"There's something wrong with the the world today, I don't know what it is.
Something's wrong with our eyes.
"We're seeing things in a different way, and God knows it ain't his,
It sure ain't no surprise."
~Aerosmith~
Living on the Edge
Trigger Warning: Description of real animal abuse and abuse against women and children.
I actually started to type the first line of that song as just a regular blog, and then realized it was the beginning of the song, so I decided to include the rest of the first couple verses. The thing is, I keep wondering if this is a new thing, or if it's been going on for a long time and I just wasn't seeing it. There's actually a meme I've seen on Facebook based on a Futurama character that says pretty much the same thing, only funnier.
I watched a video today that made me see how much good there is in the world. It was people who were caught on hidden cameras doing good deeds. They didn't know they were being filmed, and they weren't doing it for the publicity. The video was on a website called Upworthy, which is something I follow on Facebook, and I'm grateful now that I was led to it by someone else's post. A lot of what they post is extremely inspiring, and I don't mean it in the ways of singing hallelujah and saying amen. I mean that it lifts up your heart for no other reason than that the world can be an incredibly wonderful place. If you would like to see the video, and I highly recommend that you do because it will make your day, you can find it here.
The thing is, whether it's a matter of perception or not, there are some things in this world that are very wrong. Being a feminist and animal rights activist means you see some pretty nasty stuff, and it can be devastating. It can destroy your own humanity. It's very easy for some to just stop caring, or to give up on the world. It's very easy to get depressed by what you see.
Activists can burn out very easily. There's good reason for that. They often see the worst possible cases when it comes to the causes they're fighting for. I was involved in ferret owner's groups where one woman's ferret got out of the house and a stranger poured a corrosive substance down his throat. Then the superintendents of the apartment building where he was found, still alive, threw him into a dumpster to continue suffering until he died. To this day that image haunts me to where I can't fall asleep. No charges were laid against anyone, despite the fact that they knew who had done it, and it was illegal in the state in which it occurred.
The ferret shelter near me sees abuse cases all the time, as do most animal shelters. Seeing animals in pain is enough to send me completely around the bend. I've never been able to bring myself to volunteer at a shelter for that reason. I would probably wind up in jail, because I really can see myself killing someone. People stomp on their pets (on purpose, I mean - we all have accidents where they get underfoot), cut off their tails (not the surgical docking), punch them in the head, kick them so hard they break ribs, and throw them into walls. If you're an animal lover, and you're confronted with someone you know has done this to their pet, it's very hard to restrain yourself.
When it comes to feminism, there are five-year-old girls and infants being raped to death. A woman can't walk down the street without fearing for her safety, knowing that many men think she is worth less than they are, so they have the right to do whatever they want to her. Little girls are being killed at birth because they're not considered the right gender, the important gender. Little girls are having their genitals mutilated, supposedly to make them cleaner (and more chaste), when it actually causes infections and death during childbirth. Women in the military are being sexually assaulted in ever-increasing numbers, and it's treated as a joke by their superior officers. Unless you live in a cave, these are very visible issues. They're being broadcast on the news on a constant basis.
The fact is, there is an unending supply of garbage in the world for the media to feed on. Admittedly, I'm one of them. I write articles about it. I don't do it for pleasure. I don't sensationalize it. I don't lie about it. I'm also responsible in how I write my pieces, or at least try to be, so that no one ever reads something I've written and uses it as inspiration to do something harmful, either to themselves or to another living creature. I don't ever want to find out that someone learned something from me that they then used to a bad end. I'm very , very good at finding things out. Research is a skill every writer should be very good at. (Well, any writer that does the kinds of writing I do anyway - if you're writing poetry about the way a sun shines off a lake, your research will consist of seeing it for yourself most likely, rather than pouring over prescription drug manuals or statistical reports.) Knowing things, however, does not mean I have to provide others with harmful knowledge.
I could go on for the rest of my life, every single day, writing two articles per day, and still not run out of new atrocities to write about. I will never understand why anyone in the media needs to make anything up, because there are plenty of really nasty realities out there to keep the news mill fed 24/7. That's just the way it is. They tend to pick and choose their stories, and then the whole group of mainstream media latches onto those specific ones, ignoring the rest. They tear those chosen stories apart like lions on a zebra, looking for every succulent morsel. When they run out of tasty bits, they throw in parts of a gazelle and pretend it's still zebra, but it's a new and shocking part of zebra we've never seen before, except that it isn't because they're fabricating it. It's like the fakery in fossils, where skeletons from multiple creature were put together to fool the public into thinking there was an amazing new creature. Meanwhile, legitimate new creatures are being found all the time, just not by them, so they make up their own. There are many analogies that could be used to describe mainstream media, but suffice it to say they focus on one story, and one story only.
You see, if the media reported on every single thing that they could be reporting on, most people would become numb after a day or so. There are currently 10 wars going on right now that result in over 1,000 deaths per year. One of them has been going on since 1948. To put this in perspective you should know that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not on this list. We've all heard about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though, haven't we? However, the internal conflict in Burma, which is the war that's been going on since 1948, resulted in over 12,000 civilian deaths in 2012. Have you been reading about the devastation in Burma? Deaths reported from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict range between 239 and 256 in 2012.
If you don't think mainstream media is picking and choosing what to report on, and what to sensationalize, you'd be very, very wrong. They're not telling you everything. They're not even telling you the most drastic and horrific things - things which you would think they'd want to report on just for the sensationalistic factor alone. I mean, seriously, was there anything particularly out of the ordinary with the whole Jodi Arias case? Sure, kinky sex. Wippee. Free porn sites offer that, too. One woman killed one man, and it was wrong, but it was not particularly uncommon. It was worthy of news on a local level at least, but that international airtime could have been used to cover something that people could have done something about. If it's in your neighbourhood you have a right to know about it, but beyond that why did the whole world need a play-by-play?
On the flip-side of this, they're also not doing a whole heck of a lot to report the good things that are going on in the world. Yes, there are a lot of problems, and yes, they desperately need to be brought to people's awareness, but the problem with focusing solely on the bad news is that people give up on the world. They lose all hope that anything can be done. They resign themselves to the current state of affairs. Not only that, but they determine that they can't do anything to rock the boat, just in case it makes things worse. Fear of rocking the boat makes people docile. Fear makes them compliant and agreeable. Fear turns lions into lambs. Very convenient for those who don't want people making trouble.
What we have to realize as citizens of this planet, is that we need to find our own news. We need to know what's going on in the real world, not the world that's portrayed by television. We can't rely on Fox or CNN to give us the truth, and in my country that would include CBC. These are corporate-owned media companies that have their own interests to look out for. They aren't interested in doing what's good for the world. They're interested in making money. Chances are good they're being bribed by political groups to cover the things those groups want covered.
Manipulation of the media is a well-known political tactic, and it is now so blatant that news anchors are providing wholly biased reporting for their favoured political party. They freely admit to it. The First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution was created so that the government could not censor free speech, including the media (which at the time was strictly newspaper accounts), and that there would be separation of church and state. Of course, free speech turns around and bites you on the ass when it also means that people can buy that speech - and that people can say what they want, even if it's not the truth.
Every person on this planet is being lied to and manipulated. Nobody every gets the absolute truth about anything. At best we get what someone honestly believes is the truth, from their point of view. If we think our governments are not lying to us, and mainstream media is reporting responsibly, we're being worse than naive - we're being moronic. People, particularly in corporate and government environments, almost always choose to do what is best for them. In corporate environments they feel less guilt about their actions because they're separated from them by the guise of doing the work of a corporate entity. In other words, they're being told what to do so they feel it really isn't their responsibility.
As a feminist and activist I see the end result of this manipulation. I see the rape culture that is perpetuated, and I see the women who are killed for wanting to go to school. It can be devastating to the soul. If I want to be able to look in the mirror, however, I must keep going. In order to keep going I need something to sustain me, and show me that the world isn't made up of nothing but bad things. I have to allow myself to take breaks and do the things that I enjoy, whether that's playing a computer game or watching a movie. I have to focus on positives for a while before I can go back to the negatives.
Don't get me wrong. Being an activist can also be very uplifting. When you have managed to pull together money to be donated to a cause you believe in, or when you write an article that even a single person reads it and says, "Thank you for writing this," it is one of the best feelings in the world. If you fight for a cause that ends up winning, the elation is unbelievable. Being an activist isn't always a losing proposition. Quite often the activists win. Nothing is ever perfect, though, and it takes time and misery to get there usually. So, when I'm on the verge of feeling like there's nothing decent left in the world I find ways to remind myself that there are. I have to, or I'll lose my reasons for doing it in the first place.
Thursday, 9 May 2013
Wednesday, 8 May 2013
Love, Death, Faith and Terrorism on The Kovacs Perspective
Okay, I have to say this is going to be an awesome show tonight on The Kovacs Perspective. It's airing live here at 9 PM eastern. If you have any problems watching it at that link, you'll also find it here, which is where the show is broadcast on YouTube at the same time.
We've got two amazing topics for you. Our first guest is Dr. Mary C. Neal. She's been on Dr. Oz, Katie, NBC, you name it. And now she's going to be on The Kovacs Perspective, talking to our host, +Steve Kovacs, about her near-death experience, or NDE as it's often referred to. Dr. Neal was kayaking in Chile in 1999 when she had an accident. To put it bluntly, she died. Her book, "To Heaven and Back," talks about what happened after she died. Yes, that's right. Dr. Neal, who is a pragmatic orthopaedic spine surgeon, went through an amazing sequence of events, that culminated in being told it wasn't her time, and that she was going back.
Dr. Neal is going to talk about the conversations she had while she was dead. One other thing I'm really looking forward to hearing about, however, is her explanation as to how this wasn't just the response of a dying brain. Now, this is a medical doctor that we're talking about, not some new-age hippie who believes that crystals will heal everything. We're going to get the low-down on near-death experience from someone who knows it from both sides of the equation.
Next up we have +Faheem Younus who is a guest that you might recognize as well. He's been on the show a couple of times to talk to us about many things Muslim. This time we've got something very special for you, however. Steve is going to be asking him about the Boston Marathon bombing. Not only is Dr. Younus going to tell us about the Muslim-American take on this incident, but he's going to get into the nitty gritty of how this kind of thing can be avoided in the future.
Just to clarify here, we're not talking about idealistic ideas that we hope one day our politicians will decide to do for us. No, I'm talking about things the average citizen can do, right now, to promote acceptance and understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims. This doesn't mean meeting the demands of terrorists, or turning the United States into a Muslim nation. Not at all.
After the Boston Marathon bombing, I was thoroughly saddened by the hate and rage people were directing at Muslims. Anyone who reads my blog on a regular basis knows that I'm not affiliated with any religion. I have certain beliefs, but they don't fall in line with any specific religion. Maybe this makes me more tolerant of the variety of religions, because there isn't one that I adhere to. Mostly I run my life by ethics and a certain moral code, and that moral code does not allow me to hate people simply because they might not believe the same things I do. An innocent woman was attacked on the street while she was with her child, who I believe was actually in a stroller! This is not what is meant when they call America the "Land of the Free" by any means.
My religious beliefs fall more along the lines of scientific reasoning. I believe there has to be a great cosmic force of some sort, because the complexity of what we are is something miraculous to behold. I won't delve deeply into the science here, but it has a lot to do with the research I've done on stem cells, and the work that's being done in the field. The very fact that every cell in our body started out exactly the same as all the other cells, but somehow knew exactly what to do, where to go, and what to turn into, makes me think there's a greater force at work than we can even comprehend.
I also believe in out of body experiences, because I've had one. I can't say with any certainty whether or not it was an issue of the effects of lack of oxygen on my brain. That's entirely possible in my case, since I was dying of carbon monoxide poisoning at the age of two. However, I remember it very, very well. It's something that made a lasting impact on me, and has forced me to keep an open mind throughout my whole life. I know there's more to this life than what we see, and tonight on the show we're going to hear about it.
We've got two amazing topics for you. Our first guest is Dr. Mary C. Neal. She's been on Dr. Oz, Katie, NBC, you name it. And now she's going to be on The Kovacs Perspective, talking to our host, +Steve Kovacs, about her near-death experience, or NDE as it's often referred to. Dr. Neal was kayaking in Chile in 1999 when she had an accident. To put it bluntly, she died. Her book, "To Heaven and Back," talks about what happened after she died. Yes, that's right. Dr. Neal, who is a pragmatic orthopaedic spine surgeon, went through an amazing sequence of events, that culminated in being told it wasn't her time, and that she was going back.
Dr. Neal is going to talk about the conversations she had while she was dead. One other thing I'm really looking forward to hearing about, however, is her explanation as to how this wasn't just the response of a dying brain. Now, this is a medical doctor that we're talking about, not some new-age hippie who believes that crystals will heal everything. We're going to get the low-down on near-death experience from someone who knows it from both sides of the equation.
Next up we have +Faheem Younus who is a guest that you might recognize as well. He's been on the show a couple of times to talk to us about many things Muslim. This time we've got something very special for you, however. Steve is going to be asking him about the Boston Marathon bombing. Not only is Dr. Younus going to tell us about the Muslim-American take on this incident, but he's going to get into the nitty gritty of how this kind of thing can be avoided in the future.
Just to clarify here, we're not talking about idealistic ideas that we hope one day our politicians will decide to do for us. No, I'm talking about things the average citizen can do, right now, to promote acceptance and understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims. This doesn't mean meeting the demands of terrorists, or turning the United States into a Muslim nation. Not at all.
After the Boston Marathon bombing, I was thoroughly saddened by the hate and rage people were directing at Muslims. Anyone who reads my blog on a regular basis knows that I'm not affiliated with any religion. I have certain beliefs, but they don't fall in line with any specific religion. Maybe this makes me more tolerant of the variety of religions, because there isn't one that I adhere to. Mostly I run my life by ethics and a certain moral code, and that moral code does not allow me to hate people simply because they might not believe the same things I do. An innocent woman was attacked on the street while she was with her child, who I believe was actually in a stroller! This is not what is meant when they call America the "Land of the Free" by any means.
My religious beliefs fall more along the lines of scientific reasoning. I believe there has to be a great cosmic force of some sort, because the complexity of what we are is something miraculous to behold. I won't delve deeply into the science here, but it has a lot to do with the research I've done on stem cells, and the work that's being done in the field. The very fact that every cell in our body started out exactly the same as all the other cells, but somehow knew exactly what to do, where to go, and what to turn into, makes me think there's a greater force at work than we can even comprehend.
I also believe in out of body experiences, because I've had one. I can't say with any certainty whether or not it was an issue of the effects of lack of oxygen on my brain. That's entirely possible in my case, since I was dying of carbon monoxide poisoning at the age of two. However, I remember it very, very well. It's something that made a lasting impact on me, and has forced me to keep an open mind throughout my whole life. I know there's more to this life than what we see, and tonight on the show we're going to hear about it.
Monday, 6 May 2013
Federal Fallacies, Friendzoning and Falling
At arm's length is a legal term derived from a common phrase. Basically what it means is that you're far enough away to not be biased, so your involvement in something is not coloured. If you were a judge presiding over a case, and the defendant was your cousin, you would not be at arm's length. Either you would be biased for the person because they're a relative, or you might be biased against them because you hate your relative. The fact is, your opinion would be coloured by personal knowledge and/or personal interest.
This term is an important one, particularly when it comes to the media. I just got a request in my inbox to sign a petition to keep the Canadian government from being able to dictate bargaining agreements with CBC. CBC stands for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. They're our national radio and television broadcaster. It's a crown corporation, which means that it is officially owned by the government. It's meant to be completely separate and independent of the government's political control. Suddenly the party in power wants to have the ability to control bargaining agreements. Hmm. Sounds to me like they want to start having financial control in order to be able to control the media. Maybe that's a paranoid way of thinking, but with everything that's going on with corporate media in the U. S. I don't think I want to take that chance.
I signed the petition, of course. Canadians are generally proud of their media. It is strictly regulated. There are no guarantees that we will always get the truth from our news, but the fact is there are penalties for lying about the news or fabricating it. It's commonly believed that Fox News was banned from Canada, but it was not. That's an urban myth. However, it apparently took them some time to be allowed to broadcast here, and they are now subject to the same guidelines for broadcasting in Canada as every other news outlet is. I've had to file complaints with television stations who were broadcasting false statements, so I know it happens, but I think on the whole things are pretty good here. They just need to learn to use the word 'allegedly' a bit more often. Mistakes get made, but there should be an instantaneous retraction, correction and apology given, the moment they are discovered.
There are plenty of horrifying truths out there to keep our news outlets busy 24/7, without resorting to fabrication. I don't leave my apartment very often, and I see enough newsworthy items just within my own sphere of interest to keep me busy every single day for a full twelve hours or so. Some of those things I write about. I mean, if someone wants to be well-informed, there are plenty of ways to do it. I could have hundreds of e-mails from various places if I signed up for them, and everything I look at these days is pretty damn eye-popping, so there's just no excuse for fabrication.
One of the things I've been seeing a lot of lately is this ridiculous trend going around where guys complain about being 'friendzoned'. Um, what? You're bitching because you have a friend? Someone actually likes you enough to consider you an important part of their lives, and you're complaining about it? Why? Oh, because she won't sleep with you. Because, as a man, if you're nice to a woman, then she by rights is required to sleep with you. Yeah, you keep telling yourself that ya big stud! There are a lot of women who get stuck being considered a friend, or something like a little sister, or even a mother. You don't hear them talking about how nice they are so they deserve a little bit of sex for their efforts.
Never mind the fact that just being friends with someone right now does not preclude the relationship becoming something more in the future - unless of course your sense of entitlement lands your ass in the don't-talk-to-me-again-zone. If you truly care about someone, then their friendship will be important to you, and maybe one day that friendship could turn into something else. Even if it doesn't, hey, you've got yourself a friend, and that's something not everyone has. If you're interested only because you want to get laid, don't worry. Pretty soon she'll figure that out for herself and you'll no longer have to worry about being called a friend. You'll be relegated to, "Somebody that I used to know," or maybe even, "Some asshole who only wanted to get laid and was pretending to be my friend."
I've had male friends that later became something much more. I married one of them, in fact. My first husband was my best friend for two years before we got together romantically. That whole time he had a crush on me. I knew about it, but I was seeing someone else. When that relationship didn't work out, I turned to him - not during the doomed relationship, either. He was my friend, I loved him, and I figured he would be the last guy who would ever hurt me because he'd loved me for so long. I was wrong about that last part, but it seemed logical to me at the time. It probably would have been logical if he'd been sane, but for some reason I was young & stupid enough that I let the warning signs slip right past my internal radar for wacky behaviour.
I can only think of one guy where I might actually have been friendzoned against my personal wishes. Usually the men I've been interested in have also been interested in me. That's okay, though. I mean, if it's truly an emotional thing where you fall in love with someone who doesn't feel that way about you, then you might have to walk away from the friendship because it gets painful - especially if they start seeing someone else. We're not all selfless enough to be able to simply wish for their happiness.
Still, I hate to think of friendship as being that selfish. If you do really care about someone you want them to be happy, even when it's not with you. Eventually you'll get past it. Chances are, though, if the person is in a relationship with someone else, you'll find that they barely talk to you anymore anyway. I mean, the person who's with them is instinctively going to know what your interest level is, and so will your friend, so hang-outs might become a thing of the past based on their relationship needs. Those scenarios are uncomfortable for everyone.
Sometimes the friendzone happens because the object of your unrequited love is not personally ready for anything more than friendship. I've been single for five years. I know what I'm talking about. For the first few years of that I really wasn't ready for anything even close to a relationship. Thinking about the potential drama and conflicts and compromises just exhausted me. I was experiencing relationship burn-out I guess. If you could've seen what my relationship with my ex was like, you'd know why. We fought every single day, and I'm talking about me being screamed at and having him call me nasty names that had no bearing on what we were arguing about. When people don't have the vocabulary to express themselves, they tend to resort to those sorts of tactics.
After you've been called a c*nt a certain number of times, though, it loses its power to offend. I mostly remember how I tensed up the second I heard the car pull up, and how that tension increased exponentially when I heard the key in the door. I knew that there would be at least one thing I had or hadn't done that day that would supposedly be the trigger for rage. I knew that something in the house was going to get broken, and I knew how much I was going to resent the fact that the things I'd worked so hard to pay for were going to be destroyed. Things I'd wasted a portion of my life working to pay for, I should say, because that's what it is. You give part of your life to make money to buy things. When someone cares so little about your efforts that they arbitrarily destroy things, it hurts, because you know it means they don't care about your time, which is the same thing about not caring about the life you spent.
Thankfully, that's one person who has been friendzoned now. Oddly, he's been a great friend who has been there for me, and as I've said before we've been friends about the same length of time that we were more than friends. There's nothing wrong with the friendzone. It's a sign that someone cares about you, even if they did throw dishes and shatter the patio door one time.
Speaking of patio doors, my daughter and I were clearing off the balcony the other night, and while I was standing in the balcony door I slipped and fell. I managed to jam one of my finger, among other minor injuries, but other than that I was okay. My daughter was a bit worried that I'd hurt myself, but I was laughing and joking. It's what I usually do when I start klutzing and end up hurting myself. I was listing off the injuries as I became aware of them, and cracking jokes, and she was shaking her head because of me laughing at it. She couldn't believe I was talking about getting hurt and thought it was funny.
Well, hell, it is funny. Especially with me. I do stuff like that all the time. I used to work with a girl who fell down the stairs all the time. Seriously. She wasn't getting beat up by her husband. She just had this weird, involuntary habit, I guess, and she used to joke about it all the time. I laughed and cracked a whole slew of jokes about my skydiving accident, and again after I tore the ligaments in my ankle (doing nothing more dangerous than walking). What are you going to do, though? You can cry if you want to, but even injuries can be a bit like an adventure. I did the same if my car broke down, run out of gas, or I couldn't start it because it was too cold outside. It brings something new and unexpected to your life. It might not be the best thing to have happen, but once it happens there's nothing you can do about it. "Roaming the halls, weeping," as Zachary Quinto's Spock would say, would be of no help at all. I choose to think of it as an adventure.
The sad truth is, I don't go looking for adventure. I probably should, since I seem to enjoy it when it happens, but I don't. It's only when things truly matter to me that I bother. Writing since last July has been an adventure for me. I've gone in directions I never thought I would, and learned about things I didn't know were possible. I learned things about myself, too, and I have every expectation that I will continue to do so. Another thing that happens with my writing, since I write a lot of fact-based stuff, is that I find my mind opening more and more. I have to research my pieces, even when they're based on something I strongly believe in. Most times when I do research I learn things. It isn't just fact-checking, and sometimes I'll learn that I might have been wrong in the rigidity of my beliefs. I guess you could say I know the grey areas a little bit better by the time I've written a piece.
I've had this conversation with a good friend of mine a few times now. I tend to gravitate toward extremes when it comes to my opinions, so I try very hard to temper those extremes. He tells me, and I know he's right about it in most things, that the answers don't lie in the extremes. We talk a bit about the current state of U. S. politics, although we don't really discuss specifics, and he's said a few times that both sides are starting to sound like nuts. You've got extremists for gun control on both sides of the debate, and extremists for both sides of the economy debate. Neither of them holds the answer, but as long as they stick to their extremes nothing will be resolved. We need to start loving the colour grey if we're ever going to get anywhere, and I'm not referring to E. L. James' fifty shades of it, either. Then again, that might help!
This term is an important one, particularly when it comes to the media. I just got a request in my inbox to sign a petition to keep the Canadian government from being able to dictate bargaining agreements with CBC. CBC stands for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. They're our national radio and television broadcaster. It's a crown corporation, which means that it is officially owned by the government. It's meant to be completely separate and independent of the government's political control. Suddenly the party in power wants to have the ability to control bargaining agreements. Hmm. Sounds to me like they want to start having financial control in order to be able to control the media. Maybe that's a paranoid way of thinking, but with everything that's going on with corporate media in the U. S. I don't think I want to take that chance.
I signed the petition, of course. Canadians are generally proud of their media. It is strictly regulated. There are no guarantees that we will always get the truth from our news, but the fact is there are penalties for lying about the news or fabricating it. It's commonly believed that Fox News was banned from Canada, but it was not. That's an urban myth. However, it apparently took them some time to be allowed to broadcast here, and they are now subject to the same guidelines for broadcasting in Canada as every other news outlet is. I've had to file complaints with television stations who were broadcasting false statements, so I know it happens, but I think on the whole things are pretty good here. They just need to learn to use the word 'allegedly' a bit more often. Mistakes get made, but there should be an instantaneous retraction, correction and apology given, the moment they are discovered.
There are plenty of horrifying truths out there to keep our news outlets busy 24/7, without resorting to fabrication. I don't leave my apartment very often, and I see enough newsworthy items just within my own sphere of interest to keep me busy every single day for a full twelve hours or so. Some of those things I write about. I mean, if someone wants to be well-informed, there are plenty of ways to do it. I could have hundreds of e-mails from various places if I signed up for them, and everything I look at these days is pretty damn eye-popping, so there's just no excuse for fabrication.
One of the things I've been seeing a lot of lately is this ridiculous trend going around where guys complain about being 'friendzoned'. Um, what? You're bitching because you have a friend? Someone actually likes you enough to consider you an important part of their lives, and you're complaining about it? Why? Oh, because she won't sleep with you. Because, as a man, if you're nice to a woman, then she by rights is required to sleep with you. Yeah, you keep telling yourself that ya big stud! There are a lot of women who get stuck being considered a friend, or something like a little sister, or even a mother. You don't hear them talking about how nice they are so they deserve a little bit of sex for their efforts.
Never mind the fact that just being friends with someone right now does not preclude the relationship becoming something more in the future - unless of course your sense of entitlement lands your ass in the don't-talk-to-me-again-zone. If you truly care about someone, then their friendship will be important to you, and maybe one day that friendship could turn into something else. Even if it doesn't, hey, you've got yourself a friend, and that's something not everyone has. If you're interested only because you want to get laid, don't worry. Pretty soon she'll figure that out for herself and you'll no longer have to worry about being called a friend. You'll be relegated to, "Somebody that I used to know," or maybe even, "Some asshole who only wanted to get laid and was pretending to be my friend."
I've had male friends that later became something much more. I married one of them, in fact. My first husband was my best friend for two years before we got together romantically. That whole time he had a crush on me. I knew about it, but I was seeing someone else. When that relationship didn't work out, I turned to him - not during the doomed relationship, either. He was my friend, I loved him, and I figured he would be the last guy who would ever hurt me because he'd loved me for so long. I was wrong about that last part, but it seemed logical to me at the time. It probably would have been logical if he'd been sane, but for some reason I was young & stupid enough that I let the warning signs slip right past my internal radar for wacky behaviour.
I can only think of one guy where I might actually have been friendzoned against my personal wishes. Usually the men I've been interested in have also been interested in me. That's okay, though. I mean, if it's truly an emotional thing where you fall in love with someone who doesn't feel that way about you, then you might have to walk away from the friendship because it gets painful - especially if they start seeing someone else. We're not all selfless enough to be able to simply wish for their happiness.
Still, I hate to think of friendship as being that selfish. If you do really care about someone you want them to be happy, even when it's not with you. Eventually you'll get past it. Chances are, though, if the person is in a relationship with someone else, you'll find that they barely talk to you anymore anyway. I mean, the person who's with them is instinctively going to know what your interest level is, and so will your friend, so hang-outs might become a thing of the past based on their relationship needs. Those scenarios are uncomfortable for everyone.
Sometimes the friendzone happens because the object of your unrequited love is not personally ready for anything more than friendship. I've been single for five years. I know what I'm talking about. For the first few years of that I really wasn't ready for anything even close to a relationship. Thinking about the potential drama and conflicts and compromises just exhausted me. I was experiencing relationship burn-out I guess. If you could've seen what my relationship with my ex was like, you'd know why. We fought every single day, and I'm talking about me being screamed at and having him call me nasty names that had no bearing on what we were arguing about. When people don't have the vocabulary to express themselves, they tend to resort to those sorts of tactics.
After you've been called a c*nt a certain number of times, though, it loses its power to offend. I mostly remember how I tensed up the second I heard the car pull up, and how that tension increased exponentially when I heard the key in the door. I knew that there would be at least one thing I had or hadn't done that day that would supposedly be the trigger for rage. I knew that something in the house was going to get broken, and I knew how much I was going to resent the fact that the things I'd worked so hard to pay for were going to be destroyed. Things I'd wasted a portion of my life working to pay for, I should say, because that's what it is. You give part of your life to make money to buy things. When someone cares so little about your efforts that they arbitrarily destroy things, it hurts, because you know it means they don't care about your time, which is the same thing about not caring about the life you spent.
Thankfully, that's one person who has been friendzoned now. Oddly, he's been a great friend who has been there for me, and as I've said before we've been friends about the same length of time that we were more than friends. There's nothing wrong with the friendzone. It's a sign that someone cares about you, even if they did throw dishes and shatter the patio door one time.
Speaking of patio doors, my daughter and I were clearing off the balcony the other night, and while I was standing in the balcony door I slipped and fell. I managed to jam one of my finger, among other minor injuries, but other than that I was okay. My daughter was a bit worried that I'd hurt myself, but I was laughing and joking. It's what I usually do when I start klutzing and end up hurting myself. I was listing off the injuries as I became aware of them, and cracking jokes, and she was shaking her head because of me laughing at it. She couldn't believe I was talking about getting hurt and thought it was funny.
Well, hell, it is funny. Especially with me. I do stuff like that all the time. I used to work with a girl who fell down the stairs all the time. Seriously. She wasn't getting beat up by her husband. She just had this weird, involuntary habit, I guess, and she used to joke about it all the time. I laughed and cracked a whole slew of jokes about my skydiving accident, and again after I tore the ligaments in my ankle (doing nothing more dangerous than walking). What are you going to do, though? You can cry if you want to, but even injuries can be a bit like an adventure. I did the same if my car broke down, run out of gas, or I couldn't start it because it was too cold outside. It brings something new and unexpected to your life. It might not be the best thing to have happen, but once it happens there's nothing you can do about it. "Roaming the halls, weeping," as Zachary Quinto's Spock would say, would be of no help at all. I choose to think of it as an adventure.
The sad truth is, I don't go looking for adventure. I probably should, since I seem to enjoy it when it happens, but I don't. It's only when things truly matter to me that I bother. Writing since last July has been an adventure for me. I've gone in directions I never thought I would, and learned about things I didn't know were possible. I learned things about myself, too, and I have every expectation that I will continue to do so. Another thing that happens with my writing, since I write a lot of fact-based stuff, is that I find my mind opening more and more. I have to research my pieces, even when they're based on something I strongly believe in. Most times when I do research I learn things. It isn't just fact-checking, and sometimes I'll learn that I might have been wrong in the rigidity of my beliefs. I guess you could say I know the grey areas a little bit better by the time I've written a piece.
I've had this conversation with a good friend of mine a few times now. I tend to gravitate toward extremes when it comes to my opinions, so I try very hard to temper those extremes. He tells me, and I know he's right about it in most things, that the answers don't lie in the extremes. We talk a bit about the current state of U. S. politics, although we don't really discuss specifics, and he's said a few times that both sides are starting to sound like nuts. You've got extremists for gun control on both sides of the debate, and extremists for both sides of the economy debate. Neither of them holds the answer, but as long as they stick to their extremes nothing will be resolved. We need to start loving the colour grey if we're ever going to get anywhere, and I'm not referring to E. L. James' fifty shades of it, either. Then again, that might help!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)