Heart-Shaped Box

My creation of valentines for the boys for school went well; B1's classmates loved them, and B2 talked about the "millions" of valentines he got (really, more like a couple of dozen, but for him, everything good is in the millions).

Valentine's Day has come and gone. No doubt the cards are sold, the candies bought. I cashed a check at the bank and the teller asked me "Oooh, something for Valentine's Day?" and I scoffed: "Yeah, right."

I figure I won't blather about love for the rest of the month; leading up to Valentine's Day is more than enough. Suffice to say that romantics understand love; realists and pragmatists never truly will -- it's like trying to compare wildlife with livestock, and finding equivalency -- romantics love wildlife; realists love livestock. Romantics get the wild nature of love; realists run from it, are haunted and frightened by it. Realists try to tame and train love, to harness its power and put it to work for them, which might reap dividends for them at some point, but at the cost of passion and other pleasures of true romance. Romantics never presume to try to tame love, but let it roam freely through their worlds. Which is well and good, except when love upends their worlds, or when it breaks their hearts. But true romantics accept that as a price to be paid for knowing the full joys and agonies of love -- to feel deeply is to feel both pain and pleasure keenly; it is integral to the artistic temperament. The pain can be staggering, but the pleasures of it can be no less intense, if truly felt. To the realist, the logic is apparent: why go through all of that trouble, why travel through the wilderness when there's a perfectly good, paved road right there? Avoid pain and uncertainty, reap rewards, turn the heart into a metronome, counting out the beats until inevitable death. To them, "the road less traveled" is less-traveled for a reason. I understand why a realist might do that; it's their choice, and it may, in fact, be a logical and even rational choice -- not terribly exciting or interesting, but it's safe, if unimaginative. I'm just not a realist, myself. If I were a realist, I wouldn't be a very good writer, though, now would I?

Anyway, onward and upward. Spring is teasing its way into the weather, here. I refuse to accept Spring in Chicago until, I dunno, May. ;)

Truly, we get warm spells sometimes like this, and then when you think it's time to pack away the Winter gear, a freak storm comes in and wallops you. So, I'm not holding my breath over this warm trend of the moment.

The Look of Love

Need another video...

ABC, "The Look of Love"

...something to capture the absurdity of love, and of 80s videos, in general. Still, ABC cranked out nice dance-pop tunes in their prime.

Movies

This is kind of amusing -- Five Movies to Cure You of Valentine's Day. I like the line the writer wrote, saying "Maybe love is both awesome and sucky." Bahah! Glad "Valentine" wasn't included in this list, although it would've been funny if it had been, since it was just a crappy slasher movie.

This is also amusing: The Dark Origins of Valentine's Day.

Happy Valentine's Day

I don't like OutKast overmuch, but this one is topical, ergo, I post it. I like his pink-hued Desert Eagle...

Slushy

Man, the temperatures went up a little bit (not even that much; it's still cold, just not AS cold) and so much of that deluge of snow is melting, turning the city into slush-and-puddle central. I'm just surprised that so much snow is melting so quickly.

I made valentines for the boys to take to school, which was fun. B2 loves playing with art materials (making a mess, of course). B1 just kinda rolls with it.

Love Song

This is a nice, acoustic version of The Cure's "Love Song"...



The Companion Cube from "Portal" really comes into its own on Valentine's Day...

Happy Valentine's Day!

Someecards always crack me up with their Valentine's Day e-cards. I'm sure they brainstorm cards like these and just slay themselves. These are some of my favorites of this year's batch...

Howl

More howling winds again. Likely means another temperature crash, maybe a storm approaching. Looks like 20-34 mph winds for the next couple of days.

Love Will Tear Us Apart

Oh, you know I had to do it, what, with Valentine's Day looming...

Brokenhearted

Happy Almost Valentine's Day! In talking/thinking about love, the unavoidable topic of heartbreak must come up. People like to say that everything happens for a reason, and never is that perhaps truer than in the arena of heartbreak. There's always a reason for heartbreak, and responsibility for it is shared, like so much else in love. Either you loved the wrong person, or loved for the wrong reasons, or you didn't see something that you should have about the other person. When a heart is broken, there is clearly a reason for it. Heartbreak doesn't just happen. Maybe you really did love someone more than they ever loved you, and so, for them, stomping on your heart was as inconsequential to them as getting a cup of coffee in the morning. Maybe they didn't respect you, or respect themselves, or were too stupid to recognize a good thing when they had it. Maybe they were just a rotten person. Maybe all of the above.

The weird or cruel aspect to it is that if you don't love deeply, or lack the capacity to love, you'll never feel heartbreak. Which, sadly, gives an edge to folks like that in relationships -- if love makes you vulnerable and at the same time prevents you from thinking solely of yourself, you're toast if you're up against someone who lacks the capacity to love you in kind. You'll end up emotionally defrauded, or flat-out devastated. And the person who broke your heart? They'll just dust themselves off and be fine at the end of the day.

I've known true heartbreak only a couple of times, but it was real agony. The closest calculus for me was reacting to a death -- just that deep, full-body ache and gusty sobs. It's horribly painful. Just as the infinite promise of true love is intoxicating and delightful, so the desolate reality of a shattered, broken love can be horrendous. Some folks respond with thinking that they'll never love again, will never trust their heart to someone else. Others perhaps just pine. There are any number of ways of responding to heartbreak. I know my own heartbreak scarred me.

The cold consolation of it is that you can't make someone love you. You can't fake that. Either they love you, or they don't. And if they don't love you, you're just going to humiliate yourself if you fawn and brood over them -- you'll earn only their contempt, and if they're unprincipled, they'll use that to roast you alive.

You have to accept that if they broke your heart to begin with, then you're better off without them. There may have been any number of reasons for why a love might die, and there's probably some shared responsibility for it, but there's usually someone who pulled the trigger first, someone who gave up on the love, who broke someone's heart to begin with. Once that's done, there's no way to salvage it. Just bury it, leave some flowers, and move on. Otherwise, the ghost of that lost love will haunt you, and you don't want that. Ghosts will pull you down with them into oblivion. Ghosts always win, if you let them into your world, or worse, into your heart.

But it's hard, if you really love someone, because part of you believes you could have made it work, there's a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking -- If only I'd done this, if only I'd done that. The simple truth of it is that if they loved you at all, you wouldn't have had to do those things -- if they'd loved you truly, they'd never have broken your heart.

The Bow in the Snow

Crazy Little Thing Called Love

Okay, I didn't even know there was a video to this tune, which was always one of my favorite Queen tunes. The psycho-sexual subtext of this video makes it particularly amusing these days, since there are the obligatory video babes in it, whereas we know that Freddie Mercury could give a rat's ass about those babes, but the demands of the time required those dancing pretty boys to be off on the margins, instead of right next to Mercury. It would've been far more amusing and subversive had they actually done that, and put the video babes on the fringes, but the times required that to be all under the radar. So, the leather daddy rockabilly vibe of this video is just damned funny, making it a worthwhile addition to the love videos...

Unrequited

So, what does one do if they're in love with someone who doesn't love them equivalently? I don't really have an answer for it. What're the options?

1. Heartbreak, suffer for it
2. Be used and abused, put up with it
3. Wallow in limerence
4. Move on, find someone else

I guess that's it. And, really, the second and third options aren't really options at all; they're just how one can react to an asymmetrical love. But people find themselves in those situations, anyway, which is why I'd even write about it. And it also matters because one can be in a situation where they don't love someone as much as they are, in turn, loved. There could be any number of reasons how this comes about -- maybe Person A has self-esteem issues and is plagued by self-hatred and can't recognize a good love when they see it; or maybe Person A finds insufficient chemistry with Person B to really be moved to that higher love (it's surely the "Let's Just Be Friends" school of love, which is really a soft-pedaling of "You just don't do it for me."

So, if somebody's so fucked up emotionally as to not recognize what a good thing you offer, then lose'em, move on. That's the safest, most logical route to go, if you want to protect your heart. But we know that love is seldom logical, which is why people get into trouble.

If you love someone not as much as they love you, then it's perhaps stickier, because you can recognize the good thing they offer, and still find yourself not transported to those nicer places. I've been on a "courtesy date" or two in my day, where the woman in question most definitely is into me, and I'm not into her, and I'm in the position of not making any sudden movements, lest they be misinterpreted. Because a person can read into whatever they like -- there've been many times when a friend has asked me "What does this mean? Why would they do that?" and I'll offer my opinion on it, and you can see the person reading into it, trying to find the meaning, there. Hope is a wonderful thing, but hope can all too easily become delusion, when love is involved. I remember lovestruck friends mooning over and pining over loves who clearly didn't give two shits about the person in love with them.

If you find you have to justify yourself to someone else, or laundry list your good qualities, or bend over backwards to make someone (fleetingly) happy, odds are you have an asymmetrical relationship, and you're just going to be hurt.

Someone in love with you accepts you fully for who you are, appreciates you completely for who you are, admires you for who you are, treasures any moment they have with you, respects you for who you are. If you're not getting that kind of feedback from someone else, then lose'em, fast, or else you're just going to suffer needlessly and endlessly.

If you're on the receiving end of that kind of asymmetrical love, then it's perhaps harder -- because you might love the person well enough, and genuinely not want to hurt their feelings, and maybe "try" to love them more. But in a Zen kind of cruelty, if you have to "try" to love someone, then you don't love them very much, after all (for whatever reason), and you're in the position of just using that person, or humoring them, which deprives you of the fuller pleasures and agonies of love.

It's like when some of my friends had grimly talked about finding "Mr. Good Enough" because they'd given up on finding "Mr. Right." Of course, those people were themselves rather unsuccessful at ever finding a good relationship (big shock, that), but I found it surprising that "settling" for someone even came into anybody's mix.

Who wants "good enough?" Meatloaf is never going to be steak. Ever. So why tell yourself otherwise? Seems like a recipe for dissatisfaction and woe to me.