I want a new toy.....

I get a New Toy (oh ay oh), to keep my head expanding (ta).I get a New Toy (oh ay oh), nothing too demanding (ta).Then when everything is in roses you don't get any headroom.Yeh my New Toy (oh ay oh), you'll find us in the bedroom, yeh.New ToyNew toy...
--Lene Lovich

I'd like a partner and a long term relationship and all that but a new toy could be nice too. Narcissists need not apply. The truly lousy in bed need not apply. Maybe it would be shorter to talk about who can apply! The intelligent, fun, caring. You need to be able to play well with me in the bedroom and outside of it. So, fun to play with is the major criteria here.

The Narcissistic Personality

Have you ever dated the narcissistic personality? Has it ever tried to marry you? I just dodged that bullet. I said no. The trick with narcissists is to realize that you have to say no for hours and sometimes days because it takes them a long time to hear the no and actually believe it. First, the narcissist has trouble hearing you over his or her self-absorbed internal dialogue. Second, the narcissist has trouble believing that you don't find the idea of sacrificing yourself at the alter of his or her needs the ultimate in self-fulfillment. They really believe that they are doing YOU a favor by sucking out your ability to experience any happiness whatsoever along with your will to live.

I'm heterosexual so my most recent godawful experience with a narcissist came in the form of a male--I can't say man as he's more like child-man. He really, sincerely believed that I should be thrilled to marry him and take care of his woes. Do I look desparate to you? I'm not.

Don't get me wrong. I would love a partner but the narcissist is incapable of partnership because he or she thinks your ultimate fulfillment should come from taking care of him or her. This guy was just unbelievable to me. He knows me? He never lets me say anything about what I want. It's all about him and what he needs. He loves me? He doesn't know me. I think what really bothered me was that he kept saying that he knew I wasn't like everyone else and wouldn't just be trying to get money or whatever out of him--not that he's got any. So his overall message was that I seemed to be a good person to use. He really believed I should be happy to be used by him. I told him he needed to get away from me. He makes me tense and unhappy because he's constantly trying to manipulate me and coerce me into what he wants. He got so mad he told me that he would not stay in touch with me and you know what I felt about that?

Happy!!

Freedom from Guilt

I've always had an overwhelming sense of guilt about everything and while I usually blame the holy water the Church used to baptize me (Catholics always feel so guilty about everything that I think the Church found a way to liquefy guilt and passes it off as holy water), I know that this is just to try to be funny about my overweening sense of guilt.

Guilt is a perfectly useless emotion. It does no one any good. Consider why someone feels guilt. It's usually because one didn't conform to the expectations of other people, or society, or religion. In other words. we feel guilty for not being perfect in the eyes of external actors and, hence, oneself. That's alot of power to give away to others. Do the truly empowered and self aware feel guilt. Moreover, we tend to love our guilt. We dwell on it and nurture it into a truly raging case of self-loathing. Guilt is useless because it's both self-absorbed and gives us an excuse not to be happy, healthy, and whole. We tell ourselves we don't deserve it. If we deserved happines, we wouldn't feel so guilty. Talk about circular reasoning. Why should anyone feel that they need to sacrifice themselves to be worthy human beings.

I had a small epiphany on guilt this weekend. Someone I briefly dated began calling me rather relentlessly. First it was to get back a bracelet. I don't want the bracelet and managed to drop it off to him. Then it was 'he wanted to see me.' I don't want him at my house. He won't leave and has no problem with using a great deal of coercion to get laid (and he is so bad at this that one would really rather go to the dentist). So I told him he could not come over but if he really needed to see me, I would meet him somewhere like a coffeeshop. The incessant calls stopped. I stopped feeling guilty that I didn't want to make myself miserable so he could use me. Unbelievably, that's what it took for me to really see my problem with guilt clearly. Do I really believe that I should be miserable?

It was a useful lesson though. Today, I'm going for a completely guilt free day. I am doing what I want, when I want--purely to please myself. In other words, I'm going to learn from my cat. Apparently she's smarter than I am.

Islamophobes

Has anyone else noticed the sheer hatred and invecative that Islamophobes will direct at Muslims. Perhaps not. Allow me to enlighten you from the Amazon Islam Forum wherein someone actually says this: "all i have used is truth. why do muslims, communists, pedophiles and homosexuals always portray themselves as poor innocent victims?" This is not a critic of Islam or Muslims. This is someone who has serious pyschological issues. Projection doesn't seem quite right but it's some sort of pathology. The same person tried to say there's no difference between Sunni and Shi'i. I just can't believe that there are people out there who think this passes for any kind of a debate.

Those to whom evil is done

September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Settler Colonialisms and Ethnic Cleansing

Many states that were built through settler colonialisms (frontier state building) have in common a belief that they are God's 'chosen'. From the Puritan belief in the 'City on the Hill' and the need to drive out, convert, or annihilate the American Indians to the Afrikaner belief that Zulus were Amalikites to be driven out or killed to the Israeli belief that the must go forth and take the land that God gave them, settler colonialisms specialize in justifying the eviction, if not annihilation of indigenous people. In fact settler colonialisms often specialize in uniting a diverse immigrant population through aggression against a subhuman 'other'. The commonalities cannot be missed nor are Americans, South Africans, and Israelis it's only practitioners. All settler states have this commonality.

Intriguingly--despite all the hoopla and media-generated fear of some sort of Islamic will to convert or annihilate another people, we've never seen this happen. Settler states seem to have exclusively grounded their ideologies in the Old Testament and European racism. While it's likely this is something of a consequence of European power, it's odd that some people insist upon seeing an Islamic menace for what has been done exclusively by Europeans.

Running Away or Common Sense?

I'm really not sure why but Instant Messenger conversations with Y. tend to throw off my plans to work for the day. Our conversations are usually brief and usually we just update each other and how we both are and what we are doing. Today he was complaining that he might have to go to China--yeah, yeah, I know poor baby! My main concern here though is that I tend to get nothing done for the rest of the day. I really don't understand myself here. I'm not consciously pining for his company.

Maybe it's just sad that our conversations have become so superficial? Maybe it just reminds me how much I enjoyed having him around and regret that I never told him so until after he was gone? Or could it be deeper?

Do I really need to stop talking to him if I want to become unstuck? I question this all the time. Partially because I don't want to cut him out of my life and he gets so unhappy every time I have tried to just remove Instant Message from my computer. I don't like making him unhappy. I'd rather just understand myself better so that my conversations with him didn't send my whole day awry. My day is my responsibility and it doesn't seem as though cutting him out of my life really meets my responsibility to myself. It seems like running away.