Red in my Head

I just began typing "People can be real assholes" and realized this post is going to suck. Recently a lady fucked with me pretty bad. It started out a pretty hottt time. But at some point, for whatever reason, things started to get awkward. Guess she decided, you know, since she was having a birthday why not celebrate by dropping my ass. It wasn't a serious relationship, but it was fucking rude to just get dropped.

By that I mean I got no warning, no nothing. Just suddenly she doesn't return my messg. I got the idea quick but figured she might still enjoy to hang out w/my peeps+me for, you know, hanging-out purposes--all that in a total of 4 mssg, plus I talked to her once to get 2 CDs back. She now told somebody or other I know that she thinks I might be stalking. (Possible additional reason for claim: I am sitting in on some lectures in a class she is taking, no doubt I am supposedly there to "surveil" her--paranooooiaaaa.) Shit dude, that's rough.














no fear, my bleeding heart: i cannot love anyone (else) now

Now to put on the internet some amateur psychology, since that's, you know, what it's here for is putting your private thoughts and theories out there. Just let your freak flag fly, you know. The age of shamelessness. But my theory begins from not knowing why, you know, I'm not to be talked to. There are several things that come to mind, none of which are particularly disturbing and, in combination might justify someone in thinking, you know, that they don't like me. Happens. The problem being there is no stated reason. Oh no. Just, suddenly no contact and then, and then, she's hitting on my friends. I'm thinking, WTF? Really, I was thinking "What the fuck?!" but that is basically the same. And talking about how she never wants to talk to me again. Oooookayyyyy. This seems like a really smart move, right, because there is no way that people will pick up on that she is basically crayzay. I don't mean I think she's crazy. I'll give a diagnosis in a sec. But that is the word used by three people she hit on at my ex-fiancee's house: 'crazy'. That is, they think getting in with her will get them caught in a web of manipulation and possible additional drama and they don't like that. I can sympathize. I'm also okay with some manipulation; it makes things fun, sometimes.

So but also she's had all this personal trauma in the past that I won't get into but that, you know, maybe you can extrapolate. Her personal history so far as I know it from her own reports is pretty consistent in that she doesn't commit often. However, she has been involved in long-term relationships. At one point she was engaged to a mormon (!) but broke it off. My sense is that she decided the whole married life is for putzes, or she couldn't handle marrying a dude with the expectations you'd think a mormon'd have. Also she was fucking a bisexual guy who lives (I think) on the West coast, but although she broke this off (it was still going on while I was seeing her) it was a protracted and apparently ugly thing. There was a stolen iPod... Additional evidence suggests that she wants to keep anything resembling intimacy at a safe arm's length.

Being "a slut" (her words) would be an excellent coping mechanism. That way she would be able to, in no particular order of preference, satisfy her sexual desires, satisfy the emotional desire to be desired, obtain a psychological justification for not getting serious, provide a convenient method of getting out of a relationship that seemed to involve commitment. (Whatever that strategy has going for it, and whatever counts against it--whether it works I don't really care.) These things would satiate a deep need to recreate unsatisfactory relations with others, both men and women but especially men, with respect to the chaos associated with the afforementioned trauma. So far I hope I've given a descriptive story that is plausible; although I obviously have an opinion I don't want the analysis to be skewed toward the idea that these are somehow "bad" behaviors. They are only problematic behaviors, just as any behaviors are, when they cause one's life to get fucked up. This is most often evidenced by certain types of negative consequences that, although the participant/agent could reasonably anticipate and which outweigh any benefits to that agent still do not persuade the agent to change their behavior pattern. However, being a virtue theorist I have to at least pay lip service to the idea that there are naturalistic facts about people such that getting on is both a matter of certain sorts of success in, say, professional or artistic terms, and in terms of the comfort or satisfaction that characterizes one's navigation of the world. If one, say, had a deep "hole" in one's heart whose pain could only be filled by periodic physical lashing out... "fucking around", say... one's inner life would be characterized by a gooddeal of hypocrisy, self-deception, denial, and perhaps an inferiority complex of some kind. I recognize that I am not qualified to give a clinical diagnosis but, whatever. Some of these things one could expect to appear in the mental life of a person in the hypothetical situation described.

Taking that as the starting point, I'd say especially that I have to think that this woman about whom I am constructing the present psychological theory (no doubt to comfort myself on the loss of interaction with someone who (a) was fun (b) was good in bed (c) I kind of liked not just for their being amusing) would be likely to enact some of the behavior patterns here discussed. Such as: deficiency/awkwardness in articulating their needs or desires (perhaps because they are mysterious to herself, at times); repetitive behaviors with negative psychological or material consequences; unbalanced or manipulative or codependent relationships; inability to form intimate connections with other people.

Of course, again, one--especially one who's into Nietzsch and/or existentialism--could argue that these things are not bad in themselves. If these behavior patterns are authentically (however you read that) chosen and endorsed by the agent, their worth lies in their being so authentically chosen. This requires, for instance, one to adjust one's attitude toward the world--Sartre, for instance, did not despair (he claimed).

I am not clear what merit I think there is to the argument that behaviors' worths are to be measured in terms of their being espoused reflectively (?!) by some agent, what that really adds. It's not that things one choses are not better in at least some cases than those same things "inauthentically" chosen. See the distinction between acts done from impulse as opposed to voluntary or "intended" actions. You're not morally praiseworthy for following orders, or for saving the world by accident (even if the outcomes of these are good). There may be something to be said for it. But again the existentialist case and the immoralist case are not co-extensive; and by "moral" I don't mean what's usually meant by the word 'moral' at all, but merely that which, in some sense, one ought to do--this applies to many situations one does not in contemporary society usually think of as morally significant decisions. Diet choices, for instance, might fit under this sense of 'moral' or, as I'd prefer, 'ethical"--behavior-centered normative talk being "ethical" talk.

But in any case I think I've concocted a mildly satisfactory, plausible if obviously flimsy explanation for what I think is going on. And in constructing the explanation I am able to set these things in the history of myself that is identity. These events involving me and people around me become a part of me that I can understand. I just wish she hadn't been such a jerk to me. Why come around my people and act like you don't know me? I don't bite (much). There's a song that goes, I think, don't push, don't push that shit on me or something. You can do what you like, but look, if you are going to be around these peeps that is fine but you have to not be a jerk about it, and that means, you know, being accepting and cool--as much as they are of you.