Lately

…I am pondering the amount of time it takes for a cool thing seen on the Internet to go from “Holy shit, that’s the most awesome thing ever!” to “Holy shit, that thing? I’ve had it forwarded to me 327 times and seen it on 17 different blogs. Fuck that thing and every dipshit who promotes it.”

That time seems to shorten continuously. Right now it’s about two days, maybe three. Certainly not as long as a week.

The thing that set off my irritation meter today was that guy who does the teeny-tiny pencil lead carvings. I first saw those a few weeks ago, maybe two, and I was blown away. Jeez they are teeny and tiny and intricate. Impressive.

And then I started to see them in more and more places. It seemed to be some kind of insane crossover that showed up on art and design blogs, living blogs, random cool shit blogs, tech blogs. Everyone seemed to think this fit into their blog genre, and wanted to share. But instead of being initially impressed and then glad that so many people were celebrating this artist, I began to feel… irritated. The work had not changed, but my perception of it shifted as it became less novel to me. I couldn’t even just gloss over the continued mentions, they started to almost enrage me. THAT GUY AGAIN? WTF MORONS!? Was in my head more than it should have been.

And it seems the time it takes for that to happen is shortening. I see a thing three times, maybe four, and the thing and all people associated with the thing earn my immediate scorn.

My brain craves novel amusements, thinks of them as its due. My brain does not want your same old tired shit that it already saw yesterday, that shit should no longer exist! My brain wants fresh fun, god damn it.

Other things that have lately enraged me with their ubiquity: the video of the cat fighting its own reflection in the floor. Posts about how Glenn Beck is hurting America (yeah I know, not news.) Everyone who retweets The Oatmeal. Recaps about the show Mad Men, on many many blogs that had nothing to do with TV shows. (Ditto posts about Lost.) I don’t watch that show, and thus who cares? I already read that blog, why ask me to read it again? Why are you clogging my interwebs with this nonsense?

It’s like the more things become customized to cater to my tastes, the less patience I have for things that are not specifically suited to my desires at that moment. And I do not know how to turn this irritation and lack of patience off.

I do not enjoy spending half the day in enraged contempt at things that enter my overloaded data-stream and are judged irrelevant. But what is the answer? Turn the data stream off? Have less access to less information? How does one learn to gracefully tolerate the same information flying at them nonstop all day? Because that’s the issue. I am already sorting mental wheat from chaff all damn day. It’s hard to process all the information coming in. When the information repeats, it’s like it’s doing it specifically on purpose to clog up my already overburdened neurons. Hence the irritation. And yet, this is not a phenomenon that will go away. If I see a cool thing I want to share it, and my friends will want to share it, and other blogs will want so share it, that’s the way memes work. And with various info streams all feeding in, I am likely to see intricate pencil carvings guy on Twitter (MUST READ!) and Google Reader (analyzed by twenty art and style blogs + Boing Boing) and on Facebook (have you guys seen this guy OMG) and who knows where else. So it’s up to me to manage my irritation at the audacity of a thing existing past the time when I deem it relevant or desired. But how to do that?

So that’s what I have been pondering lately. Tips welcome.

Protected: Gefeliciteerd

Feed Issues

OK, for everyone saying that the feed is borked, I agree, the feed is borked and I am sorry. I’ve done what I can to correct it, but I don’t know that I can really fix it. If you subscribe to http://x.superbadgirl.com/blog/feed via Yahoo, you get the full feed. Through Google Reader? Truncated. I do not know why, I do not know whose fault it is. I cannot fix it, and I pretty much feel like smashing someone’s face in about the whole fucking thing, as every entity involved claims that it’s not their issue. So, sorry about it, especially for people who are blocked from my site via their work filters and whatnot, but there’s nothing I can do.

Or, wait, now it’s showing full feed in Reader? I don’t know, subscribe via that link up there and maybe it will work, maybe it will not. It’s a fucking crapshoot.

Song of the … everytime. October Project “Wall of Silence”

This has been my second favorite song for at least 15 years. Probably I could assemble a whole playlist of songs about disconnecting from people, because that theme has always loomed large in my mind. But this has to be the most beautiful, and the most representative of how I feel. You have connection and you have disconnection, all in cycle, and it makes you wonder if anything has ever been real. Did it ever really matter, if it doesn’t last? Are things that are temporary worth anything? Isn’t everything temporary?

I saw October Project play live one time, before they disbanded, and I wish you could have been there. They were magical.

October Project – Wall of Silence

I’ve seen that life
Touches us with pain
And we change
Becoming strangers to our friends
Tell me what happens along the way

I thought of us
Hard to talk these days
Did we change?
Or were we strangers all along?
Tell me what caused us to turn away

There’s a wall of silence
Miles across
A wall between us
Holding back
Holding back our loss

I moved ahead
Thinking you’d be there
But it changed
And now we’re strangers to our past
How did I lose you along the way?

I’ve seen that life
Touches us with pain
And we change
Becoming strangers to ourselves
Tell me what happens along the way
How did I lose you along the way?

A lot of the time, I really have to wonder if the rest of you are only pretending to be OK.

Things I Am Pondering Today

I am not sure whether I feel like even typing up all my thoughts into sharable words right now. But what I am lately pondering is:

• My belief that all photographs are lies.
• The ways in which we connect to and disconnect from other people.
• The concept that I am a person with a past and a future, and that this is just one moment in my arc. AKA: Why does everything feel like it’s the only thing that ever happened?

My head is busy, but also kind of content. Which is I guess why I don’t feel like writing it all up.

Permanence

So Myrtle Beach. WTF. It kinda sucks! I was all “Beach is Beach, yo. Might as well go to a new place with beach, and experience that, right?” But no! Beach is not all the same! The town surrounding beach is not all the same, either! Let me tell you about it! (Warning: this is not a cheerful post, and it’s not even all that funny. It doesn’t wrap up with a feel-good, upbeat ending or anything.)

Savannah? Prettiest place in the world.

See, for the past few years I have vacationed in/around Savannah, Georgia, either in the city itself, or on Tybee Island. Savannah is the prettiest place in the world. If it weren’t for me not knowing a single soul there, I do believe I’d just move there. It’s lovely. It’s graceful and charming and it’s got a slow-paced, languid quality to it that speaks to me of imaginary times gone by when things just might have been easier to deal with. Seriously. Everything there is gorgeous. I’ve said before it’s the kind of beautiful you can’t even photograph, because it’s collective. It’s just beautiful thing after beautiful thing and you’re in the middle of all this enchantment and you can’t even capture it without being there. Old, perfectly restored homes, exquisite gardens and public parks, gigantic old live oaks dripping with Spanish Moss, cobblestone streets, hidden little corners and shops, magical, sleepy things to find everywhere. Tybee is also small, pretty and old fashioned.

Myrtle Beach is none of that.

Driving into town, one is inundated with signage. All the tacky, peeling indicators of impermanence. Fast food, discount stores, designer outlets, big box madness, all the awful, temporary things that make up our world right now. Flashing traffic lights, decaying billboards, nudie bars. When you get into the main part of town, “Ocean Boulevard,” you’re in the middle of a disaster of tacky surf shops, ice cream parlors, miniature golf, go-kart racing, stands selling everything from air-brushed t shirts to tattoos and cheap jewelry. Everything you think you want for five minutes, and discard easily five minutes later.

The buildings are huge and towering, 18 floors and up, each one studded with tiny jutting balconies at odder and odder angles, so that every room can boast an “ocean view” (you just have to crane your neck a bit.) You know none of these buildings were here forty years ago, and none of them will be here forty years hence. The people in this place are pretty much what you’d expect, too. It’s easy to see that this is probably a popular spring break destination, and there are plenty of spring-break types hanging around. There are families too, but there are a lot of young people. Sorry while I whack you with my cane here, but I am not a fan of young people in troupes. They’re loud and erratic and they tend to posture and flail about and altogether they can go sit in the basement with the kids until they know how to act right in public.

So my hotel room (Actually, quite nice. With ocean view!) had a small kitchenette, and I determined to go and get some bottled water/other drinks to take out on the beach with me. I made a trip to the mall (all the same things you can get in St. Louis! Only now you also get to transport them 1000 miles home!) and on the way back the only place I saw to stop and get snacks/drinks was… Wal-mart. Now, being a card-carrying progressive liberal pro-union, anti-waste feminist, I have not shopped in a Wal-mart in probably 15 years. Back when I was in college I went to the one in my town, because that was the only place to go, really. But since then, I’ve avoided them. But this time, I was hot and tired and I didn’t want to look for another place, so I went in. And you know, I realize this will sound very dramatic, but inside that store, I saw everything that’s wrong with our society. All in one tidy little big-box hellhole. Honestly. First of all, it’s clearly set up not for the comfort of patrons or workers, but to maximize profits. It was hot. The A/C was at a barely-tolerable level, and I was just walking around. I can’t imagine having to work all day in that place, as the air did not seem to move. Also, the light? It was gray. I do not know how they managed to make gray artificial light, but  they did somehow. Presumably they’d found some kind of hideous, gray light bulbs, designed to save $.03 per bulb, per year! Increasing shareholder value! And I felt like that awful gray light was leeching the will to live out of my damn soul. So it was hot and stagnant, with evil gray light that cast a deathly pall on everything. And dirty? It was awful, spills on the ground that no one had cleaned up, things flung everywhere in the aisles. The signage was awful, it made no sense, I could not find things. People were going up and down the aisles randomly, so the whole place was a traffic jam. They had some weedy, dirty looking produce, but the main action was in the pre-packaged convenience foods. There, there were cases of crap ripped open, plastic packaging everywhere, carts piled with high-fructose death and destruction. And I looked around at all these people randomly grabbing at this crap with their dirty, mewling children, and I realized just how far out of the mainstream I am.

The other day I was talking to a friend about American attitudes, and how if you took a snapshot of the country’s views, mine (and his) would not be represented. That even though we believe our own liberal ideals are where the country needs to go, that is nowhere near where the majority of the country actually is. And that’s what I saw so clearly at this Wal-mart from hell. That I live a rarefied, organic-produce kind of life. That I have the money and the spare time and the personal interest in leading a very different type of life than most people. That the things that concern me do not concern them. That they’re not worried about high-fructose corn syrup and over-packaged, over-processed food. They don’t care that they’re spending WAY LESS MONEY! to get WAY INFERIOR, DISPOSABLE PRODUCTS! They are fulfilling their needs in the way that’s been presented to them to do so. And it’s cheap. Jesus, I checked out with two big bags of (for me) snacky, crappy food, and it was less than $25. When I shop at home, I buy $4 loaves of bread and $6 organic preserves and $5 organic butter and $6 organic milk. It’s not enough that I have the free-range eggs, or the organic eggs, I have to have the free-range, organic eggs. And they do not come cheap. (And even then I worry that they come in plastic packaging. And my milk is organic, but it’s not in glass bottles, and really, should be I be spending more to get milk in glass? Am I Doing It Wrong?) So typically, breakfast for the week costs me $30. And I know that sounds like an assholish thing to say, and I understand the privilege I have in being able to live my life that way. Honestly I do. But I really had forgotten that the vast majority of people have no such interests and concerns. They want to get some food in their stomachs, and their kids’ stomachs, and they want things for the kids to play with, to shut them up (I agree, they should be shut up!) and they don’t care that those things are going to break by the time they get to the car.

Bizarre, baby-pageant style Paula Deen.

And to top it all off, I am standing there, sweltering, in the gray light, waiting to check out, and I am next to the magazine rack. And on sale are two “lifestyle” magazines, meant to be aspirational for the common person, I think. And they were “O” magazine, and “Cooking with Paula Deen.” And you know what, Oprah and Paula? I am sorry, but you do not look like that. Paula’s pic was a variation on this one from last year (couldn’t find the actual current cover) and Oprah’s featured her laying in a hammock. Analyzing the way that Oprah’s leg and hip intersected, it was pretty clear that some serious Photoshop chicanery had occurred. And gosh-bless, Paula, but no one’s skin looks like this. And this is not even mentioning the other awful “Ten Worst Beach Bods!” and “What does he really think about your skin tone?!” bullshit “women’s” magazines. This is just… non-reality here. Aspirational non-reality. Maybe I, too, can buy enough plastic products so that one day I can look like someone on the cover of a magazine! Except, the people on the covers of magazines do not look like the people on the covers of magazines.

Actual Paula Deen. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with the actual Paula Deen.

And so I checked out. (the checker was wearing medical gloves so that she did not have to touch the products she was ringing out.) And I drove back to the hotel past all the signage (Fine Art Gallery! Giant Clearance Sale!; Live! Nude! Girls! at Club Toxic!; REAL Myrtle Beach Discount Souvenirs!; Exotic Shells and Fireworks!; Keepsake T-Shirts Sold Here!) and I felt like the world was just one giant, overflowing trash can of temporary, plastic, hideous shit. And that no one sees it but me. And that, try as I might, I am also embedded in this process, I take part in it. I support it.

And so, Myrtle Beach? Not for me. The beach itself was lovely, it was wonderful to get sun and be in the ocean. But the environs were not conducive to a healthy state of mind for me. St. Louis has issues aplenty, and the neighborhood where I live has many. Blowing garbage and flying bullets being chief among them. But at least the homes around here have been standing for 100 years, and there is some sense of history, and things that are restored instead of being thrown away.

And so now I go back to my privileged, rarefied life, and I don’t know what it all means, or if it even means anything, really.

Between Point A and Point B

So I am on vacation this week. I felt a need to go on vacation, have been feeling it for awhile now, but not any particular desire to go on vacation. Extreme apathy has been more my style lately. But you can’t hang out in extreme apathy too long,  I’ve heard you forget how to breathe in there. So I knew it would be good for me to go, I knew I needed to be doing something, going somewhere, and yet I had no particular desire to do so.

How about some beach?! Sez I. Beach will be good for you! And so I made some plans, and reserved a room, and last Saturday I headed on out to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

From St. Louis, where I live, to Myrtle Beach is about 15 hours, not counting stops, so I thought that was a little much for a one-day drive. Some people I know thought that was a little long for a drive, period. Too much time with my thoughts, apparently. Like I can get away from my thoughts, no matter where I go?

Truth be told I was not looking forward to the drive, due to the aforementioned apathy. But I loaded up my iPod and I made a rule that I could not fast-forward any songs, I had to listen to whatever came up. (Deep, Song-Related Thoughts on the Road are some of my favorite Deep Thoughts of all. There’s something curiously validating about someone feeling something you feel, and feeling it so hard that they wrote a song about it, and other people recognized that this was a real feeling and they produced and promoted and sold that song. That means I am not alone in my feelings, no matter how weird and singular they seem inside my head.)

I started out with The Weepies newest single “I Was Made for Sunny Days” because it’s hopeful, and it makes me sad and happy and leaves me forlorn and optimistic all at once, and I thought that pretty much suited my state of mind. (If you want to hear it, it’s currently streaming at their site, so click the link up there and you can hear it. But I am sure you will not understand. I am sure you will not get why it’s what it is. I could explain it to you another time, if you asked me. But no, you will not understand it, I feel certain. Oh you, you and your not understanding things. The only thing I hate worse is when you do understand things.)

And so down the road I went, listening the The Weepies and Duran Duran and Public Enemy and Franz Ferdinand and Laura Veirs and Combichrist and DICEGRINDER and lord only knows what else. And as I drove I remembered what I thought I’d remember, as I had not really forgotten it, which is how forward motion soothes my soul.

I like to go places. I really like to go. I like to be on the way somewhere. I like to be in motion, aimed at a destination. I just plain like to go. I do not so much like to arrive. I do not like to BE places. You get somewhere, then you have to deal with that place. It’s no longer a potential place, a potential experience, it’s a real thing that you have to comprehend and undertake and deal with. That’s no fun. Going to a place is wonderful, and purposeful and calming. “I am on my way to a place! Look at me go!” That’s fun. Being at a place is frenetic and scary and full of loud noises and brightly-lit signs and full-length mirrors set across from toilets and all other manner of inexplicableness.

I like to have road in front of me, and beautiful scenery that I can’t quite see clearly, since I am driving. I like the sun and the trees and getting excited every single time I cross water, and I like the interaction of passing other cars and going faster than them, and then they pass you and you’re seeing their same stupid bumper sticker again for three hours in a row, and then you’re not because you passed them again, and then they have to stop for gas and VICTORY! You have defeated them!

I love listening to music and singing really loudly because all the lyrics suddenly really mean something – something profound – and I just have to sing along to it, and it’s OK because no one can hear me and it doesn’t matter if  Jim Bob from Kentucky thinks I am making funny faces, I do not even know Jim Bob and don’t give a care what he thinks about the faces I make. Has Jim Bob even heard this song? No, I thought not.

I like the physical act of driving. I love to go fast, and feel in control of my vehicle, and feel it respond the way I want it to and the way the motion of the car drags my body back and forth when I take corners and change lanes. I love having the window open and feeling the wind rush past, but really it’s me rushing past the wind. Driving – it’s so complex and it’s so simple. I push this pedal, I make it GO. Sometimes I think I’d like to rent a race track and just drive in circles for a few hours every day. Vrooom.

And so today when I was walking around this botanical garden/nature preserve thing I thought about the pictures that I most often take when I am in that kind of environment. They’re all paths. All my favorite pictures from all my favorite places, they mostly have paths in them. Maybe everyone likes to take pictures of paths. I don’t know. But I take a lot of them. And that makes sense to me, that fits. I want to look at paths because I want to be on paths. In several senses, I want to be on my way somewhere or I want to dream about being on my way somewhere. I just don’t ever, ever want to arrive.

And so tomorrow morning I will start for home. I really, really want to go. Tonight I am impatient that a night of sleep stands between me and the going. I am afraid that I will not want to arrive, and that when I do I will just want to turn back and head out again. And I will not be able to, I will have to stay. But I guess that will be OK too. I will make up some crap about an inner journey and I will make my peace with it and I will construct a process inside my head that feels like a trip somewhere and I will wait for my next chance to go.

Something’s Eating My Music

This morning I had a sudden, overwhelming urge to hear The Cardigan’s “Lovefool.”

love me love me say that you love me, fool me fool me go on and fool me.

I didn’t just have to hear it, I had to put in on my car playlist RIGHT THEN and listen to it on the way to work. For which I was already running late. So I went to adjust my playlists and sync my iPod to this effect, and discovered to my surprise and chagrin that this song was not in my iTunes library.

But how? I have listened to that song at least eleventy squintillion times. A lot of times. I love that song. I couldn’t tell you the last time I listened to it, no, but certainly I have owned it at some point and had it on my computer. In this house? Maybe. In my apartment? Certainly. No, I can’t tell you WHEN, but I can tell you I HAD it. But it was not there. It was gone. So, despite now being really rather late to leave the house, I started searching my backups. Where was it? It had to have been accidentally deleted. It would be in a backup. But it was not. Not in the first backup, and also not in the backup of the backup. (Chez BadGirl, we protect our music, yo.) There were two empty folders in the “Cardigans” subfolder though. One of them tellingly titled “Best Of.” This is where it would have lived, back then in those happy times, when we were together. And yet now it was gone. Gone.

So I bought it again and I waited for it to download and I then re-synced my iPod and I was almost twenty minutes late to work because NO FUCKING COMPUTER was going to tell me I couldn’t hear a song I wanted to hear, when I fucking wanted to hear it, goddammit. It was gone, but I could get it back. For a tiny amount of money and a little bit of my time I could replace something that I’d lost. Not everything is like that. Some things you can’t ever have back, no matter how much money you might want to offer, or how long you were willing to wait. But THIS THING, goddammit, THIS thing, I could have. Something was under my control. And so I had it. And I have it now, until iTunes decides to swallow it whole again. And then I guess I will buy it again. I don’t know. I don’t know why some songs periodically disappear. It’s not the first time something’s gone missing. And I guess I don’t care. Things come and go. Some things, if you remember to miss them, you can replace.

Wishes

I wish there was an adequate term to describe how worthless the world is.  Alas, there is not.

Random Ramblings

This was, I do believe, my heaviest-drinking weekend since I had surgery. I am going to blame that for how absolutely exhausted I am and the fact that I am getting ready to go to bed at 10 p.m.. At least last night I knew to stop drinking once I started knocking drinks over. That has come to be a reliable sign of when it’s time to stop. Or that it’s maybe half an hour past time to stop. And I can recognize it even when there’s no Dave or Todd there to point it out! Yay me. Once I knock a glass over, I only get to drink water. It’s a rule by which to live, folks. The More You Know.

In any case, I do believe I muddled my way through the weekend without causing more than normal offense, and I also had my first CBGB patio night of the year! Whoo hoo! So what if it was cold and damp? It marks the return of an always-interesting season. This weekend I also finished re-reading A Confederacy of Dunces and I am now going to work my way through Sandman Slim, which has been sitting half-finished on my couch-side table since before Christmas. After that it’s on to jPod and then I will let myself buy the new Joe Hill book. Have to get back in reading mode. Have to get back in writing mode, and cleaning mode and art mode and everything else mode. In order to do this, there’s a possibility I may have to give up backyard maintenance. Perhaps I will let it all revert to a Missouri prarieland. I can foster native wildlife, like butterflies and alley rats. That’s what I will tell the nice people from the city anyway, when they cite me.

And so that’s it, the end of another weekend. Full of people and laughter and tears and alcohol and epic WIN and tragic FAIL and nice conversations and not as nice conversations and dining out and sleeping in and ouchy feet and an abused tailbone and all the other things that comprise my life. And I am pretty OK with that, actually.

Happy V-Day, kids!

Out of the mouths of me

Tonight I was reading through a very old chat session that I had with MyTodd™, and I ran across this pearl of wisdom:

me: “It is not my job to comfort people. It is my job to poke at their ego with my sharp tongue until they run screaming and collapse in a broken fetal heap on the floor.”

At least I WIN at understanding my purpose in life.

This weekend’s lessons

If every day should offer some educational experience, then I suppose I should be more on the lookout for them when they show up. I did learn a few things this weekend, I think – namely:

• I should have used my cell phone to take a picture of the sign that Guy posted on the wall at the bar to get me to stop using my cell phone. Oh meta.
• Matt’s margaritas really are made of magic. They taste like happiness. How simple a thing it is to make me feel so connected to the world.
• I will probably never tire of nasty, bitchy people who nevertheless love me – they make my life more fun. I should not eat patty melts at 1:30 a.m. though, that really is a bad plan.
• There are people like me, who think the way that I think – I just notice the ones not like me more than I notice the other ones. I think the other ones talk more.
• Awkward, stupid-acting people should fear running into me, not me them. I don’t have anything to be embarrassed about, aside from occasional poor judgment and an overabundance of empathy.
• I get a curious sense of satisfaction from loading and unloading a completely full dishwasher. One that has plates and cooking utensils in it, not just 17 over-sized cups. I should entertain more often.
• I need to invest in an inflatable mattress.
• I am pretty sure I am giving up Firefox for Chrome. Sorry FF, but seriously your memory issues are too much. Especially in Vista. Trying to go cold turkey and will probably uninstall FF from the laptop entirely.
• It’s OK to like Lady Gaga un-ironically. I can like whatever the fuck I want, as I am a grown-ass woman.

I think that’s it, but that’s probably enough for one weekend. Restful and full of contentment, I am going to put this one in the WIN column.

The People Conundrum

I am continuing to struggle with dealing with people – groups of people and individuals. I have leveled out on my disgust with all the concepts that I see, at least for this week, but the people are still kind of making me nuts. Not that it’s their fault, or mine, I think it’s just the way in which I think about them—I make it harder on myself than it might have to be if I was a stupider or more thoughtless person.

Over and over I learn that my moral and logic centers are considerably out of plumb with those of the people I know. Even the people I really like. Learning to accept people in a holistic way and appreciate their place in my life while disagreeing with their beliefs and sometimes their actions is just fucking hard, and doesn’t promise to get easier with practice. It’s the constant reanalysis that wears on me. It looks like this:

OK, you’re doing this –> I like you –> you doing/thinking this must be OK… wait, it’s actually not OK. Do I still like you? –> Yes. OK then how can I incorporate this action into my view of you, and the world? How can I separate who you are to me from what you are doing?

-or-

You’re doing this –> I like you –> This is not OK –> This action/belief system is so morally unacceptable to me that I no longer can accept you as part of my world. –> Now you need to go away (Sometimes with a footnote of –> Oh wait, you’re still here? –> Everyone else thinks your actions are acceptable? –> Reevaluate –> No, you still suck. –> Grudging tolerance.)

And you know what? That’s fucking hard, and that’s fucking tiresome, and I am sick of it. But it’s constant, whenever you’re in relationship with people and you don’t wish to be consumed or subjugated by their belief systems and completely lose who you are. I would prefer that people be good and be simple, and do good, simple things that are easy to live with and understand and not bring up all these sticky problems for me to analyze. But that’s not the way of it. People I like do bad things*. To themselves, to each other, to me. They do them on purpose to be hurtful, or they do them on purpose because they do not believe them to be wrong, or they do them accidentally because they don’t understand what they’re doing and what the consequences might be. And each of those things requires some level of thought for me, some reshuffling of the facts in my mind file for them.

And I feel as if I am the only person in the universe who thinks about people in this way, or has these particular ethical quandaries. I do not see others struggling to understand people quite this hard. Maybe because the concept of being in relationship with people – any people, at all – is one that is negotiable for me. Maybe other people don’t think this way because the idea of not doing people is one they can’t conceive of, so it’s pointless to ponder whether they can do these particular people, or those particular people. There are going to be some people, and people are bound to be all variable and hard to understand, so what’s the point in thinking about it? I get that. Or maybe they don’t think about it, or care about it – maybe the social neediness of primates just overcomes all and they shut down critical analysis. I don’t know. I mean – people ARE compelling. Being in a group IS enjoyable, otherwise no one would do it. Social feedback is satisfying, and people are whimsical, charming, entertaining creatures. I adore many of them, and find them very necessary to my happiness. I just also happen to find them challenging, draining and baffling too.

The one thing I know is this—the only way I can function successfully without going insane is to let my core beliefs be what they are, and not change them based on the beliefs of the people I am around, even if I care deeply for them. Everyone I know may think that something is fine, and if I don’t think it’s fine, that’s my right. It’s my right to feel it, it’s my right to express that I feel it, it’s my right to live my life in the way that I believe to be correct. And it’s my right to eject people from my personal world when the incompatibilities are too great. When trying to stretch my brain far enough to make their actions somehow acceptable is too painful or disturbing for me.

And in the end it’s not for anyone else to understand, or appreciate or approve. It’s only for me to live inside. And that seems so simple, doesn’t it? You can’t please everyone, so just please yourself? There’s even a song. But social pressure is a powerful thing, no matter how grounded you try to remain.

So the question is exactly the same tiresome, unanswerable one it’s been for years. How can I be with you and not lose myself?

Stay tuned – one of these days I may figure it out.

*Yes, I do realize that I am most probably doing bad things to other people without knowing it. I realize people don’t necessarily approve of  my value system and life choices, or my opinions. But they can get their own fucking blog and bitch about it there.

It’s Not You, It’s Me (also, it’s kinda you)

Almost every single thing that I have encountered in the last week or so has either:

A) bored me greatly
B) offended me deeply

A few things have somehow managed to do both. I am irritated with the language of the people around me, and the concepts they’re discussing. I am disgusted by the things I read, and the images I see and what those things imply about the world in which I live. I want better, more suitable, more timeworthy things to think about and look at and be delighted by. I want things to stop offending my sensibilities, and for people to stop being obtuse and obstructionist at me. I want people to be interesting and exciting and full of fun in the exact way that I feel like being interacted with at that precise moment. I want both attention and space, I want both excitement and contentment. I want you to come here until I want you to go away again, I want to buy a bunch of shit because there seem to be a lot of things I need and  I want to throw away a bunch of shit because I have too much shit. I want to read more things and watch more things and write more things and talk about more things and I would also like to stop doing any of those things because I feel a little overwhelmed. More than anything else I would really like for you to understand about it and provide me with what I am looking for, while also realizing I don’t need you or your god-damned help.

That’s all.