Switching seats on the Titanic

Although I don't use the phrase in the sense that relapsing drug addicts who go from one drug to another use the phrase, I thought it might be a fitting description for a common feeling we all have. It's the unfortunate fact that, after having escaped the shackles of our high school selves we find the erstwhile restraints still present, in a truer, more insidious form. It's the moment when, after having blamed your unhappiness, failure, myriad self-loathings -- replace with less dramatic, more realistic, subtle, complex, personalized psychological issues here -- on something else, that something disappears and you no longer have a scapegoat but are nevertheless still crippled. Then you say to yourself: Oh! I was supposed to DO something about this, take a bite out of the self-improvement pie and see the great American daydream with my own eyes. Instead the only real solution is to scuttle your blasted idea of happiness and if James Cameron were to describe you with a CGI animation, you'd be one of those ant-people sliding down the deck of a big steel ship, bumping into rivets and steel pipes and all, before it breaks in half and slips unceremoniously into a big salty puddle.

Who am I talking about? Myself? The other members of the blog, some of whom may or may not use paragraphs (hint hint)? No one really. I wasn't intending to talk about this touchy feely stuff at all.

In fact, I was compelled to donate a few words only out of indebtness to the July 4th Blogyourfeelings cause. Apparently in this country one of the most important sources of introspection is the wonderful reverie induced by the inhalation of the remnants of colorful chemical bombs. I had a firework when I was 5, it was this plastic cannonball of sorts, pretty impressive size for a pair of small hands like mine, and clearly too complex for my equally small brain to handle. I put it in upside down in the launching tube and put a crater in the pavement outside my grandfather's apartment complex.

So what was I thinking about amid the satisfying thuds and pops of Freedom's birthday? Well, the cruel fate of males who ponder excessively about the difference between sex, beauty, and love, and even though sexy isn't even the same part of speech as love the two still manage to pop into my head, both of them, at inopportune moments for the appreciation of either. And what is the evolutionary purpose of those people who can be labeled emphatically, certifiably sexy that to ponder them actually begs the question of why they aren't emphatically, certifiably lovely as well, although that's really an easy question to answer. Not so is the existence of those for whom sexy is a crass understatement but their presence in fact transcends your ability to have an infatuation for them per se, but cause you to speculate on the nature of your faculties of love and aesthetic appraisal in general.

And if you think I'm talking about anyone in particular, yes, Ms. Portman, your ring is on layaway.