We wish you Merry Schadenfreude!
I’ve had a wish to feel Schadenfreude (pleasure obtained from the troubles of others) recently. (For a good song on the matter listen to Avenue Q (iTMS|Amazon))
Its not a very stoic thing to do, when other people have troubles it should be a reminder of the troubles that can face us all, not an occasion for rejoicing.
I’ve been in that sort of blah mood lately. Kevin would say its because I don’t have a Christmas tree up. I would put them up, but the house feels like Alaska without the mineral resources. Its really this vast wasteland of sorts, a field broken promises and the past. I just don’t want to take any ownership over my dad’s house, at least not more than I have to. I feel like a tenant everywhere I am, unwilling to set down anymore roots than I’m required to set down.
I’ve had more than enough opportunities to feel Schadenfreude. I got a call from my mom this morning, she has handbell practice this morning, and she is performing tonight. But, the conductor is out of town because her husband needs a bone marrow transplant for leukemia. There are dead mice on our back porch. (Now there is a case of unfair subsidies, our cats both get fed at the house, then they feast on various backyard creatures, which haven’t had the resources of being fed.)
I think its not that I want to feel good because someone else is feeling bad, but more along the lines that i just want to feel good period.
I dunno. I’ve got a date Friday, that should be fun. Although he sounds like as much of a depressive as I am. Oh hell, misery loves company right?
Now hows that? A double horizontal rule! Whee!!! I’m living on the dangerous side now. Geeze. I’m resorting to cheap formatting to take a risk.
I wonder why we’re programmed to take risks? I mean real risks. Not cheap formatting risks.
Risks can be really fun, you can get a great rush off of them, especially when the risk pays off. When it doesn’t you still get a rush, just in the opposite direction.
In some ways that is how we move forward. You could argue that our ancestors that took risks were more likely to survive and thrive in general.
I’ve not been taking risks. I’ve been calling the social/psychological place that I’ve been in the womb, essentially a mode of being where I take as few risks as possible and incubate. I’m getting pretty restless. I guess you could say I’m attempting to kick my way out of the womb.
I just don’t know what to take a risk on. I am so weary of the triple failure that I experienced in January, that I don’t want to take too big a risk. When I told a friend of mine that I applied for the Citiphone job in Cincinnati she asked me, “Why just move to Cincy? Why not move somewhere you really want to go?” I don’t want to fail big. I don’t have the emotional resources to fail big at the moment, nor the fiscal resources. (Although, I’m always amazed when I need to I can find money.) If I move or commute to Cincinnati, Dayton is still only 45 minutes north.
I read Shawn’s entry Early Christmas today. He seems so happy. I originally thought the schadenfreude title when I read that. There is a part of me, who wants him to hurt really badly and I want to be the one with schadenfreude. I should be happy because he’s happy and part of me is happy. Its the same with Brad. DOES ANYONE ELSE FEEL CRAPPY?????
This is not the best time of year for me. In a week there is New Years, which for the past two years have been the start of bad things for me, both with Marcus and Shawn. Christmas is a reminder of how much we’re manipulated.
The eye opener to the manipulation matter was my 1998 school trip to New England. It wasn’t that we went to New England as much as that we cut ourselves off from the media and lived in really close corners. Much of my journal from that trip works through determining how much of our brains we actually own and how much of our brains are owned by marketers. (They didn’t come up with the term “mindshare” for nothing.) I honestly don’t know how much of my brain I own and how much is the domain of society and marketers. (The only way to really determine this would involve unethical experiments, which is why we don’t know. If WWII had lasted a bit longer Mengle could’ve gotten the answer, but I doubt he was interested in such questions.)
But back to Christmas, what is annoying is that we’re in a shopping and feeding frenzy right now than for no better reason because we’ve been told to be in a shopping and feeding frenzy right now. Come next month we’ll be getting advertised to death about getting out of the debt we racked up shopping and losing the pounds we ate onto ourselves.
I must admit even I have had trouble resisting the urge to buy gifts. At least I’ven’t gone on anything of a spree only spending about $200 on gifts for 13 people. (Another way to put it is I spent about 24 hours at work to buy gifts. This excludes all the extra time I put in assembling my gifts.)
This begs a bigger question, what is an agnostic doing giving Christmas gifts? I could say out of tradition, the rest of my family gives christmas gifts, and I was brought up Presbyterian so its not like I’m unfamiliar with the holiday.
But, I prefer a different explanation one given by some anthropologists to explain the clustering of important holidays in the winter; I give gifts on Christmas to participate in the primary holiday of light during the winter, in an attempt to brighten the days of those around me.
I sure know I need it.