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electricity into death
Wednesday, November 5 2014
I've heard that people with no feeling in their bodies register weaker emotions than those with normal nervous systems, because they cannot feel their stomachs "turn" or their guts "wrench" as they process bad news (or the giddiness in their bodies when they learn good news). Similarly, I suspect that someone with an emotionally expressive companion experiences heightened reactions to news both bad and good. These heightened reactions come not only when the news is discussed with that companion, but also with the anticipation of discussing that news with the companion as their reaction is simulated in the mind. This has been my experience in my relationship with Gretchen. Sometimes I dread bad news more for her reaction than for what it contains. So, for example, I'd done my best to prepare her for the strong possibility that the evil and willfully-ignorant Republicans were about to take over the US Senate. I'd even dressed as that possibility for Halloween. Sure enough, her reaction was outrage and disgust, though in this case I don't think she was as upset as I was. Disappointment has made me unable to check my usual news websites. I'm usually a news junky, but this is bad news. This is rather similar to the way I handled Kerry's loss in 2004, though in that case it came as more of a surprise. (2010, by contrast, was neither a surprise nor as a grim as either 2004 or 2014.) Eventually I'll get over it, but for now I just want to watch, read, and listen to non-news media.
Over at the Wall Street house, all I did was paint. The living room has proved fairly easy; I found a bucket of paint matching the wall color, and the existing paint hasn't faded enough for the new paint to stand out from it. But in the west bedroom, the paint was older, and I found that the matching paint fresh from the bucket dried significantly darker (less faded) than the existing paint. So I tried feathering the paint from the patches into the wall, though doing that with a small paint roller is trickier than doing it with a brush.
Back home at the house, I found that the thing I most wanted to watch was old episodes of To Catch a Predator downloaded with Bittorrent, though after a few episodes the rigid formularity feels oppressive, as does the moralizing (and the somewhat-dated soupçon of anti-internet hysteria). While it's true that these poor schmucks should know better than to try to meet a twelve or thirteen year old girl at her parents' McMansion while they are supposedly "away," I have a feeling that none of these "predators" would have offended had they not been ensnared by decoys. What tween girl would want to have anything to do with a paunchy middle-aged guy emailing photographs of his penis? Sexual attraction is a huge motivator, and it will always be possible to lure a sizable fraction of men into a trap using the bait of sex with a virgin teenager. Watching it happen, though, is a little like watching a bug zapper turn electricity into death. These are snuff films for reputations.
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