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Feb. 24th, 2007 01:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jrisingFirst, some activities.
A friend and I are struggling through Ulysses-- join in! We just started, and we're using a guidebook, a book of footnotes, and online resources to light the way. We meet to discuss the first 50 pages next Thursday.
The Salon is spawning a Film Group! Deep movies, bizarre movies, classic movies: the overarching theme is something like "films that make you think". The first movie will probably be Fantastic Planet, this Tuesday, February 27, at 8pm in MIT room 2-105. You should come watch, and tell me if you want the announcements! There's even a page to collect our movie recommendations-- go to http://existencia.org/salon/movies/ and add some!
I'm thinking of hosting another Rocky party on March 3! And I thought it'd be fun to run a cocktail bar there: what's your favorite drink?
Now, a little rant.
The world seems over-boiling with people searching for love-- yearning for it and dejected in their lack of it. To be clear, I mean a particular brand of love: significant-other love. There are few creations that have brought as much misery and personal confusion as that one.
I'm no different. I want a girlfriend too. I want someone to share my joy with. I want the sex. I want the cuddling. I want the warmth next to me when I'm asleep. It's not that I think love can't be fun and worthwhile, but it doesn't seem to do any of the things people want it to.
For example, love doesn't bring you happiness. Cathexis, sure, which can be fun the way a good night of drinking is, but is that happiness? Love intensifies emotions, and stresses them, but it can't make happiness out of thin air. And if it does, the result is a dynamic where you rely on (demand from?) the other person for the ingredients for your own happiness. It's a recipe for hurt.
Love can give you newfound reasons for living, but it does this by what it takes away, not by what it adds. People seem to imagine love like the divided creatures from Hedwig and the Angry Inch. They want to glom onto another person and somehow grow and find new security in shear mass. Love is desire, which is a radical lack, not a fulfillment. We love into our weaknesses, but using the object of our love to "fill up" our holes is the same recipe for hurt. All love can do for our deficiencies is reveal them to us (but this may be exactly love's most powerful gift).
Worst of all, people depend on each other for love. My teacher in philosophy said that all fights in relationships are because one party believes the other doesn't love "enough". Love is among the most fluid and unreliable of the emotions, and it's as different from on day to the next as it is different on the two sides of the relationship. Expecting anything of love, and drawing conclusions of what it should mean to the other person, is a sure way to kill it.
A friend and I are struggling through Ulysses-- join in! We just started, and we're using a guidebook, a book of footnotes, and online resources to light the way. We meet to discuss the first 50 pages next Thursday.
The Salon is spawning a Film Group! Deep movies, bizarre movies, classic movies: the overarching theme is something like "films that make you think". The first movie will probably be Fantastic Planet, this Tuesday, February 27, at 8pm in MIT room 2-105. You should come watch, and tell me if you want the announcements! There's even a page to collect our movie recommendations-- go to http://existencia.org/salon/movies/ and add some!
I'm thinking of hosting another Rocky party on March 3! And I thought it'd be fun to run a cocktail bar there: what's your favorite drink?
Now, a little rant.
The world seems over-boiling with people searching for love-- yearning for it and dejected in their lack of it. To be clear, I mean a particular brand of love: significant-other love. There are few creations that have brought as much misery and personal confusion as that one.
I'm no different. I want a girlfriend too. I want someone to share my joy with. I want the sex. I want the cuddling. I want the warmth next to me when I'm asleep. It's not that I think love can't be fun and worthwhile, but it doesn't seem to do any of the things people want it to.
For example, love doesn't bring you happiness. Cathexis, sure, which can be fun the way a good night of drinking is, but is that happiness? Love intensifies emotions, and stresses them, but it can't make happiness out of thin air. And if it does, the result is a dynamic where you rely on (demand from?) the other person for the ingredients for your own happiness. It's a recipe for hurt.
Love can give you newfound reasons for living, but it does this by what it takes away, not by what it adds. People seem to imagine love like the divided creatures from Hedwig and the Angry Inch. They want to glom onto another person and somehow grow and find new security in shear mass. Love is desire, which is a radical lack, not a fulfillment. We love into our weaknesses, but using the object of our love to "fill up" our holes is the same recipe for hurt. All love can do for our deficiencies is reveal them to us (but this may be exactly love's most powerful gift).
Worst of all, people depend on each other for love. My teacher in philosophy said that all fights in relationships are because one party believes the other doesn't love "enough". Love is among the most fluid and unreliable of the emotions, and it's as different from on day to the next as it is different on the two sides of the relationship. Expecting anything of love, and drawing conclusions of what it should mean to the other person, is a sure way to kill it.
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Date: 2007-02-24 06:23 pm (UTC)The cocktail bar sounds like a fun theme. I can make margaritas (slighly different recipe than gws) and white russians, and would be happy to mix either (maybe both) for the party. (Though margaritas can be a bit loud, what with smashing the ice. Maybe not the best choice for a late-night party.)
On love...
I find it truly bizarre that I read your post while the end of Love, Actually played on my TV in the background. It's a very interesting movie. Certainly, it does it's fair share of trying to spoon-feed the audience the Hollywood myth of happily-ever-after fairytale love. But it does also cover some of the not-so-happy sides of love.
Anyway, I agree with a lot of what you wrote. People who are looking for someone to fill the voids in their own selves aren't going to find what they're looking for. Yet there is that odd line between taking responsibility for your own happiness and craving companionship and all that comes with it.
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Date: 2007-02-24 11:43 pm (UTC)I don't mean to say that love isn't part of what can make a person happy, or that solid companionship is at odds with self-responsibility-- but I think certain kinds of love and conceptions of couple-hood can be horrible. Maybe the problem is companionship that acts like the people are in the same potato-sack, instead of companionship like two people holding hands.
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Date: 2007-02-25 02:47 am (UTC)