(no subject)

[channonyarrow]

There's something deeply satisfying about realising that I am always and eternally attracted to people who are not attracted to me, nor never will be. Normally, I would not consider this satisfying, but in the light of my last post, I think I'll call it that this time.

I am, I hope, a pragmatist, most of the time. However, we might all be that, because I don't know any altruists and wouldn't trust them if I did. What else is left? Either you serve yourself or you serve others, and Mother Theresa is dead anyway, so there's that option out the window. In other words, the gamut of human experience is not that great - we all tend to be pretty much alike, and that's the realisation of your twenties that is so horrible. I am not a beautiful and unique snowflake, and neither are you. We're all pretty much the same, accounting for some high swings at either end. I want to go to a high school somewhere and tell every single student that, preferably quietly (remember the cockroaches in Bloom County? Like that.) and watch them all crumble. Because we wear our belief that we are unique little snowflakes on our sleeves. America is the country of I, of the individual, and it shows. We believe ourselves unique; meanwhile, I bet that statistically speaking most people in the McDonald's in Paris near Place de la Bastille are lost Americans. We believe ourselves unique and we conform on a level that, if we realised it, would make our national brain explode.

You are not special; I am not special. You have not felt something that I have not. My ennui is the same as yours. It's like we expect that being wrapped in different flesh, shaped in different ways, means that we're different, but we still speak the same language, we still have the same words, we still know the same concepts. It's merely pretentious bullshit to assume for one second that what you feel I don't, what you have experienced I can't understand, and most of all (most commonly of all, anyway) it's pretentious bullshit to believe that You Are Unique, because you're not. Our flesh shapes us, and we share the same flesh. People act as though explaining something that they feel is like trying to translate the mating call of the Wild Yak into Swedish via Korean, and it's not. There are words out there that we all know, and if you can't explain it with words, try finding the medium you can use, for fuck's sake. In other words, shut the goddamn hell up and learn how to communicate, whether it's through words or tempera paint or feces on a wall. Don't just sit there in your isolationist bubble and pretend that You Are Different, because You Are Not. You are still human, you have still done the things humans have done, you have still got the same tools to describe your life as any other American, and on a broader level any other human. Shut the fuck up. I'd rather hear the story of someone's life that I don't know, that I haven't lived before, than listen to everyone yap like fucking dogs about how they're Individuals. I always mentally add the really stoned "man" to that sentence, because it seems to lack it.

This is what I think.

I think that everyone needs to shut the goddamn hell up about the things that create barriers, not because I love my fellow human beings because by and large I don't - this doesn't mean that I don't want your body, though - but because I am really fucking sick of hearing about how I can't understand. I can't understand what it was like to be in Vietnam. I can't understand what it's like to be a man. I can't undersand what it's like to have a specific sexual definition. I can't understand what it's like to be a victim. I can't understand what it's like to not be a victim. I can't understand what it's like to be you.

Fuck that shit. My understanding is not fucking broken. You want me to understand, you tell me. You don't want me to understand, tell me that. It has nothing at all to do with understanding, and everything to do with the amount of work you want to put into it to make me understand.

You are not special, I am not special, no one is special because we are all human, and we exist within a narrow range of personalities (because there are so many possibilities we don't use) and experiences. I can understand anything you can do, even if I all understand about it is that I had to have been there. But for fuck's sake, give me some credit and let me tell you that, don't tell me that. And quit pretending that you're standing on a ledge looking out over a sea of misery/love/success/virtue/non-virtue/soup and NO ONE ELSE is standing there with you. We might not be lemmings, but we're certainly not alone in the world or in our progress through it.

If you feel alone, maybe it's because YOU have stopped communicating.

Chew on that.

And all of this has gotten me angry again. Actually, I've been doing a slow burn for about four days. I will never have beauty, I don't know truth, I wouldn't believe in Justice any more if I tripped over the bitch with a broken beer bottle in my hand - but I know anger. And I'm mad again.

I will show all of you. I will be Someone. Not someone special, because that person doesn't exist, but I will be someone. I will be me, to the greatest and fullest extent possible, and you're invited along for the ride if you wish to come. I don't think that it will look any different than it did before (now I'll start posting all entries in rhyming quads and iambic pentameter sonnets!) but I'm angry again. I am going to be someone the world will not soon forget, goddamnit.

Just to show you that I was better than you ever thought.

Just to win. I always want to win. If I can't win, I won't play the game, and I'm still here so I must be able to win.

Comments

[jkivela.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I wonder what event sparked a certian rant of yours. They are still fun reads though.

I have no idea why you aren't published, you get your point across so well. :)

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

ARGH I NEED TO ELBOW ASIDE FAMILY AND LOOK AT THE PICTURE YOU DREW. *cries at being a total failure as a person*

Let's just say that this was a cathartic exercise. And I have no idea why I am not published either. *g*

[napalmmk9.livejournal.com]

Woah. First of all, I want to say, go you. Be you to the greatest and fullest extent possible, and make that person someone memorable.

But communication? Do you think you have to words to describe to me everything you're feeling right now? Because these words aren't it. They give me a small facet that I'll interpret differently than anyone else reading it. The way you're feeling right now is based on everything that's happened so far to make you feel that way, and you could write treatise upon treatise about it, and while I'd get a better and better impression, I'd never fully understand, not like you do, and moreover, just the act of communicating it would begin to change how you felt about it. Paging Dr. Heisenberg.

Do you think you could paint it, so I'd know exactly how you felt? Or smear it with feces on the wall? I can't see reds and greens the way you can, by the way, it might help you to know that.

It's incredibly arrogant to assume that you have the capacity to understand the full range of human emotion. Can I possibly understand what it was like, to use your example, to be in Vietnam? No, I've got no frame of reference for that kind of stark terror. I don't have the perspective. And saying, "It's terrifying," isn't nearly enough. Even if I were to have been in Vietnam, my experiences there would be different than the guy next to me. What if he'd been terrified by a snake when he was three years old, and that had stuck with him, even if it wasn't a concious memory? I bet the jungle would scare him in a much different way, and for different reasons, than it would scare me. And he wouldn't be able to communicate why.

Language is a poor, poor filter for conveying anything.

And I suppose that might be why people think they're unique, because language is incapable of making us know how other people feel, exactly. It's not a matter of trying harder. It's a matter of living through the exact same circumstances, everything that makes you who you are and makes you feel the way you do.

Nobody does that. Everyone is exposed to different circumstances. And that is why everyone is unique.

Uniqueness in and of itself is not a virtue. If everyone is "special," no one is. And some of the unique histories of people out there makes them cocksuckers, no doubt about it.

I'd actually argue "most."

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

On one level I agree with you that I can't explain what I feel well enough to be understood, nor can anyone else understand it, but on another - we're all humans. We all have a limited range of things we can convey, we all operate on a relatively similar system of symbolic communication. It's not as though I'm suggesting that a fish and an elephant should have a discourse over tea.

Mainly I find that people use the WOE IS ME argument to say, in code, "actually, I don't want to talk about that, but I don't feel all right saying that." I mean, I can't specifically say that I understand you - and my brother and I used to have discussions about whether what I saw as blue was what he saw as blue, etc - but I can say that I can listen. I can understand pants-wetting terror, even if I never fought in Vietnam, so I can be approached on the basis that I have a frame of reference, not told that I wouldn't get it. Saying that a listener can't understand what the speaker has to say is a way of excusing the speaker, and it's used as such. It's just a cop out.

I'm really sick of Unique And Special Snowflakes, really.

Language might be a poor filter, but on the other hand, all of our communication forms are, on some level, symbolic. It's not as though we use scent emissions for emphasis (though we do use verbal tones and intensities of colour for emphasis) or communicate in solidly nounal language.

And to add to that, I believe that the process of living is, on the mental level, to figure out who the hell you are and what you are about. I believe that we strive every day to understand ourselves better, with the thought that we can then understand others better - so while I would have to live your life to the exact detail to know what you feel, at the same time, I can say what I feel now a lot better than I could fifteen years ago because I know more about myself. And I can, hopefully, convey that to you better now than I could fifteen years ago.

Of course, fifteen years ago, I would have just deleted my journal in an inarticulate fit of rage.

[hammerheadshrk.livejournal.com]

A big part of the solution to this is doing something for a living or volunteering for something that matters to other humans.

Honestly, sometimes I wonder how cube workers, number crunchers, and paper-shufflers justify their existence.

Everyone is unique. Maybey you don't feel unique, but I wonder if you have ever tested yourself or been tested to your limits and abilities. I have seen a lot of humans, in a lot of situations, and every one of them is different. I've seen them dying, burned, scared, drug-seeking, stroking out, frightened, in pain, recovering, unconcious, comatose, full of tubes, getting tubes taken out. Children, elderly, felons, everything in between and everything else. I have seen all of these in groups, and all drug seekers are different, all cardiacs are different, all felons are different, all kids are different. Even in the experience of getting an IV, which is one of the most standardized procedures possible to do, every single patient is different.

Honestly, unless you have some vast human exposure you haven't mentioned, your emotions far outstrip your wisdom in regards to the human condition.

In regards to whiners, they are far more often trying to communicate the validity and immediacy of their experience, as opposed to their literal experience. Have you ever asked them, or do you just walk away seeething a the verbal expression? "Hey, do you mean the actual event, or the way it felt to you? How is your experience different from similar events experienced by others?"

I feel like you get angry at people's behavior, without having the patience or humility to ask them more about it and try to learn where they are coming from. I don't think you are stupid, just impatient with people, and inexperienced.

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

My overarching point, which apparently did not come across at all, is that I am really sick and tired of listening to people say "You can't understand" because what they mean is "I don't want to tell you." Whether or not we are all unique - and obviously, a person's life makes them unique is not the point. The point is that we are LESS unique than people would like to believe. I am more like you than I am like a salmon, even though you and I have very different personalities, lifestyles, wants, goals, needs, and frames of reference. You and I can communicate. You and I have a similar language, and can reach agreement on terms with relative ease. You and I are not teaching a fish to understand the Qu'ran.

Each person's life can be unique to them - and I agree with napalmmk9's point that our experiences make us truly unique and isolated from people - but that's a far cry from standing around saying "YOU WOULDN'T UNDERSTAND MY WOE BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT ME." Well, um, thanks for asking me to try. Thanks for giving me the chance to tell you "I don't understand your pain." Thanks for abrogating any possibility of communication between us because really, that statement says that the speaker doesn't want to talk, not that the listener doesn't want to listen or somehow can't listen.

Always remember you ARE unique

[40hex.livejournal.com]

... just like everyone else.

I am ahead of the game...

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

...because I know that no one is unique.

[isotripy.livejournal.com]

I disagree, some people *are* more special than others. Some people are born looking like Megan Gale (a beautiful model), some people are brighter or think differently. We are all sombody by default, to be special is to have something that others deem better than the average. Of course by definition then we cant all be special, if we all were then special would become average. The thing is the value judgements we have are particular to the human psyche and do not exist in an objective sense in the world. But we have to live with (or within) them, I dont think they will ever go away. And so there will always be someone who is better or worse. But only relative to the group or person making the judgements. Life is not fair and some people are deemed better, in an objective sense they are not really (except they are endowed by society further through advatage), it's all relative to contextually bound values.

I also think that human subjectivity *is* unbroachable to some degree; we are all trapped inside of it with no ability to proove beyond doubt that it is any alike or different from that of other people. Language is not an objective characterisation of the state of affairs, we try very hard to make it so, especially in science and we approximate this goal alot of the time to a satisfactory level. But for the human mind, I think it is particulaly lacking, especially for visual thinkers or those that find words difficult for whatever reason.

I cant comment on the American culture of individualism, but it reminds me of what my boyfriend said once that goes something like " You are unique... just like everybody else" Its seems paradoxical but its not. Our uniqueness, the fact that we are all slightly different and see the world from slightly (or sometimes massively) different perspectives is something we all share. But that is not logically exlusive to individual uniqueness.
Of course this is all just my opinion, I may be wrong.

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

On a deeply personal level, obviously everyone's experience (whether pretty or ugly, traveled or not, etc) means that they are unique. But I'm mainly absolutely sick of hearing, in essence, "YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND MY PAIN" from people who, really, should just shut the fuck up because we've all been there, we've all done that. We are members of the same species - we can communicate. A lot of people seem to think that actually, we can't because no one can understand them, but we're all human. Beings that couldn't communicate (aside from, obviously, the extremely mentally-abnormal) would be, like, trying to get a fish and an elephant to have a discourse. It's just a shorthand for saying, to my way of thinking, that a person doesn't care to put the effort into explaining why they feel as they do, because then they might (horrors!) be understood. There are a lot more similarities between the pretty girls' experience of men and the ugly girls' experience of men than there are differences - but if both sides shout that the other can't understand what's happening, no one will ever find that out.