A Quixotic Quest For Poetic Justice For Amanda Bynes?
A thing that is either too stupid or too smart — therein a thing I do not fully understand — is the etiological significance behind the phrase: “When you cannot effectively engage in a dialogue with someone, you are either too smart or too stupid in relation to them.” Engaging in thorough communication might not be my biggest gift as a human entity, leading to numerous cases that can serve as empirical evidence of my too-stupidity or my too-smartness.
The too-stupid-feeling readers may cease here and jump to the comment section to express disdain for this meta-bullshit. Hoping that I have yet to lose the reader who might be feeling gradually alienated as too smart, let me reintroduce my thinking as an honest projection of myself as someone who has a truly very hard time understanding where his jokes stop and where his reality begins.
If this may serve as a case study for the style section of the NYT, someone too smart or too stupid there might attribute this approach to the self-obsession of those god-awful millennials. However, I recognize this as a broader issue for more and more of us, because why yes I can maybe see outside of me-me-me. Some succumb to the need to see things more black and white and start the therapy-tour of institutionalized medication. Others do not, and thrive or burn in the gray area the past two decades reserved for the brave ones who choose the struggle of a continuous attempt to find a connection with more people who are not them, and who could be too smart or too stupid. This attempt itself illustrates a desire for human connection any trend piece fails to capture
Before I get sucked into taking a stand to support my generation, let me clarify that I hate it too and also that this is all about Amanda Bynes. However, I no longer need to build a cajoling case for the transgression of femininity she achieves with requests for murdered vaginas, comparable in force to what Robert Frost’s poetry attained in terms of transgression for masculinity. If Bynes’ permanent midnight is a simulation or if it is true I cannot know, but in the époque of birdshit at the MoMa and other celebrity cameos in museums can I know a truth? My wish to write a seriocomic analysis of Amanda Bynes’ potential public breakdown diminished when I thought of other women whose work I have admired: Maria Bamford, Melissa Broder, Britney Spears.
Instead of conceptualizing the value of her work as it arrives on the medium of sociality of her preference I might have just done exactly what everyone else must to appreciate the wisdom behind her every poem: I projected.