- Asymmetric pleat detail
- Long sleeve
If you are a fan of Halloween then you know the euphoria of pretending to be Frankenstein or a prostitute or Spiderman or Wonder Woman or a tiger or Dorothy or any old somebody or something that you are not.
To be free of social constraints, to melt the world as you know it for an evening, to be tantalized by uniqueness, causes tens of millions of people to be filled with glee on the last day of October. Some people spend a week's pay and a year's plotting to come up with the perfect costume that will blow their friends' minds away.
For some reason, people experience untold amounts of elation when they get to pretend to be somebody who they are not.
Multiply that by 50,000 and you would come close to the level of euphoria you'd reach ! if you got to actually parade around in the skin of somebody else for a few days. Just imagine if, all of a sudden, with the mere injection of a needle, you became Asian or a midget or a man. A quick sting in the ribs and you're blonde or pretty or have an Afro. Just imagine becoming any of these combinations and infinitely more. Since you are no longer actually you, you are immediately freed up to talk to whomever you want to talk to without fear of them judging you. All of a sudden, you can take revenge on enemies, commit crimes and be lascivious without fear of repercussions. All of a sudden, you are free.
Imagine how much fun it would be to be anybody or anything you wanted to be!
And with absolutely no constraints, no restrictions, no limitations, no boundaries, no gravity!
Wouldn't that be great?!
The novel blurred explores this scenario and makes the following analogy:
Drop a frog into a pot of water and he'll swim! about contentedly. Fatten him up with a few flies and he'll ! be the h appiest frog in the world. He will swim around blissfully, unaware that a fire has been built beneath his pot, only that it has become warmer, until he is finally cooked alive.
blurred turns this figurative frog into Sam Senior who swims naively in a social milieu that has had a fire applied to it for generations. Brilliant in his use of the innernet (an internet connection in the brain), Sam can navigate dozens of websites simultaneously. A NetJeopardy champion on a full ride at a prestigious university, Sam's future looks bright. Perpetually checking social sites while surfing the net, even as he converses with people nearby, Sam doesn't initially realize that he is being held in the ubiquitous sway of a constant communication that paradoxically leads to a lack of real communication, a lack of deep communication.
However, Sam takes a class where he learns about a (possibly) mythological drug, DNA, which instantly alters a person's physical identi! ty and is used primarily for either recreational sex, crime, or revenge. His professor teaches his class by having students read about "drops" he has taken where he engages in the above activities. Slowly, Sam begins to realize that the pot he is swimming in is getting too hot.
Mirrored by a future that suffers from a general dearth of love, Sam's loneliness is palpable. For, although the future is excessively promiscuous, love and sex are not always interchangeable. A hopeless romantic, Sam wants to wait for just the right woman before engaging in intercourse. Of course, with most people taking several sex partners a month, everyone mocks him as prude.
As the world begins to blur together, like water in a boiling pot, Sam quests after love. Buffeted about by reality, he finally finds the arms of a fascinating woman. Simpatico, they both realize that there is nothing in a transitory world but one another and the hope that their love can carry them thr! ough the darkness that is postmodernity.Blurred animal spot pl! eated to p
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