The Ink-Pot and the Palette

Ooh, I like your avatar!

Thank you. I suspect that the edge-dweller type is disproportionately represented in fandom, and that edge-dweller characteristics account for the sensed difference between fannish and non-fannish people. Not that fandom is exclusively made up of us--clearly that's not the case and I've met some wonderful, gregarious, highly-connected people in fandom who provide a whole lot of social glue, particularly at in-person meetups, cons, an so on.

I think you mimic "normal" and "nice" pretty well, too :D, but one of the reasons I always come away from our little get-togethers feeling energized and happy is that it's okay for our conversations to be passionate about ideas without having to dip too deeply into unwanted empathy, and we both seem to understand that.

"Conform" is an interesting term, isn't it? On the one hand, it's laden with the feeling of free will, such that conformity and non-conformity sound like choices. (Sometimes they are, but not as often as the feeling-tone of the word would suggest.) On the other hand, "conformation" is "the shape or structure of something, especially an animal"--I've heard it used to refer to horses, for example--and the implication is "this is just how this being is."

I think American culture is particularly infected with self-improvement mania. In my experience it almost doesn't matter what standard you're trying to conform to, as long as it isn't your true nature. It's almost as if self-acceptance is a sin, and lazy. It's sad, isn't it?