tuckova

For the last few days I've been feeling something I'd best classify as "low-grade rage" that starts shortly after I wake up and continues through the day. I've been meditating again, thank goodness, and so part of me sits next to this rage and watches it like a dark cloud passing across the sky or more realistically like someone else's toddler, which is to say: I'm disrupted by it, but I'm also disconnected in what I think is a healthy way. "Oh, look, it's rage. Try not to hurt yourself?"

I'm angry at things that are not as good as I think they could or should be. Comedy nights where the hosts are not in control of the atmosphere and it's therefore unpleasant for performers and audiences. Just makes me mad. Yesterday I was extra annoyed Adam Gopnik for writing a crappy article about Joni Mitchell that ran in the New Yorker, a magazine that set my early standards for editing. This morning I was stomping around because there are "holistic" dentists in Brno who offer tooth bleaching and mercury filling removal and they're getting advertised by people who should know better. 

And there's a part of my annoyance that is about why people attend these comedy nights, permit these articles, visit these dentists. I think I'm used to this feeling as one of jealousy: Why are you paying attention to THAT when you could be paying attention to ME? 

Every time I've asked WHY I get told that I don't need the attention and I'm gradually accepting that people perceive that need differently than I do but in any case it's not personal. Some years ago a promoter who I consider a friend came to an event of mine, woke up the next morning and published an article about a competitor. This felt like a punch. And it's happened so many times since, in large and small ways, that I honestly can't count. It stops hurting as much because I can't honestly register that many blows. Sometimes I ask "why" or try to point it out and sometimes even that doesn't seem worth it. 

So that jealousy is a recurring theme for me; I'm acknowledging that. And this may still be part of that, although it's quieter. It's more on the lines of "Why are you, a person/organization I respect, supporting a thing I dislike?" To be clear, it's usually fine with me that people like things I don't like; not liking is different from disliking. As long as things don't actively cause harm I rarely bother to dislike them. I guess you could argue that Gopnik isn't causing harm by being a douchey writer but he gets a platform that other delightful and talented writers then don't get, which is a kind of harm, and I'm mad at the New Yorker for failing to rein him in and thus not living up to my perceived standards of them. 

This dovetails with another thing I've been working on. I tend to think that when my friends (or actually anyone) with whom I generally align disagree with me, they've been influenced by someone else and I direct my unhappiness with this disagreement at that someone else. Like: Let's say a friend and I both like the colors yellow and purple. But my friend also likes the color brown, which I don't because it reminds me of poo. If my friend has another friend who likes brown, I am angry at my friend's friend for influencing them to like the poo color; I imagine that absent that nefarious influence they would know what an ugly poo color brown is. What I'm working on is realizing that actually some of my friends like things that I don't like just because they like them; that they do things I wouldn't do just because they do; that the "culprit" is themselves — not that they've been misled from their normal "correct" (aligned with me) path but that they're on a completely different path that only overlaps with mine sometimes. A poo-colored path.

Acknowledging this feels lonely and then of course the other part of my brain chimes in that one was always lonely and that knowing it doesn't make it more or less so. But that may be the source of my anger, actually.

Anyway, something I've been thinking about.