Caught with one's pants down

Oh, man. Something funny happened this evening. I swapped the day with Exene, because she was going to be super-late with work, so I took the boys tonight. Anyway, I was minding the boys, wearing my TAB cola t-shirt and some boxer shorts, when there was a knock on the door, and the boys started raising a ruckus, and I thought it was going to be Exene with some unexpected issue, but it turned out to be a candidate for Ward Alderman and one of his supporters, doing a door-to-door thing with prospective voters!

So, I'm standing there in my doorway, in my boxers, talking about education reform with a would-be alderman. He was asking me what issues mattered to me, and I pointed out how the TIF system was a wreck and needed to be fixed, and so he shpieled on that a bit. Then one of my neighbors came home from work, down the hall, and saw me talking to these guys. I felt like saying "Hey, we're talking about education reform! Just leave your pants and join in the debate!" When they left, the supporter said "Btw, love the t-shirt." Bahah!

I'm happy to report that I can smoothly debate city politics with complete strangers while in my boxers.

Final Solution

I haven't listened to Pere Ubu in awhile. I always loved this one...

The Call of the Mild

A visual representation of the dichotomy between the romantic's conception of love, and the realist's, below...

The Romantic.

The Realist.

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.