Tuesday,
February 9, 2010 at 1:55pm
I'm
convinced that I have something to write about. I don't know
explicitly what it is. If/when this becomes a giant collection of
random, vague, and uninteresting babble that maybe is only remotely
coherent to me, I didn't tell you to read it all.
I'm confused about what it means to call something reality. I still maintain this odd duality about my existence. On one hand, I feel like what I think and how I behave establish and perpetuate my world. It's a world I basically enjoy and understand if only for its practical implications. Way on the other cluster-fuck part of my head, I have plenty of ideas about "fate," in a weird sense of the word, and all the necessary consequences of people's behavior that I've been either been forced through, or adopted as opportunities to learn a lesson. For example, what if, because of the grand scheme of our existence and will of a deterministic universe, I have to continually affirm how much I do in fact hate everything just so everything has an example of "someone who hates everything" to learn from. Or what if I was born to a crazy fucking mom just so I could write about the shit down the line in a coherent honest manner that made sense beyond the "mommy issues" of a whiny band? Basically, this practice of always looking at the shit of life and viewing it from the point of what component it has become in your overall machine, is doing nothing but depersonalizing any drama or problems I may think are going on. This seems odd though, as the culmination of everything wrong or right in life couldn't possibly be anything less than the most personal thing you have to claim.
I just got hung up on the word honest when I read through that last paragraph. Honesty is starting to cause so many problems, particularly with a status update epiphany I decided to send last night. What is conveyed and understood in the stories you tell? Whether you talk of passion and love and die with a little smirk of happiness on your face, or you talk about how fucked we are and how you always did it right with your hyper rationality, yet still with a smirk of happiness, what's the difference to either person? They both essentially asked and reveled in what they wanted in life, were able to justify it up until the end, interacted with people who seemingly completely understood both of their positions, so on and so forth. And yes, I've placed passion and love basically against hyper rationality in starting this example. I'm not convinced that they are opposites. Say you fall in love, your heart is beating, you feel impossibly energized and fulfilled. You can rationally say, "my heart is faster, I feel very good, I will do things to maintain this feeling, I will selfishly pursue this feeling at all the usual 'costs' because nothing I've done or said so far has been so compelling." Your "overwhelming" feeling at that point isn't the blind pursuing of a fix, it's a calculated plan, an honest assessment of your feelings at the very least, and whether you describe them as love, or unbelievably compelling, or simply necessary for the type of game your running, they are there.
So back to honesty and how I use it and what I honestly think when people tell me about their loves and lives. It occurred to me last night that it could be possible to use rationality as the same kind of drug and excuse that people try to pull with me in a discussion about their feelings. Almost making yourself get lost in a world that makes sense, not outright denying feelings, but marginalizing them to such an extent you manage to not remember they are there. The easiest analogy I can draw is with a scent that you experienced only in your childhood, then say 20 years later you come across it again and a wave of emotion or sensation hits you. Maybe a flood of memories or unresolved confusions that were associated with it. Your mind would act as time in this example, pushing yourself through the experience, putting it into a neuronal pocket, enough time taken for it to make sense or make you able to cope, before being tucked away. For me, I have honestly managed to convince myself of, or genuinely forget about, things that have recently flooded back like as if I smelling something familiar. I know I am only became capable of this as I learned more, get more reasons ::coughs:: excuses? ::coughs:: to behave and think the way I do.
A good example is when I honestly say I don't believe in love. Then I immediately have to go into all the conflicting definitions I've heard, explain that there are smaller more appropriate words that make more sense, get into complicated sciency facts and explanations I've come across...this whole necessary procession that I engage in to justify my feelings and ideas about my level of honesty I feel when I say that. Now say I'm explaining this to someone I genuinely care about, but everything I know about them says they are going to take my explanation and that conversation to get confused, angry, maybe hurt or (usually) defensive, and use it to create this awkward rift in how we relate together. We can all constantly wish for "better" friends who will always take the time to fully understand where you're coming from, but I don't think this is wholly realistic. When I talk to this person I feel good, when we hang out it's fun, they are totally willing to help or contribute to the entirety of a good time when we're with other friends, but I Honestly can and will tell them something that is sure to throw that off. And even if it doesn't necessarily make some dramatic change, it most certainly prompts one or both of us to play pretend and work that much harder to find a less thought antagonizing ground. For the record, there was no one specifically in mind here, it's just happened enough at varying degrees and with conversations on much more meager of topics than love, that it was easiest to explain this way.
Fuck fuck fuck. I need to speak more simply. The honesty in me wants to never say shit about how I think or feel and just do things that you're going to assume I enjoy for reasons that make sense to me. The honesty in me also wants to alienate myself in a world of ideas and ideals I've "rationally" ascertained and believe will serve me well, that I know you don't care, nor should really want to I would imagine, to be apart of. Both appealing, both happening depending on the situation or particular mood or test I want to run that day, and yet both carry with them a massive sense of loneliness. I feel like I'm in the midst of a glaring problem. How can I maintain both kinds of honesty, and still be honest? They conflict. Isn't the only real honest thing to say is that I want to be a fence sitter? Don't I just want to deny, forget, get by, and desperately grasp whatever it is that makes me happy at any moment? I guess it could just be as simple as being an honest liar. Ehhhhh, what if it's just that I don't ascribe as much dignity to my thoughts as I would like to imagine. Though that doesn't seem like it either. Maybe, your rationality is the slave of your feelings and my mind just behaves in the same way a battered woman does. I can't tell yet if this has become completely sidetracked....
I learned from Cracked that we're born liars. Maybe you should just rest assured that I'll lie to you if only to maintain a "deeper truth" that matters more to me. But, pretending I'm hearing that from someone makes me call bullshit on their deeper truth and that it isn't an excuse to bullshit me. More so though, it just makes the other person curious until they stop caring. Hmm, a good explanation for the nature of people's friendship? People who've given up giving a shit about getting any further with someone they've managed to have fun with earlier. Could this speak to the ridiculous loneliness brought up above? Being someone who wants to endlessly pursue thoughts or feelings, but no one willing to play along? Or at least no one wanting to play by the same rules. Maybe my fake relationships matter to me just as much as my real ones....at least in the purposes they serve. Aha, I don't dignify you with honesty you can't appreciate, but I don't take from you anything beyond something merely useful or able to be manipulated. Justifying lies, as an honest person, to people who behave the same or in destructive ways when trying to deal with, or deny, your honesty. So that's how I do it both ways? I get to have very real fun on a very "fake" or "honest enough" foundation. But what does that say about personal responsibility and integrity? It probably just means we don't have any.
Ha, what are the necessary consequences of that reality...
I'm confused about what it means to call something reality. I still maintain this odd duality about my existence. On one hand, I feel like what I think and how I behave establish and perpetuate my world. It's a world I basically enjoy and understand if only for its practical implications. Way on the other cluster-fuck part of my head, I have plenty of ideas about "fate," in a weird sense of the word, and all the necessary consequences of people's behavior that I've been either been forced through, or adopted as opportunities to learn a lesson. For example, what if, because of the grand scheme of our existence and will of a deterministic universe, I have to continually affirm how much I do in fact hate everything just so everything has an example of "someone who hates everything" to learn from. Or what if I was born to a crazy fucking mom just so I could write about the shit down the line in a coherent honest manner that made sense beyond the "mommy issues" of a whiny band? Basically, this practice of always looking at the shit of life and viewing it from the point of what component it has become in your overall machine, is doing nothing but depersonalizing any drama or problems I may think are going on. This seems odd though, as the culmination of everything wrong or right in life couldn't possibly be anything less than the most personal thing you have to claim.
I just got hung up on the word honest when I read through that last paragraph. Honesty is starting to cause so many problems, particularly with a status update epiphany I decided to send last night. What is conveyed and understood in the stories you tell? Whether you talk of passion and love and die with a little smirk of happiness on your face, or you talk about how fucked we are and how you always did it right with your hyper rationality, yet still with a smirk of happiness, what's the difference to either person? They both essentially asked and reveled in what they wanted in life, were able to justify it up until the end, interacted with people who seemingly completely understood both of their positions, so on and so forth. And yes, I've placed passion and love basically against hyper rationality in starting this example. I'm not convinced that they are opposites. Say you fall in love, your heart is beating, you feel impossibly energized and fulfilled. You can rationally say, "my heart is faster, I feel very good, I will do things to maintain this feeling, I will selfishly pursue this feeling at all the usual 'costs' because nothing I've done or said so far has been so compelling." Your "overwhelming" feeling at that point isn't the blind pursuing of a fix, it's a calculated plan, an honest assessment of your feelings at the very least, and whether you describe them as love, or unbelievably compelling, or simply necessary for the type of game your running, they are there.
So back to honesty and how I use it and what I honestly think when people tell me about their loves and lives. It occurred to me last night that it could be possible to use rationality as the same kind of drug and excuse that people try to pull with me in a discussion about their feelings. Almost making yourself get lost in a world that makes sense, not outright denying feelings, but marginalizing them to such an extent you manage to not remember they are there. The easiest analogy I can draw is with a scent that you experienced only in your childhood, then say 20 years later you come across it again and a wave of emotion or sensation hits you. Maybe a flood of memories or unresolved confusions that were associated with it. Your mind would act as time in this example, pushing yourself through the experience, putting it into a neuronal pocket, enough time taken for it to make sense or make you able to cope, before being tucked away. For me, I have honestly managed to convince myself of, or genuinely forget about, things that have recently flooded back like as if I smelling something familiar. I know I am only became capable of this as I learned more, get more reasons ::coughs:: excuses? ::coughs:: to behave and think the way I do.
A good example is when I honestly say I don't believe in love. Then I immediately have to go into all the conflicting definitions I've heard, explain that there are smaller more appropriate words that make more sense, get into complicated sciency facts and explanations I've come across...this whole necessary procession that I engage in to justify my feelings and ideas about my level of honesty I feel when I say that. Now say I'm explaining this to someone I genuinely care about, but everything I know about them says they are going to take my explanation and that conversation to get confused, angry, maybe hurt or (usually) defensive, and use it to create this awkward rift in how we relate together. We can all constantly wish for "better" friends who will always take the time to fully understand where you're coming from, but I don't think this is wholly realistic. When I talk to this person I feel good, when we hang out it's fun, they are totally willing to help or contribute to the entirety of a good time when we're with other friends, but I Honestly can and will tell them something that is sure to throw that off. And even if it doesn't necessarily make some dramatic change, it most certainly prompts one or both of us to play pretend and work that much harder to find a less thought antagonizing ground. For the record, there was no one specifically in mind here, it's just happened enough at varying degrees and with conversations on much more meager of topics than love, that it was easiest to explain this way.
Fuck fuck fuck. I need to speak more simply. The honesty in me wants to never say shit about how I think or feel and just do things that you're going to assume I enjoy for reasons that make sense to me. The honesty in me also wants to alienate myself in a world of ideas and ideals I've "rationally" ascertained and believe will serve me well, that I know you don't care, nor should really want to I would imagine, to be apart of. Both appealing, both happening depending on the situation or particular mood or test I want to run that day, and yet both carry with them a massive sense of loneliness. I feel like I'm in the midst of a glaring problem. How can I maintain both kinds of honesty, and still be honest? They conflict. Isn't the only real honest thing to say is that I want to be a fence sitter? Don't I just want to deny, forget, get by, and desperately grasp whatever it is that makes me happy at any moment? I guess it could just be as simple as being an honest liar. Ehhhhh, what if it's just that I don't ascribe as much dignity to my thoughts as I would like to imagine. Though that doesn't seem like it either. Maybe, your rationality is the slave of your feelings and my mind just behaves in the same way a battered woman does. I can't tell yet if this has become completely sidetracked....
I learned from Cracked that we're born liars. Maybe you should just rest assured that I'll lie to you if only to maintain a "deeper truth" that matters more to me. But, pretending I'm hearing that from someone makes me call bullshit on their deeper truth and that it isn't an excuse to bullshit me. More so though, it just makes the other person curious until they stop caring. Hmm, a good explanation for the nature of people's friendship? People who've given up giving a shit about getting any further with someone they've managed to have fun with earlier. Could this speak to the ridiculous loneliness brought up above? Being someone who wants to endlessly pursue thoughts or feelings, but no one willing to play along? Or at least no one wanting to play by the same rules. Maybe my fake relationships matter to me just as much as my real ones....at least in the purposes they serve. Aha, I don't dignify you with honesty you can't appreciate, but I don't take from you anything beyond something merely useful or able to be manipulated. Justifying lies, as an honest person, to people who behave the same or in destructive ways when trying to deal with, or deny, your honesty. So that's how I do it both ways? I get to have very real fun on a very "fake" or "honest enough" foundation. But what does that say about personal responsibility and integrity? It probably just means we don't have any.
Ha, what are the necessary consequences of that reality...
