The Hemming Media Blog

BITTER ORANGES

There is a small but statistically significant sliver of the population that is tolerated but much maligned -- praised for the products of their work and vision but ridiculed for their lifestyles.

They are considered colourful and eccentric, fruity and creative, endowed with a certain idiot savante talent that somehow justifies their flagrant disregard for operational norms. They face prejudice in the workplace, overcome obstacles in a marketplace tuned to a more generic demographic, and endure the self-assured condescension of bigots on a daily basis.

Do not be misled: this is not a treatise on homophobia.
It's about apples and oranges.

Myself, I don't care what kind of fruit people eat. The fact that a million percent of the world apparently prefers oranges does not one bit dampen my staid preference for apples. I have always found it odd, however, that so many orange eaters feel it is their solemn duty to persuade me that the love of apples serves no reasonable, reducible end.

I think to myself: live and let live.

We are more common in some professions than others, our kind. Not often accountants, we. Our heads appear above the surface at the apexes of our highly visible clusters, instead. We are often designers, writers, photographers, journalists, performers and educators. In a world increasingly dominated by mass media, we are the crafters of the content. More often than not it is one of our kind who writes the copy, who arranges the layout, who mixes the tracks.

I absorb the bitter spurts of the evangelical oranges with even aplomb. Though I find it perplexing, I can accept this rudeness without rile. I smile politely. "My choice of fruit sux0rs, does it? Interesting. Please, tell me more about your engaging philosophy."

"Join us in our pain."

"No. I prefer this pain."

"You're a fool."

"I can also juggle."

I find it funny when people who consider themselves real independent spirits are discomfited by the simple non-conformity of apples. This is different than people who think apples are inferior fruit -- these are people who think apple eaters are inferior people for refusing to eat oranges like everybody else. They search their empty pockets for perverse reasons why some disturbed, attention-seeking kook might want to effect a preference for something unpopular.

(Why do we prefer apples, despite mountains of evidence that oranges are tops? I don't know. I don't care. But we're a fairly useful, productive, expressive lot in generak -- so we're probably not all ninnies. There must be something to it. In the end, a vocal minority continue to choose to make their marks the apple way.)

Getting upbraided like this can build up a bit of a knot of vitriol which must be expressed from time to time for optimum mental health. And so, without further ado, I would like to present the following rant:

You apple-dissing bastards go back home from your dull-assed orange-sucking borgjobs and turn on the television to watch our apple juice.

You fire up your clementines and swap songs soaked in cider. You trade your soft-earned bread for bigger, wider, flatter, higher definition screens and phatter speakers to immerse yourself in what we makes, in all its sensory glory...

The lessons for your children have been composed in apple sauce. The statistics, the simulation, the speech for the symposium: all drenched in the glow of apples. The cartoon, the credits, the casting manager's shared calendar; the scriptwriting, the animatic, the edit, the mix, the spot; the poster, the magazine, the image, the words...

You sneer but you suckle from our teat.

We use Macs.
Shows us some respect, bitches.