I beat Final Fantasy X. The ending was a disappointingly obvious extrapolation of what I'd already been told. If I'd known it would be so easy to understand, I would have had some alcohol first. It wasn't awful, though.
Current NaNoWriMo word count: 1363. It would be higher, but I just got back from a rather long walk. It's amazing how well my mind manages to distract me. This is going to be tough.
Semi-random thought: people on both political sides are clamoring for campaign finance reform. The politicians, of course, are reluctant. Now, while I agree that allowing government officers to accept bribes, or contributions to themselves or their campaigns tantamount thereto, is a bad idea, think about what exactly this means. What does it say about the state of representative government in this country if it's actually possible to “buy” elections through advertising? I think it's pretty sad. Almost any reasonable form of government will work fine if you have intelligent, educated citizens who actually care how they're governed, but I think it's pretty clear that we don't have that in the United States at present.
Wiki page for this journal entry
You might not want to read on if you haven't played Final Fantasy X yet and you intend to at any point in the future. I know, there probably aren't too many people like that left.
Anyway, I thought more about FFX's ending, and realized that one reason I was disappointed by it is closely analogous to the reason that I disliked the ending to Vision of Escaflowne. They were both unhappy endings that were completely predictable—nothing new in the plot was revealed in either one, it was just the playing out of things you already knew were going to happen. I remember reading something that was analyzing Japanese literature, and it said that anime has sad endings because they tend to evoke stronger emotions and stick in your mind more than happy ones do. Well, fuck that. I wanted Yuna to figure out some way to stay with Tidus, just as I wanted what's-her-name to stay in what's-its-name.
The other reason I didn't like FFX's ending is the break with tradition. I knew not to expect the Final Fantasy Theme (and good thing, too, since I would have been extremely pissed if I had been expecting it and not gotten it), but they didn't even have the starfield or the Prelude at the very end, either. (Although To Zanarkand is an incredibly beautiful song, and more appropriate to the story. I probably wouldn't have minded that part at all, except that as an addition to an already gratuitous break with tradition, it seems to add insult to injury.)
Wiki page for this journal entry
10,449 words. Longer by more than 50% than my longest short story. The longest thing I have ever written, already.
Was it always this easy? Would I always have been able to do this if I just told myself that it was okay to write shit, and consoled myself by saying that at least I'd write a lot of shit?
Charlie made the observation that he hopes what I'm left with when it's over is a better base from which to edit into an actual good novel than starting from scratch would be. I find it extraordinarily unlikely that it won't be, though. It seems to me that just as I can go back over my text and line-edit, by fixing grammatical and spelling mistakes and awkward wording, so I can edit at a higher level, with plot elements. I don't think everything needs to be planned out before I begin. Editing will be a pain, and I may have trouble knowing when it's time to stop, but I'm confident that even if I never change a word of my novel after November 30th, it will still be vastly superior to a blank page.
I pre-ordered tickets to The Matrix: Revolutions on opening day (today) at 17:50, inviting Charlie to come and see it too. I'll put the rest of my thoughts about it in an HTML comment, to avoid spoiling it (I may change this once the movie has been out for a long time and anyone who wants to see it has seen it, but for now, I figure it's only fair to allow people to avoid spoilers.) If you want to see it, use the “View Source” command in your browser (my HTML is fairly neat, so it shouldn't be too hard to find).
Wiki page for this journal entry
Spoiler-free this time.
I'm torn as to whether to see The Matrix: Revolutions again in the theatre. On the one hand, I was pretty disappointed with it. It could—and in my opinion, should—have been so much more than it was, and I hate to send the message to Hollywood that if they keep on letting me down, I'll keep on paying them to do so. But on the other hand, it wasn't awful, and the fight scenes were quite nice. And I do want to see if I missed anything.
I have to wonder, after seeing something like The Matrix: Revolutions, whether the Wachowski brothers were aware of what they were doing. Now, although I certainly don't believe in any absolute standard of value, I do think that there is some such quasi-objective property as Greatness. Different people will sometimes recognize it in different things, but certain things have a tendency to trigger this reaction more often than others do. The original Matrix is a good example. Not everyone “got” it, but when you were talking about it with someone who did, his or her eyes would light up.
The Matrix: Revolutions didn't do this for me, and I don't think that it did it for most people. And I think those people would agree that this was not foreordained—The Matrix: Revolutions could have been every bit as mind-blowing as was the original Matrix, if not even more so. So, did the Wachowski brothers know this only when they watched the final cut, or were they aware of it as they wrote the script? Or would they still dispute its truth even now? And if they were aware of it in as early a phase as scripting, why didn't they do something about it? Was it just too hard of a problem for them to solve? Did they not care enough to put forth the effort, knowing that even the first-day sales would inevitably secure them a comfortable retirement (as if they weren't already assured of one) regardless of how much the movie sucked?
I suppose that the world may never know.
On Friday at noon, my father and I took off, bound for Maine. We arrived around 18:00 or so. My sister took us to get food on the Bates campus, and soon after that was the concert. The last piece featured some apparently world-famous pianist, Jon Nakamatsu. He was quite good, and the room had good acoustics. I also thought that the orchestra was far better than the ones at Bethlehem Central High School had ever been, although to be fair, they had brought in a few non-students at Bates to improve the sound.
Despite spending over five hours in the car on Friday, I got almost no writing done. Saturday, my father, sister and I went to Portland. First we went to a bagel shop, then a tea place, then a liquor store. I bought a 1.75L bottle of Dewar's, figuring that if I ended up deciding I didn't like Scotch, Charlie would be happy to take it off of my hands. Then we drove to Freeport, where we went to the L.L. Bean flagship store. After that, my sister and I went to a Bath and Body Works. Upstairs was a candle store with a buy 3 get 1 free deal, of which I ended up taking advantage. Next, we went back to Lewiston and had an early dinner (16:30) at a Thai restaurant. Finally, we dropped Betsy off at her dorm and started the trip home.
The eclipse was going on as we drove back, and we could see it through the moon roof in the car (its name thus proving apt). I tried to work a bit more on my novel, and made some progress, but not as much as I would have hoped. My father was getting tired, and I had bought a mocha, so I drove for about the last three hours of the trip. We got home around midnight.
The past two days had put me solidly behind my goal of 2,000 words per day. I would have stayed further behind than I would have liked, but around 2 in the morning, I challenged Ratha to keep working on her programming for as long as it took me to write another thousand words. The knowledge that someone else was depending on me as well made it much easier to stop distracting myself, and I finished those thousand words in about an hour.
17,097 words.
This morning, I was having trouble figuring out what to write next. I know that I should try to keep as much of what I've already written in my head as I can, to avoid putting in continuity problems that I'll later have to put forth great effort to get out. So I re-read what I already have, from beginning to end. I fixed a few typos, but mostly I was just reading.
I was expecting to think that it was total crap, but something surprising happened. I actually liked what I had written. Sure, the ratio of setup to payoff is all wrong—this is very clearly the first third of a novel, not an extended short story. But I felt much the same thing about The Matrix: Reloaded, and I thought that was a very good movie, even if Revolutions failed to fully cash in on the potential that it created. And my novel kept me turning the pages. When I was done, I wanted to keep reading.
Will this be the greatest novel ever written? Very unlikely. Will it at least be free of major flaws, good enough that I can show it to the world at large, not just a select group of my friends? I hope so. Will I love it to death?
Hell yes.
Wiki page for this journal entry
I haven't written in my journal in the past week or so not for the usual reasons that I'm simply too lazy or that nothing is happening, but because the major issue that needs to be addressed was something that I wasn't sure the other person involved would want me to write about. But, it looks like that may be okay now, and I do want to have a record of this. So, here goes.
On Thursday, I told Ratha that I had a crush on her. In the same breath, I said that an actual romantic relationship between us wouldn't work out at all—actually, let me just quote the IM, as she did in her journal entry on the topic:
(21:59:27) TephX: So, and honestly I haven't been forthright with you about this for probably at least several weeks now, I've been analyzing my history as regards the “crush” emotional reaction, and realized that my way of thinking of you fits into that paradigm. It has nothing to do with reason; there are at least three reasons why it would never work out, each individually sufficiently compelling, and I believe it would never work out even were they all removed (those three being my insufficient physical attraction to you, your lack of attraction to me, and the distance between us). But as I said, reason is, I believe, a separate module from emotion. There you go.
Her reaction to this was not positive, but I didn't expect it to be. Actually, she kind of forced the issue. Early in the evening, when we first started talking, she told me that a guy she had met earlier that evening had followed her home, which made me feel very bad. I had asked her earlier when she would be free for a long conversation, and she had said Thursday evening, but I felt that this situation made that conversation—or indeed, any rational thought whatsoever on my part—impossible. I pretty much told her so, so she cut off conversation entirely until such time as I told her what was on my mind, both because she felt that I had reneged on my promise regarding the conversation and because she was pissed off that I wasn't being straightforward with her (which I admitted).
I was very self-deprecating in the ensuing chat to my revelation, probably because I was looking for more attention in the only (bad) way I really know—pity, or sympathy if you want to be a little more generous to me. She didn't really see how my having a crush on her changed anything (we've been talking very intensely on AIM of late), and was actually sort of eerily unbothered by it. In fact, I think this was what disturbed me the most—it almost seemed that a negative reaction would have been better than nothing, because that at least would have meaned that it mattered to her. Though in the long-term that's almost certainly not what I would have chosen (keep reading).
Friday evening, Ratha and I were talking about relationships and acting impulsively on emotions. My advice on the matter may have been worse than useless to her, as she realized that I might be biased—even without conscious intent—in whatever I told her about Ed. Maybe I was just jealous of him and that was what motivated my advice to her not to get involved with him. She spent about six minutes composing an angry message telling me that she should stop considering her emotions, and logged out immediately after sending it. I felt strangely unbothered by this, but I did think about calling her, both that evening and for most of the next day. I was too nervous, though. It might not have been a good idea, anyway, but in all honesty, the reason that I didn't do it was just that I was scared—I would have felt awful if she'd hung up on me. In retrospect, I wish I had called her Saturday afternoon, when she had probably cooled down a little bit, but hindsight is always 20/20, I guess.
Saturday evening, she logged back in. I had what I felt was a pretty insightful comment on her reaction of the past night:
(19:29:23) TephX: I assert that this is the case for myself, but only suggest that it may be for you or anyone else. However, in your particular case, it seems likely. The times when you or I feel very rational and devoid of emotion are just another mood. We tend to think that they constitute times when we are able to think clearly, unassuaged of emotion, but in fact, they too are driven by emotional dynamics. Reason is always and forever the slave of the passions. Hume was right. Your only error last night was in not taking things far enough and applying the principle to your state at the time as well as your state of the then-recent past.
but it turned out that she had already realized this, even while she was acting, so I didn't get to provide her with any new insight. :-)
Ratha thought it would be better if I met someone (in the romantic sense) in real life, or my crush on her faded of its own accord, but I told her that I thought this was literally impossible, not merely highly unlikely, because of my emotional monogamy. I then told her that I would prefer for things to stay roughly the same for a while, if they had to change at some point:
(22:43:14) TephX: I know that it sounds ridiculous to consider something like this, and perhaps it is, but if there is going to be some point in the future at which our volume of interaction drops a lot, I'd prefer it not to be this month. It's going to make me very unhappy and depressed and mopy, and I really want to be able to finish NaNoWriMo, which is going to be tough as is.
Somewhat surprisingly to me, she actually thought that I had a point. I mused on whether my emotional system was stupid enough not to realize the inevitability of the eventual end and act on that knowledge, but decided that it might well be. And anyway, the events that ensued provided me with a potential soft landing (keep reading).
The next thing I said was that I had looked at Ratha's pictures on LiveJournal, and even though they had been taken while she was still in college (she's 26 now) and I could sort of tell that, still they looked like… an adult. She replied that we had both been acting sort of immature lately, but I told her that although we had certainly both been acting foolish, it was distinct from what I was trying to express, which was feeling younger. This inspired her to say:
(01:23:56) papertygre: Given - a) an emotional attachment, b) no physical component, and c) a sense of feeling younger (to an extent that may not be strictly justified by actual age differences), could it be not so much a romantic attachment but a familial one? Like big-sister or mother-figure sort of thing?
Surprisingly, to her and also to me, I responded to this. I didn't think that it was exactly right, but it was a good stab at the truth:
(01:25:52) TephX: I think it's probably better understood as an axis along which things can vary than a totally different paradigm. In that light, I'd say it is rather closer to the mother ideal than the lover one.
It might appear weird that I would respond to this idea, and in a way, it is. It might also seem that I was motivated to accept it only by the desire to have an out, a “soft landing” as alluded to above, and I do think that that's part of it. But there are also the facts to consider, and they're actually sort of compatible with this theory. The thing is, when I daydreamed about Ratha (which was the thing I noted in an earlier entry that my mind had found to make fun of me—and it really was quite amusing), it was never about doing anything sexual, or even kissing her. It involved hugs, cuddling up in the same bed, going places together… but no sex. This is pretty much the same thing as happened with Laura too, so I guess it's part of a pattern—perhaps an automatic attempt to compensate for a desire for a relationship that I know wouldn't work?—but any attempt to explain it seems to just be speculation.
In any case, Ratha appears to be willing to continue a fairly intense friendship that will keep me from being emotionally traumatized at least until the end of NaNoWriMo, and I'm vaguely considering visiting Pittsburgh for her birthday (which will, probably, become much more firm after she has actually moved to Pittsburgh, since her plan to do so isn't 100% certain yet). So the only issue that I think might still generate substantial tension between us is that I'm probably inclined to be a little jealous of any guys with whom she's dealing, and very displeased if she does end up going out with Ed (an Oedipus complex on a surrogate mother?), though even that will be a little less intense now than it would have been, I think. And given that I can mentally put her in a different slot, I think it might even be logically possible for me to fall for someone else now, though of course, there's still the nearly insurmountable practical issue that I essentially never deal with eligible females in my day-to-day life.
Ratha made what I thought was an incredibly beautiful LiveJournal post on this subject, though she didn't seem to understand why I felt that way. She said that in fact, she had only posted it because it had been 5:30 in the morning when she finished writing it and she didn't want to lose her work, and that she had really thought she was going out on a limb. She originally posted it as friends-only, but made it public, so you can read it here if you want to. We talked briefly about using a protection system such as this; basically, the difference between her attitude and mine is that I accept that random people I've never met, or even people I have met but who are reading my journal without my knowledge thereof, may read something potentially embarrassing about me. I don't even hope that this entry is anywhere near as beautiful as hers is, but hopefully it's at least a reasonable and (relatively) unbiased summary.
There are more things about which I want to write, but they can wait.
Wiki page for this journal entry
I just woke up, and Unstability was playing. (The two were not related; I needed to urinate.) Unstability is kind of an interesting song to me, because I tend to think of it as the exact opposite of my musical æsthetic. Roughly, it sounds like a skipping CD. The thing that I didn't quite realize is that it actually sort of fails to do that. I had sort of conceptualized it that way, but the beginning part of it actually kind of has a beat, although it does make very heavy use of short segments of complete digital silence, much like a skipping CD would.
Though I find the result quite unpleasant to listen to, it is at least interesting to me. I think that John Cage's 4'33" might actually be more offensive to me (in case you're not aware, it's 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence), because it refuses totally to make any æsthetic decisions at all. Unstability got me thinking about it, and I realized that if I were at a performance of 4'33", I'd actually consider starting to hum one of my favorite songs very loudly, or perhaps even singing during the performance. Why? Well, first of all, because my initial understanding of 4'33" was actually slightly flawed—the point is not, in fact, to listen to perfect silence for the duration of the piece, but to hear whatever random sounds are going on around the concert hall. (I believe a pianist sitting in front of a piano but not playing any notes is involved.) So, technically, an incredibly rude spectator who decides to hum or sing is a “legitimate” part of the piece. Second, because listening to that would actually be more pleasant and musically valuable than listening to… nothing.
I probably wouldn't actually do it, because I would be too ashamed. People would stare at me. But I would actually feel grateful towards someone else who did. To those who think I simply haven't “understood” Cage's amazing piece of “art”—yeah, I got it. There's a difference between failing to understand something and thinking it's stupid. (Yet somehow the track of 32 seconds of digital silence on Rob Dougan's album Furious Angels fails to bother me. Perhaps because I think of Dougan as a legitimate artist in the first place based on his other work (kind of a chicken-and-egg problem, as I'm not really willing to investigate Cage enough to give him a fair hearing) and perhaps I just hear that track as a sort of extended fade-out from the last track / intro to the next one.)
Wiki page for this journal entry
Don't cry for me
When your nights are cold and lonely
Baby, don't cry for me
Cause I'm not your one and onlyDon't lie to me
I see through the words you're saying
Baby, don't cry for me
Cause I'm not the game you're playing
Don't Cry for Me, Dougal & Innovate
I must apologize for writing in my journal so infrequently of late, both to my readers and to my future self. My life has been fairly intense for the past few weeks, including this past week or so in which I haven't written in my journal at all, but it often feels like I have no energy left between the other things that are going on to record it.
Fortunately, much of what is going on is stored in AIM or email logs, so I at least will be able to go back over those and remember it. I say “most” because Ratha and I actually had a phone conversation, I believe late Friday evening (or early Saturday morning, depending on your perspective). It was originally started to try to help resolve an issue I've been having with touch, because Ratha felt that we weren't getting anywhere on AIM and I was just going down a road I'd already travelled, but once the phone conversation started, things went down a path that was so different it didn't have any effect on the original problem.Yesterday Ratha told me that she had already decided to go out with Ed (if he wanted to) and that she was surprised I hadn't already realized that. I totally panicked. I lost control of myself, but eventually she went to lunch and I drove up to Albany. I did this not to accomplish anything in particular, but simply to give myself space to think (I also didn't bring my cell phone). I suppose it's more or less the equivalent of taking a walk (which I also use when I feel emotional) with modern technology, though I only took the car because I wanted to listen to music very loud (Happy 2b Hardcore 7). On the trip, various impulses came to me. Most of them corresponded to parts of myself that have gotten too much expression of late: jealousy, anger, loneliness.
I applied something I had figured out on my phone conversation with Ratha, though. We were discussing how sometimes reason and emotion (or two different emotions) clash and the result is that I'm left unsure how to act, torn between different motivations, and the ensuing anxiety is sometimes worse than either choice would be. What I realized on the phone was that trying to compensate totally for my emotions is impossible—they'll always be one step ahead of me. So, instead of thinking of it that way, I should consider each possibility in turn and decide which one to act on based on what part of myself I think needs expression at the time.
I had two “revelations” on my trip, by which I mean two things that clearly corresponded to parts of myself that needed to be expressed. The first is that regardless of what happens between Ratha and Ed, if she's sure she wants to meet me, then I feel comfortable planning a trip to Pittsburgh. This corresponds on the one hand to the acceptance of defeat and on the other to expression of a genuine desire that remains unchanged thereby.
The second, which literally gave me chills when I realized it, is something that's implied by two ideas I already hold, but I had never realized it before. I'm still fighting it, because it seems totally unacceptable. One idea is that one human body does not continue to contain the same person for its entire life. People change, and gradually (or sometimes suddenly) the change becomes so much that asserting personal identity seems wrong. The second is that it's impossible to compare values between two different people on the basis of facts alone. By saying that the change (positive or negative) in value from state of affairs A1 to state of affairs A2 for person X is greater than the change in value from state of affairs B1 to state of affairs B2 is for person Y, where X is not equal to Y, one is necessarily making yet another value judgment, independent of the ones already made by person X and Y.
The issue about which I was thinking was this. Although I'm sure I will be unhappy—probably to a very high degree—if and when Ed goes out with Ratha, I was wondering whether she would be better off in the long run having done so. But, this occurs over a fairly long period of time, and is likely to be a life-changing event. So, Ratha is likely to be a different person over the course of it. This means that it's actually meaningless to talk about whether she's better off having done it! I don't want to understate my point here. I'm not only saying that it's hard to tell whether she's better off, or that it's practically impossible to have enough evidence in advance, or that it's pointless to consider choices of that magnitude. No, what I am saying is that there is no fact of the matter whatsoever whether it would be a good choice for her or not, or similarly whether any life-changing choice would be good for anyone or not.
Ratha and I discussed this later on, and she seemed not to have a problem with it, but for me this is almost a paradox. I don't believe that a life needs to have a well-defined “purpose” overall (although it can) in order to exist. But it still seems that the sum total of everything a human wanted over the course of his or her existence can be aggregated into an overall value somehow. I think that the conclusion towards which I was leaning when Ratha and my conversation about this topic ended was that the value of a life-changing event can only be judged—even in a logical sense, not merely practically—in retrospect, not in prospect. But this is still extremely frustrating to me, because it means that there is no basis whatsoever for making life-changing decisions, other than what feels pleasant at the moment or at best what the results will be during the future period which one can reasonably foresee.
I guess that this last bit casts things in a different light. I mean, surely there is a future point at which things become too unpredictable and one can't rationally decide which of them one would prefer. At that point, is it a reasonable strategy to assume that all choices have equal value from then on? Equally reasonable as any other, because nothing is or can be known about what will happen from then on. So, I guess that this revelation, too, involves an expression of defeat—which, incidentally and interestingly, is also the theme of The Matrix: Revolutions.
Anyway, I feel good now. One might think that all of these ups and downs would be distracting me from my novel, but actually I think that they're keeping me engaged with it (although it is still only dribbling onto the page). I've noticed that when nothing is going on emotionally in my life, I tend to completely withdraw, which is not a good thing. I find it very easy—too easy—to stay in one place for a long time, as long as I'm too afraid to go anywhere else. And, in a way, I'm doing that now—living at home, taking a safe and easy job, my social interaction consisting almost exclusively in AIM conversations. NaNoWriMo, planning trips to Pittsburgh, and perhaps all of this with Ratha are the only dynamic things I've done since graduating from college. I'm sort of okay with that, but I feel like I'm waiting… and this time, unlike on my summer vacations, I don't know what for.
I feel like this ability to analyze things by what part of myself I want to express rather than fearfulness and uncertainty is a good thing, but I also fear that at least at this point, it's impossible for me to apply it in realtime. The impulses to just say something are too strong. The only reason I was able to apply it this time was that I specifically cut off my ability to communicate—this let me focus on each idea of something to say and decide whether each of them was a part of myself that needed expression. But maybe I'll get better at applying this in time, and even if not, it's still useful for dealing with a good range of the situations in which I've felt most crippled.
(Ratha, sorry if this reads like a summary of our AIM conversations. :-)
Wiki page for this journal entry
If you have never written a novel, you have no idea what it feels like to cash in a plot point 52 pages after introducing it.
40,364 words. I can do this.
Wiki page for this journal entry
50,163.
Wiki page for this journal entry
So, I finished NaNoWriMo. And moreover: my novel is really, really good (and I hope you don't think I'm being immodest in saying that). I've completed a round of copy-editing and it's cleaned up and ready for anyone I know personally to read it. So, if you don't already have a copy (I know most of you do), email me at <kenn@cmu.edu> and ask for one, and I'll be happy to supply it. I am extremely anxious to get feedback, in as great a volume as I can reasonably expect.
I had a preliminary title, but the final title came to me in a flash: Breakout. The flash only happened because I was thinking about it, though, or so it seems. I think creativity works like that a lot of the time. Just sitting there waiting for the answer doesn't work, but when you keep thinking about it and coming up with bad ideas, then all of a sudden a good one will hit you. Actually, that process applies to many parts of my novel, as well.
The other night (I think it was Thursday almost a week ago), Ratha had already said good night to me, but was still up about 15 minutes later. I asked her what was up, and she said she was vacillating over something. I asked her what it was, and she said I wouldn't like it. A few minutes later, I said I couldn't pretend I wasn't just sitting there thinking about what it could be. She said it was stupid anyway, or something like that, and logged off a few seconds later.
I was still up and trying to focus on my novel, with a slight degree of success, but I couldn't help wondering what it was Ratha had been thinking about. Then, unexpectedly, she called me on the phone and told me (it was no big deal) and we talked for a few minutes. Even though objectively this wasn't huge, it meant a great deal for me—I would say I was touched, maybe even moved—because what it meant to me was that she actually cared, because it was totally uncoerced and free for her to do this. If I had asked for it, it would have been impossible to receive that gift.
This brought on a mood of profound inner peace, which was reinforced by my easily finishing my novel (a day early) and doing the preliminary copy-editing on it. It's mostly faded by now (Wednesday), but there are still some slight echoes, and I believe that it will come back some time.
Anyway, if you ever end up reading my book, that's the meaning of the first half of the dedication.
So, I am forced once again to ask the perennial question: is keeping a journal worth it? In a sense, the question is silly; I journal when I feel like it and don't when I don't. There's no particular reason to abstract this behavior into a higher-level pattern of “keeping a journal”; it just is what it is.
However, it is still a fact that lately, I have been maintaining my journal at a level far below adequate for me to read back over it and truly remember everything that was going on at the time. True, I have AIM logs of much (perhaps most) of it, and I can always go back and read my novel whenever I feel like it.
It's a little discouraging to have such a small audience—only 4 or maybe 5 people, I think, not including myself. Of course, it's pointless to say this here, because if you're reading this text, you read my journal. :-)
I guess I don't really want to increase my audience all that much, anyway. The people who I do know read it are the most important to me in the world. Still, I don't really see writing my journal as a way to entertain them, even though it can serve that function.
This is pointless metalevel musing and I know it, so I'll stop now.
Last night I visited Charlie. It had been a long time since our last visit due to NaNoWriMo, so I didn't want to wait for the weekend. We ended up staying up until about 3:00 in the morning (and I'm now quite tired because of that, though the coffee let me get through the day), mostly talking about love, or specifically Charlie's concept thereof, which I will from this point on write “Love”, both because he does so and because I am not convinced that his usage has all that much to do with anyone else's.
Charlie seems to believe that Love is some sort of weird, inexplicable force that causes things to happen that seem to me to be practically impossible (in the philosopher's sense; that is, it is impossible, in a practical sense, that they will happen), particularly a definitionally permanent relationship. I have in fact defended this view in the face of numerous attacks myself; Ed and Ratha both seem to think that it is fairly foolish. I want very badly to believe that it is true, but I'm realizing that I am not convinced that it is. People and circumstances change, and while the existence of this form of Love does not seem logically impossible for any reason, it does at least seem to present a severe epistemic problem: there's no way to know that something is or is not Love until, I suppose, one of the relevant people dies. Charlie says that he thinks you “just know”, but I see no reason whatsoever to believe that you couldn't feel just that same way and be wrong.
Now, Charlie claims to be able to judge this in other people as well as himself, and he believes that marriage has a necessary connection to Love, in that marriage without Love is in some sense totally dismissive of any value that a person might have. He takes divorce as definitive evidence of a lack of Love in a marriage. But it seems to me that I can see myself eventually getting married because of practical considerations and a high degree of emotional attachment—but not this magical, qualitatively different flash of Love, whatever that is, which seems impossible to judge. If this is true, then I'm between a rock and a hard place, because I do think that I would like to get married, but according to Charlie, any knowledge of how Love works is totally impossible (though he still acts himself as if it were uniformly probable; I suppose that in the face of so absolute an uncertainty, any choice is as good as any other, like in my earlier revelation about how to act when one has no idea what results one's actions will have). Thus, if I ever married for reasons other than Love, whatever that is—it basically seems to be some arbitrary whim of Charlie's whether to assign it or not—then he would effectively disown me.
Once again, though, the solution is to give up. I assume too much in asking Charlie to be totally rational; instead, he concentrates almost all of his irrationality in one or maybe a couple of places.
Also, Charlie concurs with my sentiment that it's not worth dating someone who is not a potential candidate for Love and ensuing marriage, but I was surprised to find out that he also thinks Love is so incomprehensible that he simply has no way whatsoever to actually know that any particular dating situation would not result in Love, eventually. He uses this as an argument to justify hedonistic dating, which I've been avoiding. There are two possible reasons I've been avoiding it, and it seems that the most likely structure is that I'm simply fearful and I've used the whole “if marriage is not a possibility then dating is not worthwhile” thing only as an excuse to make myself feel less bad about it. However, it certainly is possible that the latter actually has some hand in things.
Wow, that was long and likely uninteresting. (Meta-comments are taking over…)
Wiki page for this journal entry
Kenn Hamm
For copyright and other information, click here.
Last modified: Mon Aug 4 19:38:45 2008