We Can Be Heroes
For a long time I've been attached to the Fray. It's about community, the web, stories and more subtly, San Francisco. When I'm reading it I feel all of a sudden surrounded by people in a cool little cafe in the Haight Ashbury. The kind of people who are all about The Well or Wired. As Apple would have it:
'Chic, not Geek'.
Inspired by recent film, a recent story at the Fray was My Superpower. It got me thinking about my own suprahuman abilities and I recognized not one but two special powers that I wield daily.
I will always remember the moment when I realized I had a special ability. I was told by my friend Jote during a ride home on the school bus. We spent about an hour each way between the bus stop and school in Nairobi - enough for some maddening boredome when no one else was there to keep you company. On this particular trip there weren't too many people on board for interest's sake and I ended up making faces in the window and laughing intermitently. Jote started laughing hysterically and said:
'You know how to amuse yourself, don't you?'
Sure. But what seemed like freakish behavior to him has been useful so many times over. Forget the fact that I'm in a town of 10,000 with no coffee houses for a moment and think of long car trips, airline flights, and Dodgeville, Wisconsin1. It does get worse and when it does, my self dialogue kicks into overdrive and I'm alright in the end.
My second amazing ability is colloquialism. People like me whose lives are spent in cultural transit become adaptable. One isn't forced to think about things like this until they interact with people who have trouble with even the most obvious form of adaptation, language. It's a casual habit, one I don't realize a priori, only when I find myself emitting the strangest concoction of language. When I'm hanging friends of a particular etchnicity, for example, I stop using articles:
"You going use those stuffs?"
"Its works!"
Other times, around another ethnicity, I'll say:
"Dude, I'm stoked about that code I wrote."
"What-Ever Bro, What-Ever"
Yet another ethnicity will coax the following:
"Aw, Hells No."
"Fo' Sho'"
So what is your Superpower?
1 Dodgeville, WI has 4 things: Wal-Mart, Pizza Hut, McDonalds and Lands' End. I worked there in the dead of winter once and managed to tear my achilles tendon. But that's a story for another day...
6:12:43 PM 
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