Much Ado About Nothing

Nothing much to say, more of a "hi... I'm still here, just ain't got much to blog 'bout" (on the other hand, my friend the Lonely Infidel has finally come out of semi-retirement with a bunch of thought-provoking stuff. Go and read, I'll wait ;-) Now, on to my drivel...

Bland is as bland does. Inane factoid: my five most used applications according to Windows XP are Notepad, 7-Zip File Manager, Adobe Reader 7.0, Filezilla, and Internet Explorer. I promise you that I use Firefox far more than IE and that I use the Voyager cataloging client far more than Filezilla. I have no clue how Windows tracks these things, but then again, I have no clue about most things.

We are a strange species. We are hardwired as social animals, but our minds can become suspicious, paranoid, jaded, misanthropic, etc. We want the companionship of others, but we have the ability to learn that such companionship can lead to great pain. We have levels of trust, levels of sharing, levels of acceptable risk, yet we want to have complete trust with at least (and maybe at most!) one other. But the reality is that our minds record the failures of others and play these videos back to us enough that we hold some cards perpetually close. We become, if not full-blown sociopaths, then at least stunted in our emotional development, because we're afraid. We let our fear get in the way of empathy (but not compassion, which is too often self-serving ego stroking, rather than genuine suffering with another. But again, this judgement may just be on me. Your ego may be less egocentric than mine.) I'm basically a nice guy (don't disillusion me here!), but there's this crappy place inside me that is stubborn in its demand for self-preservation, for saying "never again!" to feeling the pain that it thinks is all-crippling (yet, paradoxically, I'm still alive...)

On reflection, maybe it *is* just me (and a handful of other fledgling mental cases). The feeling that there is some piece burned out inside, that despite medication and counseling, it's just broken ("Sometimes a thing gets broke, can't be fixed." --Kaylee Frye) Dunno. It seems a human thing to me, but most of us feel "normal" in the sense that our reality is our norm. Which gets us off on a tangent: do you ever look at people and think to yourself, "Wow, those people are nothing like me at all: their values, thought-processes, way of life is almost completely different"? And yet, at other times, no single person is a stranger. They all seem like close family members whose names I can't quite remember, but who I nevertheless find myself fond of.

Well, enough carthatic crap for one post. I'll try to come up with something clever and fun next time (or else I'll just post a bunch of quotes from Kevin Smith movies ;-)