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• Thursday, November 20, 2008 04:09 PM

  @ The New Number 2

  Now you've done what I thought wouldn't happen tonight--you've made me laugh. Me a hero? You set your standards quite low. (By the way, I also liked The Prisoner!)

  Maybe it's because I had a hard day at work today. Or maybe it's because I'm listening to Estonian romantic songs (Urmas Alender, Birgitte Õigemeel...) and they keep singing about how love ends up trapping us into some unsolvable puzzle and causing harm. ("Kas sa tead, mida tähendab / Üks armastus suur..." 'do you know what a great love means?'; "...ent oled sa mõelnud või tundnud, mis saab kui mind enam ei ole..." 'yet you've probably thought or wondered, what will happen when I am no longer with you?').

  Or maybe it's that old Beatles song--"Oh, look at all the lonely people..." Man, I wished so much I knew what to tell people so that they could be happy. I sometimes wish so much there was something I could do...

  Or maybe it's me listening to Joy Division--they were very important to me in a rather dark time of my life. Remember "Love will tear us apart"? (You can now find all their songs in YouTube...) I remember thinking "Isolation", despite its stupid and irritating melody, was one of the most perfect songs ever written--it really says everything worth saying about the feeling of isolation... "A blindness that touches perfection, yet fails just like everything else... Mother I try please believe me, I'm doing the best that I can... I'm ashamed of the things I've been put through, I'm ashamed of the person I am..."

  If only people would resist the Essentializing/Immanentizing Trap, the desire to Blame Something Big, men's nature, women's nature, feminism, God's unknowable plan, the Republicans,... and realized that life is unfair and people simply don't always get what they want, and that no amount of politicking or fairness redistribution or Rules books or date rape hotlines or whatever isn't going to solve it completely, because it's ultimately metaphysical. Like that little doctor in Vanilla Sky asking 'what's happiness to you?'

  It's good to fight for equality and fairness, and I hope men and women will be able to live as equal beings. But that won't solve all their problems. Actually, by making other distracting factors (prejudice, sexism, etc.) disappear, it will actually make the essential, metaphysical problems only sadly clearer. Life doesn't come with a refund guarantee, happiness isn't just waiting round the corner, and love can be wasted. Sorry about that.

  —Asehpe Read Asehpe's other letters
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