I’m starting to see a bunch of people on various social media slamming Pokemon Go as stupid or
juvenile, saying that whoever plays it is clearly uneducated or living
in their mama’s basement, and I honestly have been getting kind of het
up about it.
‘Cause, here’s the thing: I fucking hate Game of Thrones.
I honestly loathe it. I think that it’s pandering trash.
The Walking Dead is worse.
I only hung on ‘til the end of Breaking Bad because I wanted everyone
to die, and I genuinely hoped that Mad Men was going to end with a
suicide-by-long-drop.
I find almost all organized sports of the
sort that you’d see on television to be criminally dull. Despite living
in Pittsburgh for twelve years I can only name three of the Steelers,
and one of those only because he used to come into my favorite
restaurant and mistreat the waitresses.
Beer is disgusting. Tastes like the fifth straight day of being sick.
But so what? WHO CARES?
My friends love this stuff. Why should my opinion matter at all? Why
should I feel that it’s my place to be a downer about any of it? Why
should I look at their conversation about how great Tyrion is, or how
much they loved that last play, or when they wax lyrical about the
difference between this smalltime brewer and that, why should I look at
their happiness and think it’s a good time to for me jump in with a
“Well, ACTUALLY–” and embarrass or shame them? Not liking stuff doesn’t
somehow make me better than them.
The world is full of spite
and exhaustion and constant, grinding sorrow. It’s full of people who
spit at children from cars, people who cause pain out of the sheer mean
joy of dragging someone else down to where they constantly sit, people
who are so afraid of not being on top that they’d burn their
neighborhood down.
“I’m too *busy* to play a child’s game, so you should be too” is on the same spectrum.
Why would I want to number myself with those people? Why would you?
When did joy become shameful? When did someone expressing delight in
something become something you felt they should be ashamed of?
This is a wonderful, community-building, health-encouraging and
ultimately harmless thing. And if we’re talking about maturity, it’s
your job as an adult to not be made so uncomfortable by someone else’s
naked enjoyment of a thing that you think you have to take it from them.
Kimchi and Justice 