Managing Expectations

There is a threshold for how much we can endure. Some never reach it. Or more accurately, are unable to recognize it.

These same people do not know what certain feelings are supposed to be - love, disappointment, pain. Everything is just a varied numbness.

A benchmark or comparison is a necessity for these people. How else would they know what is acceptable? If everything is functioning the way it is supposed to. How would you know you're doing right without some form of an example?

You can ask for advice. That's all you can do. But at the end of the day, you know that the voice in your  head is right, that the niggling feeling that something is wrong almost always means that it is. Even if you can't rate it on a scale. All you have to count on is in binary: 0 or 1.

Others don't understand this, this inability to articulate the wrongness you feel in exact terms. And often lose patience. What is more important - so have you. Lost patience with yourself.

It is then time to let things slide, and sweep the things you can't understand or face under the carpet. Trick is to never change the carpet, or look beneath it as you sweep more stuff under.

here we go again...

There is no point in trying to change things to make it go your way. You still won't know what to do when it does. 

And the things you want to stay the same, don't. 

Screw it.

Guns N Roses - Feb 12

If you've survived a November Rain when you've been Estranged, been accused of a lack of Patience in your journey on a Nightrain to the Paradise City; remember it was all worth it, even Better than whatever you expected from this Street of Dreams...

Futility

That day at the church, she knew. She'd never been to churches before, not the traditional ones anyway, the kind you see in the movies or read about in books; where something poignant, romantic, sad, happy thing, or some bloody strong feeling happens to people. But this morning was different.

Redemption and damnation after all are just results of desire. 

Clarity. That's what happened, that's what usually happens when you're recovering from a drug high. Clarity like this make people take a gun and shoot themselves in the head. Or someone else. [No it's not just men who shoot, women do too. It's about accessibility, not gender that makes men shoot themselves, and women to take pills. We'd all like a little privacy for our private actions, so what are women left with at home when the men have taken the guns out to play?]

Anyway, about the epiphany in church. It was when the flowers were to be arranged on the pews for someone's wedding. She knew nothing about  what was to be done. She'd never done it before you see. Never was good at things like this. Arranging flowers, sewing, making polite conversation. All the things that's supposed to come naturally to anyone with half a brain. 

She didn't like flowers. Why anyone in their right mind would like things like flowers, things that are beautiful but stupid to get their heads chopped off and thrown into the bin was beyond her comprehension. But apparently, they make ugly permanent wooden pews look good for an hour of the service. Make a good photograph they do. A masquerade for an uncomfortable evening. Oh they're perfect for funerals. Dead heads on dead heads. That was apt.

But she tried. To be normal. Like her friends. To be with her friends. But then she started sweating. Again. Like when she has to talk to some stranger, or make up a story on the spur of the moment. Whatever she took to get her courage up wasn't working now. She was still nervous, shaking. Loud voices disturb her more than she lets on. She is so good that to the world she doesn't react at all like normal people to sudden sounds. But really her heart has stopped, she knows it. People think she's got a thick skin, but it's neither fight nor flight, just freeze. Then the sweating begins once her heart starts normal mode.

When heat is removed from a superheated gas, the temperature of the gas decreases as it is cooled until it reaches the saturation point. If enough heat is removed after it reaches the saturation, some of the gas will turn back into liquid. 

Remove heat after saturation point. Become liquid. You've got to love physics, it explains everything, don't it?

She realizes there's no getting away from the truth. She leaves without a word to anyone, takes a bus, and 12 hours later is in another city. Just for a day. Meets him. Has lunch. Doesn't touch him. Or him her. He doesn't see her off, but she leaves. Again. 

She didn't want to... she knew it that day among friends, among strangers, in a small chapel that needed beautiful stupid flowers for some strangers' wedding.

She may not have stayed. But she didn't want to leave. That day. And he never knew. 

He never will.

Word outside my place

"Whitney Houston's dead. Bobby Brown is still alive. HOW UNFAIR IS THAT??"

- screamed by some random guy out here on MacDougal...

I guess now she knows where broken hearts go... RIP
(Playing your greatest hits tonight...)