Giving to Get & Not Giving to Not Get

You know the feeling you get right after you say something that you did not intend to say? It feels a bit like shooting a jumpshot and knowing it's going to miss as soon as you let it go, or swinging at a hanging pitch and knowing you popped it up as soon as you make contact. And while it may feel like that... it usually isn't that, at all. In revisiting these tourrettes moments, I often realize that my only mistake was honesty. For me, shared language, whether spoken or written, is so tightly tied to my emotions that the culprit for my misspeech is almost always either memory or alcohol. So if I said it I meant it... And because that is how I am, I tend not to believe it when others claim to be otherwise.

The other day I was telling a friend of mine that I think of her as the most "human" of people I know. To that she asked, "what do you mean?" Though she was aware that the word human is used as a number of parts-of-speech, certainly as either noun or adjective, she was only really comfortable with it's use as a noun. As she was well aware, "human" as an adjective essentially means to be human-like; to exhibit charactistics that are, or should be, characteristic of humans. So her question to me was, at its core, what characteristics are, or should be, characteristic of humans and how and why do you feel that I exhibit those traits. I found myself as unclear as she was, so I spent some time trying to figure out what I meant. Had I misspoke? Again, probably not.

My immediate response was part of the truth: I told her that she has an incredible capacity for empathy. Despite having seen many of her friends do and say plenty of things for which many others would judge and probably distance themselves from, she always seemed to be able to put herself in their shoes. She seems capable of comprehending anyone's subjectivity... She has a sincere belief in both the power of personality and the moral neutrality of people; she practices a sort of super-personalized relativism and is able to, quite effortlessly, disassociate moral value from the human decision making process. In other words, she can understand how other people come to act as they do because they are the complicated people that they are, rather than understanding their actions as those of a good or bad person.
Digging further... I found myself wrapping my arms around more of the truth. Stuck on this idea of moral neutrality, I began to consider that moral neutrality is a bit of a hypnotizing concept. How can one judge something so nonjudgmental? Well, why not? Perhaps too little of something is just as bad as too much. Perhaps people don't judge because they don't want to be judged... the brother who gets his siter a barbie so that she'll get him a GI Joe... or better yet the guy who never asks how many she's slept with... it's giving to get, and not giving to not get. Why can't we just be...

Dope Video...

http://vimeo.com/12449882

FACEBOOK IS EQUAL PARTS CONVENIENCE & INCONVENIENCE

With every mode of communication made common in our new world, there are new arenas in which the emotional games and wars that humans play and wage are won and lost.

Sympathies, Strength or Weakness???

I can't begin to recount the number of times I've heard people express frustration stemming from incidences when expressions of their sympathies have led to people taking advantage of them. People proverbially "mistake kindness for weakness" everyday. Often times the full picture is a little bit more complex. These complaints are often better characterized by people percieving their own selfish behavior as pro-social (actions motivated by altruism), or people perceiving their own pro-social behavior as something other than weakness. See, if it were not weakness, it would not have exposed you to the exploitation motivating your complaint... And purely altruistic behavior connotes an understanding of the intended beneficiary(ies)'s plight that more than likely justifies/explains the pain of exploitation. Sympathy, though a beautiful and essential part of life, is weakness.

Understanding a woman's past does not mean you can deal with the scars that past has inflicted upon her. Your inner-social worker may aim to improve her, or may perceive her growth as an enjoyable spectacle to be audience to, but your own weaknesses may render your coexistence with that woman unbearable for you...(Ellipsis)...

What women want!

This is no secret... women want attention. The female desire for that central location in the universe is often misunderstood though, or at least discussed in language full of miscues and misnomers. Women don't want to be the center of THE universe, they want to be the center of the universes within the minds of those they are consumed by and preoccupied with. With that I would argue that fame, as an end, is at heart a masculine goal, that is yearned for by women as a vicarious experience... Women seem to seek fame to impress upon those closest to them their value... often out of a desire to prove naysayers wrong and impress people that are important to them rather than the almost colonial desire for expanded influence and exaltation that many men are driven by. So I would argue that the unbending linguistic laws of the "man's world" rear their blunt and imprecise head in the discourse concerning female ambition...



Thus fame becomes another launch point for identifying what fuels the female experience... While men seem to remain focused on THE universe shared by us all, women seem to understand this shared universe as a more fractious conglomeration of universes owned and governed by the subjective experiences of us all, from ant to homo-sapien, from Andrew to Zachary, we each have a WORLD of sorts. To a woman, each of our worlds form 4 dimensional venn-diagrams as our experiences collide, with the four dimensions being shared time, chemistry, objective value or "on paper" credentials, and subjective interpretation of physical beauty... (TBC - ELLIPSIS)

Apologies to Tomorrow for My Yesterdays...

I'm sorry, tomorrow... Today has been about realizing that I made a lot of mistakes yesterday.

Those who came before us that offer us advice really do know stuff... my parents, for instance, offered me, through a series of suggestions, demands, and asswhoopings, a path toward their version of success. They saw themselves as my life-GPS telling me when and which way to turn en route to success... But that's not actually what they were. They were far less state of the art. They were much more like maps illustrating the location of failure, drawn with the natural ink of parental concern to help me avoid peril. Fear mongerors, they were. They would say, "Do you want to end up in jail, son?"

And frankly, their fear mongering brought upon me the feeling of vertigo, as Milan Kundera describes it: Is vertigo the fear of falling? "No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us, which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."

As a parent... I will propose a right way, as the only way.

-JH

The world continues to spin on it's axis, and rotate elliptically around the sun... the oceans continue to inch up onto our shores... suns still shine, hearts still beat, new children are still born... the cycle of existence continues...
The wind may move rocks, streams may wear stones to pebbles, and changing seasons may bring leaves to the knees of trees they once ornamented, but the only independent things that ever really change are the minds of men. We live, love, lose, and most importantly, we learn. With how we value education in today's world, it may seem counter-intuitive to suggest that life's lessons are moments when the world's many malices manifest. How negative, one might think? But life's infinite dualities emerge in our lessons, as our own enlightenment occurs with the equal and opposite darkening of our sense of truth... our enlightenment may, in fact, be better described as the beclouding of our senses; our minds darken, as they bring light upon the pitfalls of our life’s journey.
As I experience my own personal beclouding, I realize that comprehension/social maturity is to moments of disappointment as molecules are to atoms... The Neucleus of these atoms is, tragically, good intention... The buzz of life's electrons creates confusion, which becomes bad situation. Whether it's love life of loss, it's all eventually lost.