Item: 4 multi-colored dinner plates
I wonder sometimes about my thought process. I'll be lying awake at night, remembering what I was thinking about when I first went to bed, and trying to figure out how I got to the topic I'm thinking of then. Sometimes I can trace the associations back, and sometimes I can't.
Doing dishes and washing these plates, I wound up thinking about what happens when running into ex-boyfriends at parties. I can explain this as follows. Once a roommate of mine was getting rid of some old plates, and suggested that we could perhaps go smash them out in the street, and my other roommate suggested that maybe we could write names on the plates and then go smash them out in the street. This wouldn't necessarily have had anything to do with ex-boyfriends, except for the timing of it. So my thoughts wandered from there to the various types of weirdness that happen later on when a person encounters someone she used to date.
Mainly, this: Why does it always seem like a competition? Or is this only me? No matter how long it's been, there always seems to be this subtle (or not-so-subtle) comparison going on, this ongoing attempt to score off the other person. Oh hi, this is my lovely new girlfriend. Yeah, well, I just got promoted again. Yeah, well, I just attained my lifelong dream of playing in the Super Bowl. Yeah, well, I'm doing great. Yeah, well, I'm doing really great. And so on.
I guess this is a natural reaction in cases that involved somebody's rejection by somebody else, but it happens even when it was amicable. Why? I've come out of such encounters feeling like a complete fool, that of course it didn't work out because he is normal and I am an idiot, or with the sobering thought that the real reason he's doing great now is that I was the only thing holding him back.
What's weird is that sometimes I actually win one of these encounters. On a good day I can waltz in as a confident person in a hot outfit, who has her life together, and know that he is feeling like a screw-up. I can tell this because he's a person I probably know well enough to be able to tell what he's thinking.
What's really weird is that even if I feel like I come out the winner in the situation, this is not a qualitatively different feeling than when I'm the loser. I guess that's because to me, the calculations involved in such designations mean that we now relate to each other as targets, which means we both lose.
Doing dishes and washing these plates, I wound up thinking about what happens when running into ex-boyfriends at parties. I can explain this as follows. Once a roommate of mine was getting rid of some old plates, and suggested that we could perhaps go smash them out in the street, and my other roommate suggested that maybe we could write names on the plates and then go smash them out in the street. This wouldn't necessarily have had anything to do with ex-boyfriends, except for the timing of it. So my thoughts wandered from there to the various types of weirdness that happen later on when a person encounters someone she used to date.
Mainly, this: Why does it always seem like a competition? Or is this only me? No matter how long it's been, there always seems to be this subtle (or not-so-subtle) comparison going on, this ongoing attempt to score off the other person. Oh hi, this is my lovely new girlfriend. Yeah, well, I just got promoted again. Yeah, well, I just attained my lifelong dream of playing in the Super Bowl. Yeah, well, I'm doing great. Yeah, well, I'm doing really great. And so on.
I guess this is a natural reaction in cases that involved somebody's rejection by somebody else, but it happens even when it was amicable. Why? I've come out of such encounters feeling like a complete fool, that of course it didn't work out because he is normal and I am an idiot, or with the sobering thought that the real reason he's doing great now is that I was the only thing holding him back.
What's weird is that sometimes I actually win one of these encounters. On a good day I can waltz in as a confident person in a hot outfit, who has her life together, and know that he is feeling like a screw-up. I can tell this because he's a person I probably know well enough to be able to tell what he's thinking.
What's really weird is that even if I feel like I come out the winner in the situation, this is not a qualitatively different feeling than when I'm the loser. I guess that's because to me, the calculations involved in such designations mean that we now relate to each other as targets, which means we both lose.
posted by Karen at 8:25 PM
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