LIFE IS PAIN, HIGHNESS

From the sound of things Honey went ahead and took her own advice last night. And it is probably about time I took her advice to me as well, “just POST already.” She has been terribly disappointed in me and I’ve been spanking myself with episodes of One Tree Hill in an attempt to atone. But even I don’t deserve that and my Netflix queue keeps insisting that, due to my past preferences, I need to watch Apocalypse Now and Toddlers in Tiaras ASAP. RESET. So here goes.

Since the beginning of time I have begun every essay or paper I have written or any correspondence I write with an apology. “Sorry I know this isn’t any good, I’ll do better next time,” “I accidentally took too much excederin and then wrote this letter with my left hand, sorry.” This honestly isn’t caused by gratuitous self-deprecation on my part, I swear. Sorry if it comes off like that. I don’t really have the problem of under appreciating myself. It is that I feel the need to acknowledge that I am not living up to my full potential so that “they” know that I know that this tripe isn’t the best I can do.

I have touched on this before several times but here it is again - Honey and I share the characteristic of being kind of unemotional about things. And when we try to explain to someone what we mean when we say we are robots, we run into the problem of trying to convey “I just don’t care about people’s problems and feelings… but I care about yours.” I can imagine that never seems genuine. The reality is that I think most problems people have could be solved by being less self indulgent and just change it already instead of complaining about it. Now that is obviously not universally applicable and most people aren’t me so I hold them to lower standards anyway. And I totally do care about YOUR feelings, with all the others I was just pretending, but never with you. But as I have mentioned before, I have very little regard for my feelings as well. Usually I ignore them and wait for them to pass.

The combination of these two character nuances makes posting on a blog really, really, difficult for me. It never really crosses my mind to call up a friend or whatever and catch up and, like, list things that happened in my life, or feelings I had, or thoughts or whatever. As you can imagine, conversations with me are completely one-sided. There is a lot of deflection and me awkwardly saying “oh nothing, what else is new with you.” Not because I have nothing going on, but because the last thing I want to do is listen to myself blather on about it. I usually get bored halfway through a sentence and abort the mission entirely. When I ask myself “do I really need to say this out loud" the answer is rarely "yes." Writing blog posts requires more commitment than that, so I’ve been avoiding it. But I am getting the apologies out of the way now and hopefully we can work through my inadequacies together.

Next up, I expound on how to stalk someone the right way.