Faking It

I have a problem. I keep pretending to fit in by trying to understand references that I don't fully know.

Here is an annotated list of things I've made jokes about that I haven't read, watched, played, or listened to:

- Kanye West
- LOST
- Game of Thrones
- Mario Kart
- Bollywood films

Many of my friends are avid gamers, and yet I have never played video games. Many of my friends are addicted to shows such as Game of Thrones, Community, Doctor Who, House of Cards, Mad Men, and Downton Abbey. I have watched these shows only sparingly or not at all. I want to watch them, but I don't have the time.

I have this constantly nagging sensation that I don't belong. There's a pit in my stomach, as I agonize over my lack of cultural knowledge. Because I have a photographic memory and a ridiculously good sense for small details, I can read comments that people make about their favorite shows, books, and movies, and get a pretty good sense of what people like about their entertainment and what they find memorable - I don't typically know enough to have an in-depth conversation but I'll remember enough to laugh at inside jokes that only fans usually get and to deduce what happens next in shows without getting the spoilers first.

I am alternately dismayed and amused by my talents.

I've never been a primarily self-guided person - I've always been heavily influenced by other people, whether it's been my parents, my former church, my fellow Scouts, my school mates, my coworkers, or my college theater friends. When I was in school, I always found it annoying when teachers asked me to answer questions for them before being instructed in how to solve them.

While I now realize that these teachers were often teaching me how to think, I often felt at a disadvantage because these teachers were trying to get me to think in a way that is more difficult for me. My best thinking happens when I reconfigure things I hear and learn from other people and imaginatively rearrange them. Among the first CDs I ever got as gifts were Weird Al Yankovic's Running With Scissors and Allan Sherman's Greatest Hits. I respect the work of these parody artists, who substitute their own words in popular songs to produce jaw-droppingly awkward and subversively hilarious new interpretations.

I'd much rather learn what people believe is best and why they believe that, and then try to make the connections myself. Perhaps that is why I added a philosophy major when I was a college student. I've long been fascinated by how people construct their own realities. That leads me to ask whether my own efforts to construct reality are, in fact, a parody. That's a difficult question to tackle; let's agree to defer the follow-up question, asking if my parodies are genuine or ironic?

For me, claiming to be an individual has never been a natural or a self-evident act. I can see the fault lines where I added or subtracted various habits and fandoms to become who I am today, and I recognize the role of luck and contingency in my life so far. It just doesn't matter that much to me whether I'm riding the crest of a wave of popularity or favoring obscure pursuits that most people ignore or impugn.

Nevertheless, I'm eager to see how far I can push. How inventive can I be spurning the social boundaries of my generation, sparring with the popular imagination, and spurring strange new vistas of awareness? Or am I just rationalizing my own laziness to sound pretentious? The answer, of course, is in the act - in the knowledge of the act - and in the knowledge that, despite our best efforts, we are all actors in our own way.