Another Old Lang Syne

Dan Fogelberg died today. Aaaww~! Sent me off in search of this song, which is so beautiful and sad.

Met my old lover in the grocery store
The snow was falling Christmas Eve
I stole behind her in the frozen foods
And I touched her on the sleeve
She didn't recognize the face at first
But then her eyes flew open wide
She went to hug me and she spilled her purse
And we laughed until we cried.

And because I always associate unnatural meaning to minor synchronicities in my life, as I hummed this lovely song in my head tonight I thought of a phone call received today--not an old lover but someone I loved and still care for (always) as a dear friend. It was so nice to hear his voice; he sounded well and happy.

We drank a toast to innocence
We drank a toast to now
And tried to reach beyond the emptiness
But neither one knew how.

The things that bring old lovers back to our attention, what an odd sensation. Boredom, in this case--when pirates get bored, I guess they like to revisit sites of previous pillage and plunder where they particularly enjoyed themselves, islands where the buried treasure was never uncovered.

The beer was empty and our tongues were tired
And running out of things to say
She gave a kiss to me as I got out
And I watched her drive away.

When you talk to someone you've missed, does your mind start spinning off all the questions you'd wanted to ask but never got the chance? Mine did. Not serious questions, necessarily, but silly questions like, "Do you dream in other languages?" or curious questions like "Who was the beautiful green eyed woman in the photograph?" Fortunately the call was cut short before I could ask much, and perhaps I'm fortunate that he didn't ask much either.

God bless the boredom that prompted the phone call. Though the conversation was short and a little awkward, it was nice to know we're still friends.

Just for a moment I was back at school
And felt that old familiar pain
And as I turned to make my way back home
The snow turned into rain --

While My Guitar Gently Weeps

..

It sits pouting in the corner, my guitar, its slender neck pointing into the air like an accusatory finger, or perhaps like a phallic symbol mocking me in my temporary (but still maddening) celibacy. We both miss him, my guitar and me. We both sigh and moan, counting the days until he comes home again. We both long to feel his skilled fingers once again, him playing us both with equal vigor and producing the loveliest of music from each of us.

Only a week without him--that's nothing compared to the years my guitar and I were without him before we knew him, but of course the intensity of being without him could only be felt in cruel contrast to the intensity and pleasure of being with him. I didn't know how much I was missing him until the day he captured me with his blue gaze and dropped a slow, sexy wink. Now I know exactly how much I'm missing him--enough to fill my days with thoughts of him, even as I sternly remind myself to get a grip and knock that shit off, before lapsing back into my bittersweet blue-eyed daydreams minutes later. Enough to fill my nights with dreams, either strange or erotic but always with him here with me and my guitar, right where he belongs.

Only a few days, then my guitar and I will be touched again the way we need to be touched. As much as I love my guitar, though, I'm afraid I must insist--me first!

Envy is for the dead

I saw this interesting idea recently and found it intriguing:

PERSPECTIVE: Jealousy is simply and clearly the fear that one does not have value. Jealousy scans for evidence to prove the point - that others will be preferred and rewarded more than you. There is only one alternative - self-value. If you cannot love yourself, you will not believe that you are loved. You will always think it's a mistake or luck. Take your eyes off others and turn the scanner within. Find the seeds of your jealousy, clear the old voices and experiences. Put all the energy into building your personal and emotional security. Then you will be the one others envy, and you can remember the pain and reach out to them.

What is jealousy, exactly, and where in our psyches is it born? It seems that such a natural human emotion can’t be entirely unhealthy. Like anger and fear, it serves some purpose in our sense of well being, perhaps to warn us or to inspire us. And such a complex emotion can't be "simply and clearly" summed up or caused by any one aspect of our personality.

For a man, jealousy over a woman is usually first more related to sex than to anything emotional, but even men do feel jealous when a woman they care about gives her affection and attention and admiration to another man, even if she reserves the sex only for him.

Jealousy defined, first of all, I guess is the unpleasant feeling you experience when you perceive that someone is giving something to someone else that should be given to you. It’s a combination of confusion (that should be mine, why is it being given to someone else?), fear (does it mean that there won’t be enough for me? Am I about to lose something valuable?), pain (related to rejection, I guess, that someone does not consider me as special as I think I am), and anger (result of pain). So these emotions can occur in varying degrees and mixtures, and the whole combination, the jealousy, can occur in varying degrees. Like any other unpleasant emotion, its presence doesn’t necessarily indicate a problem, but the way you handle it can cause huge problems.

As an issue of low self-esteem, I see “envy” as what’s involved rather than jealousy. Perhaps it’s a subtle difference, but to envy someone is to strongly desire what they have—again, it can be a very unpleasant emotion but it doesn’t involve the same elements as jealousy. With envy, there’s no sense that the something the other person has should rightfully belong to you, no sense of confusion why they have it and you don’t, no sense of rejection really. Simply really wanting bad what it is that they have. As it relates to self-esteem, yes, I see envy as an indicator that one doesn’t feel deserving to have it. When we envy someone, we feel we have no choice, all we can do is watch and want. "Eat your heart out," the saying goes. Perhaps we don't feel worthy or capable of setting that as a goal for ourselves, nor do we feel any confidence that we could ever achieve it, so we just...want it.

With jealousy, one definitely feels deserving to have it, that’s the source of the emotion, that feeling that you are worthy of it, that you earned it or deserve it or have a right to it, but it’s being given to someone else. To me, that’s actually an indicator of good self-esteem. Maybe in extreme jealousy, it’s even an indication of too much self-esteem—ego, the feeling that you deserve everything from everybody and anything anyone gives to someone else makes you jealous because it should be yours. In this sort of person, there’s no feeling unworthy of having that thing, it’s just the opposite.

In the matter at hand, I can say I have a super cool life, I can’t complain, and I'm appreciative enough of what I've got, who I am and what I've done that I'm not likely to envy anybody else. If I see something I want, I either set it as a goal for myself or I examine what it is I want and why, and sometimes find that I don't really want it after all. Whatever I would like to have that I can’t have right now, I can quite easily put out of my mind (if I’m left alone and not provoked), or I can put it on the shelf of my heart labeled “Someday I Will Have This, Just Watch and See.” I feel no sense of being unworthy to have it.

And, dear Lord in Heaven, I absolutely never envied Her for what she has. I would sooner convert and become a nun than to step into her shoes. Consider for a moment what has been seen through my eyes. While the relationship may be the most perfect, fulfilling, inspiring, healthy relationship in the history of mankind, consider the small sliver of that relationship I have seen. Two people tossing romantic cliches back and forth to each other, making declarations of love and devotion that sound quite large and impressive but really have no substance when you look close, telling very little about them other than the fact that they both know how to use Google and how to find music on the internet. The slice of relationship I saw, it could have been any two people in love, very generic.

Come now. Do you not know me well enough to know that I would never envy this? Sure, everybody wants love but does this seem like thekind of love you'd expect me to eat myheart out for? (Again, it's very likely the relationship itself is very deep and earth-shakingly good, but I would only be able to envy what I could see, and what I saw was not something I want.) When have you ever known me to be impressed by a cliche?

You know me, I'd get a bigger kick out of subtlety and more flattered by something that seems very understated but is in fact something deeply meaningful to me or to us. I'd be more touched by a very simple gesture than week after week of grandiosity and hyperbole.

You can believe it, or choose not to believe it if your ego requires you to think certain things about my motivations, but if you sincerely think that my motivations were jealousy and envy, you don't know me well at all. Envy, or feelings of being unworthy, were never a factor here.

Jealousy was born when I began to perceive that certain things should be given to me, that I had earned them or that I was led to believe they might be given to me, only to have them yanked out from under my nose and given to someone else. Jealous--yep, I was.

I’m fortunate enough, though, to be emotionally very flexible. I’m pretty good at changing my perspective, developing healthier (and less painful) ways of seeing the world. In short time I no longer felt that what was being given to Her should be given to me. I felt betrayed by certain manipulations and deceptions, sure, but the jealousy part was easy to get over. Love is love, and you can’t fault someone forever for giving it to the person they feel it for. It’s life. It happens. We could have been friends, and that sting of jealousy would have stayed gone. Yes, really, gone. I no longer felt pain to see the lovers, nor any sense that I should have that. I was curious. I wanted to understand.

Of course, some people get an ego boost from inspiring jealousy in others. And certain well-placed words or actions can bring jealousy back from its cold green grave--that feeling of being entitled to have something which is being given to someone else, that feeling of rejection. When jealousy is gone, how do you get it back? You simply get the person to believe again that they should or could have what's there. Being once bitten, the person might be reluctant to believe it this time, so you might even have to go so far as to suggest that not only will you give her that thing she has earned and is worthy of, but that you will no longer give it to the other person at all. Bang, the person is now ready to feel jealous once again when it turns out to be untrue.

Most importantly, the jealousy could have been severely eased or even completely eliminated with just one brief, sensitive, direct conversation--or even just an email--in which you expressed regret at any pain caused but shared your honest intentions and shared some of the reasons things turned out the way they did.

But if inspiring jealousy was your goal, yep, you did it just the right way.

Imagine the hypocrisy of a man who intentionally provokes jealousy in a woman and then criticizes her for feeling it and questions her self esteem. Especially when his own jealous impulses have caused him to do things like this:

[link deleted, because I'm over it now and far too mature to go there again.]

I think I caught something deadly...

I just finished reading a book that has creeped me out more than anything since, I don’t know, Pet Sematary I guess, but this one is not fiction, it’s real! When I told Steve about it, he laughed at me and said, “Uh, where were you in the 90’s?” Okay, so apparently this is an old book and there’s a movie based on it with Dustin Hoffman and everybody knew about this except for me, until now.

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston.

Come on, y’all, pretend like you never saw Outbreak and you’re just hearing about this Ebola thing for the first time. Oh My God!! Right?? Wow.

What is up with these weird African viruses that can get inside a person and just make him, like, dissolve internally within a couple of weeks until he finally erupts, in impressive geyser-like fashion, with fountains of black blood and vomit? These are viruses (virii?) that incubate only 3-10 days before they kill you, and they have a 90% mortality rate. Which means, if you get this shit onya, you’re toasted. And it ain’t a pleasant way to go.

I’m not going to describe the progress of the disease caused by the Ebola and Marburg viruses; there’s no way I could make it even half as horrifying as it was when I read it. I swear, I could not put this book down, but I felt like I wanted to be wearing rubber gloves and a surgical mask while I read it. I must have increased my hand-washing behavior by at least 300% since I began reading this book.

Instead, I turn my thoughts to the concept of a virus itself. This book has made the virus scarier than anything I can remember being scared of in my whole life, and yet so small that millions of them would fit on the dot of this “i”. If five of those teeny tiny little things got in your blood, you’d die a terrible death. Worse, you’d probably know you were going to die many days before the relief of death actually came to you. It would start with a headache…

But the virus himself…is he evil? Does he kill? I’ve heard some people say that the AIDS virus is a tool of righteousness, a moral judgment on gay people, but the HIV virus kills “people” not “gay people.” And these Ebola critters are far far far more deadly than HIV, and you don’t even have to have sex or do anything immoral to catch them. All you have to do is be there with your living cells ready to receive the uninvited guest of a virus or two.

A virus is not really even a living thing, is it? It is a simple structure made of protein that just lies dormant until it bumps up against something alive. It’s like a tiny little chunk of your hair or fingernail. Not alive at all, does nothing, consumes nothing, produces nothing. Until it brushes up against a living cell, and then it grabs hold. It penetrates, and then its sole activity is replication. It can’t reproduce like a living thing, but its only reason for existence is to create as many copies of itself as it can, using the host cell’s reproductive equipment and instructions. In Ebola, it is this zealous, mindless reproductive frenzy that causes the death of the host organism. The virus simply reproduces itself so rapidly and efficiently that it causes every living cell to burst open with thousands more viruses, turning the whole body to jelly and dead blood.

And then, of course, in order for the virus to continue doing what it loves to do, it must find another living host, and what better chance of doing that than to end the whole infection/drama/kill by causing a massive eruption of virus-filled fluid? You see, this virus produces the best biological means for its own spread to another host. Even the “evil” HIV virus doesn’t do that! It would be, like, since AIDS is spread easiest through body fluids during sexual contact, so one symptom created by the virus is unusual horniness, making sexual contact more likely, thereby increasing the virus’s chance of spreading. That not being the case, I think the AIDS virus is not evil. Not even close.

This Ebola fella, though, he might be evil. He freaks me out. I’ll be having bad dreams about him for a while, you watch.

"What's puzzling you is the nature of my game..."

"Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?"

"Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day--and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse,--
Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
As kill a man, or else devise his death,
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it,
Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,
Set deadly enmity between two friends,
Make poor men's cattle break their necks;
Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' doors,
Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more."

For some, villainy comes quite naturally. They were born to wreak havoc on others, taking pleasure in their own ability to cause pain. As we welcome the sweet relief of a villain's departure from our lives, we can rest assured--even the devil gets what he deserves.

I can write the saddest lines tonight.
Write for example: ‘The night is fractured
and they shiver, blue, those stars, in the distance’
The night wind turns in the sky and sings.

I can write the saddest lines tonight.

I loved her, sometimes she loved me too.
On nights like these I held her in my arms.
I kissed her greatly under the infinite sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.

How could I not have loved her huge, still eyes.
I can write the saddest lines tonight.

To think I don’t have her, to feel I have lost her.
Hear the vast night, vaster without her.
Lines fall on the soul like dew on the grass.
What does it matter that I couldn’t keep her.
The night is fractured and she is not with me.
That is all. Someone sings far off. Far off,
my soul is not content to have lost her.
As though to reach her, my sight looks for her.
My heart looks for her: she is not with me
The same night whitens, in the same branches.

We, from that time, we are not the same.
I don’t love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the breeze to reach her.
Another’s kisses on her, like my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body, infinite eyes.
I don’t love her, that’s certain, but perhaps I love her.

Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long.
Since, on these nights, I held her in my arms,
my soul is not content to have lost her.
Though this is the last pain she will make me suffer,
and these are the last lines I will write for her.
~Pablo Neruda