rambling

[rushthatspeaks]

Well, I think I am caught up on my sleep. Nine-tenths of you who read this were at the wedding, so I won't go on and on about it, except to say that, in an outcome I find not entirely unexpected, Ruth caught the bouquet. Mind you, Sei very carefully gauged exactly where the two of us were standing before she tossed the thing... her throwing arm was a tad off, and the bouquet hid Ada in the head before Ruth got it. There has been speculation as to what, precisely, this means, ranging from 'She will think she is married, but will not actually be' to 'She will find out she is married only when she is served with the divorce papers'. My personal favorite, and one that may have a grain of truth to it, is 'She will find herself stuck planning a wedding'. Going to one has caused me to spend time ruminating on my own. It is an odd thing to think about. I am firmly telling myself that I have two years in which to worry about this and should let it be entirely until I have done such things as graduate and get into my next school.

Hikaru no Go is crack. EVIL crack. I have this tendency to want to watch a couple of episodes and wind up watching ten or twelve in a sitting. I have just finished Episode 21, and have been assured that the real Pain, Strife, and Agony of this show is yet to come, Nevertheless, I have been screaming loudly at the screen for the last five episodes. This is not usual. The writer is out to destroy us all. One can just tell. However, I am watching it with fascination, not only because it is insanely brilliant, which it is, but because I am hoping it will help me figure out something I have never understood: why people compete. I mean, *some* competition I can understand. Competition pushes people into doing better than they would otherwise. But why take it all the way? Why insist on a winner and a loser? Both winning and losing seem to me to damage people: they grow to matter too much. Pushing each other is a good thing, but in the end one can always stop pushing. Somehow, people don't. I do not understand why. I have felt it in myself-- I used to be in spelling bees when I was younger-- and it mattered so much to me that I used to feel very ill with nervousness and adrenaline. But even at the time it was foreign to me, it felt like a disorder. I don't know why competition works the way it does. In fact, it's one of several human impulses that most people seem to believe to be intrinsic that I simply do not comprehend. If anyone at any point could explain any of the following to me, I would be extremely interested: the desire for power over others for any serious purpose and for anything longer than a transitory moment; the desire for more money than is required to keep one in reasonable comfort; the desire for rank/title/aristocratic position; the ability to believe that there is one and only one sect that is correct and that adherents to all others are consigned to some kind of perdition. I have never understood why people are willing to run themselves and anybody else ragged for any of these. I mean, what happens if you get to rule the world? You have to take care of it. And then you die anyway. Why bother? Not worth the effort. My intrinsic desire has always been for freedom; not power over others, but the inability for others to have power over me. I don't tell you what to do, you don't tell me what to do. More than that, bound by nothing. Muichimotsu. And I have basically achieved a life in which I do exactly and precisely what I want to do, and only what I want to do. Although I enjoy hurting people, I enjoy other people's pleasure much more, so I get by in a social setting. And yet there are people who tell me that I am inherently lazy and/or selfish for only doing what I want to do. I do work, when I enjoy it or when I enjoy the results of it. I enjoy being there for my friends, I enjoy helping people. I will put myself through a great deal of pain and inconvenience to help people, I enjoy it so. But if I say to people, outright, 'I only do what I feel like doing. I do nothing I don't want to do, ever,' I get called a lot of nasty things. Why is that? That is yet another thing that I have never understood.

Comments

[breadandroses.livejournal.com]

Can't help you with understanding most of those desires (except as maybe-misguided attempts at earning respect, which I do understand.) Quick thought on your last question: maybe people think that desire is transitory, that if you don't have anything stronger than "I enjoy it so" to back up decency and caring for people and such, they can't trust it, because what if one day you don't enjoy it? I know that my inner petulant three year-old sometimes doesn't at all enjoy helping people, and if I do it anyway, that's because there's something underlying my desires - principles, I guess. But maybe we're working off different definitions of 'want' and 'enjoy.'

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Probably different definitions, yes. I'm pretty good at prioritizing my wants. There's a difference between, for example, the sleep that my body wants at this precise moment and the deep need I have to write fiction, which I will be assuaging in about another five minutes. Between the pleasures and impulses that are transitory, which will make no real difference to my life, and the wants that are desire, that are need, that are necessary. It's *necessary* to me that I continue being a decent human being, and what underlies that is the desire for others' happiness that comes from love. I hadn't thought of the fact that people probably have trouble trusting it when I phrase it the way I do, so thank you; I may have to develop some other way of describing this.

"I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires."-- Angela Carter.

[wayman.livejournal.com]

Well, here's a competition that has "fun" written into the rules: Finnish wife-carrying, and the growing Finnish-Estonian rivalry!

The Finns, on the other hand, apparently just want to have fun. One of their world championship rules, in addition to the one imposing a 15-second penalty for dropping a wife, stipulates that "All the participants must have fun." In past competitions, Finns have awarded winners the woman's weight in beer. The Estonians, at their national championships here on June 21, gave winners the woman's weight in mineral water.

The sport is absurd, but the article does illustrate something I think is an important but hard-to-grasp and impossible-to-enforce principle: the Finns had this great silly tradition/competition that was all about fun, and the Estonians . . . well, one could say they have enhanced the tradition through innovation, but I look at this and say they are damaging it by having taken it too seriously. To them, it is clearly primarily about winning, not fun. And any time you introduce that mentality it tends to take over any previous fun mentalities, just like kudzu.

I used to live for competition, mostly of the academic sort, and sometimes I still enjoy it, but for me it's never about beating other people, it's about being the best I can be. As long as I do my best, if I get a ribbon or some prize money, great, but if I don't, that's ok too because I'll have still had fun.

Sarah read this article and said "Don't get any ideas!" Blat. :-)