Category: Words

I can’t tell one from the other
I find you, or you find me?
There was a time before we were born
If someone asks, this is where I’ll be,
–Talking Heads/This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)

The Modern American World really wants us all to be happy. All the time. It all started with Prozac. Just being as happy as you were naturally wasn’t enough. You had to be blissful. Constantly blissful. Eternally smiling.

At first it was a minor barrage of anti-depressant “ask your doctor” commercials. Nothing against anti-depressants, I am pretty sure they may have gotten me through a year that I might not have come out of alive, but I do have a bit of ire about commercials for drugs. That’s a rant for another day.

Anyway, that is how I remember the start of it. What this article on Brainpickings.org refers to as the modern happiness industrial complex. There is a lot of pressure on people to be perpetually blissful. Pressure that until very recently did not exist.

People had other things to deal with. Getting the crops planted. Feeding the livestock. Burying their children and spouses who kept dying of inconveniently incurable diseases. Big stuff. Sometimes people were happy, I am sure, but mostly I am guessing they were tired. And hungry. Like they are in the parts of the world that are still un-Modern.

Given the choice, wouldn’t we all choose happy over sad? Most of us would, sure. Being happy is..happy. Who doesn’t like happy?

But what happens when you force feed yourself happiness to the exclusion of all other feelings? I think maybe, just maybe, you become less authentic.
What started as drug companies trying to create a new market for their product has become a nearly inescapable onslaught of happiness porn. The Internet seems to consist of equal parts cat videos and articles on how to be happy.

But maybe it is a trap, or at least not the right goal. There’s nothing wrong with happiness, but maybe what we need is to live an authentic life with all of the human emotions. Happiness, contentment, sadness, anger, melancholy. People who claim to be happy all the time? I don’t find them very believable. It seems like they are either suppressing their other emotions or just denying that they have them. I also suspect most of them aren’t really happy, either.

I could be wrong about all of this, of course. I’ve been known to be wrong about pretty much everything. On the other hand, I am mostly happy. Not always. There are some sad, difficult things going on right now. I probably spend a little more time crying and being overly introspective than usual. Still, I laugh a lot. I smile a lot. I enjoy most of every day. I love people. It isn’t perfect. Nothing ever is.

You have to find the thing that works for you.
It might not be a positive affirmation.
It might not be being in the moment
It might include being over analytical.
It might include some large doses of trash reading when your brain is tired.
Sometimes you might want to do some singing.
You might want to acknowledge that happiness won’t be there every second.
You might want to just tell the happiness mafia to fuck off.

It’s your happiness.
Do it however you want.

And what is so bad about melancholy anyway?

Where would most of the great movies, books and music be without the emotional drama of sadness, anger and betrayal? Not that I want any more betrayal in my life, please–but a cup of coffee and some bittersweet thoughts with a fire going and rain hitting the window? That’s not a bad thing. I like to think that periods of solitary melancholy let me recharge my happiness.

Or maybe I am deluded and I am doing it all wrong.

If I am, then I am doing it all wrong in a way that mostly suits me.
I can write out the worst of it, and laugh at almost all of it. Sometimes through tears if I have to.

Anyway, it’s Winter in Oregon.

It would be unnatural to have a sunny disposition all the time in the gray, cloudy, soggy Willamette Valley. I am blending in with my surroundings.

My laugh always gives me away though.

Today I made a mistake. I read the reader comments on a story on Fox News (I think..it was hours ago) about the Rams football players who made the “don’t shoot me” gesture in a demonstration about the shooting in Ferguson.

This is an actual quote from someone who identified himself as a Christian:

Every liberal defends freedom of speech and expression when it suits them. Boy it was not long ago when a player was dam near crucified over taking a knee and saying a small prayer on the field, or the team owner who was forced out because a comment he made. You fucking hypocrites can rot in fucking hell.

What sentiment is more Christian than wishing eternal damnation on someone?
What “ism” is more Christian than racism?
What did Jesus love even more than politics? Clearly football.

Way to keep it insane, folks.

Players have not been, as far as I can tell, crucified for praying on the field, except an occasional penalty for taunting if they make that praying/bowing gesture in a way the officials interpret as not prayer but taunting the opposing team. People did make fun of Tim Tebow for praying on the field. A lot. True enough. That is not the same as being crucified. He was showboating his faith. I’m not a Christian myself, but I do remember something from bible school about not showing off by praying in public:

But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
–Matthew 6:6

There’s another one about how people who pray in public in order to be admired get all the admiration they are going to get here on Earth because God don’t play that. I am paraphrasing because I am too lazy to look it up. It was also in Matthew.

The funny thing is, the same people who are whining about the Rams players protesting with the “don’t shoot” gesture like to say it’s because the venue is not appropriate. Doesn’t seem like the temple of bone crunching that is football is a great place for prayer either. Be consistent.

Side note: a lot of the teams do have prayers on the sidelines before games. Or in the locker rooms. Even in the NFL. Crucifixion, clearly.

The team owner forced out in LA did some worse things than making a racist comment. He paid out something like $3 million to settle a few different charges of housing discrimination brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. That was years before his rant to his mistress about how he felt about black men last year. I don’t think I necessarily agree that you should be able to take someone’s business away for being a bigoted buffoon, but what he did was substantially worse than making a comment.

Freedom of speech does not mean no one can make fun of you for what you believe. It does not mean no one can criticize you or disagree with you. It doesn’t mean no one can point out flaws in your logic or even be mean to you.

And if you are a Christian who tells people they should rot in hell?
It is not violating your free speech if I point out how very un-Christian it is to say that.

Y’all go and check your New Testaments for examples of Jesus sending people off to rot in hell. I remember a lot of stuff about not judging lest you be judged, and nothing about Jesus telling people to fuck off to rot in Hell, but I could be wrong.

I will wait here…I’m finished with my rant now anyway.

PS
A lot, maybe most, Christians do not act like this. Neither do many, perhaps most, Muslims/Jews/Buddhists/Pagans/Atheists. I just hate to see someone being such a poor example of their own stated belief system!

We might be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.
–Magnolia

It’s not going to stop until you wise up.
–Aimee Mann/Wise Up

Conditional love is:
I will only love you if you love me.

Unconditional love is:
I will love you even if you do not love me.

It’s really easy to love passing strangers unconditionally.
They demand nothing of you.
It is really hard to love people unconditionally when they can hurt you.
–Amanda Palmer/the Art of Asking

It is hard to love someone unconditionally even when they haven’t ever hurt you. People tend to really want someone to love them first. It is even harder to love people unconditionally when they have hurt you before. Harder still when they know they are hurting you and don’t try to stop, or maybe it doesn’t feel like they try hard enough to stop. Or even, maybe most of all, when you know they care about you and they still don’t stop and maybe they can’t. Or just don’t want to.

You can’t make people want you.
You can’t make people stop hurting you.
All anyone can do is the best they can.
All you can do is be you. Be open to everything. Be trusting.
Sometimes, that isn’t enough. Sometimes it’s who they are that hurts you.

If one person thinks honesty and factual are synonyms and the other thinks honesty means sharing much more than answering questions factually..there will be problems. There are bound to be, and one of you will not understand why the other doesn’t trust him.

It is difficult to maintain a love that is unconditional when there is a problem with trust. You start to think you will love him if he starts to behave differently. If he starts being more open. Or that he will love you if you are more something or less something. And it can’t ever work that way.

Maybe that is the same as only loving them if they become someone else. Or maybe they are just a dick who can’t be trusted who doesn’t love you back.

When it hurts enough, you have to admit that you need to move on. You can love unconditionally, but you can’t trust unconditionally. Well, I can’t. I can make trust my default setting, but if you stand me up and tell me only the factual truth and omit everything that is really going on in your life? If you stop talking entirely? Even if you have really great reasons for some of it, if I don’t ultimately trust in you or your intentions, it doesn’t really matter how deep the bond is.

Because loving someone unconditionally doesn’t mean you have to let them continue hurt you. You have to love yourself, first. If I love you, I will love you with no strings attached. Freely given. If you love me back, I will take all the love you give me. I will have complete faith in you.

If you hurt me on occasion, that is just part of life. The tax for being human.
If you hurt me repeatedly, without knowing, that might be something I can live with.
If you hurt me a few times, even on purpose, I will forgive and move past it. I will keep trusting you, or try to.

At a certain point, though, given enough instances in which someone hurts me on purpose, I will no longer be able to trust them. I might continue to try, for various reasons. I don’t know if trust is reparable once it is broken. It would take a lot of work. Work that someone who would hurt me over and over would be pretty unlikely to do.

It is difficult and painful to admit that you love someone who can’t be trusted or who is simply wrong for you. We love people with our hearts wide open, and when someone takes advantage of that, it is doubly painful. There’s the pain of loss, and the pain of admitting to yourself that you were wrong about someone you love. And if you are like me, you will continue loving them in spite of the hurt, and in spite of their actions…and really struggle about when and if you should let go.

The balance, I guess, is in giving people a chance but not so many chances that you can no longer respect yourself.

Balance, we know, is hard for me.
So is not getting what I want.