Sunday, October 28, 2007

ADD Strikes Again, on Neruda, MASH, Monkeys and Three Strikes

Zaphod browsing through the TV channels, '50s movie comes on:
Cowboy, wistfully: Ah yes, now those were simpler days and simpler times
Zaphod: when were the times any simpler. Everyone wants to go back to the then, talk about everyone wanting to be there either yesterday or tomorrow.

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Everyone seems to want to find a a purpose in life. Now if you think about people in Africa who have to move around finding food, who have to, at the rate of painting a pithy, walk miles for potable water, well, do you think they look for a purpose? Their entire existence is to live from day to day, to just live.
We have too much time on our hands. The removable of the need to just live has created a vaccuum that must be filled by a thus unknowable purpose. In the end, it's just one thing, one common thread that runs through every human being that has and will ever more exist: to be happy.
If it's finding an easy meal in millets or truffles, we all move toward a common aim and that aim is happiness. Aristotle defined it best by not defining it all. He defined it as that we all move toward, however you define it.
We keep looking for purpose and meaning. Maybe it's a wild goose chase, the fact that we are alive, that was the purpose. Perhaps we do it so well, that we have forgotten how hard it used to be and how much of our days went in doing just that.
We seem to be monkeys with too much time on our hands.

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It happened again. The new Mac OS is out and I was dying for it to come out. It came out Friday and I walked to the store and picked it up but I couldn't bring myself to pay money for something I don't need, for something that is so superfluous to my life that I can't buy it and yet remember the guy I saw huddled in the cold near the subway station, swaddled in a blanket the same color as the cold concrete.

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Why I love MASH: where else can you find such a simple and innocent joke that isn't anything other than what it is, something to make you laugh, laden with simplicity
Supply officer: you know this kind of trading goes on in the army all the time. Remember Major, I got you those leather knee high boots with the spiked heels?
Major Margaret Houlighan: No no! (gesticulating)
Colonel Potter: with spiked heels? how do you fish in those?

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Something I read that blew me away and I haven't been able to stop reading it:
I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

-- Neruda, Sonnet XVII (100 Love Sonnets, 1960)

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Something brilliant I saw:




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And a few things that occurred to me:
-- I tend to over analyze myself and cut myself off from emotions. I was wondering why I do this so much and the answer is rather simple. I hate losing control. Whenever it has come to other people, I have always always been disappointed. I feel sad. To stop that, either I control every outcome or I disassociate myself from that bluesyness. There have been so many relationship issues that have tossed my emotions wildly, including my getting back with the Ex for the emotional masochism I put myself through (which has eerie manifestations in some sexual fantasies), it terrifies me that I put myself thorough it. It really feels like the emotional equivalent of cutting except its worse and deeper.
But I digress. I cut myself off to be in control.

-- I am terrified of dropping my walls because I'm scared that someone who really likes me will see something they don't like and leave... that they'll see the dark stuff that used to cause the prickly feeling at the back of my neck, taht horrible temper I keep away. And how can I live with that? So I put on walls faster than they can get through so either they leave, like the Ex, or they become frustrated like the Sasquatch.

-- I have had intimacy issues yes, that would explain a string of relationships based on sex. Because it's just that, sex, I leave a few hours later and resume my life, my thoughts and who I am. I think there's nothing harder that the intimacy when you are naked and it's only when you feel comfortable with who you are, that's when you may be able to share who you are

-- I'm still trying to remember the first moment when I was terrified of losing control, the situation and why I dread it so

-- Self awareness breeds loneliness. The better you know yourself, the more defined becomes the kind of person you want to be with. Friendships lose their veneer and become the average, and like bad acting, you tend to overlook the average and the bad and just find a basic delivery and move on, but like good acting, you try and find the ones who accept and want to be with you
The more defined the person you want to be around, the less you find it and the lonelier you get

-- There is much to be said about content in and of yourself, of being able to be with your self in your head and alone. People come and people go, as does the happiness they bring. People change and so does what they bring and give and share with you. But while this is a great cynical thought, I never want to lose sight of the fact that I want to be with a person who loves me for me, who sees through my walls, the cracks and the dents and the fears and never wants to leave.

-- To quote the Sasquatch who increasingly sees through me said, "you show more when you run away". Fuck, either that means I have met someone who I can't hide myself from or I need to do a better job covering my tracks. But even that she sees through and I turn around and face her and make it a battle field. I think I am rubbish at relationships, I can make the other person feel loved and beautiful. But the moment they want to get under my skin, I turn ugly. Of course, as she has said twice in twelve hours, it's as though she is introducing me to a meaningful relationship for the first time. I'm scared she may be right. Or, in my usual humors vein, I'm a blank slate and she can do what she wants!

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The US has this law called the Three Strikes Law whereby the third time you are convicted for a crime, you are given a lenghtier sentence than had it been your first offense. I find it odd to name a law after a sport, especially one like baseball. Imagine if we had the Silly Point Law or the Law of Square Drives in India.

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