After knowing her online for quite sometime I finally met Ariel Waldman in the flesh today when we meet up at CTTP for coffee, vegan cookies, and cupcakes. It was teh awesome. Later we headed over to, and had a brief tour of the Porn Palace before the opening sessions of Arse Elektronika. She wrote a much better recap than I could so I'll just point you over to her site. People who actually know how to write never cease to amaze me.

Though out the day we spent a good chunk of time talking about choices some people are making, and at least I spent even more time thinking about how we are all faced with these same questions and what direction we decide to run with says so much. It easy to sit back and look at what other people are doing wrong in some situations, because not being a part of them we have a better perspective. But how different can the inside perspective be? I know I've certainly done things that I later wished I'd had the benefit of hindsight to save me the horror of the results, but just as often I've known something was a bad idea, known it was going to end badly, and walked right into it anyway. Why? What was I hoping to get out of it? What are these other people hoping to get out of it?

I was telling my therapist the other day that I never believed the old cliche about it being better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I'm pretty much of the opinion that never having loved at all is way better than having loved and lost. Of course that could just be a grass is greener situation as well - you want the thing you can't have. Either way... these thoughts have been burning in my head all day. When something is a bad idea and you/I/we know that ahead of time, what reason could any of us have for continuing down that path? Because of the short term benefit and enjoyment? Is that good enough? I've got friends in relationships they know aren't going to last (some more obviously than others) yet not only do they not walk away from them, but they keep putting more into them. If you already know there is an expiration date looming in the future, why keep investing?

I do it too so that's not a condemnation, it's a real question. I think a lot of it boils down to just not wanting to admit things to ourselves and others. Mostly ourselves. Other people are way better at accepting our own defeats than we are I think. I know for me personally, I always assume things are going to go over much worse with other people. Then they don't. And then I'm even more mixed up.

Side note, am I the only one that thinks Gabriele Pauli's proposal makes a hell of a lot of sense? She's suggesting that marriages should expire every 7 years, forcing the couple to either renew it for another 7 years, or go their separate ways. Obviously I have a skewed perception on this since I had a marriage that ended after 8 years, but really let's think about this for a second. I was talking to a friend the other day about how I don't think the concept of a single relationship lasting happily ever after is even possible. Of course she invoked the age old examples of parents and grandparents who pulled it off, but my argument is that was then and this is now. In our parents and grandparents times there were no other options - you got married and that was that. You made it work because there was no going back, period. It really truly was "until death do you part." That isn't the case now simply because the idea that people get divorced has circulated, so people think about it, consider it, and now ending things, walking away and starting over is just as viable an option as working them out. Perhaps more so. And you can't undo that, there is no way to remove that idea from the general lexicon. Everyone has a plan B now, one they didn't have X many years ago simply because the idea wasn't as acceptable. Point being if you have no way out, you actually solve the problems because you are stuck with the results. If you know in the back of your head there is an escape route you more frequently ignore or overlook thinks rather than confront them, and eventually they build up to the point when you have no choice left but to walk.

Anyway.

Back to the earlier thought - which is worse? Knowing something is going to fall apart and continuing on and letting it crumble around you? Or using that foresight to put the breaks on before it gets to that nasty part, even if that means convincing someone who might not be as sure of the ultimate demise as you are. I don't know the answer to that one either. Later on, back at Violet's she and I were talking about some other folks and how as much as people complain about long distance relationships for the obvious reasons they are actually pretty ideal in many ways - most notably that they allow you to avoid the "real life" aspects of being around someone all the time. You get to create this fantasy world in your head of what a relationship with that person might be like because when you are around them you have to make sure every moment it filled with awesome, and when you aren't around them you have the benefit of forgetting the negatives and only remembering the bits you want to. Of course this hinges on that relationship staying long distance, because the more you close that gap the less able you are whitewash all of those flaws.

OK, enough rambling for the night. It's 3am and I promised Violet I'd read the intro to Palahniuk's Lullaby before going to sleep so I'm closing the laptop and opening the book. See you all tomorrow.