Well, I helped J move his stuff to his new place, for which K told me she was upset with me, and during the course of lugging stuff to the van she had a meltdown on me. I suppose we'll patch it up at some point, but... ah, fuck it.
I am so giving up on looking for a relationship of my own. I can't even handle the spillover from other people's fucked up relationships.
Alphapage has animated gifs showing the evolution of various alphabets. Insanely cool.
The Observer | Review | The 100 greatest novels of all time: The list
But that 100 is whacked, since it doesn't include any of A Dance To The Music Of Time
J is still planning to divorce; K is still planning not to, although she doesn't seem to have any idea of how to avoid it. She can drag it out for two years if she wants (PA law for no-fault), but how that will help I can't see. K seems to spend all her energy convincing herself that J is nuts, dredging her memory for things that he said he wanted (up to eighteen years ago) that contradict things that he says now. Um, maybe he's changed his mind? Maybe the way you behave has something to do with him changing his mind? Maybe the statements aren't so contradictory as all that? An example: J complains that they have too much stuff, there's no place to put it all, the basement is full, K won't let him get rid of any of it without a fight, and they keep getting more. He moves out, and after a few weeks asks if he can take one of their TVs (out of their four).
So I've just today been reading Rational Ignorance vs Rational Irrationality, by Bryan Caplan which takes a stab at explaining this sort of thing using economic reasoning. The basic idea is that rather than just assuming rationality and ignoring irrationality you view irrationality as imposing private costs on desirable beliefs (beliefs that you actually desire, not that are beneficial in the abstract). If there are large private costs on the belief, such as believing faith healing is more effective than real medical treatment for dangerous but treatable conditions, there is pressure (not social pressure, but disutility imposed by the universe, such as pain or the risk of dying) not to be irrational so people will choose irrationality less. Where the private costs are low or non-existent (the condition isn't very serious, or is serious but untreatable), people are rationally free to choose irrational beliefs to whatever degree they want (for comfort, hope, or whatever). The interesting insight is that people pick and choose when it's cost-effective to be rational vs. when they can get away with believing what they wish to believe. This is a much better theory of irrationality than most other obvious ones, and neatly explains both widespread irrationality on certain topics that naturally have low individual costs--at least in our current society (e.g. religion, politics, pseudo-science) -- and people who are rational, even extremely rational, in general or in their own areas of expertise but are loopy on others and explains why people often change their irrational beliefs when the perceived costs change. Anyway, it's an interesting article, well worth reading.
Which brings me back to K, and I think maybe explains something about her that was puzzling me: if she wants J back, as she says she does, and J says that certain problems are important to him, then why doesn't she work at fixing those problems even if she's dubious about whether they're the real source of his discontent or whether he'd return if they were addressed. It would be the rational thing to do, I think: it might help, either because the issues are the real sticking point, or because showing some willingness to change would be a demonstration of earnestness, or because clearing them away would open up discussion of deeper causes or at least test her theory that he's dodging or confused; it can't hurt, since she's going to have learn how to cut back on spending anyway, and cleaning the house just isn't that big a deal (or if it is, she's been extra unfair to make J do it all the time). But if K is being rationally irrational, it makes sense: if she, like me, thinks the chance of winning him back at this point is very low, then the satisfaction that she gets from thinking that J is nuts and she's blame-free is well worth the small lost opportunity cost of taking him seriously.
I'm reminded of this by a comment I left on badger's blog to the effect that I've lived a sheltered life...
I was having a discussion online with my friend Sappho the lesbian with a capital L (not the only lesbian I know, but the only one who makes it her religion and even at times in the past her profession) about a scene in Frank Miller's Dark Knight Strikes Again in which Superman and WonderWoman have sex, shattering mountains, boiling seas, etc. I saw it as rough but consensual (they went at it like that because they couldn't be hurt and they couldn't ever be uninhibited with anyone else), whereas she insisted it was rape. We were having a pretty civil discussion, or so I thought, until I suggested--thinking explicitly of badger here, and some of the stories she's told me--that IF she thought it was completely impossible that rough sex, even sex that pretended at rape, could never under any conceivable circumstances be consensual, then she had lived a somewhat sheltered life. And she flipped out--I mean totally lost it, threatened banning me with her power as assistant sysop on the forum, etc. So I did what any self-respecting craven coward who just got blind-sided with an eruption from deep within someone's tortured psyche would do: I apologized profusely, even excessively, expressed my bewilderment, and publically dropped the subject, but without any dramatic exit lines or high-horsery.
That turned out to be one of my better decisions, and has really made me rethink some of the ways I interact with people, particularly in arguments. Well, that and reading Getting To Yes I avoided talking with her for quite a while after that, but Sappho and I are friends again, and she even obliquely apologized to me on another forum we frequent.
I still haven't the foggiest what set her off--something about her self-image as worldly-wise oracle on matters of sexuality, obviously, but what or why I don't know. It may well be that she doesn't even know.
Does this story have a point? Not really, although I've been thinking a lot lately about the ways in which people are irrational, and how to deal with that, both from a personal and a public policy perspective.
Crap. I saw a profile I was excited about on match.com, started composing an email, but got called away to do some work (the nerve of my employers!), and went back to finish it today...only to find that she's taken down her profile! Nutbunnies.
Is proceeding splendidly on all fronts. Most of the women I've written to through either match.com or yahoo personals haven't even bothered to respond (although the fact that they probably have to pay some money before they can do so might have something to do with that).
One woman who initiated contact with me turned out to be an easily offended Russian with a not quite idiomatic grasp of English. Yeah, that relationship would go well. So I thanked her for her interest and told her as politely as I could that I didn't think we were suited for eachother, which she promptly confirmed for me with a snippy reply. I had hemmed and hawed about whether to take that step, or at least try to meet her first (I even asked badger's advice), but in the end decided that I'd be damned if I dated a woman who didn't actually seem interesting to me just because I was flattered by her interest. Been there, done that, didn't even get laid.
Actually, I joke about getting laid, but I'm not that interested. Thanks most likely to the dread ex I don't even like sex all that much; I'm sure I'd probably change my mind with a partner who was really interested, but what I mostly think is it's too much hassle. The match.com personality test thinks I'm a weirdo.
Areté Magazine. The Arts Tri-Quarterly.
It seems like tidbits for badger are all I post to this blog anymore--maybe I'm spread too thin across my other blogs...