This totally made me go AWWWWWWW! out loud!
Insert standard “I wanna kitty but roomie is allergic” whine here.
Monthly Archives: March 2011
One fine morning
One fine morning, I woke up evil.
At first, I didn’t notice. After all, who isn’t evil when they first wake up in the morning? For most of humanity, it takes a significant period of time and the soothing comfort of our morning routine in order to regain all the lost civilization and humanity we have lost, somewhere, while asleep.
So I took no notice of the roiling miasma of irritability, malevolence, darkness, and greed that boiled in my soul that fine summer morning. I simply attributed it to the usual combination of sleepy confusion, low blood sugar, and severe lack of caffeine that normally blackens my soul before breakfast, and went through my habitual grooming and preening with nary an inkling of the life changing discoveries I was about to make.
Indeed, it was not until I I had finished my second low-fat croissant-based ham omelet sandwich and my third cup of slow roast Arabica Gold that began to realize that something was awry.
At first, I couldn’t tell what it was. I just knew, the way one can sometimes know this sort of things, that all was not right in the house of my psyche and it had, in fact, shifted subtly but deeply on its foundations some time during those long dark hours between evening and dawn.
But as I gazed out of my breakfast nook’s tastefully restrained bump-out window and mused open this development, the fog slowly cleared and a terrible dawn crept across my mind in rough synchronicity with the one that was creeping across my front lawn.
And in the cheerless light of this inner dawn, it became clear that I was, for whatever reason, now deeply and profoundly and seemingly irrevocably evil.
Ah, but what does this mean, this evil of which I speak? By what definition did I judge myself evil? Gentle readers, your poignant philosophical entreaties did not go unanticipated.
The primary element of this self-diagnosis was malevolence. I felt a deep and abiding ill will towards all people. It was not very strong (yet) but extremely pervasive. In fact, I could not, at that moment, think of a single bad thing that could happen to a single person in this world which I would not both wholeheartedly support and richly enjoy. The slightest thought of others brought on fantasies of perpetrating abuse, manipulation, and degradation on them, all accompanied by gales of laughter from I, the perpetrator.
Accompanying this was nearly complete lack of active empathy and sympathy. I tried to imagine tragic situations which would normally make me feel badly for the people involved, but I found I simply could not bring myself to care. I could imagine the situation, I could imagine how the persons in the situation felt, I could judge that I would not want to be in their situation, but I simply didn’t care what happened to people who were not me and were of no use to me.
Shocking, I know, and even as I type this, I find myself appalled at my callousness and craven disregard for others. That morning, I was stupefied. How could this have happened? Previous to this disturbing incident, I had been, in my opinion, a fairly good person. I lived well below my means and donated much of the surplus to the charities at which I also volunteered. My work was in a field I had chosen specifically because I judged it to be where I could do the most good in the world, namely using my engineering and design skills to work on low-cost versions of important medical machinery. I stay in touch with my family. I recycle considerably more than mandatory. I teach Sunday school. I freecycle.
All this seemed entirely pointless to me now. Why should I do all these things for others? What was in it for me? I could not, for the like of me, imagine one reason not to do everything for myself and to hell with others. Who cares about a bunch of weak losers?
Again I was appalled at myself. What on earth had happened in my sleep? Had I had a brain aneurysm that had selectively and silently rendered me sociopathic? Had I, in my wanderings through the shadowed realms of the dreaming world, stumbled upon a dark and eldritch evil whose very touch left me forever corrupted beyond all hope of redemption? Or had I merely loaded the coffee machine with decaf by mistake?
I pondered my sad fate. Everything I knew about evil from countless hours of movies and television suggested my future was not a bright one. Evil people always met a sorry end and never get the girl or the ticker tape parade. I wondered if I would now feel compelled to grow facial hair and affect a British accent and a penchant for elaborate deathtraps and jewel encrusted canes?
And what would the neighbours think? I was keenly active in many neighborhood improvement communities and had strong feelings about maintaining certain standards of lawn care and yard maintenance discipline. How would it look if I was to suddenly start littering my carefully groomed lawn with laser-shooting statuary and crudely disguised pitfall traps? Already I could feel myself yearning to install a trap door under the “Welcome” mat in front of my front door. And the worst part was, I knew exactly how to do it! Confound my intuitive grasp of mechanical engineering!
A terrible thought crept across my mind. I looked at the small television I kept in my breakfast nook for the morning gardening and cooking shows I enjoyed on the weekends. With but a few buttons pressed on the remote control, I would have, via my reactions, incontrovertible proof, one way or the other, if I had forever abandoned the light for the path of unmitigated evil. But no. Not evil a moral crisis like this one could make me watch Fox News. I would get my answers by other means.
But all that paled in comparison to my horror at my sudden and total lack of empathy. It suddenly became clear to me just how much I relied upon it in order to guide my actions. Everything I did, from the smallest gesture to my political affiliations, was bound by my commitment to the question “How will this affect others?”. Without that question, I was adrift.
But wait. Had I truly converted to a lifestyle of pure and unadulterated evil, I would not be horrified by my suddenly lack of empathy. I would be reveling in it! At last, freed of the burdensome shackles of so-called “morality”, I was now free to unleash my campaign of terror and darkness upon the world! My name would go down in history as the blackest villain to stain the suspecting Earth with his foul designs! My will would become the absolute unchallenged power behind all of history from this point on!
You know, that kind of thing.
And just like that, I could feel the ice around my heart and my soul begin to melt. I wasn’t evil, I had just lost touch with my moral core for a short period. Of course I still cared about others! Of course I still had a deep and abiding sense of my obligation to make sure my actions made the world better instead of worse! Empathy and sympathy flooded into my mind as the blockage crumbled like ice in spring, and I once more felt the deep warmth of the community of humanity.
I am not ashamed to say I wept with relief.
Clearly, this had been a momentary aberration. The morning mind is a dangerous place even at the best of times, and I felt silly for forgetting my long standing rule about making absolutely no decisions about my life or the state of the universe before 9 am at the earliest.
Once more in full possession of myself and with a fresh and intimate appreciation for the moral guidance provided by my conscience and my empathy, I gathered up my things, set the dishwasher into motion so that I could unload it when I came home that evening, and set off to face the day with renewed purpose and fresh enthusiasm for my work.
But just to be on the safe side, I threw out all my decaf coffee before I left.
How about a Monday special? OK, cupid!
I think part of me is still one day behind. It feels more like Sunday than Monday to me, and I did a somewhat serious article over the last few days, so I figure I’t tome to let my literary hair down and just gab.
This weekday dysphoria is only exacerbated by the fact that my dear friend and roomie Joe is off work for spring break now. He works as a janitor for the local school board, and they have one of those fun rules that says you are only allowed to take your vacation days while the kids are also out of school (efficient, but also kind of dickish, don’t you think?), so he has to take his time off during spring break, Christmas, and so forth.
So instead of packing off to work at 10:30 PM like he usually does (poor dear works !1pm to 6am Sundays through Thursdays…. night shift work sucks), Sunday and today he has been hanging out in his pajamas (or is it pyjamas?) and taking it easy. I am happy to have him around more, but it does throw my already very weak link with “the world” into further confusion.
This, I don’t need. What’s next, having to go outside for stuff? Perish the thought.
On the personal front, as I have mentioned, I have been hunting the surprisingly fertile grounds of OKcupid, looking for a man, and so far I have gotten just the one nibble, but he seems like a cool guy. I read his profuile and messaged him, and he messaged me back, so I messaged him back, and now I am like the old-fashioned image of the girl waiting by the phone for the boy she is interested in to phone her, waiting for him to message me again.
(Modern gals have it so much easier with cell phones. Sure, you are still going to be driving yourself insane worrying and waiting and wondering if he’ll call and concocting all kinds of scenarios in your head for why he hasn’t called yet, from the “maybe he lost his cell phone” end all the way to “oh my guy, he died in a horrible accident” or “he decided he hates me and is too busy throwing up at the thought of me to even dial” level of insanity), but at least you can leave the house and run errands and stuff. )
Exploring the likely matches on OKcupid has been pretty fun. Part of the process of getting so I can do this and not give up right away like I normally do has been giving myself permission to reject men for whatever reason I want to reject them. Normally, before this little psychosocial stepping stone was traversed, I was not self-confident enough to think I had the right to reject anyone for any reason at all (how I can reject anyone when I am worse than everyone?), but even more than that, I felt guilty for rejecting them. I have been rejected plenty in my life, and it sucks, so it makes me very sensitive to the exclusion of others in any way.
But realistically, it’s not like I am rejecting these guys to their faces or telling them they suck. I am just not choosing to contact them, and clicking a button so they won’t show up in my searches any more. They will never know I even looked at their profiles. Nor would they want to! I certainly have no desire to see how many men checked out my profile and didn’t pick me.
I mean, what’s wrong with those people? Can’t they tell how awesome I am?
I have to admit, some of the things I read on people’s profiles just makes me shake my head and think “Wow, and you just admit that, right here, in the open?”. No doubt, others would say the same of my profile. But some of these fellows… oy.
In fact, it’s very tempting to post links to and exerpts from some of the more outrageous and/or entertaining of the profiles, but that would be very wrong of me, to hold some poor individual up to ridicule just to amuse myself and my lovely, handsome, intelligent, and above all sexually dynamic readers.
And I can’t fool myself into thinking “Well, as long as I don’t include any user names, nobody will know who I am talking about, right?” because someone could easily just Google the text and find their profile.
So, no war stories from the trenches of romantic warfare, as fun as that might be.
Labour versus risk, part 2 : Risk and investment
In the first part of this article, we discussed how labour and consent form the first track of how human beings legitimately acquire wealth and material.
This track is easily understood by most people, and resonates with them in a way that suggests that this track is, more or less, natural to human beings.
But the modern world is largely run, at the higher levels, by the other major track, which is the rewarding of risk instead of labour. Once we embraced capitalism via mercantilism in the age of the tall ship, material prosperity caused capital to accumulate rapidly in the hands of a small group of people, and this enabled this group of people, like the early bankers, insurance men, and venture capitalists, to increase their wealth entirely by backing the ventures of other people. These other people did all the actual work, and in return for the risk the investors took, they got a percentage of the profits ad infinitum.
Thus, a group of people became still more wealthy simply by signing a document. They made money because they had money, and this allowed their wealthy to grow to staggering proportions.
This gave birth to the first stress between these two tracks of wealth acquisition, because wealth acquisition via investment simply lacks the intuitive resonance that the labour and consent track does. It is easy for the average person to understand being paid for work. The work is obvious. You work the production line, and you can see what you do while you are doing it. You tightened that screw, or worked that press, and thus you created wealth for your employers, and deserve compensation. It fits into the labour and consent model perfectly. I trade my work for your money. It is no different than hiring a kid to mow your lawn.
But investment lacks that clarity. From the point of view of the average worker, what, exactly, did the investors do? This is especially true when, as in most corporations, the investors (usually at least partly stockholders) retain a permanent interest in the business for their risk. Most people can grasp a casino model of reward for risk. You risk a certain amount and get a certain larger amount back if the risk pays out. But that’s it. You don’t get a percentage of the casino’s profits forever. You are paid and that is it.
In the business world, that is where loans come in. A bank risks money with every loan, but they loan you a fixed amount of money and then charge interest. If you business does well, you can pay back the loan, and that is the end of the bank’s interest in the business.
But investing for a permanent interest simply does not make sense to people on a gut level. And the longer the business prospers, the larger this gulf appears. Sure, someone took a risk by fronting the founder of the money the cash to start that first shop, but that was generations ago. Surely they have been paid back now? What have they done for the company lately?
Modern business practices, with boards of directors many layers away from the people who do the actual labour, in addition to shareholders to whom the stock is just a string of letters on a computer screen and who couldn’t care less what the company does because they only care about the stock price, only increases this alienation between the labour and the investor. Add in the confounding factor that in many large corporations, the company itself owns a lot of its own stock and hence its fortunes are driven by the fluctuations of the stock market, as opposed to old-fashioned concerns like whether they make a product that anybody buys. It becomes harder and harder for the average person to understand what, exactly, the stockholders are contributing to the equation. After all, the investment came when the company sold the stock the first time. The company doesn’t get any money when other people sell its stock. Yet everyone is, theoretically, working for the stockholders. Why?
This gulf between the investors and the workers has never been larger, and recent world economic events have brought this to light in a painfully obvious manner. The trend towards more and more money in fewer and fewer hands has reached the point where the billionaires are nations unto themselves, and view any attempt to stop them from doing anything ever to be outrageous violations of their sovereignty, and use their vastly superior personal power to fund whatever it takes to protect themselves from the rule of law.
The tension has grown to the point where there seems no way for the average person to bridge the gap.
What do you think?
A surprisingly accurate love test
Normally these things are way way off, but this one… they got it pretty much dead on.
According to that test, I am the Slow Dancer. Here’s the text :
Steady, reliable, and cradling him tenderly. Take a deep breath, and let it out real easy…you are The Slow Dancer
Your focus is love, not sex, and for your age, you have average experience. But you’re a great, thoughtful guy, and your love life improves every year. There’s also a powerful elimination process working in your favor: most Playboy types get stuck raising unwanted kids before you even begin settling down. The men left over will be hot and yours. Your ideal man is someone intimate, intelligent, and very supportive.
While you’re not exactly the life of the party, you do thrive in small groups of smart people. Your circle of friends is extra tight and it’s HIGHLY likely they’re just like you. You appreciate symmetry in relationships.
That… is pretty much me to the proverbial T, yup. Love is my focus, taking things slow and gentle (which has cost me people I am interested in who get scooped up by someone who moves faster), looking for someone intimate and intelligent and supportive, you bet, and I thrive in small groups of smart people.
Not bad, test. Not bad at all.
According to the test, I should be looking for this guy, The Gentleman :
Steady & mature. You are The Gentleman.
For anyone looking for an even-keeled, considerate lover, you’re their man. You’re sophisticated. You know what you want both in a relationship and outside of it. You have a substantial romantic side, and you’re experienced enough sexually to handle yourself in that arena, too. Your future relationships will be long-lasting; you’re classic “marrying material,” a prize in the eyes of many.
It’s possible that behind it all, you’re a bit of a male slut. Your best friends know that in relationships you’re fundamentally sex-driven. You’re a safe, reliable guy, who does get laid. In a lot of ways, you’re like a well-worn, comfortable pair of socks. Did you ever jack off into one of those? All the time.
Your ideal mate is NOT a nut-job. He is giving and loving, like you, but also experienced.
Whoever wrote that test result text needs to learn focus. Then again, I’m one to talk!
Anyhow… that does sound like my kind of guy. Someone to yang my yin, so to speak.
Labour versus risk, part 1 : Labour theory of value
In the field of the psychology of capitalism (psycho-economics?), there are two main ways that human beings justify their ownership of and control over that which they consider their personal property. In other words, two theories of justified transfer of material into their possession.
These are via labour, and via risk.
First, though, to quickly clear this up : all human societies have had personal property. Despite what some well meaning socialist and communist theorist have said, even primitive nomadic hunter-gatherers have some personal property. This my spear. That is Klingt’s portable hut. This is our kill, not theirs. The amount shared in commons varies from society to society, but all societies have some degree of personal property. Therefore, it is safe to assume that personal property, like marriage, is natural to human beings everywhere, and not an arbitrary construct.
But where they is personal property, there has to be a method of transferring ownership, both in transferring it from the unclaimed commons and transferring it between individuals and groups.
The most common and natural of the former of these is via labour. The classic example is two friends walking through the wilderness when one of them finds a fruit tree heavy with ripe fruit. As his friend catches up with him, he picks a fruit, and begins eating it.
Most people would agree that this fruit now belongs to the person eating it. They have every right to eat it, or stick it in their pocket, or throw it away for that matter. It is their fruit. If their friend was to just take the fruit from them without asking and start eating it themselves, we would all agree that this was an act of theft. and quite wrong. This, despite the clear fact that moments ago, nobody owned the fruit, and thus seizing and eating it would have morally justified.
So what happened? As Locke said, by mixing an object with their labour, it become an extension of their labour and hence became part of their person, part of their personal property. By picking that fruit, our friend in the example took that fruit into their personal domain and thus signaled to all the other humans that this fruit is “taken” and they should look elsewhere for their own fruit.
This happens even in cases where there is no actual transfer of property in the legal or moral sense at all. In modern life, a perfect example is shopping carts in supermarkets. As people shop, they put items into their shopping carts. They don’t own the items. They don’t own the cart either. All of these things, most people agree, still belong to the supermarket, exactly like the items still on the shelves. And yet, if someone was to simply take off with another person’s half-full shopping cart, or simply pick items out of it and put it into their own carts, we would all agree this was extremely rude and quite wrong. Maybe it would not technically be theft, but it would feel like theft, and theft is wrong.
What makes it theft? Because by the simple act of putting the item in their carts, people have clearly signaled to all other humans that this is now part of their temporary personal domain. Legally, the item is not yet theirs, but emotionally and morally, it is no longer part of the public commons and is, in fact, theirs more than it is anyone else’s but the supermarket’s. .
Obviously, then, the labour theory of signaling a justified transference of public domain objects into private ownership is a deeply rooted psychological instinctual truth in humans.
But it is far from perfect. If all that was required was any amount of labour to justify transferring an object into your ownership, then stealing the fruit would be just as legitimate as picking the fruit yourself. The thief invests as much labour to steal something as the owner does to acquire it, after all.
Clearly, then, there is a different set of rules regarding the transfer of objects between individuals or groups than between transferring from the unclaimed commons to said individuals or groups.
This is the entire basis for our concept of ownership. Owning an item means it is no longer in the unclaimed commons and thus may only legitimately be acquired with the consent of the owner. Capitalism, then, is largely a system for managing these consensual transfers.
This basically boils down to barter. You have a duck, I have milk from my cow, I want that duck more than I want my milk, you want my milk more than you want your duck, we exchange duck and milk, and thus, we both have more of what we want.
Through this simple human interaction, we have increased one another’s happiness. Multiplied by all the human barter interactions that happen every day on planet Earth, it is clear to see why this sort of free trading results in happy, productive citizens. All a currency does is add a mutually agreed upon barter intermediary to the equation, thus making it even more fluid and granular and hence more efficient. I don’t need to have the milk you want for your duck. I can simply pay you for your duck, and you can then use that money to buy milk from someone else.
So the labour theory of value makes sense to most people, and it is how most of consumer capitalism operates. The institutions involved have become quite large and complicated and it’s a long way from two farmers dickering, but the essence remains the same : labour and barter.
But there’s another route to legitimate acquisition of material, and it’s the subject of the next part of this article : risk via investment.
Local reality fault
Had somewhat of a reality segment fault moment today, and it was so weird I just had to share it with you, my brilliant and attractive readers. (I see you out there! You look fantastic. )
Today started normal enough. I played a bunch of Okami for the Wii (while secretly pretend I am actually playing The Little Hobo Goes To Japan) and napped and futzed around on the computer. I have recently taken the plunge and signed up again for the world’s hippest and coolest personals site, http://www.okcupid.com, and spent a good deal of this morning answering a whole whack (82 or so, to be specific) of their many questions designed to get some idea of your personality. They are fun to answer (especially because you can skip the ones you don’t like) and I have to admit, answering questions about my opinions and reactions to various issues and situations scratches that constant need for attention I seem to have in an abstract but satisfying way. Someone cares enough about me to want to know what I think about things! Such validation! Sure, it’s a computer program, but I am truly and sincerely that pathetic, so it all works out.
And to my mild surprise, when I finished putting in the scads of info I wanted, it then produced a list of potential matches that actually included some fellas who sounded interesting to me! The last time I was on OKcupid, that was not really the case. I’m not sure if the men got better or I just got less depressive and therefore less likely to reject people out of hand, or both, or if aliens live in my eyebrows, but whatever. Point is, better results this time, and giving my incredibly negative experiences with personals sites up till this points (so many men who only want meaningless sex…. what’s a sensitive guy to do?), I am especially pleased that I found some interesting seeming fellows via OKcupid. Wow, there are guys out there with like, minds and personalities and such! So that’s where they have all been hiding. Jackpot!
I messaged three of them, and none of them have replied yet, but what the hell, fishing is waiting and keeping bait on the hook. Where there’s three, there’s more. I will land one dammit!
So anyhow, I spent a bunch of my morning dropping my hook into the local dating pool and seeing if I can get any bites, and a bunch of my afternoon playing Okami, and then when 6 PM comes around, I put some pasta in the microwave and cook it, because, it being Thursday, I have no plans for the evening and so I am left to my own devices re food in the evening.
(Yes, yes, I hear all your little ears perking up and see all the hands waving frantically up in the air so you can all tell me “But geez, Mister Bertrand, it’s FRIDAY not THURSDAY, Mister Bertrand, SIR!”. What an eager and well mannered bunch you are, and of course, you’re right. You are all very bright, and deserve pats on the head and marshmallow treats. But you’re getting ahead of the story. )
And so all was tranquil in my little world until I headed to my room with the intention of napping with intent and happened to casually remark to my roomie Joe that there was leftover pasta in the fridge if he wanted it, and he looked at me with gaping disbelief (I get that a lot… it’s a thing… ) and said “Um, we’re going to Denny’s soon? Because it’s FRIDAY?”
Instant reality bomb detonating in my skull! I think I actually fainted a tiny bit.
“It is?” I managed to croak while the universe wobbled around me. In the movie version there would be serious quivering reverse zoom and color separation effects going on, along with 70’s freakout synthy sound effects. “I have been thinking it was Thursday all day!”.
So just like that, I lost an entire day. For an hour after that at least, I was walking around in existential pain. “Ow, my reality!” I said many times. It really did hurt like a physical trauma. I can still feel it, honestly. I get the feeling it’s kind of like epistemological jet lag. I will not totally catch up for day, I would imagine.
I am not sure exactly what happened. But I know it happened between around noon Thursday and today, because I am pretty sure I knew it was Thursday then…. but somehow, my internal clock/calendar just never updated when another day came along. Bizarre.
Now I am no stranger to little…. um, reality issues. I’m not psychotic or anything (BUT I AM), but I am a total introverted intellectual and I am way more into my own internal universe than this “reality” shit people are so into today, and so I am not unfamiliar with the sensation of having to suddenly catch up with reality because I have wandered out of Plato’s Cave again and missed some important updates.
But even for me, this was big. I really hope it never happens again, because that hurt like a bitch and I already don’t trust reality enough, so the last thing I need is having it squeeze a whole day of the week past me when I wasn’t looking.
Meet me half way, reality. You start being more pleasant, and I promise to pay more attention to you.
Send money and men my way would be a good start. Hint hint.
I’m not sure why, but….
And thus I find it oddly soothing.
Also from my childhood : the two yipping aliens from Sesame Street.
I was absolutely terrified of those two when I was a kid, especially after seeing one bit where it established they could walk through walls all phased out like. I was sure they were coming for me.
Seriously… anyone know where this comes from? It’s fucked UP.
That time of the month
I feel bloated, moody, irritable, and depressed. Is this what PMS is like, ladies? If so, I saltute you ladies for hardly ever killing anyone because of it. I feel like I could punt a toddler.
Guess I am going through one of my dark periods. I have felt like crap pretty much the whole day. All I do all day is sleep and eat and pee and feel bad. I wake up dehydrated from sleep sweating and my dreams are hyper-real demi-nightmares of complex nostalgia, unstable reality, emotional eruptions, and below behind and beneath it all, a clean clear never ending deep down soul shaking scream.
And of course, there is the self-loathing. Seems like I can never entirely shake it, I can just displace it for a while, like a bad debt, and days like this are when it comes due with a vengeance. This is a sad truth that I continue to struggle with : there is no escape, only delay.
Escape, of course, is part of the problem. Escaping into my mind from harsh, complicated reality is exactly what gets me into such a pathetic state to begin with. But it’s all I know how to do. I have no other coping methods. I am like a box turtle. I only have one defense : retreat into my shell. The problem is that the predators don’t go away. They gang up outside your shell and wait. And now you can never come out of your shell again. Ever.
So many of us eggheads get stuck inside our shells.
I have been thinking a lot about my problem with option paralysis and the perils of too much creativity lately. I am an extremely creative person, and part of that creativity is the ability to see possibilities where others see none. But that gift is also a curse, because I see so many possibilities everywhere that I can never decide what to do, and so I end up doing nothing. It’s like being stranded at an infinite crossroads, with billions of signs pointing in every possible direction, and not knowing which way to go, and always afraid that you will pick the wrong way, and be doomed.
“Just pick something and stick with it, doesn’t matter what!”. Easy to say, hard to do. Next to impossible, it seems. I am not sure if it’s just option paralysis, or the pseudo safety of the sessile, or whether it’s the combination of both that is the truly deadly power in this never ending geologic struggle. I suppose the option paralysis serves the function of justifying the inactivity and withdrawal that I need anyhow.
But there’s always so many millions of possibilities, how is it possible to choose? Science shows that past a certain point, giving consumers more choices in products actually makes them far less happy with the product once they have bought it. It’s meant to empower people’s individuality, but instead, it cripples their enjoyment with doubt. If given three choices, they will choose one and be happy with it. Given a dozen choices, though, the odds of believing you chose the right one are eleven to one against, and people are left with uncertainty about everything about their purchase and are more likely to regret it later.
Now imagine being able to see more than a dozen possibilities in all things, and you get an inkling of my problem. In the consumer analogy, most of the time, I end up deciding I didn’t need one that bad anyhow.
This particular rund of depression and self-loathing was kicked off by this song.
The song is about a man looking back over his life and all the wonderful, life-enriching things he has done, and concluding that he’d lived his life very well indeed. And all I could think of was how my life was the exact opposite. I have done almost nothing. You’re familiar with the litany. Never had a job, never supported myself, never been in a relationship, never even really had a childhood in many ways, when you get right down do it. I am likely a medical case history of differential development gone horribly awry. All my development, so to speak, has gone to my head. Enormous brain, tiny wimpy little soul.
And I know I should not judge myself by the standards of healthy people. I am very ill, so ill, in fact, that I am unable to do the things I know would help make me well. Unable, even, to call attention to this fact and maybe get outside help. If you can’t do it, get it done. Nope. No dice there either.
But I cannot help but deeply mourn everything I have missed in life, and continue to miss. I am a very broken person abd being broken fucking hurts. Even if I stop myself for hating myself for it, just knowing how badly my life has gone is extremely painful and I long for the me that has never been.
The one who’s a real human being, and not a pathetic joke.
Commandments of Parenting (part 2)
VI. Thou shalt not confuse their innocence with your own. As we grow up, we lose our innocent. It is a sad but necessary part of becoming an adult. The simple safe world of childhood, where the world is no bigger than the house we grow up in and the biggest threat is bedtime, slowly gives way to the real world, with all its complexities, stresses, ambiguities, difficulties, and unpleasant truths. It’s a process we all go through, and no matter how grown up we might become, there will always be that inner child within us who wishes none of it had happened and who wants to “go back to when things were better”. And this is the part of us that comes to the fore when our own children are young. It is the part of us that, with the best of intentions, wants to preserve our children’s innocence as part of us wishes our own had been preserved. But as adults, we have to remember that loss of innocence is a necessary part of growing up, and it is we as adults who suffer far more from our children’s perceived loss of innocence than the child themselves. It is not our children’s job to preserve our own innocence, to keep the part of ourselves safe from the pressures and realities of adulthood. They can handle more than you think they can.
VII. Thou shalt not attempt to be a perfect saint of parenting. Restraint is a very good thing in a parent. But like all good things, it too can be taken to excess. Children do not need a robotized and lobotomized parent who is always the perfect, plastic model of saintly beatitude, who never gets angry, never seems upset, never gets stressed, and is never, ever worried about anything. For one thing, it’s absolutely impossible for anyone with a pulse to keep that up for the entire eighteen years it takes to raise a child. You are bound to break down sooner or later, and when you do, it will likely be in a catastrophic way as all your suppressed negative emotions boil to the surface all at once. A parent who is human and imperfect is far better than one who is falsely perfect most of the time then periodically explodes into tears and anger. And even if you could keep up the facade indefinitely, you shouldn’t, because children need to learn emotional coping skills from their parents, and they cannot learn what is never modeled for them. And they also need to know that part of dealing with others is that certain behaviours make people angry, and it is better that they learn this from you, someone who loves and cares for them more than anything, than learn it for the first time on the school’s playground.
VIII. Thou shalt give generously and meaningfully of your love.Every parent loves their children, but communicating that love to them is not always easy. Parents often worry about what is the “right” amount of affection to show towards their children, and I don’t claim to have a formula for the perfect answer, but I do have a question : Name one case you know of where a child was harmed by being loved too much. You can’t, can you? So err on the side of “lots”. Concentrate on how much you love them and try to find ways to show them. Telling them is not enough, especially if they sense you don’t mean it at that second. Speaking of which, concentrating on how much you love them will also help you through those moments when they are driving you crazy, so it is good for you as well as them. It’s win/win.
IX. Thou shalt treat your children with respect. Our first impression of our children is of a helpless, squalling, squirming creature who can do nothing for itself, and from there into the Terrible Twos and Threes, we are dealing with a person who is supremely self-centered, has to be constantly watched to make sure they do not kill themselves in ways that even mentally retarded adults would not do, and who tries out patience and wears out our nerves in ways we never thought humanly possible. This does not leave the best impression, and even a very patient and understanding parent might find themselves reacting to their child as though they were a very ill behaved adult, as opposed to a child who knows no better. But through all this, we must remember to not just care for our children, but to value them and respect them as well. Really listen when they talk, even if they rarely have anything interesting to say. Take them seriously when they are concerned about something. Never belittle or dismiss their fears or concerns. They do not have the advantage of your adult perspective on the world. Above all, always treat them with respect. That doesn’t mean treat them like an adult, but treat them with the level of respect that you yourself desires. Only this way will they learn to respect themselves.
X. Thou shalt meet thy children every single day. We do not kid the kids we want. We get the kids we get. And the truth is, we have little control over what their basic personality will be. When your little one came home from the hospital on that first day, they already had their own personality, moods, temperament, likes, dislikes, and attitudes. You can’t change these things. And the further truth is that, no matter the genes of the child’s parents, they are a brand new human being, a fresh combination of traits that might well be absolutely nothing like their parents in any of the basic ways we normally look for when we decide with whom we wish to associate. Think of everyone you have ever known, and think : my child might be like them. Or like nothing you have ever experience before. You have to accept, as a parent, that despite raising them, loving them, worrying over them, and being more intimately involved in their lives than anyone else every will be, you don’t truly know them. Every day, you meet your children and get to know them a little more. But they are their own beings, and you will always be faced with the reality of the child you have, who might just be the sort of person you would not even mix with socially if you could help it. Knowing this before you conceive is best. But even learning it after they have moved out of the house after college can save a parent a great deal of confusion and heartbreak.