PussEKatDoll's blog: "yeah well"

This is your brain on drugs... Some thoughts on relationships. Your brain is always predicting the future for you based on past experiences. It remembers you left your coffee mug by the keyboard last night so when you walk into the room in the morning you barely notice it's there because it's simply what you expected. Then one morning you wake up and walk up to your computer – something is wrong. You can't tell what it is at first but your subconscious is busy trying to get your attention. Then you finally notice, "Hey, my mug isn't where I left it!" It seems like a sudden realization even though part of you noticed right away and knew what was wrong all along.

So what does your misplaced coffee mug have to do with relationships? It is simply this: your brain is always predicting the future of your current relationship based on its similarities to your past relationships. Since they didn't work out you brain is always offering up predictions of why this one isn't going to work out either. Maybe this quote says it better:

Quote:
"I was thinking that everyone I loved I still love. They are just below the horizonline in my mind's eye, just waiting for them to come up like the sun again. These are the people I pined for, longed for, cried over, would have done anything for. I think that the great challenge in life is to have an experience and not be bitter about it. Love is painful for everyone. To get the full high you've got to pay the full price. What is the full price? It's the devastation of its loss.

Allen Ginsberg once said - love doesn't die, it just get buried under fear and misunderstandings, and the accumulation of missed connections and failures to be brave. It gets buried under all that sludge. It's funny that if someone expresses love for us it means they owe us all kinds of things. From then on, once the word love has come up, the other person is on trial."


This might be helpful too, from the short story the movie "Memento" was based on:

Quote:
Here's the truth: People, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain. Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions, and then again within those twenty-four hours. It's a daily pantomime, one man yielding control to the next: a backstage crowded with old hacks clamoring for their turn in the spotlight. Every week, every day. The angry man hands the baton over to the sulking man, and in turn to the sex addict, the introvert, the conversationalist. Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots.

This is the tragedy of life. Because for a few minutes of every day, every man becomes a genius. Moments of clarity, insight, whatever you want to call them. The clouds part, the planets get in a neat little line, and everything becomes obvious. I should quit smoking, maybe, or here's how I could make a fast million, or such and such is the key to eternal happiness. That's the miserable truth. For a few moments, the secrets of the universe are opened to us. Life is a cheap parlor trick.

But then the genius, the savant, has to hand over the controls to the next guy down the pike, most likely the guy who just wants to eat potato chips, and insight and brilliance and salvation are all entrusted to a moron or a hedonist or a narcoleptic.

The only way out of this mess, of course, is to take steps to ensure that you control the idiots that you become. To take your chain gang, hand in hand, and lead them.