Babble babble babble amorality
Yup. I’ve graduated. I guess this means I’m supposed to have invented myself.*

One of the things I invented at Beloit is that I was a philosophy minor. I took classes on ethics and stuff. Another thing I invented about myself is that I don’t care much about ethics and stuff.

Back before freshman year, when I was applying for the presidential scholarship, my Interview Guy asked me if I had a hero. I didn’t. I sort of muttered and stammered at Interview Guy until he moved on to the next question. (I’m pretty sure I only got the scholarship because of my confident and thorough explanation of why, if I were a fruit, I’d be a kiwifruit. Interviewers for the presidential scholarship only care about the Important Questions.)

If I had to do that interview again, I’d be able to answer the hero question.
This is a picture of Mary Willcocks.

Mary Willcocks was a poor Englishwoman who, in 1817, convinced the majority of high society that she was a princess named Caraboo from a long lost foreign island. Princess Caraboo had been kidnapped from her homeland by pirates, and she escaped by jumping overboard in the middle of the Bristol Channel and swimming to England. As Caraboo, Mary Willcocks invented her own language and made up all kinds of complicated religious rituals. She got her hosts to buy a bunch of fabric so she could make “native garb.” She climbed trees and swam naked in the river, and nobody told her she couldn’t do these things even though it was the 1800’s. She was a mysterious foreign princess, so odd behavior had to be okay.

The really astonishing part is that the Princess Caraboo thing wasn’t Mary’s first adventure – she did lots of less-famous stuff before that. Like, shortly after she ran away from home, she pretended to be a Lady of the Evening so that she could gain admittance to the Magdalen Hospital for reformed prostitutes. She also claimed to have traveled across the country dressed as a man, to have lived with gypsies, and to have been abducted by highwaymen.

Mary Willcocks is my hero. When I first told Sam about how much I looked up to her, he said “I hope you don’t do something similar someday. It seems to involve a lot of lying and running away from loved ones.” The ethics classes agree with Sam. In all my years at school, I didn’t study a single philosopher who said that people should lie to each other and hurt each other and take advantage of wealthy strangers in order to make good stories. Mary Willcocks once set fire to an employer’s bed. The ethics classes would say that was bad too.

Sam’s probably right that I’ll never be like Mary Willcocks. I’m too sentimental to leave everyone I love behind without warning. Also I’m afraid of fire. The thing is, I see these traits as moral failings. I want enough balls to overcome my sentimentality in the name of adventure. Stories are more important to me than ethics. Ms. Willcocks was a paragon of Lex-morality because she devoted her life to the story. She wasn’t born with balls, so she strapped some watermelons to her crotch and went adventuring.
I admire that way more than I admire people who spend all their time feeding starving children and nursing injured baby birds back to health.
This might make me a bad person, but right now I’m more worried about Lex-bad than philosophy-bad. Hey Lex! Get off the internet and go fight a dragon or something!

* Beloit’s motto used to be “Invent Youself”. Now it’s “Otherwise known as life,” which is possibly the single crappiest motto change in the history of ever.