You can take your cog and replace it!

I recently encountered a quote attributed to Douglas Coupland that states:

“You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you fear you are an interchangeable cog."


That intrigued me. To think that there are people out there that fear that they are not different enough that they do out of character things in order to convince themselves that they are in fact not just white noise (I'm sure there's some metaphor for the Ganzfeld experimentation in there somewhere but I think it's more interesting to make you look it up [This is all the help you'll get]).

I know a girl like this. It's not enough that she be weird (enjoy miming in public outside of the realm of buskering, wear cat whiskers on days other than Halloween or possibly the odd cosplay convention). She insists on everybody around her knowing that she is doing these things:

"So what do you think of my 'coonskin cap?"
"I mismatch my socks every day."
"I think normal people are weird."

I have no issues with people that do these things. In fact, I'll be one the the first to applaud them for their candor. I just don't understand the purpose of pointing out to people that they are participating in aberrant behaviour. The closest approximation I can come to is it being a statement that she is not associated with the very negative things that she attributes normalcy to which in my mind is not at all the same thing as not being normal. That said, I think she is eccentric. I just don't know why.

I don't believe that I'm an interchangeable cog. I feel more like a catalytic converter in that I do something just not something so obvious as what a cog does. The eccentricites I put forward are an attempt to discover that my function in the world can't simply just be removed with little noticeable impact on the world. My fear isn't that I'm replacable, it's that if I am a cog I have no other cogs that will react to my ridiculous gear system.