LONDON (Reuters) – Eight million Americans admit they send themselves Valentine’s Day gifts — they may feel lonely and unloved but at least they will get something nice.
Swell. But I can get myself something nice any day of the week too, and I already know that I love me. I bought myself a nice Mercedes-Benz back in October and if that’s not a proof of love I don’t know what is.
I’ll buy myself a nice birthday cake when I have to, and that’s about it. I did that for years until last year, when my friends give me a really nice birthday party, and I’m here to tell you a cake from your friends, beats out one you bought for yourself by light years. If I can’t have the real thing on Valentine’s Day, then I reckon I’ll just stew in my juices and sulk. I’m an artist…I do a good sulk.
Which reminds me…it’s almost time for me to post another round of finalists in The First Annual Casa del Garrett Valentine’s Day Poster Contest! Stay tuned…
The First Annual Casa del Garrett Valentine’s Day Poster Contest…
…is already closed to new entries. Sorry. But that sense that you’ve been left out is all part of the fun! Here are some of the finalists…
More worthy finalists tomorrow. Which will be Valentine’s Day Eve! The winner (which, in the spirit of things, was already chosen before the contest was announced) will be shown on Valentine’s Day. You may not want to look…
The problem has been well known for years: Ever since the mid-1990s, young Eastern Germans have been fleeing the region due to a lack of economic opportunity, hoping to find jobs in the western part of the country. Some 1.5 million have already left the region — roughly 10 percent of the population of East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell. Even worse, most of those who leave are under 35 and many of them have above average education or training.
But according to a new study released by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, there is another problem that accompanies the migration. Since 1991, more than two-thirds of all those who have left Eastern Germany have been women. The result is that in many towns in the region, there are simply not enough to go around — some places are missing up to 25 percent of their young women. Even worse, the young men who stay behind are often poorly educated, unemployed and frustrated — perfect fodder for neo-Nazi groups looking for members.
"In general," the study finds, "right-wing radical parties receive more votes in those areas where the most young women have left."
…
The study comes on the heels of a report that right-wing violence rose in Germany in 2006, with many of the neo-Nazi-related incidents occurring in Eastern Germany. Additionally, the neo-Nazi party NPD has seen increasing success at the polls in Eastern German states. In state elections in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, the NPD captured fully 7.3 percent of the vote, meaning that the right wingers now hold seats in three German state parliaments, all of them in former East Germany.
The study recommends a greater focus on educating the region’s young men, but admits that solving the problem is a difficult challenge. After all, there is no one to turn to for advice: nowhere in Europe is the disappearance of women as severe as it is in Eastern Germany.
"The lack of women in former East Germany has no equal anywhere in Europe," the study says. "Even Polar regions in northern Sweden and Finland, where young women have for years been leaving in droves, don’t come close to the problem in Eastern Germany."
I don’t think education is going to do anything for those guys except make them smarter neo-Nazis, and who wants that? You want to make this world a better place? Universal education would help…sure. Feeding the hungry helps. Creating jobs and opportunities for economic improvement helps. Working for peace and reconciliation helps. But nothing, Nothing, will do more to make this world a better, more peaceful and secure place, then making sure that love has a chance to take root and grow, in every heart. Yet we persist in isolating the lonely…turning away from their misery…blaming them for their own loneliness… You just need to get out more…
You see it in every totalitarian state, in every theocratic pest hole, in every babbling right wing crank who just can’t seem to get enough of waging war on their neighbor’s private lives. The war on sex…which is a war on human intimacy…which is a war on love…which becomes a generalized war on all humanity, on everything that a human being can be. When love dies inside of a person, the void that’s left is all too often filled with the only thing left to fill it with. Hate.
Via Atrios… According to this actuarial life table, having reached the age of fifty-four, and being male, I can reasonably expect to live through another 24.77 valentine’s days.
So I resigned shortly after I wrote the post below about why I’d prefer a non-geek boyfriend, from Chemistry.Com. That’s the dating service that had that cute little commercial jabbing eHarmony for discriminating against gay folks. Their personality profile test seemed promising and I hoped I would get matches that I might actually be compatible with for a change this time. So I bought a six month subscription several months ago. Just last week they stopped sending me new matches. None of the guys I pinged, about a dozen or so over a period of several months, even bothered sending me back a "not interested". I can’t even be sure if they were even active members or not. Nine-tenths of the guys they matched me up with…weren’t even close. That’s pretty much been my experience with dating services…both online and off.
I don’t think I’m that picky. There’s a scene at the beginning of the movie Animal House, where the new freshmen Kroger and Dorfman make the rounds of fraternities during pledge week. First they go to Omega house where they’re greeted with a lot of paper thin smiles and repeatedly ushered into a small room with all the other pledge week rejects. And it’s not like they see anyone else sitting in there that they have anything in common with either. They’re all just the random flotsam of pledge week all thrown together in the category of Other…Not Suitable, all staring uncomfortably at each other. That’s how dating services make me feel.
Peterson Toscano has written about all the tens of thousands of dollars he once spent trying to cure himself of his homosexuality. Well I haven’t spent quite that much trying to find a boyfriend over the years, but it’s been in the thousands. I got pushed an ad the other day as I logged out of my MySpace account, for a new gay dating service called MyPartner. Supposedly it’s only for folks who are interested in long term relationships. Which makes them similar to…oh…nearly all the other dating services I’ve bought into over the years that promised me they were different from the others, and really, really, honestly were only for people who were really, really, honestly looking for relationships, as opposed to quick hooking up. The MyPartner basic service, they claim, is free. But if you are really, really serious about finding romance you can buy into one of their optional packages promising a higher level of service. The ad I saw flashed in my face recommended the five-thousand dollar "Executive Level" package. But for a whole ten grand I can get a program customized specifically for my particular needs.
So…dig it…today’s struggling awkward confused lonely homosexual can spend thousands of dollars in various ex-gay programs over a period of many years to no effect, or they can spend thousands of dollars in various gay dating services over a period of many years to no effect. Let it be said, The Gay Lifestyle™ gives you options. This is why all those surveys of gay people keep finding that we all have so much disposable income. You just can’t afford to be gay if you don’t.
Well Chemistry.Com turned out to be a dud. Maybe I should have tried these instead…
For the lover man who wants to get lucky. With a 60’s swing feel these chocolate cookies come equipped with pickup lines as fortunes. Box contains 8 chocolate fortune cookies.
So I’m out strolling around the neighborhood, cigar in hand, still trying to burn off some nervous energy from my holiday adventures, when I happen across a neighbor packing his car for a little trip. We chat for a brief moment, and it leads to this short exchange…
Me: Yeah…I’m still trying to de-stress from my holiday trip. My path took me past two of the great loves of my life…
He: I can see where that would lead to stressful times…
Me: Yeah. My Ex down in Hilton Head just Had to show me the house he’s living in now…with the guy he dumped me for. I tried to explain…but he insisted and I just can’t say no to him… (shakes head) He just had to show me. Arrgh…
He: (Grins)
Me: And then I drove through Florida, where my first love lives now… So basically about half my vacation amounted to taking a tour past the lives they’ve both made for themselves… (shrug…puff…)
He: Yes. But you survived.
Actually…that’s still an open question.
One of my D.C. friends asked me why I fucking did that to myself. I told him I didn’t know. And, really, I don’t. Except it’s just the way I am. I had to know. It’s why I was never able to just sit in my church pews and passively accept what I was being told about life, morality, evolution, creation, and my relationship to my creator. Ever since I was old enough to lay on my back at night and look up at the stars and wonder what they were, I’ve always had to know what is.
For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
-Ecclesiastes (ch. I, v. 18)
That’s not really true. Knowledge is broadening. Both the joys and the sorrows increase. But there’s a point you reach where you find you can’t cope anymore. Understanding nature as it really is, has provided me with very great joy. But there’s only one joy that can ease the sorrow I’ve lived with most of my life, and I don’t see it coming. And that one great sorrow just really drags me down lately. I don’t think anyone who knows me really sees how bad it is.
I wish I could draw. If I could just draw it might help a little.
Psychologists have found that thought patterns used to recall the past and imagine the future are strikingly similar. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging to show the brain at work, they have observed the same regions activated in a similar pattern whenever a person remembers an event from the past or imagines himself in a future situation…
For some, the best hope of ‘seeing’ the future leads them to seek guidance — perhaps from an astrologist. But it’s not very scientific. Now, psychologists at Washington University are finding that your ability to envision the future does in fact goes hand-in-hand with remembering the past. Both processes spark similar neural activity in the brain.
"You might look at it as mental time travel–the ability to take thoughts about ourselves and project them either into the past or into the future," says Kathleen McDermott, Ph.D. and Washington University psychology professor. The team used "functional magnetic resonance imaging" — or fMRI — to "see" brain activity. They asked college students to recall past events and then envision themselves experiencing such an event in their future. The results? Similar areas of the brain "lit up" in both scenarios.
"We’re taking these images from our memories and projecting them into novel future scenarios," says psychology professor Karl Szpunar.
Most scientists believed thinking about the future was a process occurring solely in the brain’s frontal lobe. But the fMRI data showed a variety of brain areas were activated when subjects dreamt of the future.
"All the regions that we know are important for memory are just as important when we imagine our future," Szpunar says.
Researchers say besides furthering their understanding of the brain — the findings may help research into amnesia, a curious psychiatric phenomenon. In addition to not being able to remember the past, most people who suffer from amnesia cannot envision or visualize what they’ll be doing in the future — even the next day.
I’ve always found charming, the head on collision between George Santayana’s "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" and Shaw’s "We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future". All my life I’ve intuited that remembrance and imagination, which is the key to any future you may hope to have, were inseparably interlocked chunks of a personality, and to turn away from one would be essentally to kick the legs out from beneath the other, and leave you just an empty shell walking zombie like in the present. And actually, I see a lot of people in this world who seem to be doing just that.
I am not living in the past. I am living with it. Sometimes it’s a struggle. But it’s the life I have and I can’t go forward without taking it with me. Nobody does.
Somehow, I’ve no idea how or why, I’m able to keep my common sense when I’m completely wasted. I may not be able to stand up straight but I know better then to fall for items seven through 2. But item number one has actually made sense to me when I was badly drunk. Regrettably.
It’s good to know where your failure points are. Take heed of them when partying tonight…
One big reason I turned the comments off in those previous few posts here where I’m letting my heart bleed all over this blog, is that I didn’t want my friends and regular readers getting into it with the assholes I just knew those posts would attract. Like the one that sent me a longish missive last night about how he didn’t give a damn and didn’t see why anyone else should either, because having read my life story here, he could see so clearly that I’d brought all my problems on myself. And since I’d turned off the comments to the posts he was referring to, and he just couldn’t bear to send it to me in email like I’d asked, because then nobody else would have seen how profound his thinking on the subject was, he tried putting it on one of my other posts here with the comments still turned on. Let’s hear it for spam filters.
Actually nitwit, you Do give a damn…otherwise you wouldn’t have written that long, rambling, misspelled, babbling, incoherent message. Someone who really didn’t give a damn wouldn’t have bothered. They’d have just…you know…not given a damn. I’d never have heard from them.
But I heard from you. And in the spirit of cheap barstool psychoanalyzing someone you only know from a few words on a computer screen, methinks you protesteth too much. What I wrote got under your skin didn’t it? Seems to me like there’s probably someone in Your past, with a wound on Their heart with Your name on it, and you’ve been spending the rest of your life ever since you put it there trying to convince yourself that it wasn’t your fault and you don’t have to give a shit.
Fine. We all have our coping mechanisms. And they say a lot about who we are inside. I appreciate the "tough love" stuff and all guy, but you know, there are fates sadder then the one I was contemplating back there. I’d rather care too much and bleed myself to death then stop giving a damn and end my life as an asswipe whose companionship is like drinking turpentine.
If my bleeding heart emotionalism really really irritates you…good. That means there’s still something human left inside of you. Try to find it someday.
Oh…and you were wondering if the people I write about know that I’m writing about them? Duh…it’s a blog… Everyone can read it. If they don’t know, it’s because they don’t give a damn, which is what you said they were supposed to do.
I could swear I turned comments off for the last few posts… Sorry. It’s taking me a lot of nerve to write some of this and make it public like this. If you have something to say to me about any of it, send an email. I’m not looking for a public discussion of any of this.
A few moments spent in the arms of someone you love can bring you back. Even if a few moments is all you get, it can bring you back. At least, for a while.
Those little moments when a little voice starts telling you, You shouldn’t be alone now…? I have them occasionally…maybe you do too. But alone is my default condition. So when those moments come it usually goes something like, Yes Bruce, you shouldn’t be alone now…but you Are alone… So I cope the best I can with whatever it is, and obviously I always have because I’m here typing this blog post right now. And hopefully everyone who knows me won’t suddenly discover one day that I couldn’t cope with it that one time.
You know…people who take their own lives don’t do that because they’re cowards. They do it because it hurts too much, and they just want to make it stop…
You want to make someone you dumped bleed? I mean, really, really bleed? I mean, Profusely…? Here’s my little tip: Don’t tell him about all the great sex you’re having now that he’s out of your life. Don’t bother telling him that your new boyfriend is so much better in the sack then he’ll ever be in his wildest wet dream fantasies. Don’t tell him how much your new boyfriend understands you so much better then he ever did. That’s amateur stuff. Really. You want to give him a hurt he’ll take to his grave, and hopefully sooner rather then later, just mention in passing some small bit of domesticity that you and your new main squeeze are currently enjoying…
Me: So I’ll probably be in town in an hour or so…you want to go grab a bite to eat somewhere after I get settled in…
He: Um…well actually (XXX) and I are about to go grocery shopping in a bit… Why don’t you call when you get in. If you want…there’s some good British comedy shows on TV later tonight you can watch at the hotel.
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