bra

I get emails from a company who lists its name as "Bra." They, of course, sell bras. It is a pleasant relief from my normal deluge in the spam box for Viagra adverts.

Today, at 3:35pm, I printed the last thing that I needed for tomorrow's meeting. The thing I have been burning the candle at both ends to get a grip on. At 3:38pm, the Mad Kitten and I were tucked into bed and took a 4 hour nap. It was one of the most pleasant experiences of my life. I woke up to find my brain had crept into the room and scooped it off the floor and popped it back in its window seat. It is nice to be able to think again.

And I sat and fired up the computer and wrote on the City for the first time in a while. Always there is this strange thing that happens, a simultaneous exhaustion that occurs while writing it and also a kind of drive to keep on writing. I wish I had the kind of physical stamina to write for as long as my brain and heart are speaking but the process is draining.

I am up to the part where Laineta, the Waves (sister of the Lord of the Ocean) has climbed up to the Heavens to ask of Issand (the creator) to make a man for the Ocean so he can speak to Sadima of his love. I have been avoiding this part for several reasons. One, I hadn't quite figured out Laineta yet, what are her motivations? What is she feeling as she goes there? How is Issand? I mean, he pretty much fulfills the role of God in the Christian sense all that creation and all that, yet he is not the primary God in this poem. What is he like?

Hidden within that has been my foot dragging avoidance about what comes next. You see, when the Ocean finally has the man and can speak to Sadima, that is when I get into the whole shebang about unrealistic expectations in love and immature love. The kind where people are "loved" more because of a need you have to fulfill within yourself (casting them in a role so who they are is less important than what you want them to be). It also contains the puzzle of "love at first sight" and the attraction of the familiar (for better or for worse).

But I think I have a better grasp of that now. Certainly a better one than I had a year ago, but it has required some deep introspection and then some external changes.

I had a funny conversation with a man yesterday about why I would not just "try it" with someone. The "it" being just go get in a relationship and see if you can make it work. His attitude was essentially (going back to having a role you need someone to play) that the fit was more important than the person, if that makes sense.

That is something that I think deceives a lot of people. Finding a good "fit" but not paying attention to the person who is fitting. "Fitting" is another way of it being all about you and the last time I checked, most relationships require two individuals. But we like it when someone fits, when it is easy for us to be with them, when we only have to consider them as something outside of ourselves when there is friction.

I reached a place in the book I am reading, The Mask of Sanity, on psychopaths where Cleckey mentions Korzybski's concept of the consciousness of abstracting. It is the core means by which one personality recognizes the effect or potential effect of something on another person without that other person defining the options. In order to do this, the person must be capable of recognizing the other individual as existing outside of their need, something a psychopath cannot do.

So it is interesting to me to back up and examine our modern expectations of relationships and see how...like the when love leaves post...everything around us is essentially pushing us to relate psychopathologically to each other in relationships. If you read men's and women's magazines the women's magazines present the psyche of men as that of children who must be shown what is needed to be done (as defined by the woman) and the men's magazines emphasize the need to gain skill at appeasing the woman because they are an alien species who has no sense of reality and the present. Each side is defining the other according to their perception rather than learning how to perceive through the other's life, to abstract the importance of events to that individual.

The whole culture of emotional processing in relationships is one that seeks to diminish the responsibility of one partner for being to abstract meaning in regards to the other. Everything has to be explained and defined.

Which brings me back to the kind of false love that is found most often in "love at first sight," what is it that you are really seeing? Usually it is the familiar, but it is not usually the other person, it is the familiar as defined by you. It is the "fit." The effortless "fit."

Mull and ponder, mull and ponder. My 3 hour nap is timing out.

Sleep now.


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