hollow man

i don't remember much from "the wizard of oz" but i think l. frank baum chose correctly when he made the heartless one a tin man. not in that it's a man (christ, i'm not that sexist), but how he's made of tin. it's weird how when you're very deeply hurt you can actually feel your heart. it's a physical thing. your chest feels hollow. and... everything is more flat. the moment of the initial blow, you feel / hear / think nothing else but of how differently your heart feels now. and worse yet, your heart aches for the rest of the "mourning" period (heart ache, there's another one that was hit on the head).

maybe i'm weird, but normally after something bad happens to me i just feel sad (this is specifically about relationships). i don't feel angry. just sad. and hollow. and different. afterward i kind of wait to see how i'm going to feel next. i think that after your first reaction, most of everything else is voluntary. you can choose to become angry, or sad, or forgiving.

a few nights ago something happened. that initial moment was a killer. it was... infinite sorrow. and after... i was hollow. normally after this sort of thing i like to get away and process. unfortunately i couldn't get away in that situation. and the next day, i still felt hollow, but i was totally functioning, you know? then something else semi-related happened and i just... and i didn't really react to it. i was still just sort of waiting.

today i was asked to talk about it. and i didn't want to. i felt like i hadn't yet put enough distance between me and the event. i hadn't talked to a friend about it yet. i hadn't worked through how i was feeling. or even how i wanted to feel. how i was going to choose to act about it. of course, i didn't get to not talk about it. and i fucking erupted. i was really really goddamn angry.

i'm not actually angry tho. i think. i'm not sure. he didn't say this, but i think he thinks that once i make my mind up about something, i stick to it and it doesn't matter what he says he was doing / saying / meant. and so he wants to explain things away, right away. and maybe i do make up my mind unfairly and without his input. but i try to take a lot of time to think about / wait for how i really feel about the situation. i run it thru in my mind. why it happened. why he did it. what it really means to him, to me, for us. i like to take my time. and when i'm denied that time to process i don't have anything else but sheer primal feelings.

and honestly. i sometimes feel like it doesn't matter why. you did it, that's all. or you lied, and that's it. it's not why you lied, or why you felt like you should, or what truth your lie was covering up. all i heard was your lie, and so that's all that matters. ...this of course doesn't work in most situations. people are too complicated, you know? i think rarely is something done out of only one motive. but sometimes you're just so damn tired of figuring things out that you decide to stay with the initial moment. that moment when you know you saw something true.

simone de beauvoir - a very easy death

"I do not blame my father. It is tolerably well known that in men habit kills desire. Maman had lost her first freshness and he his ardour." [36]

"'If you had not lost your faith death would not terrify you so,' wrote the devout, with rancorous commiseration... And inwardly I told them all that they were wrong... Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death." [92]

"'A corpse no longer means anything.'" [97]

"We were taking part in a dress rehearsal for our own burial. The misfortune is that although everyone must come to this, each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days which she confused with convalescence and yet we were profoundly separated from her." [99-100]

two in one!

obviously, this is a photo of albert einstein. but get about 10 feet back of your computer screen and who do you see now?!

it only takes a second

Men take a fraction of a second to decide if they are attracted to a woman or not – but they should not be called shallow because they are genetically programmed to do so, scientists say.


Men weigh up potential partners almost instantaneously based on their appearance because their “ancient” genetic preference for attractive mates leads them to, experts claim.
According to research, a woman with an attractive face is taken by men to be fertile and able to continue the family line, appealing to the man’s survival instinct.

In contrast women take longer to decide their feelings for a man because they need to weigh up whether he will be a committed partner who will provide for them well – part of their survival programming.


Professor Mark van Vugt and Dr Johanna van Hooff, from the University of Amsterdam, and postgraduate student Helen Crawford, from the University of Kent, were behind the study which is to be published by the Oxford Journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
They tested men and women’s bias towards looks by conducting a series of tests on 20 women and 20 men, making them perform tasks while recording their brain activity.
While the subjects were doing the task they were shown a series of photographs of faces of the opposite sex, ranging from attractive to ugly.

Men were easily distracted when they saw a pretty face but women stuck to the task.
Prof van Vugt said: “Men definitely have the most wandering eye but it is because they have evolved to pay attention to cues of fertility and one of those cues is facial beauty – it’s not that men are shallow.

“But we found they do make snap judgments about women, much earlier than was previously thought. They make that decision on whether a woman would be a good mating partner in milliseconds.

“This is something very ancient and a way of helping men find the best mate to produce children.

“Women were not distracted by attractive male faces because women need more proof of whether a man is a good mate.

“Women make that decision on behavior, whether a man is trustworthy and committed. They make their decision much later than men.”

source

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from tracy kidder's mountains beyond mountains: the quest of dr paul farmer, a man who would cure the world":
How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitians peasants answered with a proverb: "Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe, "in literal translation, "God gives but doesn't share." This meant, as Farmer would later explain it, "God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us."

i send that above quotation to some friends and one replied that "...it's sad, cause it seems to come down to a few things, with corruption and without democracy, people will continue to starve in other countries. even when we share and donate stuff to corrupt countries, it's not used to distribute to the people in need, but to further solidify those in power."

my reply was:
i don't know how much democracy has to do with it (but then, i know very little about poli sci). i agree that corruption (both in govts and charitable orgs, and in individuals!) taints everything!

i was talking to a friend the other day about the "billionaire's pledge":

"German shipping millionaire Peter Kramer feels that it would better if the billionaires kept their money and let the government collect the revenue via taxes. Kramer believes that the government would use the money more effectively by putting it to work directly in local communities. He thinks that the giving pledge is a way for the ultra rich to avoid taxes and donate to their favorite interests and hobbies. Many of the rich feel that the government and other organizations are the best vehicles for charitable endeavors."

i agree with kramer (not entirely, but i totally get it). i've always thought that if i were super rich i wouldn't create my own charity thing, i'd give my money to an existing one cause it takes a lot of overhead to create a new one and what wrong with an already established fund? i know a lot of people are like "it's my money, so i want to spend it exactly the way i want to" which is true. but... in the end aren't you really just helping the same people? except now there will be fewer duplicated efforts in getting that money to those people.

but back to your thing about corruption, tons of the non-profits that people donate to have such a high overhead (or embezzling, whatever) that of the, say $100 that you donate, only maybe... $65 actually goes to help someone. so who would even want to donate to these orgs? problem is that you really don't know who you're "helping" anymore. so i know of lot of people use that as a excuse and not donate at all. which soooo does not help. :(

i've come to think that... i don't want to change the world. i don't want to change someone's whole life. ...well, not that i actually don't want to, but... i just want to make at least one person's single moment in life a little bit better. so when i did my shoe drive, or my current eye glasses drive, if at one person who honestly deserves it will be helped (and of course there will be! it's just the odds, you know? collect ~300 pairs of shoes, at least one person who needs it is going to get a pair!). then that's good enough for me. :)

basically, other people doing bad cannot prevent you from trying to do good.