July 9, 2008, 6:33 pm in playlists

“While you were gone” – Hell hath no fury.

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I am displeased.

I’ve allowed myself to remain deeply involved with someone who claims not to be ‘dating’ anyone, who categorizes me as a ‘friend’ along with everyone else in his life. I’ve allowed him to hide behind semantics and phrasing that I’ve known are bullshit to enable himself to enjoy me and another woman who also considers herself to be in a relationship with him. I’ve allowed for his selfish, dishonest, and often utterly ridiculous reactions to make me question my sanity, my motives, to feel controlling, out of line and unhinged – just as he’s hoped they would.

Even though I have been clear from the start where I stood in regards to multiple relationships in relation to ours, I have not stood my ground. I have allowed for his actions and my own to damage me over and over, as I quietly read books about strengthening the bonds between lovers, searching for new ways to connect and show affection toward him.

I’ve acted such a fool.

I’ve been operating under the constructs of a romantic relationship with this man, giving and receiving much more than I have ever given any supposed ‘friend’, based on whispers of manipulative assurance and lies of omission (and often outright lies) that didn’t line up with his actions at all. I’ve done this all in the name of growth and consciousness expansion while he’s lied point blank to my face and been insincere, greedy and dishonest for months, perhaps longer. How utterly irresponsible of me.

He’s recently told me I am the love of his life, declined advances from people by declaring that his heart belongs to me and has for a long time, and has been sleeping with me. We’ve talked of babies and marriage and remain bonded in chemistry thick enough I can barely see through it. Even as I have sought to end romantic relations with him he’s consistently resisted and acted out in protest. Yet, I am assured to be a ‘friend’ to him, to someone who is clear about having strong feelings for him with whom he has recent history. It’s been a source of profound tension and distress for me, and I’ve often felt insulted.

I kept telling myself to be a ‘bigger’ person and to accept things how they were, even though they were hurtful. I wrote numerous pep talks for myself about growing past what I wanted, what I felt was right for me, changing my standards. It was all bullshit. I allowed his constant refusal to listen to me about this to mean that my feelings must have been wrong. That the respect, and the honesty I wanted was wrong.

I am hurt by the mixed signals, distressed and suspicious of the vagueness, and I always have been. I am angry about the defensive wall that is put up every time I’ve attempted to address this triad with him – even simply that it exists. I am saddened and confused by the inconsistency with which he represents our relationship. I am frustrated by his persistent unwillingness to recognize my feelings, my warnings, about these discomforts I’ve had, even when I’ve been in tears over them.

I’ve been met with a constant standoff about any details regarding his relationship with her. I am furious with his resistence to owning his actions as precipitating the tensions between the three of us, and his excuses. I am sick of being lead on and sick of watching him lead her on like we’re both fucking stupid.

I’ve been involved in a shadow what I want for myself since he approached me in April wanting to rebuild our relationship. I’ve trusted that whatever we ended up having would build trust and strength and be celebrated honestly and be protected. That’s not the case, and it hasn’t been for a long time. I’ve been utterly played.

And yet there I’ve been, still giving this guy my all, gut wrenched and walking on eggshells.

It’s always something, isn’t it. A mutual interest. A book. A text message from across the country. Some clothes. I break free, but there is always something to grapple to, and get the hooks back in me.

firstwaveII.jpg

Enough. I’m finished being this person.

October 15, 2005, 6:16 pm in public

Mortality and you

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I listened to a really fascinating segment on kexp this morning, in the “community forum” portion of Mind over Matters. It was about death and mortality, and how the awareness of which effects the human race and has contributed in a massive way to the state of the world, such as it is right now.

I’m trying hard to find a transcript online but to no avail. There was so much information there that connected with things I’ve been seeing other people taking about – The oppressiveness of most education, the loss of connection between humans, the fact that we are in “the apocalypse” RIGHT NOW and all that lovely shit.

But the gist of what they were saying, and have been spending a lot of time and energy studying and proving, is that the reason we find it so difficult to get on with folks who don’t share our beliefs in how reality is perceived is because it threatens the viability in our approach to internally resolving the matter of our mortality and how we handle that day by day, as opposed to the viability in how we think life should be lived.

Conflict that leads to wars and genocides aren’t so much about about life and liberation and the freedom to live how we want, they are much more about the freedom to believe in our own homey version of death and what it means and what, if anything, happens after. Fighting over territory/food/power happens, we are animals after all. But, we are the only animals on the planet that understand mortality and live with that terrifying, looming fact most of our lives, we are the only animals who war over belief matters and worship methods as opposed to territory and basic survival/reproduction, we are the only animals who make these mistakes and perpetuate our own miseries.

Because, think about it, if I believe that there is no heaven/hell and that I may possibly have a second chance at life, have probably lived a few already, and base my lifes work and choose how I feel I may be important in this world on how I rationalize and manage this eventual fact of dying, a person who believes otherwise and lives much differently would be a threat to my way of life, not because they want to pray seven times a day to some guy I don’t think is listening, but because if they are right in their beliefs on mortality, than I AM WRONG and so is everything I base my life upon.

I think the humans in this world are fear-based because of knowledge, more than of ignorance, and that’s the conscious, crystal clear understanding that we are going to die, so I really wanted to hear more when I noted what the subject matter was.

They conducted many studies where they talked to people in controlled environments and gaged a persons willingness toward violence, mass destruction, nuking other countries, and even voting for Bush, against whether they had recently considered death. People who had not been asked to think about death or something equally unpleasant answered questions VERY differently. When these same questions were asked, such as “Would it be worth it to wipe out a city of tens of thousands if it meant eradicating Osama Bin Laden”, people were much more supportive of the notion if they had been asked to think about their own mortality first.

They also talked about symbols in cultures, and how they are effecting us, and how cultures, particularly ours, are going so astray. When the $ symbol is one of the most important in a society, and children have been being taught this for decades and centuries, it’s a wonder we’re not even more disconnected with the earth and our own species than we are.

They touched on the civil unrest in our society, liberals and conservatives and all that. How the Olde Beliefs are obsolete in the face of science and freer thinking, which is threatening the realities of the Christian Right and so forth, and how this is an even bigger problem due to the fact that no viable alternative belief system has been offered or contrived.

It was an absolutely fascinating, revolutionary piece with lots of very sobering and informative notions and facts. In the quest to understand what the fuck is going on with all this insanity and all this fighting and all this horror, the timing was just perfect and information like this is so desperately needed right now, I’m just really touched.

There was so much more to this segment and I really hope that every human on the planet eventually comes to know of what these people are trying to say.

It got me thinking about a lot of things, including why I’m so conflicted, annoyed, afraid of and obsessed with money and the obligatory need for making it, having it, and spending it has had in my life and our society. I want to be free of the burden of needing and/or wanting money to survive, I don’t agree with its place in our world and I feel it’s extensively evil and causes massive amounts of problems, I don’t understand why it’s become such a big fucking deal, and I don’t know how to master being financially secure.

Even just having this instinct and belief causes more problems and internal conflicts for me; having this misplacement of “$” in the ranks of what’s truly important as a human being presented the way it was really clarified a lot of why I feel and act the way I do in regards to money, why it’s one of the first things to cause unrest in relationships, why I hate owing it to people or asking for it, and why I fucking want it so bad anyway.

And how, we are fighting and dying and suffering over nothingness, over things we cannot prove, over things that ideally would have no bearing on our lives, tripping over our own feet, our afflicted ignorance, our frustration over not knowing something that feels so very important to understand, over our arrogance that we have the answers to the unanswerable, and our inability to just not worry about it. We are all frightened, hissing, spitting, confused children hurting each other over things we will never control.

If only every person were to have the means to understand how truly futile and ridiculously unnecessary war and murder really is – so few of us when moved to express this have the focus to explain in terms that make logical sense, but there are some and hearing about this gave me .. faith, in people, to hopefully figure it out before that is futile as well.

Just really a fantastic way to wake up in the morning. I had forgotten how much I liked waking up at 7:30am on Saturday to lay in bed with my cat and listen to that show.

Here are the few urls I was able to dig up on the guests, their award-winning (and that’s an understatement) film documentary “Flight from Death” about this subject, and the people who have inspired them:

http://www.flightfromdeath.com/ – Site for the documentary

http://ernestbecker.org/ – The mission of the Ernest Becker Foundation is to bring advances in social
scientific theory to the public in efforts to reduce human violence.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/ – “He believed in life, creativity, health, and the realities of the world we live in, rather than those situated in a world beyond.”

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