Questions from Louis II
These were some thought-provoking questions sent to me as a bulletin on MySpace by a thoughtful friend; I decided to use them as the basis for a blog, as most of the answers I thought of went on too long for a bulletin.
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1. What is more difficult for you, looking into someone’s eyes when you are telling someone how you feel, or looking into someone’s eyes when they are telling you how they feel?
I think it’s probably more difficult to look into someone’s eyes when they are telling me how they feel because when someone is opening up to me, I don’t like to be intrusive. If they are talking about something with a heavy emotional charge, it seems to me that they might need to set the level of intimacy in their own comfort zone, so the beginning of intimacy, it seems to me, is eye contact.
2. Think of the last time you were REALLY angry. WHY were you angry?
I never got angry, or knew I was angry, until well into the second half of my life. Now all sorts of things get me angry, so it’s hard to remember the very latest incident. I try to let all that go when it’s over with anyway: deal with it as appropriately as possible at the time, then simmer down and forget about it. Anger is important, and it certainly has its place in life, but hanging onto it turns it into something else, something much more sinister. Decayed anger often turns into resentment and then rage. So I try not to let it go that far.
3. You are on a flight from Honolulu to Chicago non-stop. There is a fire in the back of the plane. You have enough time to make ONE phone call. Who would you call?
My daughter, hands down, the love of my life.
4. You are at the doctor's office and he has just informed you that you have approximately one month to live.
(1) Do you tell anyone/everyone you are going to die?
Yes. I would even tell strangers, probably, because that’s how I am. When I found out recently that my sick brother did not die on the operating table during surgery, I went around telling people who couldn’t possibly care, along with friends and other caring types, because I liked saying it and having people to rejoice with, even if their rejoicing was somewhat insincere. Some things in life require human interaction for me. Something sad, like imminent death, needs people to share it with, too. I would tell the same random folks that I was dying, just to hear myself say it and to get used to the idea. Why keep it a secret, anyway, when they’ll all know pretty soon anyway?
(2) What do you do with your remaining days?
That’s a really hard question, because in a case like that, you may think you would do certain things, but you don’t know who you will be until you actually are that future self. I realize that that is a little confusing, but I have been in life-altering situations before, and I thought I would react in one way or another, and either I reacted differently than I had thought, or the reaction was the same but the way it felt was completely unexpected.
So, what I think I would do would be to try and think of things I wanted to do, people and places I wanted to see, that I hadn’t had a chance at yet. But I might also want to redo things I had loved in the past. I would probably want to have fantastic sex. I probably would not want to start drinking or smoking or doing drugs again, though when I quit all those things, I promised myself at the time that if I found out I was dying, I could let myself do them again. But I find that the idea of doing that makes me sad, like fighting a battle, winning it, then surrendering anyway. So I probably will leave my addictions where they lie. There’s no way I could tell my family of origin directly that I was dying, so I’d probably have to delegate somebody, and that would be really hard. Nobody I know nowadays has ever met them, except my daughter when she was very little, and I don’t want her near them if it can be avoided, and my ex-husband, of whom I prefer not to ask favors. I’d probably end up asking my adopted brother if he’d do it if I bought him a plane ticket. He’s a very gutsy and loyal guy. Other than that, I don’t know.
(3) Would you be afraid?
I think I would be nervous, like on opening night, but I’m not afraid of death. My body is programmed to be afraid of it, but my mind is pretty peaceful about it.
5. You can have one of the following two things: trust or love.
I don’t believe you can have love without trust, unless you’re talking about that trivial kind of ersatz “love” that is actually lust and narcissism that passes for the real thing. Then trust doesn’t matter because none of it counts anyway, as there is always a final betrayal. And trust without love-that’s what handshakes and contracts are for.
6. You are walking down the street on your way to work. There is a dog drowning in the canal on the side of the street. Your boss has told you if you are late even once more, you are fired. Do you save the dog?
No question. I’m not the kind of person that is chronically late to work, but I suppose for the sake of the scenario, it could happen that way. I’d rather lose a job, which is replaceable, than decide for somebody else that their life is worth less than my job. If the dog drowned, I couldn’t make it come alive again, but I could conceivably either find another job, talk the boss into giving me another chance, or find some other way to survive. But the dog has only that one chance…
8. Your best friend confesses that he/she has feelings for you more then just friendship. He/she is falling in love with you. What do you do/say?
Tough question. I’m very vulnerable about issues concerning love. Is this some mythical, rhetorical best friend, or is it my real best friend? Very different answers involved. After decades of searching, my real best friend has found and become affianced to the love of his life. She’s a wonderful woman and possibly his soul mate. They are amazing together and it does me good to know that his life has something so beautiful and happy in it. Anything that messed with that would be seriously upsetting to me, and if he started thinking he was in love with me, I’d do everything I could do to make him come to his senses and get over it. I love him dearly, but not like that. And he’s not the kind of man I want as a boyfriend or husband anyway. So I suppose there would be tears for me and hurt feelings for him, until he had a chance to sleep on it and smack himself in the head a few times and let go of his delusion. The mythical friend, on the other hand, if there were no impediments of that kind… hmmm. I’d probably talk it to death, but I’d have to do a lot of reality testing and see if maybe I was missing something. I love a lot of the people around me very much, and most of them don’t realize it and wouldn’t understand if they knew it. I could probably just fall in love with them if I just nudged my feelings a little, because love is not just lots of little separate emotions, it’s an ambiance and an overriding environment and an attitude toward the rest of the world, among a host of other things. So making an exclusive loving commitment could happen, given the right friend under the right conditions. I’m not ruling out the possibility, anyway. It could also happen that in the course of the discussion, he would realize that he didn’t know me as well as he thought he did, and would fall back into an intense, loving friendship, instead of a romantic relationship. As I said, I could talk it to death. It would be a difficult, complicated, tetchy kind of puzzle to work out, for sure. Or we could just fuck.
9. Think of the last person who you know that died. You have the chance to give them 1 hour of life back, but you have to give one year of your life. do you do it?
I would have to ask. Maybe the person wouldn’t want that. I would do it if they wanted it, but I wouldn’t be very happy about it. I want all my life for myself, but I am capable of giving despite my own wants, if it seems like a good idea.
10. Are you the kind of friend that you would want to have as a friend?
I wish! I never had a friend like me. I am a very good friend to have.
11. Does love = sex?
What a stupid question. No. But I do love sex. Some kinds of love make sex inappropriate. I love my daughter dearly, but I never ever want to have sex with her. I love my dog. Ibid. If I have a boyfriend or husband or whatever, though, I think sex is really important and I would have a lot of trouble going without it.
12. Your boss tells your co-worker that they have to let them go because of work shortage, and they are the newest employee. You have been there much longer. Your co-worker has a family to support and no other means of income. Do you go to your boss and offer to leave the company?
There isn’t really enough data here to make a really good answer to this question, but my first thought is, no. I have a family to support and no other means of income, so why should I lose the job? Plus, if my boss needed the other employee more than s/he needed me, wouldn’t there be some discussion about it? And if I didn’t need the job, what would I be doing there? How close to retirement am I? What kind of severance are we talking about, if any? There just isn’t enough there to answer. Mindlessly sacrificing oneself is dumb.
13. When was the last time you told someone HONESTLY how you felt regardless of how difficult it was for you to say? What did you have to tell the person?
I make a point of it every time. And a public venue is not the right place to write about this. When it’s just me chasing my own tail, fine, I’ll blather up a storm. But if someone else is involved, I should avoid dragging him or her into it.
14. What would be (or what was) harder for you to tell a friend, you love them or that you do not love them back?.
I don’t have any friends that I don’t love. I enjoy telling people I love them. There’s a time and a place for everything, though. Not telling someone that you love them when you do is really, really hard and stressful, yet sometimes I have to just shut up and let it go, as an act of love. If I don’t love someone back, I don’t care that much how they feel, so it’s not that hard to say. So it’s kind of a silly question, isn’t it?
15. What do you think would be the hardest thing for you to give up? Why would it be hard to lose?.
I fear losing my freedom more than anything I can think of. I don’t have very much, to begin with, and I value what there is of it.
16. Excluding romantic love, when was the last time you told someone you loved them? Who were they to you?.
My cat.
18. Imagine. It is a dark night, you are alone, it is raining outside, you hear someone walking around outside your window. WHO do you wish was there with you?.
My best friend/adopted brother, or my roommate.
19. Would you give a homeless person CPR if they were dying?.
Well, yeah.
21. You are holding onto your grandmother’s hand and the hand of a newborn that you do not know as they hang over the edge of a cliff. You have to let one go to save the other. Who do you let fall to their death?.
Both my grandmothers are dead already, but if they were alive, I would have to go with the newborn, I guess, though that’s another one where you just don’t know till you’re in that situation.
22. Are you old fashioned?
Yes and no.
23. When was the last time you were nice to someone and did NOT expect anything in return for it?
All the time. It never ends. It’s the way I try to live my life.
24. Which would you choose, true love with a guarantee of a broken heart, or never loved at all? Why?
In my experience, love always hurts, but I always want it anyway. Emotionally retarded, I guess.
25. If you could do anything or wish anything, what would it be?.
Not enough details. The parameters are way too broad here. Sigh. However, I will try and list a few.
I wish I could fall in love with somebody who loves me back just as much.
I wish I could see all my old friends again.
I wish I could be a superhero called The Expediter, who clears away all the crap and bullshit and red tape with no trouble at all.
I wish I could write really good novels.
I wish I could go get a nice fresh bottle of water…oh…there it is!
I wish I could have a big old ranch with some land and have a lot of little yurts surrounding the big house where all my friends could have a permanent home whenever they wanted to be there. Just have a home base where we could all be together and have our private space too. And as many cats and dogs and parrots and turtles and frogs and rats and hamsters etc. living there as we wanted, with no fleas.
I want to have more than the 3 hours of exercise I do a week, and get really strong and slender and flexible.
I wish I could disband all the governments and go back to bartering. I know it wouldn’t work, but what we’re doing now isn’t working either.
I wish I could think of a really good way to end this damn blog so I can go to bed.
The End.
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1. What is more difficult for you, looking into someone’s eyes when you are telling someone how you feel, or looking into someone’s eyes when they are telling you how they feel?
I think it’s probably more difficult to look into someone’s eyes when they are telling me how they feel because when someone is opening up to me, I don’t like to be intrusive. If they are talking about something with a heavy emotional charge, it seems to me that they might need to set the level of intimacy in their own comfort zone, so the beginning of intimacy, it seems to me, is eye contact.
2. Think of the last time you were REALLY angry. WHY were you angry?
I never got angry, or knew I was angry, until well into the second half of my life. Now all sorts of things get me angry, so it’s hard to remember the very latest incident. I try to let all that go when it’s over with anyway: deal with it as appropriately as possible at the time, then simmer down and forget about it. Anger is important, and it certainly has its place in life, but hanging onto it turns it into something else, something much more sinister. Decayed anger often turns into resentment and then rage. So I try not to let it go that far.
3. You are on a flight from Honolulu to Chicago non-stop. There is a fire in the back of the plane. You have enough time to make ONE phone call. Who would you call?
My daughter, hands down, the love of my life.
4. You are at the doctor's office and he has just informed you that you have approximately one month to live.
(1) Do you tell anyone/everyone you are going to die?
Yes. I would even tell strangers, probably, because that’s how I am. When I found out recently that my sick brother did not die on the operating table during surgery, I went around telling people who couldn’t possibly care, along with friends and other caring types, because I liked saying it and having people to rejoice with, even if their rejoicing was somewhat insincere. Some things in life require human interaction for me. Something sad, like imminent death, needs people to share it with, too. I would tell the same random folks that I was dying, just to hear myself say it and to get used to the idea. Why keep it a secret, anyway, when they’ll all know pretty soon anyway?
(2) What do you do with your remaining days?
That’s a really hard question, because in a case like that, you may think you would do certain things, but you don’t know who you will be until you actually are that future self. I realize that that is a little confusing, but I have been in life-altering situations before, and I thought I would react in one way or another, and either I reacted differently than I had thought, or the reaction was the same but the way it felt was completely unexpected.
So, what I think I would do would be to try and think of things I wanted to do, people and places I wanted to see, that I hadn’t had a chance at yet. But I might also want to redo things I had loved in the past. I would probably want to have fantastic sex. I probably would not want to start drinking or smoking or doing drugs again, though when I quit all those things, I promised myself at the time that if I found out I was dying, I could let myself do them again. But I find that the idea of doing that makes me sad, like fighting a battle, winning it, then surrendering anyway. So I probably will leave my addictions where they lie. There’s no way I could tell my family of origin directly that I was dying, so I’d probably have to delegate somebody, and that would be really hard. Nobody I know nowadays has ever met them, except my daughter when she was very little, and I don’t want her near them if it can be avoided, and my ex-husband, of whom I prefer not to ask favors. I’d probably end up asking my adopted brother if he’d do it if I bought him a plane ticket. He’s a very gutsy and loyal guy. Other than that, I don’t know.
(3) Would you be afraid?
I think I would be nervous, like on opening night, but I’m not afraid of death. My body is programmed to be afraid of it, but my mind is pretty peaceful about it.
5. You can have one of the following two things: trust or love.
I don’t believe you can have love without trust, unless you’re talking about that trivial kind of ersatz “love” that is actually lust and narcissism that passes for the real thing. Then trust doesn’t matter because none of it counts anyway, as there is always a final betrayal. And trust without love-that’s what handshakes and contracts are for.
6. You are walking down the street on your way to work. There is a dog drowning in the canal on the side of the street. Your boss has told you if you are late even once more, you are fired. Do you save the dog?
No question. I’m not the kind of person that is chronically late to work, but I suppose for the sake of the scenario, it could happen that way. I’d rather lose a job, which is replaceable, than decide for somebody else that their life is worth less than my job. If the dog drowned, I couldn’t make it come alive again, but I could conceivably either find another job, talk the boss into giving me another chance, or find some other way to survive. But the dog has only that one chance…
8. Your best friend confesses that he/she has feelings for you more then just friendship. He/she is falling in love with you. What do you do/say?
Tough question. I’m very vulnerable about issues concerning love. Is this some mythical, rhetorical best friend, or is it my real best friend? Very different answers involved. After decades of searching, my real best friend has found and become affianced to the love of his life. She’s a wonderful woman and possibly his soul mate. They are amazing together and it does me good to know that his life has something so beautiful and happy in it. Anything that messed with that would be seriously upsetting to me, and if he started thinking he was in love with me, I’d do everything I could do to make him come to his senses and get over it. I love him dearly, but not like that. And he’s not the kind of man I want as a boyfriend or husband anyway. So I suppose there would be tears for me and hurt feelings for him, until he had a chance to sleep on it and smack himself in the head a few times and let go of his delusion. The mythical friend, on the other hand, if there were no impediments of that kind… hmmm. I’d probably talk it to death, but I’d have to do a lot of reality testing and see if maybe I was missing something. I love a lot of the people around me very much, and most of them don’t realize it and wouldn’t understand if they knew it. I could probably just fall in love with them if I just nudged my feelings a little, because love is not just lots of little separate emotions, it’s an ambiance and an overriding environment and an attitude toward the rest of the world, among a host of other things. So making an exclusive loving commitment could happen, given the right friend under the right conditions. I’m not ruling out the possibility, anyway. It could also happen that in the course of the discussion, he would realize that he didn’t know me as well as he thought he did, and would fall back into an intense, loving friendship, instead of a romantic relationship. As I said, I could talk it to death. It would be a difficult, complicated, tetchy kind of puzzle to work out, for sure. Or we could just fuck.
9. Think of the last person who you know that died. You have the chance to give them 1 hour of life back, but you have to give one year of your life. do you do it?
I would have to ask. Maybe the person wouldn’t want that. I would do it if they wanted it, but I wouldn’t be very happy about it. I want all my life for myself, but I am capable of giving despite my own wants, if it seems like a good idea.
10. Are you the kind of friend that you would want to have as a friend?
I wish! I never had a friend like me. I am a very good friend to have.
11. Does love = sex?
What a stupid question. No. But I do love sex. Some kinds of love make sex inappropriate. I love my daughter dearly, but I never ever want to have sex with her. I love my dog. Ibid. If I have a boyfriend or husband or whatever, though, I think sex is really important and I would have a lot of trouble going without it.
12. Your boss tells your co-worker that they have to let them go because of work shortage, and they are the newest employee. You have been there much longer. Your co-worker has a family to support and no other means of income. Do you go to your boss and offer to leave the company?
There isn’t really enough data here to make a really good answer to this question, but my first thought is, no. I have a family to support and no other means of income, so why should I lose the job? Plus, if my boss needed the other employee more than s/he needed me, wouldn’t there be some discussion about it? And if I didn’t need the job, what would I be doing there? How close to retirement am I? What kind of severance are we talking about, if any? There just isn’t enough there to answer. Mindlessly sacrificing oneself is dumb.
13. When was the last time you told someone HONESTLY how you felt regardless of how difficult it was for you to say? What did you have to tell the person?
I make a point of it every time. And a public venue is not the right place to write about this. When it’s just me chasing my own tail, fine, I’ll blather up a storm. But if someone else is involved, I should avoid dragging him or her into it.
14. What would be (or what was) harder for you to tell a friend, you love them or that you do not love them back?.
I don’t have any friends that I don’t love. I enjoy telling people I love them. There’s a time and a place for everything, though. Not telling someone that you love them when you do is really, really hard and stressful, yet sometimes I have to just shut up and let it go, as an act of love. If I don’t love someone back, I don’t care that much how they feel, so it’s not that hard to say. So it’s kind of a silly question, isn’t it?
15. What do you think would be the hardest thing for you to give up? Why would it be hard to lose?.
I fear losing my freedom more than anything I can think of. I don’t have very much, to begin with, and I value what there is of it.
16. Excluding romantic love, when was the last time you told someone you loved them? Who were they to you?.
My cat.
18. Imagine. It is a dark night, you are alone, it is raining outside, you hear someone walking around outside your window. WHO do you wish was there with you?.
My best friend/adopted brother, or my roommate.
19. Would you give a homeless person CPR if they were dying?.
Well, yeah.
21. You are holding onto your grandmother’s hand and the hand of a newborn that you do not know as they hang over the edge of a cliff. You have to let one go to save the other. Who do you let fall to their death?.
Both my grandmothers are dead already, but if they were alive, I would have to go with the newborn, I guess, though that’s another one where you just don’t know till you’re in that situation.
22. Are you old fashioned?
Yes and no.
23. When was the last time you were nice to someone and did NOT expect anything in return for it?
All the time. It never ends. It’s the way I try to live my life.
24. Which would you choose, true love with a guarantee of a broken heart, or never loved at all? Why?
In my experience, love always hurts, but I always want it anyway. Emotionally retarded, I guess.
25. If you could do anything or wish anything, what would it be?.
Not enough details. The parameters are way too broad here. Sigh. However, I will try and list a few.
I wish I could fall in love with somebody who loves me back just as much.
I wish I could see all my old friends again.
I wish I could be a superhero called The Expediter, who clears away all the crap and bullshit and red tape with no trouble at all.
I wish I could write really good novels.
I wish I could go get a nice fresh bottle of water…oh…there it is!
I wish I could have a big old ranch with some land and have a lot of little yurts surrounding the big house where all my friends could have a permanent home whenever they wanted to be there. Just have a home base where we could all be together and have our private space too. And as many cats and dogs and parrots and turtles and frogs and rats and hamsters etc. living there as we wanted, with no fleas.
I want to have more than the 3 hours of exercise I do a week, and get really strong and slender and flexible.
I wish I could disband all the governments and go back to bartering. I know it wouldn’t work, but what we’re doing now isn’t working either.
I wish I could think of a really good way to end this damn blog so I can go to bed.
The End.
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