Interesting...

Very interesting...

And what is so interesting, you ask?

Well, tonight I discovered something about myself: I don't really have a desire to be a cowboy.

Now, the obvious reply to this is "Michael, you want to be a priest. You can't ride. You're an indoorsy type. Why on earth would you want to be a cowboy anyway?"

Well the answer to that is that I am, and always have been, rather the dress-up sort, or the fictional world loving sort. Even today, give me a toy sword and a place to swing where there's no one I'd have to explain why I was swinging to, and well... I'd probably start swinging. Those orks wouldn't know what hit them.

There are three big things, I'd say, that North American boys are stereotypically considered to play at being: Knights (or various sword-wielding alternative Castle-y types), Astronauts, and Cowboys. Now, to any of my fellow Classic-Castlers, or my fellow 'Downers, the fact that I would enjoy playing at being a knight should come as no surprise. It might rather shock them to know that I'd willingly imagine myself as an astronaut, but no more so than that I would be a pirate, or a policeman, or well... a whole lot of stuff.

But a cowboy? Tonight I discovered what I hadn't articulated before, but which was certainly there: I don't care to be a cowboy.

Which is not to say I have anything against cowboys. I have friends who ARE cowboys. And I will willingly watch a good John Wayne movie, no problem there. And one cannot blame it on an not-wanting-to-be-taken-for-an-American complex (which would be a plausible theory, otherwise, seeing how I'm rather pro-Canadian, and British-over-American in my leanings), since the astronaut image is still plausible, and astronauts are more American than cowboys. Cowboys, after all, are perfectly indigenous to this part of Canada.

But no... I just have no desire to ever be in cowboy garb. Indian garb (the p.c. term is "Native", but the context should make it clear what kind of Indians I mean) is far preferable, though I am 100% European in ancestry (least within the past five centuries or so, anyway... before that you might get some Asians and whatnot).

Now, the curious thing, to me, about all this is that I don't know WHY I have this cowboy-is-not-for-me thing. Unless I'm just getting a plain old glimpse into my own aesthetic sense, then I am completely clueless.

Another thing I noted about myself tonight was that I dislike the smell of mingled cigarette and alcohol... but I don't think that so interesting a realization. More of an articulation, and just that.