My Hearty Friend

Everyone is an untrustworthy bastard. The most important emotional skill I grokked from being with my ex is living under the assumptions that:

1) Everybody will eventually fuck you over. People like him are cynical, but "cynical" in this instance only means more attuned to the truth. And,

2) A primary determinant of a person's character is how he responds to this reality.

Do it right, and you can be a suprisingly (if not profoundly) happy and optimistic person. The key is not to become too attached to any person or any set of assumptions about the trustworthiness of people collectively. When your baseline assumption is that people are going to treat you like crap, the world frequently is a much better place than you "expect," and you're not as suseptible to the onset of suicidal fits of rage and despair when the world is falling apart all around you. It's just that nobody happens to be putting on the show of niceness at that moment. It's only the base case showing through, nothing to be alarmed about.

A demystified view of the human being as automaton — or, more optimistically, as well engineered hardware-software system &mdash makes it much less disappointing when people behave as if only responding to sufficiently strong stimuli: that is precisely what they're doing. Enough horniness, enough anger, enough fear, enough lust will make anyone do anything. I wouldn't be too out of sorts if my computer crashed when I gave it twice as much work to do as its hardware can handle. Likewise, I've come to expect that other human beings, even and especially the ones of whom I have expectations, will substantially and, on the whole, frequently disappoint me; I chalk it up to the way the machine works.

Yes, lad, I lie easy,
I lie as lads would choose;
I cheer a dead man's sweetheart,
Never ask me whose.

Knowledge and communication

This is a bit off of what I usually think of as apropos for this blog, but what the hell:

Today my extended family celebrated my grand-uncle's 90th birthday. After the party, I learned that one of my cousins had been abandoned by her husband. Of course, "abandoned" doesn't entirely cover it, since he cleaned out all their bank accounts and other finances, and just up and disappeared one day. No one knows where he is, even now.

The thing that gets me is, they were married for as long as I can remember, certainly almost as long as I've been alive, seeing as they have an 18-year-old son... who's barely gonna be able to graduate from high school now, in shock as he is, and I can't say I much blame him.

The whole sorry business just makes me wonder whether or not we can truly ever trust other people. I mean, not that I was a fly on the wall for their entire marriage or anything, but... two decades plus, and it ends with that kind of betrayal? I can't wrap my mind around that at all. Recently, I was watching an episode of Six Feet Under in which one character said to another: "Nobody ever really knows anybody else. If you think they do, you're living in a fucking dreamworld."

Before today, I would have dismissed that sentiment out of hand. I still would, in a way, if only for its absolutist denial of alternatives, but I understand it better now.

King of Love

Nooo! Google should totally do this! I didn't figure it out until I was halfway down the "tour" page, and even then I wanted to believe.

The front page of Google Romance today begins:

When you think about it, love is just another search problem. And we’ve thought about it. A lot. Google Romance™ is our solution.