Assignment

He’s making me write.  It’s fucking midnight!  Isn’t he supposed to be the GOOD influence that stops me when I TRY to stay up all night?  How is making me write at fucking midnight helping anything!  It’s because he doesn’t know what to do with me.  He’s at the end of his rope, he can’t penetrate whatever cloud my brain is lost in and he thinks if I write to the faceless masses I’ll reveal some secret key he can turn to make me behave.

I’m hurting him.

I want to care about that, but I’m just angry and…  I’m hurt and I don’t want to feel hurt so I’m shoveling anger on top of it to try to bury it and he just looks at me and makes me feel more hurt and then I have to be more angry so I don’t have to feel the hurt and the guilt for making him look at me like that…

Adele wrote to my last blog post.  I saw your reply, thank you.  He says I can’t answer until tomorrow, though.  But he told me to write so I’m writing, he can’t really tell me to write and then tell me I can’t say hello to you, can he?

I watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest today.  That was such a fucking brilliant, amazing movie.  It was a brilliant, amazing book, and then they did it justice with the movie which most movies don’t do.

That’s not why I’m upset.

I used to get upset by that movie.  But today I just appreciated how brilliant it is…

But sometimes I wonder if the world would be happier if I was a little less smart.  D would be happier, I’m pretty sure.  He stopped trying to reason with me and just told me to write.  It’s because he doesn’t know what else to do with me.  I’m too smart.  It’s a defect.  He should learn to gag me.  It isn’t always necessary to LET me argue, you know… especially because I’m too damn good at it.

Everyone thinks being smart is a good thing.  Like to the point that I can’t even discuss it because people will think I’m being arrogant because they all think that being smart is a good thing, so if I say I’m smart, I must be saying I’m better than them.  Why can nobody understand that it SUCKS sometimes!  It’s fucked up!  It’s… disappointing and disillusioning and isolating and miserable.

I build up certain people that I think of as smarter than me… then I can look up to them and not feel like I’m a freak… I can believe that I’m not alone and… then they say something stupid.  And I think, wait, you’re supposed to be SMARTER than me!  You can’t say something stupid!  So I think, well, everybody has blind spots, I’ll just gently point it out.  But then they trench in and DEFEND their stupidness.  And I think… What?  You’re supposed to be the smart person!  And not just smart, but… wise… self-reflective… mature…

I don’t want to be the most mature person I know.  I don’t want to be the smartest person I know.  I don’t want to be… I don’t want to be the only one who can save myself… that’s what that’s what I had when I was a kid and he was raping me and I was the one running my own family, I was the one taking care of everybody… so who could save me?  Who could I turn to?  Nobody.  I was it.  I was who everybody else turned to.  Nobody was my hero…  Nobody was…  nobody was perfect… not even when I was a kid and you’re supposed to be able to look up to somebody as your hero…

I never got the chance to grow up and realize my childhood hero was actually a human being.  I want to have had a chance to feel that disappointment, because it would have meant that for a while, I got to have a hero.

I never had a hero.

Now I’m an adult and I should know better, but I still try to make people into heroes.  I try to make them the people I can look up to, but I can’t, because they’re not.  They’re human and flawed and ignorant and narrow-minded…  Everyone…

I can understand why M and R are so attached to their religion.  They have a built-in hero.  Someone completely without flaws.  Inhuman.  Because humans are crap to depend on.

Of course, they can’t actually talk to, see, touch, feel this perfect being, it’s all created in their minds, they just BELIEVE in this god… but I can understand the comfort of it, of needing something to believe in that is perfect and without any of the human flaws.  Humans are disappointing.

I hate my class.

I was doing so much better today.  I felt like I finally had a handle on things, I finally understood things.  I was a little annoyed and disillusioned because we have to grade these “sample papers” that were written by former students as an exercise for us to understand the rubric that will be used to grade our writing…  I’m reading these MASTERS level papers, and they are crap.  Really.  One of them could have been written by a high school sophomore.  And this is a Masters level thesis class.

Then I went and got into a discussion with someone I usually respect as level-headed and open-minded and with his feet on the ground.  And he went and spouted off a stereotype and… it knocked all the hero shine off of him.  And I was angry at him for doing that.  For taking that away from me.  Isn’t that childish?  What does he owe me?  Nothing.  I hardly even know him, just interact with him in discussions.  But I built up an idea of him as respectable and then he blew it and I need to get over it.  I need to stop building people up.  People are human, they’re going to fail.  I have to learn to appreciate what is good about them and let the rest go… It’s not fair to make them heroes.  They’re not.  Nobody is.  If I need a perfect being, I probably ought to become a theist.

Since that isn’t going to happen any time soon, I probably ought to be a better Buddhist and stop with the attachment and expectations.

See, being smart doesn’t mean jack shit in this world.  Being smart doesn’t mean you don’t get all stupid and build up expectations on people.  It doesn’t mean you don’t get all irrationally disappointed when they don’t meet your expectations.  It doesn’t mean you are good at your religion.  It doesn’t mean any damn thing.  People should stop making such a big deal out of it.

Someone can say he is smart, but the question should be, “Yeah, but are you mature?  Are you a critical thinker?  Do you have perspective?  Are you introspective?  Can you examine and confront your own shortcomings without being defensive and childish?  Can you treat other people with kindness even in the face of their unkindness?  Can you admit your mistakes?  Can you love even when someone isn’t being lovable?  Can you see past your own ego?  Can you understand the world is bigger than our little, individual experiences of it?  If you can’t do all that, who gives a flying fuck how smart you are?  Smart doesn’t make you a good human being.  It doesn’t have all that much to do with it, in fact.”

People don’t understand me.  I try to tell them I’m hurt by something they said and they don’t listen.  They get all nasty and mean about it.  D says that I need to consider that maybe the people I respect so much respect me, too, and hearing that they let me down with their behavior – maybe that’s hard to hear so they get defensive because it hurts to think they actually screwed up in my eyes.

I don’t think people think that much of me.

To believe his argument, I’d have to believe his premise that people hold me and my opinions in high regard, and I don’t believe that.  I’m nobody.  I’m just a smart girl, that doesn’t mean anything, didn’t I just prove that?  Smart is nothing.  Other things matter more and I don’t have those things.  No one has any reason to respect me or hold me in high regard.  My disappointment in their behavior should be no threat to them.  They should be able to simply see it as what it is and recognize what they did wrong and change it.  They always get all full of bluster and justifications and arguments about how they’re not wrong.  And… it’s so strange, because they’re usually logical people… but then suddenly they start being so illogical…

D is saying I’m the one being illogical right now.

Maybe he’s smarter than me.

That would be comforting.  I need people who are smarter than me.  I need somebody to be smarter than me sometimes.  And better than me.  Better than me isn’t so hard.  But nobody values those things, they only value the smarter.  Why can’t somebody be proud of being BETTER – more kind, more wise, more mature, more critical thinking, more tolerant, more peaceful… why can’t THOSE be the things we value?  Why does my intelligence have to be a threat?  It’s nothing.  It’s just a defect in my brain.  I didn’t work for it.  I didn’t earn it.  It’s there because I have no filters and my brain had to develop more neural connections to deal with the constant influx of sensory information that normal brains can filter as irrelevant.  So I’ve got a defective brain that overgrew its neural connections and has defective dendrite pruning and suddenly everybody is all afraid of my opinion of them.  Really?  Let’s start valuing the things that actually matter…

D is smiling.  He says he understands what upset me now.

I’m not sure how, I’m more confused than I was when I started this stupid exercise.  And it’s now 1 in the morning.

He says it isn’t my intelligence that makes the people whose opinions I’m caring about at the moment defensive.  He says it’s because I AM good, in all those other ways, and that makes them feel guilty… oh dammit!  He just used me against myself!

He says I have to write this down so I don’t forget later when I get foggy.  He says that I am a good person and that’s why those people get defensive when I point out that they did something hurtful, it’s because of my goodness, not my intelligence.  They are intelligent, too.  But he said it’s like when I started writing (he made me scroll up and see what I wrote when I started this) and I said I was hurt, but I didn’t want to feel hurt so I was being angry to cover it up.  Sometimes someone we respect points out how we’re acting poorly and it makes us feel guilty and we don’t like feeling guilty so we get hostile and angry to try to avoid that bad feeling of knowing we screwed up and hurt somebody…

I still would have to buy his premise that I’m a good person.

He says that’s not his premise, he says his premise is other people think I’m a good person which is a subjective statement that I can’t argue with.

He thinks I can’t argue with that?  Silly boy.  He should know me better by now!

He is smiling, he says he won and I know it and now I’m just trying to deflect attention away from that.

He didn’t win anything.  I never accepted his premise on the grounds that it can’t be accepted because it is a subjective premise which makes it a circular logic fallacy so it is invalid.

He says he’s the dom and he says the argument is over and since I accepted the premise of his dominance, I have no more arguments to make.

I don’t think that would fly in debate class…  o.O

I don’t really feel like posting this.  D says to do it anyway because maybe somebody else out there might feel the same way and if I post it then they will know they’re not the only one.

I disagree with his premise that there is anyone else in the world remotely as neurotic as me.

He says to say goodnight.

I think he should just type this if he’s going to talk to me and make me write everything he says… I don’t think I agreed to be his secretary, even if I agreed to be his sub…  And I’m not even that…really…

He says say goodnight.  :

I’m thinking about it!

Sigh.  Goodnight internet.

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