; she owns a pet hedgehog in Brooklyn and has really healthy chakras, which were somewhat shaken when I shyly mentioned how much that old piece meant to me and thanked her.  She hadn’t expected anyone to be reading.

The site where we make a legacy that sticks to someone’s brain will not be where we expect it to be, and it is happening all the time.  It won’t be what we wanted to have been remembered by, and it will not be by the people we care about the most.  We won’t even notice all the micro-legacies we leave and collateral damage we cause for the most part, unless that person is moved to tell us about it.  So that’s what I’m interested in here — the awareness of our own absurdities, the way they effect our community and the effort to reach out and make the stakes feel real for someone, even for a second.

This column isn’t Mythbusters.  I’m not going to always talk about how we are dumb kids and what it is we’re getting wrong or right.  I just want make some hazy observations and opinions on the intersection of “culture” (which is what exactly?), college students and the way we live.  Most of these articles are inspired by nightmare notes I wrote to myself in the middle of the night or Gchat conversations or visions that come to me when I’m lying on the floor of my thesis carrel underneath my coat, reading Joan Didion.  I’m just your neighborhood neurotic, popping an anti-anxiety Rx in Proctor and admiring your hair from the next table over.  Humans! We’re so crazy!  It’s so great, right?  Lets talk about it until 4 a.m.