OK, folks, I’m very sorry but I had to go back to the previous blog template. I hate to be one of those people who keep fussing with blog templates but the most recent one was constantly causing me trouble and I don’t have time right now to keep straightening it out. I’ll see if I decide to do something about the template later on. It isn’t like people come here for an inventive template, right?
By way of compensation, I wanted to acquaint you with a new trend in nail-painting. See how every nail has its own polish? If you have many almost empty nail polish bottles, this fashion trend that I picked up from my students will allow you to utilize them.
Clarissa's Blog 
That is very cool, I myself have my fingernails and toenails painted black right now. I just hope the paint job lasts for at least a week, I don’t want to keep touching it up.
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Black is the best. I’m totally doing black next.
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I like this template much better. Thanks for returning to it!
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I’m glad this switch back is not a disappointment!
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I really do like this template. There is something about the dark background that makes it really easy to read. 🙂
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// I like this template much better. Thanks for returning to it!
I too! 🙂
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Here’s an interesting article:
http://www.sciencegymnasium.com/2014/01/scientists-have-found-that-memories-may.html
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More proof that Freud was right.
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Those genetically passed experiences are the most fascinating thing. Now I begin thinking about WW2 and the so called “national character.” If something like that exists at all, could it be attributed simply to the shared past? Like history of Jewish persecutions.
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The concept of a national character is very problematic because nations are completely arbitrary and imaginary. People from New Mexico obviously don’t share a lot of history with people from Connecticut. Plus, there are immigrants. Yet all these folks form the same nation.
Freud’s idea of an inherited family pattern of behavior and Jung’s idea of a historic archetypes seem much more productive to me. Jews are the perfect proof here: their shared history of persecution transcends national borders. Today’s Jewish student might have no idea of what drives her to succeed, learn, be the best but a huge part of this drive will be a subconscious memory of her ancestors who were given much harder entrance examinations to universities and who could not afford to be anything but the absolute best simply to survive.
In psychoanalysis, for instance, people whose ancestors survived Holodomor or the blockade of Leningrad spend a lot of time discussing food, money, food-related anxieties.
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Maybe so. But also broader principles apply than the dynamics relating to a narrow, nuclear family. For instance, the environmental pressures and opportunities relating to particular geographic and historical circumstances can also be learned.
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I mean Nietzsche seems to have also been right about a kind of Lamarckianism. It’s not just that our ancestors give us their problems, but they also give us their sometimes very workable solutions to adapt.
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One thing that seems like adaptation facilitated by the ancestors in me is that I scan the environment, whichever environment I am in, for danger. I’m always highly vigilant, no matter what the environment or how peaceful it seems. I’m actually quite interested in finding where the danger spots are, too, and thoroughly investigating them and bringing back reports. I get bored if I can’t do this.
Also — and this is less pleasant — I always expect to hear that something horrific has happened close to me and that someone has died in an unexpected way. I have that feeling too, which sometimes is damp or almost disappears but other times rises to the surface quite dramatically. I don’t like it when the phone suddenly rings, for instance.
I think a lot of this has to do with my family’s background on my father’s side — and oddly enough, world war 2. But also with African circumstances and a living enmeshed in cultural and historical instability.
I cannot see how backgrounds do not matter. I agree also with one of the comments in this thread about Jews being pushed to academic excellence. But with me it is the excellence of the survivor — knowing how to read the environment very, very well indeed. That is why I am often surprised when there is a natural disaster or something else and people are taken by suprise en masse. I can’t imagine anything more degrading or offputting than allowing oneself to be taken by suprise by anything. Even if you die, you have to kind of expect it — or, what is wrong with you?
I don’t adapt at all to a state of mind that says it is our right to sit here and chew cud comfortably. I’m not comfortable with comfort. it irks me. Life is passing you by.
So people find me very difficult to read because I do not want what they do, and then they take out their vengeance on me, which I always see coming.
But I can’t change or adapt to what is conventionally normal. Even watching very normal people have their very minor adventures without seeming vigilant annoys the hell out of me. For instance, the modern versions of Doctor Who, which are nothing more than Cinderella stories, cause me to go out of my mind at the ineptitude of the characters in not taking more care. They just want to be whisked away and put down again. But they don’t look around them or guard themselves. There’s a thunderous stupidity about this, which detracts from the mind’s abilty to process its own material.
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“I can’t imagine anything more degrading or offputting than allowing oneself to be taken by suprise by anything. I don’t adapt at all to a state of mind that says it is our right to sit here and chew cud comfortably. I’m not comfortable with comfort. it irks me. Life is passing you by.”
– But doesn’t this create an intolerable sense of anxiety? If you are always expecting something bad to happen?
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I was addressing two issues in the post. In one situation, which I think is not so bad now, I did speak of a very high state of anxiety, and certainly there were a sequence of traumatic events or let-downs that led to my developing that reaction.
But the paragraph you have quoted above is unrelated to this state of intolerable anything. It is actually something desirable to be on one’s toes and experiencing things as they actually happen. If one can do this and wants to do it, one should certainly opt to do so.
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Honestly: the thing that has built up trauma over the years has been other people’s assumptions that I really just want to live like them, but somehow can’t manage to do so. When I start to see myself from this perspective, I lose touch with myself, as well as with what I really want, and that can be extremely confusing and traumatic. I have to do a spring clean and chuck out those ideas once in a while and out they go. But the bad thing that can happen — the very worst thing — is that I wll start to misunderstand myself. Anything else is not so bad and I can handle it.
People who read me back to front though. phwah.
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“But the bad thing that can happen — the very worst thing — is that I wll start to misunderstand myself. Anything else is not so bad and I can handle it.”
– This is very good. Very profound. I like it.
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Good. I’m all for live and let live, but the reason I get cast out of docile communities is that I don’t belong there. It’s important to realize that. There are different types of people in the world. The people who want to realize a docile life for themselves always, always attack me. If I start to think, “there is something wrong with me because of this,” that is when I engage with them in actively traumatising myself, which is pointless.
I suppose it really is possible just to accept that we all want different things, but the ideological framework of universalism makes this hard to grasp.
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‘Honestly: the thing that has built up trauma over the years has been other people’s assumptions that I really just want to live like them, but somehow can’t manage to do so.”
– I don’t really see anything you have to envy anybody else. You have clarity, you have insight. Who’s got it so much better than you?
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In close analysis nobody has it better than me. I noticed this over Christmas. People were talking in a way I could not relate to at all, until I realized they have little energy or free time to spend on contemplating the world. They overvalue very, very slight insights, because it’s all they have. I have also noticed that people view even their most intimate relationships in terms of utility, as if the other person were mainly there to help them to conform and provide financial support. It’s a whole different language, and so weird that once I thought I had to learn it and adapt to it.
Also, perceiving things as they are becomes easier over time, after figuring out all the false paths and dead ends. But still — I wish people would stop trying to do Christmas to me.
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“People were talking in a way I could not relate to at all, until I realized they have little energy or free time to spend on contemplating the world. They overvalue very, very slight insights, because it’s all they have. I have also noticed that people view even their most intimate relationships in terms of utility, as if the other person were mainly there to help them to conform and provide financial support.”
– Oh yes. I SO know what you mean. A great problem I see is that when people don’t take the time to elaborate their own system of values, they end up investing incredible effort into the value system they were told is the only one that matters. Such people look like cars that spin their wheels endlessly in a rut. The effort is enormous but the progress is nil. Very sad.
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I don’t see it very much, that whole mistaken version of reality, for which I’m grateful, but at Christmas it seems to open its jaws for me, so that I look into the fundamental meaningless of life for the majority. Even the good ones seem to be struggling with putting simple points together. I just made a cynical video, which however is entirely in tune with reality, to commemorate that fact.
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