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Sunday, 14 March 2004

Elephants

A few days ago, I used the old metaphor that is used to describe the way alcoholic (and dysfunctional) families just "don't talk about" the problems in the family. The metaphor is that there's an elephant in the livingroom, and everyone knows it's there, tiptoes around it, but everyone pretends not to see it and nobody mentions it.

Well, last night I had a dream about my parents and their house. In the dream, they had an elephant, and I got on it and rode it into town!

Gee, what do you think that might mean? Heheh, sometimes my dreams are kinda funny.

Thursday, 11 March 2004

Feel crappy

I feel really crappy about now. I was absolutely furious this evening (with Andrew, but that was just the proverbial straw that broke th camel's back). I mean furious. It was that eyes-bugging-out, face-turns-red, steam-shoots-out-of-ears type thing. It came about as a result of frustration, general tiredness and stress, and a particular issue with Andrew that keeps pissing me off (Note: 97% of our relationship is either wonderful or perfectly okay, but the 3% that's irritating is, for me, really irritating, but I tend to be a quite irritable person, anyway. In other words, a few issues here and there just piss me off, they don't make me head to divorce court or anything.)

Anyway, I was very, very triggered and extremely angry, and now I have that restless, drained, unfocused kind of uncomfortable feeling that I get after a panic attack or a particularly emotional event.

Bleah.

Friday, 05 March 2004

Horrible Nightmare

I had a really horrid nightmare. I'm surprised I didn't wake up crying or something, actually.

Because of the nature of it and the people who were in it, I don't want to give the details. Let's just say it included a tragic death, some ghosts, and a great deal of emotional pain.

Horrible. I don't even have any idea what it means, and that bothers me. When I don't understand them, they tend to keep coming back...

Monday, 01 March 2004

Very, very triggered

I am so seriously annoyed right now. Someone in a forum I visit is going on and on about how young girls wearing "suggestive" clothes (hipsters, short tops, etc.) are somehow inviting rape. I mean, he's not using those words, but he may as well.

Furthermore, he's going off on that idiotic view that the 1950s was perfect, and everything was lovely and wonderful then. The fact that women were quite repressed and that a lot of crimes (such as what we now know as "date rape") went unreported, the fact that women who became pregnant out of wedlock (even if they were victims of rape or incest) were ostracized, the fact that a hell of a lot went on and just nobody said anything or reported it, that doesn't matter. It was perfect, and because I disagree, I'm some sort of left-wing lunatic.

Yeah, yeah, whatever. It's all Liberal Bias(tm). It's not that people are predatory. It's not that the world has always sucked and people have always done harm to each other. It's not that at certain periods in history there was a guilt thing and a conformity thing and people just did not or could not report certain kinds of crimes...

I'll calm down. I've put that particular person on "Ignore" and I won't read any more of his idiotic blame-laying or unrealistic view of history or interpretation of hsitorical events. He can rant all he wants and I don't have to see it.

So thing this is... I'm wondering how this belief makes him feel better. I think that most people's beliefs are held because they're comfortable or comforting in some way (yes, I believe that). My belief that the world has always been dangerous and full of predators of all kinds (human and animal) is helpful to me because I can manage my fears better this way. If I honestly believed that the world was getting worse and worse and more and more dangerous, I'd be back to agoraphobic in no time at all. And I really do believe that the world has always sucked, for what it's worth. Until and unless I see really, really good evidence to the contrary, I'll continue to believe it.

This guy, though, believes that humanity was pretty much horrible for all of its existance, then suddenly, for a brief period in the middleof the 20th century, human beings became non-predatory and perfectly nice and reasonable, and then it all went to hell again (I did point that out to him, pretty much just like that, and he then accused me of being left-wing because I "refused" to "see" this as being true, but anyway). What I'm wondering is, how is he comforted or rewarded by believing this? I'm guessing that it's the belief that human harmony was achieved once, things were "under control", etc., and since it happened once (and in living memory), it can happen again, if we all just return to all the values and social repression of that era.

At least, that's my theory. I don't really know why people believe this particular thing. I've seen it before and it always puzzles me. For whatever reason, people want to believe that the 50s was the pinnacle of human achievement and social evolution (we'll just ignore rampant racism, the Cold War, persecution of homosexuals, persecution of "Communists", repression of women, etc.).

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