Off Limits

You knew I loved them. How could you do this to me?

There's something greater at stake here than you're happiness... my own.

It's a neat trick of human rearing that causes me to consider certain humans "off-limits". Once I hear that someone is married or in a relationship I find it difficult to have romantic and/or sexual interest in them. It's a fine behaviour to avoid conflict and contributes to a stable society. Why are we here? Not to rock the boat. It's interesting to observe behaviors in oneself that stop us from exerting our desires on the world. The only fault with reasonable repression is that it's not interesting. It lacks passion, conflict, and a breaking of routine that marks our fiction.

I've often thought that entertainment allows us to release our own private desire to transcend the norm. That's probably why I hate fiction that promotes itself as realistic. I don't want art to pacify me and make feel normal. I want it to make me feel small and empower me to take what I want. When I was young, I didn't understand the appeal of the "bad boy". I understand this popular image on two levels.

1. The bad boy scoffs at repression.
2. To love the bad boy makes someone feel special. In the hopes that the bad boy will open up to them and share the secret world that no one else understands.

What a reduction. I do love reducing the people I meet to their psychological patterns. I think one of the neatest insights about human psychology that I have had is that:

no one is as simple as others claim them to be, nor is anyone as complex as she or he thinks.