2005-10-04 - 12:34 a.m.
I feel like talking this evening, diary, so what should we talk about? Should I threaten you to get you to help me in my thought process, as I feel like doing? It would be frivilous, but perhaps cathartic, and other words which aren't as simple as they ought to be for the concept they represent. Let's talk about my shame of vocabulary, since you bring it up diary.
As a kid I thought it was my responsability to expand my vocabulary, first and foremost because I sought to and firmly believed that I COULD eventually know everything, if I just applied myself. (My arrogance > your arrogance.) But more to the point, I wanted to be able to understand what people were saying, because I seemed to have such difficulty conveying my thoughts and feelings to others. Later, I decided it wasn't my fault, they just didn't care to listen. Too busy, too impatient, too anything other than interested, absorbed, enrapt.
THAT was a hard thing to decide was true, and it's something I still prefer not to believe, but I can't find any evidence to refute it. I can understand my nephews well enough when they speak. The one who can't currently speak and I seem to get along well enough, I seem to manage to avoid ignoring his needs and wants as I often felt mine were. And if I can do it, so can you, so can anyone, because if there's one thing my childhood tried very very hard to instill in me, it's that I'm special, but no more so than anybody else, and the point to stress is the second half. That first part, the special part, you kind of gloss over. It's a yes dear, an of course, any form of placating agreement which precedes a direct contradiction intended to balance things but instead manages to muddle them.
And why WOULDN'T you want to know what someone has to say? My whole life I've spent more time trying to understand what other people are saying then trying to figure out what I'd like to say myself. I spend days still thinking about what others say to decide what I should take from it, as everyone has at some point or another. Right?
That last statement suddenly feels like a slap your balls on the chopping block kind of statement. Like the "Look ma, no hands!" just before the ten car pile up. Don't you take what others say on given topics and turn it every which way in your mind until you decide what to do with the information? That guy who wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence called it the cleaving point, I think. A point at which you can crack a thought or concept in half, and on one side you have one thing, and it makes sense by itself, and on the other you have another which also makes sense on it's own. Or that observation about the offensiveness of the word "just". I sometimes wonder if I'd have figured that out if he hasn't mentioned it. Those kinds of things.
Because it's not the statements which are easy to accept which you turn over in your mind over and over. You might come back to it and consider it now and again, and if it's a concept you hadn't considered before perhaps you feel gratitude, or whatever the hell it is you people feel. It's the statements that pissed you off in a way you can't define, or the ones that simultaneously flattered and insulted you. You strive to find the offense, you search and search for a way to separate the flattery from the insult, and it possesses you for a time.
It isn't "Oh my god how did you know?!"
It's "You have a lot of good ideas. But you never do anything with them."
