Catching up on sleep debt today.
Fine. I’ve had some of the really rough sleep that results in my waking up all dizzy disoriented and feeling like I have been squished flat, but it has not been too bad so far.
Knock on wood.
Making the words happen is a bit trickier than usual because I am having trouble staying on task. My mind keeps wandering off on tangents.
Mmmm. Tan Gents.
See? Like that.
So I might not make it all the way to 500 words this session. I might end up needing to take a nap before I get there.
Suboptimal but acceptable. It happens from time to time.
Besides, the caffeine in my Diet Coke may rescue me yet.
Go stimulant, go!
On the local front, 7-11 has 2Ls of Diet Coke again, which means they have started getting my money again. It was weird that for a couple of months, not only did they not have my precious 2Ls of Diet Coke on their DoorDash menu, they didn’t even have 2Ls of Diet Pepsi either. Coke Zero was the only option in the 2L size.
And Coke Zero is…..ehhh. It’s not undrinkable but it’s not very good. Has such a heavy and strange taste. Like there are way, way too many flavour notes and it ends up producing an oppressively busy flavour profile.
Your mileage may vary, of course.
In other good news from the world of us urban hermits, I discovered that a local Chinese place, Bamboo Express, has the sort of Dinner for One type ordering that is my preferred way to order Chinese food.
Here, do you like one of these four lists of three dishes? Yes, yes I do. Parfait.
Without this option, if I want those same three things, I have to order three full orders of those things, and that’s both way more expensive and way too much of a commitment.
So now Bamboo Express will be getting my money just like 7-11.
It’s not complicated. Just have what I want!
Something on my mind lately : the difference between lying and being wrong in relationships of all kinds.
Let’s take your typical love song setup. You said you would love me forever and now you are leaving me. So when you said that, you were lying!
Um, no. They were wrong. When you say something like “I will love you forever”, you’re not just making a commitment, you’re also making a prediction.
This prediction is based on how you feel at that moment. To break it down into legalistic language, what you are really saying is, “Right now, I love you so much that I cannot imagine that ever changing”.
But things change. People change. Circumstances change. The truth is that commitments based on the emotion of the moment are generally not the soundest, no matter how powerful the emotion and no matter how hard it is for people to imagine being in an emotional state other than the one they are currently in.
I don’t blame people for viewing it as lying, though. The difference is quite subtle and probably only suited to mental mutants like me who think too much about stuff.
It feels like they lied, and that’s good enough.
But the truth is, people just suck at predicting their future emotions, and I suppose in a theoretical sense, we would all be better off if we could learn and accept that.
Even the person who seems like our soulmate might turn out to be someone who just happened to be going the same way as us for a while.
A lot of love is really just collisions in the dark.
More after the break.
More than human
When I first thought of this subject while in the shower. I immediately felt a lurching feeling in the pit of my stomach like someone had just slammed on the breaks, immediately followed by a surge of fear and reluctance.
So obviously, it’s what I have to talk about tonight. This should be good.
Let’s talk about being superhuman.
As patient readers know, I was born with a crazy high IQ. Learned to read before I was 3, got great marks without studying in school, and so on.
This put me well above my peers (and most adults), and let me tell you, it’s lonely at the top. The fundamental problem I had in terms of socialization was my inability to relate to the other children.
Oh, I could understand them well enough. Too well, as a matter of fact. Sometimes I knew them better than they knew themselves.
People hate that.
But understanding people like I do, analytically, is not remotely the same as relating to them. Relating inherently puts people on the same level and forges a two-way connection between individuals.
There is nothing two-way about my astounding powers of analysis. My ability to understand them does nothing for their ability to understand me.
Rather the opposite, in fact. It makes me even more of an alien to them.
And this gulf between us really hurts. The pain I feel from my inability to truly connect with others gnaws at my soul and all these decades of isolation in my ivory fucking tower have left me with so much built up loneliness and mindless fear of the world that it feels like it could kill me if I let it.
Don’t worry. I won’t let it.
I could intellectually understand what my fellow kids got out of playing in the sandbox… but it didn’t make the sandbox any more appealing to me. I had a pretty good idea why teens in my town hung out in front of the liquor store in hopes of getting some grownups to buy liquor for them, but it didn’t make it seem any less pointless to me.
And I can dive deep into pop culture and produce endless hours of cogent, brilliant analysis of what made the Flintstones so appealing or tell you all about how Columbo episodes are structured, but that doesn’t make me any more like the people these shows are written for.
I’m a very weird dude, and it’s a lonely frigging life. I want so badly to reach out and connect with others, but between my social damage and my Olympian mind, it is too huge a gap to bridge.
I have to believe that there was somewhere in the world where I’d fit in.
I thought it would be VFS but it wasn’t.
Maybe I will try academia next.
Surely there’s lots of brainy weirdos there.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.