Barbarian Camps in Life

It would be fantastic if someone could tell me why life must be so very, very complicated.  What is it about life that must - absolutely MUST - sneak up behind you, just when you're walking blithely down the street, whistling Adele, and shank you?  Why, why, why, why, why?

No, I'm not frustrated.  I'm confused, irritated, nervous, and at this particular moment, full-on scared.  I wish I could understand why things can never follow a straight line, even when it seems like they are.  And yes, I know, I know, any line that you follow for any significant distance actually curves, because of the curvature of the earth, yes, yes, yes.  I know that.  But stay with me.  We're on a metaphorical plane right now.  If you create a path that should follow a straight line, why is that, all of a freakin' sudden, there pops up a curve you didn't know existed?

Okay, time to reveal some serious geekishness.  You know how in some games, like, for example, Sid Meier's Civ 5, you're happily modding a new world, and then you set out to play it, and all of a sudden, something appears in that world that you absolutely DO NOT remember putting in?  Like a barbarian camp that appears in the several-square-space that you explicitly reserved for your starting city that should not have ANY barbarian camps in it, because barbarian camps + starting cities = very slow advancement. This happens to me quite frequently, is terribly obnoxious, and is an outstanding example of what I'm talking about with regard to life.  A stupid freakin' barbarian camp has appeared near my starting city, and I was not prepared for it, and I just lost my worker.

Now, I'm not going to lie.  When this happens to me when I'm gaming, I will straight out quit the game and start a new one.  Yes, I know, I'm a lamer, but whatever.  I don't care.  I didn't spend all that freakin' time modding the perfect world to get taken out in the first 20 turns by a god-damned barbarian horde.  The crappy thing, though, is that in life, you don't get to start over.  You have to deal with the barbarian horde, and . . . and . . . and I don't know how.

Okay, yes, I've now written four paragraphs without explicitly discussing what the spine-shanking I've recently experienced actually IS.  But unfortunately, this time, I won't/can't do it.  I mean, I'll talk a bit in vagaries about what has sort of happened.  The details, though, are reserved for those few demented souls who have season passes to the full-time crazy that is me.  Count your blessings.  Those season tickets reserve for you a place in Hell, somewhere in the River Styx Condominiums, probably next door to Chris and Satan. You don't actually want them.

So, in vaguest terms, the curve-ball I've encountered is this: I recently discovered (like, yesterday morning), that I am apparently the same person that I was 13 years ago, before I ever got married, divorced, moved across the country twice, no, wait, three times, found myself, lost myself, got accepted to grad school, found myself again, lost myself again. . . .  It appears, to all intents and purposes, that I haven't actually GROWN in all that time, just submitted to the same Katie Paradigm over and over, like a tetherball.  Why the tetherball goes back to its abuser continually baffles and frustrates me, but it seems that I'm no smarter than the tetherball, only in this case, I'm both the abuser AND the tetherball.  I guess that's a metaphor that fell down, but I'm sticking with it.

What do you do when you think you've grown, but discover that, to all intents and purposes, you're still the same person you were when you were 18?  Isn't part of the joy of growing up knowing that you will NEVER have to be 18 again?  So why don't I get that joy?  I don't want to be 18 - 18 was awful - and while I'm not keen on 31, it's certainly better than 18.  I think people who rhapsodize about their teenage years are full of shit.  It's a terrible part of your existence, and the best thing that life can do is rapidly move you away from those years.  So you can see why discovering that I'm still the same feckless, reckless, selfish, unutterable bastard that I was when I was 18 is disconcerting, to say the least.

So what's the deal, life?  I thought you were supposed to cure people of their very worst traits and characteristics, and instill in them worthwhile and useful ones ("This'll give you character!").  I know that life doesn't necessarily change people's core personalities, but it's definitely frustrating to think that all those things that I'd thought I'd left behind aren't, in fact, traits and characteristics that I can snake-skin shed, but are rather permanently welded to my core self.

I don't know what to do with this knowledge.  I could ignore it, but that would be very Katie Paradigmatic indeed, yet if I can't change it (see core personality, above), then is there any point in fretting about how very worthless my core personality seems to be?

I'm giving myself a headache.  I've achieved nothing by setting this on digital paper, but I'm not going to delete it.  I'll break the paradigm.  Instead of ending the game, and starting a new one, I'll let this game sit for awhile, and see if I can't find a way to make it out of the mess o' shit this barbarian horde has created for me.

Self-Definition and Relationships

Relationships are strange things, aren't they?  The thin, tenuous threads that bind human existence into a delicate, almost nebulous whole, linking every person to another - no man is an island, and all that - they're strange threads, and perhaps the Greeks and Romans had it right.  The three Fates weave us all together, and to pull on one strand of the web is to inevitably disturb strands elsewhere, strands which might not even be immediately linked to that one original strand.  Man is a social creature - who said that? - and even those of us who prefer their own society most (if not all) of the time still have pangs of . . . pangs of . . . something . . . anyway, still have pangs for the company of their own kind.

I've never been particularly comfortable in the company of my own kind - it's almost always awkward, frustrating, painful, difficult, disconcerting, and just downright anxiety-inducing - but there are times when I become acutely aware of how much I sometimes dislike being alone.  Not always, certainly - being alone is often preferable to being with people (see awkward, above) - but there are times when I absolutely crave the company of another person.  Never crowds - more than a few people turn me into a plastic version of myself, all smiles, charm, and extroverted falsity.  And (my apologies in advance to those of you who fall into this category), there must always be something a little off about those people with whom I spend any significant one-on-one time.  I don't mean that they are - or should be - deeply disturbed, but people who skew to normal inculcate feelings of inadequacy and despair in me, because I couldn't be normal if I tried, and I wish - oh, how I sometimes so much wish - I could be normal.  So it follows that if I spend real time with anyone, they must have "issues".

It is ineffably strange to me that people should be so dependent upon each other, and that they allow other people to define who they are to such an enormous extent.  I mean, I completely understand that without other people, one cannot be an individual.  That is, one cannot define oneself as something unique without having something else against which such a definition could exist.  Fine.  But the lengths to which some people go to avoid having to define themselves independently at all never fails to shock and sadden me . . . until I realize that, really, I'm not much better.

I mean, I could go on and on (and do, especially if you put enough beer in me) about how pathetic and stupid people are, allowing themselves to be defined by "the media" and "political and societal pressure" (I become very categorical when drunk), and how they should just "be themselves" (see, for example, the deeply disturbing article in Rolling Stone on fraternities at Dartmouth).  Never mind that I'm ignoring the gaping chasms of insecurity and fear with which most people struggle on a daily basis, or that I'm completely dismissing the need for relationships which aren't tainted by the spoiled-milk, "something off" tendencies I have in my own relationships, or that most people choose not to darken their everyday existence with the probings of diseased minds.  It is a bad habit of mine to examine the relationships of people around me - for the most part, healthy, functioning relationships (and I don't just mean romantic, but friendships, familial - whatever) - and dismiss them as being too "typical" (I'm using lots of quotes today.  At least they're not italics).  And then I look at how I define myself, and shudder.

I do have to give myself a little bit of credit here.  At least, for once, I'm recognizing what the hell I'm doing before I've done it so completely that there's no going back.  My ex-husband used to call me (and still does) "experiential", meaning that I never learn anything just from hearing about it, no matter how many life lectures I attend.  (Although, really, let's be honest here.  I attend just about as many of those voluntarily as I do my actual academic lectures.  I really don't like listening to people tell me what to do - or know.  So stubborn.  Anyway.)  I have to experience it, and if I don't, I won't believe what I've heard.  Stove is hot?  Really?  Still have to touch it to see if it's true, and I can't blame my burnt fingers on anyone but myself.

Anyway, ambling away from the point here.  The point is this: that I'm just as guilty as everyone else for using external methods of self-definition.  For me?  It always has been, and probably always will be (shameful) men.

One might chalk this up to daddy issues, but whatever.  It doesn't matter where they come from, what matters is that I still - after all this time, dammit - do it.  I have recently entered into a relationship where I've discovered that some of how I'm now defining myself is directly attributable to the person I'm dating.  Which is troubling, because I thought I had managed to excise that particular behavior-tumor after my divorce.  Apparently not.

Not that all of it is a bad thing.  This newfound obsession with pool, for example - that's good.  Ditto my renewed determination not to waste any more time, and actually start writing again, for fuck's sake.  But I've also noticed that I'm thinking about things - big things, future things - that I wouldn't be thinking about were it not for this person, and while they aren't bad, I just have to wonder how much of them are coming from me.

So there's my failure.  I use relationships - romantic relationships - to define me.  Not that I'm not my own person - there are things that are me, and me exclusively - but I always take something from each relationship I've been in, and add it to my personality, which is becoming more cluttered with each passing day, and is seriously making it difficult to exist comfortably in my own skin.  Emilie Autumn's "What If" really does exemplify the frustration inherent in one person containing so many damn contradictions, and the fact that she never answers her own question - what if? - indicates that I'm pretty well screwed when it comes to reconciling those contradictions.

Yay!  Hypocrisy revealed!  It doesn't change the fact that I'll still rant and rave about stupid, pathetic people using external methods of self-definition.  But I'm guilty of it, too.  I'm guilty of relying on those delicate bonds between humans, which, some might argue, is really all that makes life worth living.  Perhaps I should stop fighting it, and just give in - give in gloriously - to the intoxicating pull of the chemistry which exists between two people, and enjoy the results as much as I enjoy the results of the fermentation of yeast.