So tonight’s work involves watching and analyzing The Incredibles. I’m halfway through it.

And you know, it’s really good. I had seen it once before, not that long after it came out in 2004, and I remember rating it on the positive side of meh. But the me of twelve years ago must have been looking for something it was never going to be, because the me of now is quite spellbound.

Of course, it helps that it’s on a big TV screen with great color. That makes everything better. But mostly, I am far more hooked in to Bob’s (AKA Mister Incredible’s) journey. Somehow I can really identify with the struggle between what you are, by logic and reason and sensibility, supposed to be doing, and what your unique power is calling you to do. I don’t blame Bob for not being happy living a normal life when he knows that there are people out there suffering and dying that he could have saved if he just had the balls to tell the government to go to hell and go back to being a superhero.

For those who have not seen the movie, the plot goes basically like this : In a world with lots of superheroes and supervillains, a series of very expensive lawsuits against superheroes (but it’s the government who ends up paying for some reason) has caused the government to pass a law banning all superheroing forever.

Which is a bit of a plot hole, because one would think that with the superheroes gone, the supervillains would take over. I mean, supervillains already operate outside of the law and face a lot of prison time if caught doing what they do, so it’s not like they are going to care about yet another law they are breaking. And we all know that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with superpowers is a good guy with superpowers.

Yes, just like they say in the gun control debate. Only in this case, it’s actually true.

So either the world of The Incredibles is a world with superheroes and no supervillains (unlikely) or it really should be a dystopian future where supervillains run rampant and the whole world is a Somalia type anarchy ruled by warlords with superpowers.

But instead, the world is just like ours. Fast forward fifteen years and Bob has a horrible, humiliating job as the person who is supposed to be denying claims to people trying to actually get the money their evil insurance company owes them (those greedy bastards!), but he’s actually too softhearted and tells them how to use legal loopholes to get what they are legally owed. This really pisses off his tiny angry boss, voiced wonderfully by Wallace Shawn.

I will stop myself there before this becomes an entire plot synopsis instead of a blog entry. Suffice it to say he gets drawn back into superhero work, despite his ex-superheroine wife not wanting him to risk their “normal” lives with their two superpowered kids.

And I know what it’s like to know you are exceptional and that making it impossible for you to live a “normal” life. Admittedly, my superpowers are a lot more modest that nigh-invulnerability or having a super-stretchy body like a superhero. They have a lot more to do with being crazy smart and creative to boot.

Nevetheless, I have always identified with people who are too powerful on a personal level for their own good. I have known I was exceptionally bright since way before I ever went to school. I learned how to read when I wasn’t quite three years old, for crying out loud. And that made me stand out from the my fellow students and made it hard for me to relate to them, a problem I still have to this day.

But like I have said many a time before, I could have gone the traditional route of becoming an apple-polishing prig who embraced the usual brand of intellectual elitism, misanthropy, and arrogance that turns so many of the best and the brightest into Ayn Rand libertarians these days.

Thank goodness most of them grow up and get the fuck over it. Oh yeah, it’s your specialness that people hate, not your atrocious personality.

But something in me resisted that, and still does to this day. It just seems like such an ugly and isolating route. And I am, deep down in my soul, a humanist, and you can’t be a humanist and a misanthrope at the same time, no matter how hard people try to do it.

The statements “I hate people” and “I love humanity” are not logically compatible. Besides, isn’t blaming all of humanity for the actions of a few the theoretical maximum of prejudice and bigotry? There is no large subset of humanity than humanity itself. That’s not even a subset any more. That’s the set itself!

And these days, I am actually someplace where I can learn to use my superpowers to make a freaking living. I guess that makes VFS my equivalent of Xavier’s School For Gifted Youths, though I ain’t no youth any more, except in life experience.

Any way you look at it, though, writing for television is not a normal life. So I will have dodged that bullet. I could never have been happy with something that clipped my wings too much anyhow. I have thought how it would be nice to have a job as a cashier at a bookstore or the like. Some small job that is well within my skills at customer service that could get me a minimum wage income and give me something to do with my time.

But now I wonder if maybe I would have gotten restless in a job like that and either ended up self-sabotaging or taking up some very self-destructive habit to deal with how unhappy I was, like drugs or alcohol or high risk sex.

I’m too queer and too big of a duck to be happy in a cage. On land, I am awkward to the point of ridiculousness.

But let me soar…. and I am fucking majestic.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.