Mmmm...Cynicky...
Well, that was certainly a pisser of an afternoon, wasn't it? Not that you'd know, because you weren't there. Honestly, you never call, I haven't seen you in months, what the fuck.
Anyway. I come not to abuse my readership (either of you), but to entertain it, or something. I'm sitting on the couch, fending off a needy cat who doesn't quite understand the concept of laptop and wondering just how far into the shoals of bitterness I've actually wandered. It's difficult to tell, sometimes, whether I'm producing posts as part of my regular everyday processing or I'm actually striving for something completely different. Or, perhaps, some combination of the two.
It does seem a bit of a stretch, doesn't it? I mean: one month I'm high as a limerent kite and the next I'm decrying not only my own foolishness but everyone else's. Really, it's not your fault, and I certainly don't mean to be bashing you about the head with my antinuptiality if that's what you're happily aiming for. Different fucks for different ducks and all that (is that my "fuck" quota for this post? It might be; I'll check.)
I've got three books lined up in my reading queue, one after the other: Easton and Liszt's "The Ethical Slut," Tennov's "Love and Limerence," and Lewis, Amini, and Lannon's "A General Theory of Love." This is on top of the book I'm reading for the book club I started a couple of weeks ago: Daniel Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness," which takes as its basic premise that humans are stupendously bad at predicting what will make them happy, and attempts to explain why.
See a theme here? I knew you could.
Despite having been a bit of an asocial introvert for much of my life, I am in fact an acute observer of people and their behavior, and nine times out of ten if I'm asked to explain what the hell's going on with someone, I'll get it right, even if they insist to the sky that I'm wrong. This might be the kind of objectivity that one obtains as an observer of and not a participant in the odd dance of primates we're pleased to call society, but nevertheless, it's a useful skill that I really need to value and trust much more than I do. The trouble is, I end up gathering a lot of data but fail to present it to my decision-making committee in a handy executive summary which they can then use to make recommendations to the action committee, so while they're hemming and hawing over the Powerpoint slides being projected against my frontal lobes, the impulsive bastards in my limbic system are charging full-speed ahead without even so much as a preliminary budget, and god I really do work in corporate America again, don't I? Jesus. Stop that.
The other side of this particular psychological coin is that, like Clarice on the other side of the ventilated plexiglas, I have difficulty getting the keen observer in the cell to apply his skills to himself. (Did I just compare a part of myself to a psychopathic cannibal? Why yes, you did. Have some Chianti.) The cobbler's children have no shoes, and the acute observer of human behavior has mixed success in sussing out his own motivations.
In real time, that is. I can roll the tape and see exactly what I was doing and why I was doing it, but my in-the-moment processing is often sorely lacking. Part of that, I think, is due to the fact that I'm used to being pickled, and I'm not now. It's frustrating, though, and I do occasionally beat myself up about all the time I've wasted in my life attempting to bludgeon myself into mental health with bongs, bottles, and pills.
Still: I'm better at it this month than I was last month, certainly better than I was the month before that, and entire galaxies better than I was this time last year. There is progress, and part of the lesson plan (Part III, actually) is learning to cut myself some slack and stop treating time and love alike as though they're vanishingly rare commodities in a starvation economy. Yes, yes, live every day as though it's your last, but frankly, I know what it's like to think upon waking that this day or that day might be my last, and it's not helpful. It doesn't lend daring and vim to the diurnal anomaly; it creates fear and paralysis. If I get nailed by a bus tomorrow I won't spend my last millisecond of awareness regretting that I didn't call the personal trainer at my gym who wrote her cell number on her business card after our "free session" for no reason I could identify until a week after the fact. I'll spend it getting hit by a bus. Very Zen, that.
Despite my mad skilz and best intentions, the lumpen fist of cognitive obsession still manages to put a good squeeze on my heart at least every few days, and this afternoon was no exception. From a strictly empirical standpoint, it's actually quite fascinating: Observe the monkey. Notice how, despite his accumulated knowledge, hard-won, he is powerless against the onslaught of his own desires and their accompanying neurological states. Look! He's discovered websites he probably shouldn't read...and there he goes! Let's give him a food pellet and a shock to the ankle.
From a subjective standpoint, however, it blows yak dick. It's one thing to be jerked around by someone else, but quite another to realize you've been pulling your own damn strings all along, and are still doing so. Figuring out how to disentangle yourself from your own manipulations is bloody difficult at best, and a fount of misery at worst. Yet: I see people in the same situation who've got no idea that they've got their own strings clutched in their own two fists, and are puzzled every time they kick themselves in the face. So perhaps I'm ahead of the game, even though some days it feels like I've lost it entirely.
Fuck.
(I had one left.)
