A while ago, someone asked a group at broad who best pony was. That was their first mistake. The second mistake was asking for my opinion. · 4:59am Oct 8th, 2013
It’s not Rarity, surprisingly.
TL;DR edition: Skip to the bottom paragraph.
In advance, please accept the usual apologies for rant and preach and idiocy. And I'm sorry that I don't have a lot of cat pictures to throw at you like many of your favourite blogger(s). The only thing I have is an uncanny sense of what the fuck is going on, and I want people to relate to that, and to me. So sorry if this doesn't engage you enough, maybe you can peruse it vaguely tonight before you go to bed. If not, that's fine, this is more to clear my own head than anything else.
I remember what it was like to be a boy growing up in the countryside. I often like to remember it fonder than it actually occurred, maybe because I was so young, but I think there's another, proper reason for me liking it so much, and that reason is simply 'the people'.
People in the city, unlike people in the country, were more than – or maybe less than – their country counterparts. They had all the savvy and hype of a generation of well-educated people, they recognised trends, and I wanted in on them because they were cool. Maybe it was this mob mentality that led me to being so strangely alienated in my school days – I felt as if it was a terrible thing to not fit in, and, having come from the country where such notions of cliques and friendship circles didn’t seem to be apparent, I felt a little overcome with the urge to be normal.
This was complicated by the progression of my brain throughout my youth and teenage years, in which a lot of idealism and confusion about my actual ability were formed. People told me I was clever, that I could do almost anything I wanted – but at the same time, being so ‘gifted’ meant that I had little that really held me in both learning and life. Work became a chore and a leisurely pursuit at best, and then fell off completely when it actually began to take on some challenge.
I am willing to accept today that many, many people would be more intelligent than I am. In fact, I would almost insist that this is the case, as it seems to me that those who have worked so hard to be where they are, no matter their apparent lack of education or ‘smartness’, have continued to prosper in their lives, almost on parallel with my own, to which I seem to have achieved little – and found less things worth achieving.
Today, there is none of that same amazement and enchantment with the world at large that really sprung up in my young years. School, at all ages beyond year 5, profoundly bored me. School shaped me into being good at the ‘sit and be still for 8 hours’ exercise, and the part of the day I looked forward most to, in the beginning, was the classwork (not the homework – NEVER the homework). Classwork really gave me an opportunity to shine, maybe, although to me it really didn’t matter if I was good at my classwork or not – the best and most important thing for me was that I continued to find things both interesting and wonderful.
For example, when I was in kindergarten, I was fascinated (yet creeped out) by some insects, and I would willingly bet that I knew more about insects and perhaps their basic biology – where they lived, what they did, etc – when I was three years old than when I do now, aged twenty-one. I was a Twilight Sparkle age three, in full and proper bloom, and I spent a long time out in the garden with a magnifying glass. Outside was an adventure, a wide, sweeping expanse with mysterious things lying beyond the borders of the garden, and my imagination ran rampant with the possibilities of what might be out there beyond the sandhill next to my house. It might have been childish, but bugger it - it certainly provided inspiration, and I’m disappointed that simply standing in a wide open space just doesn’t do it for me anymore, at least not in the learning respect.
I really miss having that sort of knowledge at my fingertips, even though today that's more achievable then ever thanks to the smartphone – I guess the irony is that even if I have all the world’s knowledge on google at my beck and call, it doesn’t matter if I can’t describe something in words, like what kind of tree that tree is, or what kind of bird that bird is.
I stopped asking why in life, because nobody knew the answers I wanted. All they did was give questions that didn’t require me to think, just do. And, I think I stopped asking ‘why’ in my classrooms shortly after that point. I couldn’t exactly place a year on when I became complacent with boredom and the answers of my teachers, almost all of which I had already found out myself, but I know it was after I moved to the city. To me, the real things always lay outside in the garden and roads and people and towns and history of the places I'd been to. I had no interest in simple maths or grammar, really - it was something I’d known already, to the extent where I was leaps and bounds ahead of all my peers.
In reality, if I had been coaxed into co-operating more deeply beyond my first few years at school, I would probably be a celebrated achiever among my family and friends.
I don’t call that regret, though. I have very little regret for things that passed over my head, and things that I could not control – and this was certainly both. My regret was that going to school in the city made me lose out on everything that I’d ever had as a child. I lost the world of infinite discovery, I lost the open spaces, I lost all the friends of my youth – which probably wasn’t a big deal to me at the time, luckily – and I felt suddenly hemmed in, pressured by every and all sources to be as ‘clever’ as my brain would allow me to be, to ‘achieve’. The aim of the game stopped being about learning and the accumulation of knowledge – which was at odds with the continued good feelings I was getting from my heart, and started being a medium of my success.
And from then on, I don’t really understand why things were as they were. I suppose you could blame social idiocy as a source for my strangely uncanny sense of ‘I do not belong’ in my latter years of highschool. I’m convinced that this might just be the usual teenage jitters - when was the last time you heard from a teenager who had a good time in high school? - but you do have to wonder about these things. I don’t think I’d ever factor it into my learning – those things should be and usually are unrelated, but I don’t imagine that they were in this case.
In the city, I felt apart, I felt pressured, I saw the slight ridicule put on those who did achieve and wanted to avoid it. I was already different enough from other people. I felt run over by the hustle and bustle of it all. I had to watch my mouth and brain around everyone, even my friends, all of whom seemed to like me for who I was in the instant that I knew them, and not any of my other qualities. In fact, the lack of qualities would lead me to later finding a lack of self-worth, and I had a tiny, tiny crisis of person in my late teenage years, that would end up becoming lost in the shades of something much greater – one that forged me into the happy guy I am today.
Probably not the best wording of how I feel. I feel more happy-go-lucky. I put a lot of effort into socializing with people, trying to make them laugh, trying not to weigh them down with information and heavy facts, but sometimes I can’t help myself, and I sometimes feel like the best answer for a situation is one that portrays the other person in a superior light – not just for the sake of comedy, but because I genuinely feel more comfortable in a conversation where I’m not dominating it, but engaging the other person, despite my ability as a charismatic speaker and presenter.
All of which comes back to the countryside. Things were a lot simpler then, though maybe it was less the geography and more the age. I didn't feel so uneasy with people there. I know it's a world and age bracket apart, but the fact remains that I haven’t found a lack of anything in the country – the only difference now from 10 years ago is my own peers, the same ones who I grew up with in high school. They’re all married and having kids and doing things that everyone else in the city would readily call ‘hick’ at the drop of a bat, but I can’t bring myself to look down on these people for living that way. But I find myself criticizing your average city resident for driving a big car and living wastefully.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I stayed in the country, if my parents had never had enough money to move to the city and put me through a nice school. I suspect I would have probably been put into a decent enough public school, locally, and my experience would have been mostly the same if not better due to the absence of rich-kid cliques and the presence of more down-to-earth kids. The kind who have taken a good punch in the face to make them stop being little pricks. I was probably in need of a good beating or six when I was in high school.
And this image of ‘real people’ keeps getting reinforced by people who come out of the country. They’re nice people. So is everyone else, don’t get me wrong, but there’s something unusually good about them. They seem more realistic, ready, eager to work, eager to talk, and enjoying of a good conversation to name a few qualities. Almost all of them are willing and ready to accept me as a friend at the drop of a hat, and that is almost certainly something I can put down to having come from any number of small towns and cities inland. It’s something I do a lot and is probably why I never had any trouble adjusting socially when I moved schools as a kid. I just picked up the first set of nice looking guys I found and made them my friends, never mind the absence of common likes, dislikes or anything like that.
But I digress. Country people are nice, and unqiue, and almost a little apart from their city counterparts, but not in a way that you could pick them on the street. They’re just two different varities of people, and I guess you could call me convinced that I think this is true, even though I have no idea how to respond to people who ask for proof of it. I guess it’s just something you feel. I feel like city people are jaded by the smoke, and tricked into forgetting there's more to the world than tall buildings and steel bridges.
I should really stop identifying with the country. It’s not me and it never will be, even though I like being down to earth. I live here now, and so I'm sort of half-and-half - not properly from the city, not properly from the country, and it makes me feel awkward, being told I’m something I’m not – smart, clever, from the country, from the city. But I still continue to play off of all of those things for recognition, and I have no idea why. I mean, I understand that recognition is a good thing, but I just want the right kind of recognition, or maybe mutual respect for these things, even though these things have no value and I didn’t work to achieve them.
Wtf? So why want respect for them in the first place? You’re rambling. Go home, you’re drunk.
I wanted maybe not a ‘respect’ for these things, but a greater sense of belonging where I understood who I was and why I was there, and getting someone to recognize various stuff about me might help me find a greater identity. I honestly don’t know about that identity bullshit – I can’t put it right in my head, let alone in words – but I think it’s something I still want and still enjoy, though my outlook on life has become more passive to neutral of late, only slipping into determined once a month when I get enough of a spike to want to do everything, and occasionally falling back into negative, when I don’t really want to deal with life any more.
But I still admire that hardworking tenacity, and simple – yet complex – understanding of the essentials of life by people who come from the country. Life is probably harder for them, and it makes them better people to be with, to deal with. It probably makes them less opinionated. I know a lot of people who would enjoy that. They see the circle of life revolve before their eyes in farm animals and cattle, and kangaroos on the highway, and they see a lot of it. They see the city as someplace foreign, and in a way it is and always will be, which saddens me in a sense, knowing that where I live doesn’t feel like a proper home.
Even though my reality is so very different from the rest of the country people (most of whom will have read the first sentence of this blog and said, ‘yeah, righto’, rolled their eyes and closed it again), I can appreciate Applejack. I can appreciate her philosophy, or my imagining of her philosophy, and I can imagine the bonds between family and kin that really keep them together, because I think I had it once, and I probably lost it, among other things that were way more important, like a passion for hard work and learning for the sake of learning.
Holy shit. I just realised, in re-reading this, that I’m sort emulating Applejack from that one episode where she goes to Manehattan and just doesn’t feel right. Except I’ve just never realised it, and where she left after about a month, I never left.
Yet.
I appreciate Applejack’s almost quaint humbleness. I enjoy her simple values, that are in reality tied to something greater. I can appreciate the wisdom – not intelligence – that was required to commandeer her family farm, and I conclude that there’s hardly much that’s ‘simple’ about her. Simple is a word made up to mean stupid or plain, but if you can call a person who is surrounded by the people they love, doing what they love, achieving as they love ‘stupid’, then I suggest you re-evaluate your own life, and take stock of exactly how many of these things you have, and how hard you struggled to get them.
And that’s the reason why Applejack is best pony. And I’m not sure who the fuck cares, but I wrote this, so it’s going on my wall as a memento.
Wow.
1404021
well, at least I told you it was a mistake at the outset of the blog, instead of dropping you in it.
also, this is why I don't blog. I have too much to say, and frankly I feel like most people couldn't give a rats
but like i said
it's nice to have the expression sometimes
1404065
You're completely right, on the expression part. But just because you don't think people give a rats ass shouldn't stop you from speaking. If I followed that I never would have written my first story, much less published it. Blogs and stories are really not very different. They are both a way of expressing yourself. If you're more comfortable with stories, take what you want to say in a blog and write it into a story.
Well...
You my friend, just came close to understanding the meaning of life the universe and everything. In order to truly appreciate something one must work and struggle to obtain it.
My deepest respect towards you. Seriously, where I live, it is rare to see such pondering!
At the very beginning, I questioned internally: ''How is this going to answer the question from the title?''
However, your monologue was actually relevant to the purpose of this blog the whole time! Furthermore, by telling us about yourself, you didn't just let me know valuable information about yourself (Which I highly adore, since my parents were from the country too, but moved to the city, where I was born with a hidden sense of homesickness for a reason. I always liked the country more than the pissed-down streets...) , but provided me the privilege to see this way of reasoning for the very first time from someone other than myself! I just got home from school and THIS awaited me! My gratitude for you!
You didn't start listing up facts about the pony in question - which were by the way, overused - to prove why she is the best pony, but from a personal opinion, you proved YOURSELF right! And that is it! You didn't outright declare that these are the facts and accept it, but proved your statement right with personal, logical and unique reasons!
Also, you made me recall this mare after so long. I've been blinded with other things and I haven't really looked into Applejack in such a deep way. Thanks for that too!
Even more so, for I have to agree with you with everything you've said...
Thank you very much for creating a better picture in overall about her for me!
I wish you the very best in the future!
~Adam
1404545
Hey, thank you.
That expression - pissed-down - is great. I think I'll keep track of it.
1404436
Well damn, didn't I do well?
1404643 You're welcome and have great use of it!
I'm patiently waiting for more kind of stuff like this.
Let me be one of those fucks who care, because this one was golden and heartwarming. It was something, which I could relate to as a person...
Also, finally, an outright deep thing to receive inspiration and ideas from, topics to muse about and memorize etc...
In short, I thank YOU for taking your time to share such a personal concept!
That's a pretty great reason to say Jack is best poneh, and I myself can subscribe to that reasoning that she is best mare, I always appreciated hard work and honesty myself even though I'm a hypocrite because I have done neither of which myself.
Also it's nice to know that some writer (unlike most) can have blog posts not filled with a plethora of useless garbage and porn and lots of dickery, can't forget that, I mean seriously whatever happened to common courtesy and kindness, internet amirite? So anyway, because of the fact that you go against the tide of shit, gracias.
*Feasts eyes on colossal wall of text*
Holy...hobgoblins.