(no subject)

People are curious animals and God help me if I'm not completely inept at handling them.

Right now I've got an entire speech laid out in my mind addressed to the former girlfriend, detailing at length just what went wrong, how I erred and how she might have done a few things differently herself. It is a masterful piece of rhetoric, drawing on some of my more recent readings from "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" (which actually has some interesting things to say despite it's pop-cult status), in which I shoulder most of the blame for everything (she broke it off) and explain why we can't just "be friends."

Of course, it's an utterly useless group of words that is most likely self-serving, martyrous and liable to cause hurt feelings.

Honestly, though...am I being overly rancorous or is she just naive to think that, after a unilateral step back from intimacy, that she can still have everything she wants. A movie companion/ walk taker/ IMer/ masseuse/ pillow/ anime-watcher/ listener as if nothing else had ever happened. To end things is her prerogative, of course, but to believe it need not change anything??

I don't know if it's bitterness or just some sort of post-break-up defense mechanism, but I begin to wonder what we were doing together in the first place. I come out of it, at least, knowing that I tend to over-react when someone pays attention to me, mis-reading signals and generally being pushy and premature at best. Of course, I'm fairly certain I knew this about myself beforehand and it didn't help then either. Maybe next time...


Oh, and by the way, for everyone's future reference: "It's not you, it's me." is neither believable nor reassuring. Even if the change is internal to you, I still either helped to promote it, or else failed to take steps to prevent it. And if I could do neither than I'm irrelevant. None of these three options makes me feel any better...it just triples to number of guilt-scenarios I can run in my head over and over and over again.

And since I've ranted this far:

( What went wrong, the short version )

There. That was actually...cathartic, I think, given it's been several weeks roiling around inside me. If nothing else, it'd be hard to find a more negative slant on the matter. Better than demonizing the other party, right?

And now for something completely different

Having purged, last entry, I now reflect.

Am re-reading "Brothers in Arms" by Bujold and came across Cordelia's theology. In short: "Principles come and go, but people and their immortal souls are forever. Therefore people are to be valued above principles."

All well and good. Wise even. But my internal satanic advocate then has to speak up: "Ok, so who's got a soul? What's a person? To wit: how do you apply this to abortion?"

Yes, he's a cantankerous one, my advocate is. Fortunately, I have an answer.

I don't know where the line between person and non-person can be drawn. And neither do you. So I'll concede on abortion. Full-term pregnancies for everyone not threatened with death and then easy adoption afterward (hey, I can concede that, it's not like I'm ever going to be pregnant ;-)) In return, however, since neither of us can say what is or is not souled, you have to give me full rights and recognition for the great apes. Among other species.

::blinks::

Unfortunately, the musing went downhill from there. Smug with my clever loophole victory, I was then caught up in the logistics. Each species would get a U.N. representative (because to do it any other way would just be too confusing). Chimps, Bonobos, Orangutans and Gorillas. Only you'd have a big hoopla over whether or not to have separate reps for mountain and lowland gorillas; the two camps being the biological nit-pickers and the people to whom they're all just big hairy monkeys.

At this point we arrived where my subconscious had been planning from the beginning. After all, what are you to call one of these reps but Speaker to Simians.

...and the crowd breaks up in disarray and flees the scene.