"It's Not For Me... Okay?"

 don’t understand.

“Hold on a second.”

What?

“I notice you often begin posts with ‘I don’t understand.’”

That’s because there are a lot of things I don’t understand.

“Is that why you say that?  Or is it simply a ‘literary device’?”

What do you mean?

“I mean you actually do understand but you pretend that you don’t.”

Why would I do that?

“It’s like a deliberate “pose.”  Your saying you don’t understand things when you actually do masks some overt criticism you are unwilling to “own” because it makes you sound snooty.

I’m not snooty!

“Spoken like a true ‘Snooty.’ 

But I’m not!  Lots of people understand things I don’t.  It makes me wonder why I’m not them.

“Is that a ‘literary device’?”

What?

“‘Look at me, reacting differently from all of those people.’  While, deep down, it’s ‘Everyone’s wrong, except me.’”

I do not know where this is coming from.

“It’s been pent up.”

You think I’m lying when I say, “I don’t understand”?

“I think you’re ‘manipulating’.”

Look, can I keep going, and we can work this out later?

“Fine.  But this better not be a ‘literary device.’”

You mean like the “Inner Me”, speaking in italics?

“What’s wrong with that?”

Okay.  (Now that I am almost out of time.)

A new movie comes out, like Tarentino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, which I know from his reputation is too violent for me.  I read the script of Pulp Fiction and got scared.  Just reading the damn script!  “A syringe, plunged into her heart”?  I had to put the thing down!

So I don’t see this new movie.

And I immediately catch flack, people telling me I should.

“It’s not that violent.”

By whose standards?  Not mine.

“It’s only violent at the end.”

Right.  Like “The Alamo’s” only “butchering massacre” at the end.  It’s “Thirteen Days of Glory.”  Twelve of them went well.  And the whole movie, you are waiting for “Thirteen.”

“How do you know if you don’t see it?”

That’s the old “liver” example.  “How do you know if you don’t taste it?” 

Because it’s liver!

I mean I give in, and then what?  Can I “un-see” the bloodbath?  Can I “un-taste” the liver?

I don’t like having my personal proclivities casually dismissed.  As in, “Don’t be a baby!”  (Implied in my unwillingness to “do mushrooms” in the desert with show biz celebrities.  And other examples, available in these archives.)

I don’t do things a lot of other people do – so what?  “So what?”  “So what” is me, constantly defending myself, just ‘cause I say “No.”

I really don’t understand.

“Because you never do that?”

Me?

“Others don’t do stuff you do, and you never wonder ‘How come’?”

I guess sometimes I do. 

“Like what?”

Well, I was watching this movie last night, and a character in the film littered.  I was really upset about that.

“You went to ‘fictional littering’ for your primary example?  I smell ‘highly judgmental in actual life.’”

All right, sure.  I have reactions to other people’s behavior.  But I normally just “think” them.

“They never come out on your face?”

I hope not.  But you never know about faces.

“Let’s take a non-filmic example.  Somebody litters, and you don’t.

Most people don’t litter.

"Most people are untroubled by violence in movies."

Why not? 

“And there we have it.  ‘I'm right, and they're wrong.’”

Hm.

“‘Non-Understander’ – Understand thyself.” 

I am thinking of disabling the “Italics” function.

“Good luck with that one.”