Being "Alternative" or "Eccentric" - C/D?

I'm suffering a severe case of disillusionment right now about someone I thought was "alternative" and "freaky" and "unconventional" who is proving to be as staid and conventional and unadventurous as the suits in my office.

Like you said, it's like it's a choice that some people make, a lifestyle, something they DO. Genuine freaks just ARE, they can't help the way that they are, and that's scary and REALLY threatens society in a way that just chosing to opt out of it in limited manageable doses just doesn't.

"I chose to be weird, let's all be different together" = "cool"

"I have no choice, I cannot be any other way" = "not cool"

This outsiderdom as a fashion, a pose, is why, as you astutely point out, real outsiders and eccentrics are excluded.

Being consciously "eccentric" is dud for non-teenagers. If you dye your hair blue and tattoo your nose because you just happen to think you look good that way, more power to you. If you do it because you get a kick out of the bank teller giving you a look or little kids asking their folks, "Why did that man draw on his nose," and pat yourself on the back for "freaking out the mundanes," you're a weenie.

Forced eccentricity is obviously the former word, but not the latter.

http://www.az-books.co.uk/t_Mad_People_s_History_of_Madness.html

It's a very interesting read.

I agree with what Martin and Kate have said, and have particular sympathy with you Kate - the number of times I've fallen hard for an arty, bohemian, eccentric (and incredibly fickle) Sussex Uni girl only to discover that I'm just a bit TOO weird/intense/passionate for the seretly rather conventional girl in question is getting both ridiculous and depressing.

Perhaps if I were a rich-kid with dreads things would be different.

- sympathy for (rather than "with")
- secretly, rather than "seretly"

Please forgive the typos and bad grammar, my soul is sick.

If anyone could tell me how to italicize or underline in HTML I would be truly grateful.

i do - well i think they're double headed monsters really - they both sustain the chic of affected alternative/weirdo/eccentric and encourage viewers/consumers to adopt certain behaviours. i take the northwest 'artist' ms. m. july to be an exemplar of when eccentric/alternative goes wrong and becomes untrustworthy. often in this case the affected agent copies a previously successful *eccentric* person's ideas and adds a weirdo flourish to suggest authenticity - in ms. m. july's case i suspect she has ripped off the brilliant, yet remarkably well-adjusted, laurie anderson. but i could be wrong and i certainly don't wanna diss here.

some suicides (noun) are weird/alternative/eccentric and get it right and can be trusted - retrospectively, sadly and obviously.

It's all subjective, depending on how you use the word. But there's certainly a marked difference between people who consciously choose X because X is not valued/approved of/accepted/understood by the mainstream, and people who choose X because X is what they want and would be what they wanted no matter what other people thought of it.

Perhaps the person just meant alternative to me, but I rather think she meant the bongoing trustafarian type.

Bitter - moi?

that should have read "which is why I was" of course...

I think maybe I'm equally sad, though. I'm kind of stuck with being a bizarro on the fringes and I have never come to terms with it too well. I guess I'd like to be 'normal' quite a lot. Although it's a futile desire.

Then again, I hate human sheep and people with no individuality. So I think I have an insoluble dichotomy going on somewhere.

Me too, the person in question developed acute bi-polar schizphrenia and killed himself > Nietzche's theory that a hypocrite who persists in the role ceases to be a hypocrite.

I went to a state school. Surprisingly, it helped me feel more normal.

I went there when a guidance counselor pointed it out to me after finding out I wasn't planning on going to college -- it seemed to answer most of my complaints about higher education (and it didn't occur to me that if Hampshire was different, other places might be too). The whole "alternative community" aspect of it was so in-your-face and cult-like that I ended up spending as little time on campus as possible.

I don't think there is one, really, in the sense you seem to want. The dictionary definition is pretty simple -- deviation from the norm -- but everything involved is subjective. Extremes are obvious, but outside of that, everyone's going to draw a different line in the sand.

It's not necessarily being saddled with the image that should cause them to shy away from that school. Like was said previously, every single person I know from Hampshire who actually fit the description of smart kids with backgrounds not fitting trad ed, ended up transferring out. Granted my experience is more limited because I didn't actually attend Hampshire, but everyone there said the same thing. You can't actually learn a damned thing attending classes there, no matter what your intentions are, because the trustafarians who are interested in spending their parents' money and smoking weed and being "counter-culture" are completely destroying any attempt at doing anything educational.

Going back to the topic at hand, I find most people who look like the standard definition of "alternative" or "eccentric" are completely unadventurous in real life. My office is full of sociopaths, no standards at all as to what they should or shouldn't do, no boundary. The firemen and cops I know? All completely insane. Whereas the kids my age, I gotta fucking fight them just to stay out past 2 in the morning on a night out.

Actually, pretty much the only "counter-cultural" dresser I knew that was actually eccentric in any real definition of the word was my ex, and eccentric quickly turned into full blown mental illness.

(this is discussing people I know personally in real life that are not on ILX, you people are all fucking nuts too)

this is EXACTLY why i think its really wrong for everyone to be erecting a border between being "genuinely" eccentric and "just adopting the lifestyle". sometimes it isn't that simple. i know i have a gall to be talking about blah blah generalisations and all considering i had a thread about hating men, but really, when is anything ever so black and white?

anyway, if you go to Hampshire and you really want an education (as opposed to a four-year pot-smoking trustafarian/smelly-hippie holiday) it can be done because you can take classes at any of four area colleges (U. Mass, Amherst College, Mt. Holyoke, and Smith). though again you might also get sick of the pot-smoking trustafarian/smelly-hippy schtick and transfer to get away from that, too. and doesn't Bennington College also have the same vibe?

the dirty little secret of American colleges is that you don't have to go to a place like Hampshire or Bennington to be a weirdo, or even a pot-smoking trustafarian. about the only colleges you can't get away with such antics would be very conservative religious colleges, like Bob Jones or Yeshiva, or a military college like West Point or the Citadel -- and i don't think that kids who go to such places are all that eager to rebel anyway.

besides, it sounds like the Hampshire College notion of "eccentric" or "alternative" is to be a pot-smoking smelly-hippy, which might have been "weird" in 1968 or even 1973, but is lame and boring in 2003.

You get an advisor who has to approve your stuff, but you choose your advisor: if you got one who didn't approve what you wanted to do, you dropped them and found a different one.

My problem was that every semester there was an excuse to keep my workload low, and there was no pressure on me to "buckle down" and actually make use of my time.

The other thing I loved about it when I applied was the lack of general education requirements. On paper, I still see the virtue of that -- in practice, it didn't seem to work, because a corollary of that was that very, very few classes had prerequisites, and so many of them were either superficial or assumed a level of knowledge from the students which didn't actually exist (this is something they had acknowledged and were attempting to correct when I transferred out).

Taking classes at other schools was tricky, too -- between the commute and the way courses were scheduled, you were pretty much always scheduling around whatever off-campus course you took, and having to take an off-campus final could mean staying at school for as much as an extra three weeks in December. It was possible, but discouraging, and few people I knew did it except for courses directly related to their field of study.

The best word for it still is 'wanker,' I guess. :)

Di: I'm not actually trying to make a distinction between the two at all? I was using it as a point to illustrate my greater point, which is that the majority of people who dress "oddly" indie types and rockers or whatever, this like class of 25 year old "weirdos", none of them are actually weird at all and are more "middle America" than anything, and that people who actually are "different" are few and far between in that group...

Actually I think my point is that by and large in my experience, if you are mentally off a bit or you have impulse control issues or whatever things people here are seeming to label as "alternative", then you AREN'T going to wander around dressed to advertise it at all.

So, if you're irregular or off-centre according to convention (however that's defined anymore), you can legitimately be called eccentric.

take a look at ILM now - we have the Gospel according to Geir Hongro taking place.

[ILM, was launched in late August 2000 and Geir finally finds it March 2003]