happiness is a pair of socks away

happiness takes time to look at

I noticed a couple threads in there that I liked, sort of. As much as I am impressed by anything.

One: the notion that many people are defensive about how they are liked, complimented, or generate any affections. That sort of intimacy is rare, cultivated, and difficult. And supposedly rewarding. We shelter these feelings carefully because they are difficult to act upon in part, but mostly because it's easier for (many of) us to make decisions for much of our life in the belief that they're absent. This isn't a surprising revelation of course.

Culturally speaking it's far more common to see detailed descriptions events and effects of offensive nature, however common or rare they may be in our daily itinerary, than to depict a event where we were ourselves unselfish, altruistic, helpful. And yet these latter events surely happen, even among the most selfish and narcissistic people. Among others, it's likely we see them so rarely in part in the attempt to avoid the narcissism. We share the painful memories because it's like passing them off, a therapeutic effect of sorts. We create private shelters for these moments of joy and then never relive them through a story because we content to know we touched someone in some trivial way even if it was much more important than that. I noticed in reading about and watching "Band of Brothers" that one got the distinct impression there were a lot of heroic acts from what otherwise were ordinary people in an extraordinary situation. But no one saw themselves as THE hero. Especially Winters, who seems to have come down that way in the eyes of the men he led. And none of them seemed content to let that be their story. They seemed more interested in telling stories of someone else's heroism, but willing instead to convey the moments of privation, suffering, and death, however saddened they were by these often intense memories. Maybe combat is a bad example, but it really doesn't seem much different from the rest of life. It's simply more intense with the prospect of death much closer and yet more distant at the same time (because of its commonplace occurrence).

Two: I'm not sure what Valliant's take actually is on whether people change or not, which seemed to be the notional topic of the final page. But it seemed to me like crucial elements form up rather quickly in our lives and they frame the perspectives and motions for a lot of later life. These things in themselves may be replaced by others, and these may change in some measure our degree of involvement in our own life. But it seemed to me like the same tragic flaws, in the literary sense, run throughout. The ideal person adapts better around them (by changing the surrounding environment to conceal them usually), but that doesn't mean their essential character adapts. The sort of static impression that we're the same at 50 as we are at 25 is obviously going to be an over simplified notion. We learn things of course, and we have different experiences. But we're having to process these things through the same mind, it's the same entity making judgments, decisions, actions, and intentions. I don't quite see how this essential person creates a new element, ie, changes. Maturity is a vague assessment of how people cope with different things at different times in their life spectrum. I'm not convinced that it alters the underlying meaning of the story however. It's basically like adding a more complex vocabulary to events rather than using something like a more accurate equation to how we balance ourselves.

In other news, I discovered this week that I have apparently never purchased socks. I discovered this flaw by realizing that they've been depleting themselves over the past year down to a pitifully small collection from their inherent weaknesses when I have use for them. Since one tends to dispose of socks when they discover they've born holes in their soles or some such injuries, and this occurs typically in ones rather than twos, and one tends to be supplied with such footwear in bundled quantities that all match each other anyway, this is a strangely predictable phenomenon. Even within independence, I have generally had contact with at least one other person who procured some socks. So I have managed to cook, and sort of clean, and to marginally care for animals at the expense of other human beings. But not buy socks. I submit this problem lies in the overuse of flip-flops. But then again, Einstein typically wore his socks around his neck, if at all. And I seem to wear them inside-out all the time, which I'm not sure how this works within their design either. Much like ties I'm not really sure they're a good "functional" piece of clothing. Couldn't we just have longer pants when it is cold out and better designed running shoes to prevent blisters or some such?

As a final note, I finally got around to deleting the old myspace page. Facebook has long since taken over for whatever semblance of contact I have with the outside world and the current tendency not to be bombarded with popular culture on every log-in tends to make this tenuous attempt at meaningful human contact at least tolerable.