What is Love?

I just washed my hair four times because it was so disgusting.

Anyway, that's beside the point, except to provide a backdrop for my philosophical self-inquiries. I do my best thinking in the shower, and probably my second best while washing dishes. I spent a collective five hours or so reading through roughly 2,500 PostSecrets over the past two days, curious as to what all these people had to say that was so deep and dark. Alot of them were overdramatic, a few dealt with suicidal thoughts, strange fantasies, weird habits, vengeful "I just slept with your boy-/girlfriend" notes, and the like, but the overwhelming majority had to do with love. I can't begin to estimate the number of times I saw something like "I still love him/her," or "He/she is my best friend and I'm in love, but we will never work," or some variation. So I got to pondering, what exactly do they mean by "love?" Well, my ultimate conclusion was that this word is a sort of misnomer, although I do suspect that some of them were genuine, if slightly campy or "emo."

"You know," I said to myself, "I bet people who say things like 'I love pizza' are more accurately expressing true love than people who say with alarming frequency to each other 'I love you.'"

"That's funny," I answered, "and quite true. I mean, no matter how many times you get sick from eating too much pizza, you will never stop liking it, right?"

And that's funny, because I suddenly realized that people who casually say they love anything, be it music, food, television, sports, or whatever, are probably telling the truth. For instance, one week ago today I was supposed to see My Chemical Romance play at the Glens Falls Civic Center. This is the first music I think I've ever really liked, and I daresay I've said I love it frequently enough. Alas, three members of the band were stricken with salmonella a few days prior, and as a result about six shows were cancelled, mine included. This naturally made me quite upset; more upset than I think most people realize, and more upset than I would have thought myself. For the next day or so I refused to listen to "The Black Parade" (and actually I'm quite thankful for this, because I discovered how truly awesome Muse is in the process) for no real reason. I thought I would only be upset further by listening, so I didn't. Then, all of the sudden, I had an intense longing to hear "Famous Last Words." I dialed it up, and amazingly it was the same awesome music it had always been. There was no bitter taste. No matter what, even after having been crushed by this very music, I was still able to listen, appreciate, and love it as much as before. So I asked myself again, what then is love?

"Well," I ruminated, "most people, when they hear the word 'love,' probably think of hearts and kisses and romantic Valentines type stuff, right?"

"Indeed," I agreed. "From what I understand, most people think of love as this sort of feeling that you get when you are around that 'special someone,' a supposed soul mate."

And here is where the tricky part of the discussion began. Perhaps people are too caught up in the romantic to realize the realistic. What's the difference between loving pizza and loving a person? As it turns out, loving pizza is just as shallow as the pop culture version of loving another human being. If pizza didn't taste good, would so many people still like it? Oddly enough, human beings have an added level of attraction that seems to be at the same time the key to and the bane of true love. Unlike pizzas, humans have personalities and souls, all individual. Through this, rather than by taste (well, maybe some people actually like the way other people taste; I wouldn't know), humans connect to each other. And yet, while a pizza is perfectly content to be consumed by a human and has no desires of its own, every person is innately selfish, greedy, and lustful. Naturally this makes it impossible for one to love a person the same way they love a pizza, because the pizza will satisfy their desires unconditionally. Thus, it seems there must also be an added facet to this higher dimension of love. Because every person wants the best for themself, no one can possibly get exactly what they want all the time.

"Well now, you've struck upon an interesting point," I said.

"Indeed.There is no personal sacrifice involved in loving a pizza," I concluded.

And then I thought of Jesus, who said to love our enemies. Whether you take him as God, a prophet, or just an inspired teacher, this brings up an interesting point. Obviously it's rather silly to think of romantic attachment to our enemies. Clearly that's not what was intended by that directive. Rather, this deals with the part of love that is conscious choice. We don't have to like our enemies, but we should be forgiving, kind, patient, and thoughtful of their humanity. No one is perfect. No one is exactly like us, which is just a recipe for conflict, especially given the huge number of people on the planet.

"Hmmmmm..." I made an onomatopoeic sound indicative of deep thought. "So unlike our mindless love for pizza, love for another human must also include some decision on our part, beyond a simple attraction."

"Precisely." I think I had finally hit on something important.

Then I imagined a pizza with a personality and wondered just how much that pizza might want to be eaten. Now, if I were a conscious pizza, I probably wouldn't enjoy the thought of my own consumption very much. No, I certainly wouldn't want to be eaten, but what if the person who wanted to eat me was starving to death? What then? Would I be willing to give myself up for that person's betterment?

"Aha!" I exclaimed.

"And yet," I pondered, "people are still not comparable to pizzas, not even living pizzas, because we don't eat each other. Well, maybe cannibals do, but I mean in general we don't."

Nevertheless, I think by this point I had realized where this discussion was going. Pizzas, it is clear, love the people who eat them unconditionally. How do people love each other though? Well naturally, it seems that if one person loves another person, they would do everything in their power to make that person happy, wouldn't they? In general, I suspect that people who are romantically attached to each other automatically have this sort of desire initially. I suspect further that the emotions we are capable of realizing exist solely for the facilitation of that ultimate decision to really love another person. I also hit upon another interesting idea: it must be easier to love someone from whom we have nothing to really gain, especially in a physical sense. Maybe the romantic aspect of a relationship makes actual bonding more difficult. Maybe people who are just friends, no strings attached, simply connected by common interests values, actually experience the strongest form of love. On that same token, though, wouldn't two people who are romantically attached that are capable of achieving that sort of connection have an even more powerful love between them?

"You know," I said," your shower wasn't actually this long."

"Yes, I'm aware of that." I replied. "I only came up with the basic framework. All of this is kind of building on my pondrances whilst under the streaming water. It must have something to do with water, these strange epiphanies that I have."

Despite all my deep thinking, I don't suppose I've really come to a good conclusion. Despite my best efforts, I can't put a definition to love. Still, I have decided that people who place their lives in the hands of a feeling in hopes of a fairy tale life are on a collision course for disaster. It's said that the person you should marry should be your best friend. I think this is probably true. Obviously not everyone is going to end up marrying someone they've known their entire life and are literally "best friends" (in the traditional sense) with. That just means that we have to put forth the effort to become best friends with those we are involved with romantically. I can only conclude that a physical relationship is detrimental to those who have not established a true friendship. That of course opens up a whole new can of worms (what is friendship, exactly?), but I shan't get into that one now.

"So what we're saying is that there are certain necessary aspects of true love," I summarized the whole thought process.

"Exactly," I affirmed."There's a choice involved in developing a real relationship with another human being. We have not only to share an attraction and common interests, but we have to share values like trust, faithfulness, honesty, and a desire to serve each other. These sorts of things are all willing admissions. We trust each other, despite our many reasons not to. We remain faithful to each other, despite potential desires that cause us to stray. We open up to each other so that we have a mutual understanding. We work to make each other's lives better, even if we have to make personal sacrifices."

"That's pretty profound," I thought aloud. "I can't believe I came up with all of this in the shower. Well, at least the general idea, anyway."

So when I went back to thinking about these PostSecrets, I wondered how many of them actually dealt with true love. I don't intend to pass judgment on anyone, but I concluded that in the cases of the "I still love him/her" postcards, there is a good chance these people focused on the romantics and failed to achieve true love. The feelings that they may still have are merely those some emotional attachments. Obviously this isn't universally true; any number of circumstances could lead to unrequited love like this. In general, I think people try too hard to apply fairy tale magic to real life, and end up with a skewed idea of love that only makes things worse. Maybe some people make it work. I don't know. As for me, I fully intend to achieve true love, not just the Hollywood version, but the kind that will last a lifetime. I don't ever want to be the guy posting "I still love her" on PostSecret.

"Alas," I said, "little league is calling your name."

"I know," I said, "as is food and clothing, since I still haven't gotten fully dressed after my shower."

"Well I don't know about you, but I'm gonna get right on that," I ended the absurd conversation with myself finally.

FROM THE ASHES!

I feel sort of like a phoenix, writing a blog post after a lengthy period of dormancy. Back in the glory days of high school, when exciting things happened to me on a daily basis, I found it a whole heck of a lot easier to write about lots of stuff fairly regularly. These days I live in a state of constant boringdom (not to be confused with boredom), where nothing out of the ordinary happens to me. I pretty much live and sleep most of the time. That reminds me of the new Blogger, which requires a Google ID to login. This kind of caught me off guard a while ago, though at the time I did have a Google account (calvinocious@gmail.com, if you spam me I will track you down and force feed you marshmallows until you throw up), but even so I had an atrocious time actually logging in because of passwords and things like that. I have to say that the benefits of the new Blogger, such as "Labels for this post," vastly outweigh the pseudo-inconvenience of having to login with my stinking Google account. Google is like the evil internet empire. It's a dang good search engine, though. I admire Google, while at the same time sort of feeling like I want to stage a huge revolution against the tyranny and oppression that it lays so heavily upon us all. The trouble is, I don't know how to stage this sort of revolution.

In other news, the greatest and most mighty rock band on the face of life, My Chemical Romance, was defeated by food poisoning last week. This meant that they cancelled a bunch of shows, mine included. Spell checker is telling me "cancelled" is spelled improperly, and I'm telling you that spell checker is retarded, because that's a perfectly acceptable way to spell the word. It can also be spelled "canceled," but I don't like that spelling. I think it looks stupid, and I'm very liberal in my use of the letter L, so I always opt for that extra instance in the word "cancelled." Spell checker can suck an ole buck. Anyway, my show got cancelled, so I now have to wait for it to be rescheduled. In my opinion, to prevent this type of situation from happening in the future, they should probably just not eat while on tour.

I think I would like to take a trip to Six Flags over the summer. Technically, the Great Escape [and Splashwater Kingdom] (the latter only included as part of a clever "two parks in one" scam; despite what they say, it's still one park, it just happens to have water rides) is a Six Flags park, but I'm not talking about this park when I say Six Flags, because I've been there a bunch of times and it still isn't called Six Flags, so it doesn't count. It's been far too long since I've visited an "amusement park" (I think 9th grade was the last time, when my amusement-park-visiting career ended with a bang and lots of pyrotechnics), so I think fixing that is in order, since I don't really have anything else planned for the summer. I think perhaps I may be suffering from some kind of advanced roller coaster withdrawal or something, which might explain my recent weirdness. The funny thing is, I never used to like roller coasters, but then all of the sudden I did like them. Weird, huh? It was like I woke up one morning and turned into a roller coaster person. Anyone who doesn't like roller coasters is a weenie. Clever manipulation of gravity makes for some interesting experiences. Heck, now that I think about it, I haven't been on a real vacation in three years, since that time Woodard came camping with us and we were basically obnoxious for a week, half-heartedly chasing this attractive girl from the site right next to ours. We never actually found out said girl's name, but instead dubbed her "Cookie" because of a shirt she wore that said the same thing on the back. Those were the days.

I saw Spider-Man 3 on Friday, the very day it opened. I have mixed feelings about it. I ultimately concluded that it was a good movie, but not a good Spider-Man movie. Venom was basically wasted (no more so than Doc Ock I suppose, who should not have been killed off), the Sandman wasn't actually a villain so much as a desperate, petty criminal victimized by his circumstances who turned himself around in the end and became a non-villain. The Harry/Spider-Man tag team at the end was so completely unrealistic and clearly just one of those feel-good moments that artsy people love so much in movies, just like the part in the first movie where hordes of New Yorkers suddenly started chucking things at the Green Goblin from atop the bridge. Despite that, it was still a cool team-up; just completely out of character. All in all, I think artsy people doing super hero movies is a bad idea, because they get caught up in all these silly things like romance, inner struggle, and blurring the lines between super heroes and villains with this "well, we all do bad things from time to time, so it's not about beating the bad guy, it's about forgiving them and learning lessons about ourselves" junk. Super hero movies are about action, basic good vs. evil stories set in slightly unusual but generally realistic worlds that exist purely for entertainment. That's why Spider-Man needs to face the Sinister Six in the next movie, without having to deal with Mary Jane, college, Aunt May, lack of money, Ursula the Awkward and Mr. Dinkovich, Harry being a pain in the butt about his dead father, or any of that. There are plenty of action movies that simply exist as action movies. Why can't super hero movies be like this? At the end of the day, Spider-Man 3 failed as a super hero movie, but was pretty successful as an all-around general movie. It was well made and everything, it just missed the point.

We are now up to 20 home runs at Colonie Little League. I'm rather appalled by this high number, though more appalled at some of the names who have hit them. There are ten year olds hitting home runs. This just shouldn't happen. Pitching is a thing of the past, sadly. All-Stars is gonna be a total bummer this year.

Oh yeah, I went to see Relient K last night at Northern Lights, and also ended up seeing Sherwood and Mae (because they played first). Analysis: it was a good show, but the music was so loud I couldn't hear it. Next time I think I'll find a spot much much farther from the stage. However, I do seriously need to go to another show, because I noticed that live music, even live music that I don't necessarily care for, is really energizing and exciting.

Well, since I'm a pirate, I have lots of pirate related things to do right now, including maybe some pseudo-studying for my IEA final exam tomorrow morn at 8 o'clock in the morn. That's an absurd hour for a final exam, but once I'm done with it, I'll be done with it. That's all I have to say about that. I'm gonna miss the SGS once summer starts. It's a magical place.

The End