Open Mind Over Matter

I started reading Cosmo when I was about eighteen. Religiously, I bought it from the local grocery store, never bothering to get a subscription. I couldn’t wait to get home and devour all of that valuable information about men and sex and dieting. And how could I forget the Cosmo Quiz? “Are you too selfish?” “Does he love you?” “Are your toenails too long?” “Are you high maintenance?”

I stopped reading it several years ago. I began to think that something was wrong with me since I’ve never gotten a boob job and men weren’t sending me flowers every Monday and Thursday. I think I’m better off living my relatively bland life when compared to that of the Cosmo Seductress. I just don’t have the energy, the legs, or the time, to scamper from obsequious men while wearing a skirt so short and tight that anyone within a mile radius knows when I had my last bikini wax.

So, I changed direction.  It wasn’t about sex and dieting and dating anymore.  Other things mattered.  I was going to expand my mind. 

How?  I picked up painfully liberal magazines, whose articles explaining why our tax dollars should be supporting homeless drunks made my eyelashes hurt.  I was raised in a dog-eat-dog house where it was every man for himself.  If you didn’t work, you didn’t eat. 

I started talking to Neo-Nazis who taught me about 1488 and Rahowa.  My best childhood friend was a black girl who became valedictorian.  Sending her back to Africa would mean one less pediatrician in America.

I did this to deliberately expose myself with vigor to ideas that violently opposed to everything I believed in.  To expand my knowledge.  To focus on something other than myself.

I still do that every day.  I read articles that oppose gay marriage.  I watch religious programming on television.  I spend time with people who want my tax money to pay for their extravagances.  I suggest I believe one thing to more completely understand the other side. 

It keeps the mind open, the ideas flowing, and the debates interesting.  This whole open-minded knowledge-expansion thing even introduced to the Brazilian.