Have you noticed it's been a year since we did ATEC?
As you would, the (dis)connection between affectations in and out of army is something that’s been bouncing around in my head for a while, and my unpremeditated meeting with Kendrick (or the vernacular Botox) yesterday was all the provocation I required. Yes, my post is a sterile piece of amateur thought and no, you don’t have to read it.
I draw a sharp distinction between our subjective positive emotion and army's objective 'good' quality. It’s relatively easy to detect and evaluate our feelings about what we’ve experienced, since we’ve easy access to what goes on in our own heads. I don’t think there’s necessarily any connection between how we feel about the harsh top-down treatments, and said treatments objectively measured quality: there aren’t many people which I would have the courage to condemn as definitely bad, but Just Cringe Cock is one of them, and I loved thinking of ways to get him combusted. Quite a lot of tangles ensue if we confuse our emotional attachment to what we’re savoring, and our assessment of its objectives.
To make matters worse, I have not found a way to directly perceive interaction, or even to prove once and for all that it exists as a distinct function. I’m going to use the unwise analogy of causation here: I’ve no proof that eating reduces my hunger - all I can say is that whenever I’ve eaten in the past, my hunger has lessened (good enough for a scientist, but not for a skeptic). Were I a biologist I could of course provide a more detailed account, but if (in a maneuver familiar to kindergarten children) you questioned me for long enough I’d either admit to not knowing exactly why A causes B or resort to ‘a wizard did it‘. Causation may be out there, or it may not be. Consistency has so far been similarly undetectable.
The thing is, we behave as though causation exists. There’s an axiomatic assumption of a connection there in our minds: I eat when I’m hungry because it’s worked in the past but I won't have the same consecutive menu. Similarly, we behave as though interactions exist. Long arguments flare up over the quality of communication (usually with a fair bit of sentiment mixed in, think of a normally whimpering yk). If we decide that objective interactions doesn’t exist and retreat into purely subjective conversations, or decide that we can’t decide one way or another on consistency’s existence and use that as a justification for purely subjective (purely hedonistic) replies, then we’ve nothing to say to one another.
There’s nothing to discuss, really: the purely subjective is the purely personal, the analytic and tautological, always unchallengeable but never useful (and rarely interesting). There’s little mileage in discussing how much we each enjoyed or failed to enjoy something. This is significant because one obviously has a considerable emotional attachment to an objectified being, but instead of thinking directly about that attachment (and what could one say about that? surely it would boil down to ‘I liked it’?) we use it as fuel to power our search for demonstrations of it's subjective quality, which have some kind of value. Somehow we must persist in our quixotic quest for quality interactions - the universal, synthetic, always doubtful but somehow useful - however impossible it seems. Maybe it’s good for us, in some way.
The greatest problem I have with what I’ve written here, however, is that I don’t obey it. As I discovered a while back, I don’t revel in more than salutations, if I do make small talks I make them brief and I spend (waste?) most of my time wondering elsewhere (directed at things I love). Protracted conversations are not my forte, because I lack confidence in my ability to accurately perceive mannerisms and then wrap that accurate perception up in pretty words.
And, after all this, can we like bad people? Of course - in fact, it’s a non-question, as we undoubtedly do like them as boyfriend materials. So long as we observe our emotion and avoid letting it tangle up our attempts at objective analysis (while still expressing some feeling in our interactions - a tightrope, really), this shouldn’t be a problem, I suppose. I tend to follow the dictates of emotion in my own habits: if not entertained, drop in haste (without asking for arguments) and repent at my computer. As with all my Edison posts, guilt happens, but then guilt’s irrational.