Thursday, March 17, 2011

The thing about wetsuits

I learned something today about wetsuits. Wetsuits are meant to be put on, and little to no time is meant to pass between this and the time in which you enter the water. It's a basic law of wetsuits. If you happen to put on a wetsuit and then sit around on a patio for 15 minutes, while, say, your surfing instructor tries to corral a number of preadolescent boys into their wetsuits so they can go surfing, and is trying to locate his own wetsuit in the meantime, you and everyone else who walks by the patio will invariably be thinking, why are you sitting around on a patio in a wetsuit? You will start to feel like a second rate superhero who was in the midst of donning his costume to engage in some crime-fighting, when the entire Justice League of America decided to show up and clean house before you've even managed to get your boots on. Naturally, after having gone through all the trouble of putting on your spandex supersuit, you don't want to turn around and strip it off, so you decide to lounge around nonchalantly for at least a little while, as if you were going to hang out in spandex irrespective of whether or not those assholes in the Justice League swooped in from nowhere to steal your thunder. Again.

This, by the way, is why Superman and Batman and Spider Man and so on have secret identities. It doesn't have anything to do with anonymity, or with protecting the ones they love, or with avoiding the difficulty and pressure of being super all the time. It's because wearing spandex all the time makes you look like a jerk. It also has the potential to really mess with you.

Along these lines, I highly recommend the graphic novel The Watchmen. Look at Rorschach for an example of someone who decides to be his super self all the time.

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