Too much perspective? (Even this is too long still.)

Sometimes I feel like I see everything from so many different angles that I don't know which one is the one I believe in the most. I think I have this fear of being too absolute, too extreme, too single-minded. There's something to be said for stability and more to be said for permanence and legacy, but I like transience, too. I like being able to change my mind. To me, seeing anything as absolute is a trap and it hinders growth, it stops you from being able to learn and grow. I like being flexible and I like the fluidity of being open to multiple possibilities. I often don't like having to choose one way or another when I relate to both. I prefer to evaluate case by case, and not choose a blanket answer that is intended to encompass everything.

I'm in between about a lot of things, and sometimes I worry that I don't have definite, assertive opinions or beliefs of my own. I know I do. I just also know that it's not important to me to have absolute opinions on a lot of things, and I know I feel different ways at different times in different situations. I don't like feeling chained to one concrete belief. I don't like the feeling of being trapped that accompanies that. I like feeling free. I don't like narrowness.

Or maybe it's that I don't like broadness? I mean, I hate it when someone asks me if I'm pro-life or pro-choice. I don't think it's that simple. I understand logically and emotionally both sides of the argument. Sure, it's ethically shady, but I also think it's wrong for a baby to be born into a world that doesn't want it, where it will only be abused and mistreated. In that way it's cruel. At the same time, I'm usually an "everything happens for a reason" kind of a gal, and messing around with a potential life isn't something I think I'd ever consider. But my life is a piece of cake. I don't have to endure extreme adversity and it's easy for me to believe in some kind of fate. It's not like I'm a fourteen-year-old rape victim who's pregnant by her attacker or something. If I were, I don't know how I'd feel. I can't say. So I generally say that I think a woman should have the right to choose, but I also think most women shouldn't choose abortion. Even that's simplifying it more than I'd like.

I can choose to see things the way I want to. I can choose to see people as a bunch of foolish, ignorant jerks who are going to lead to the demise of all humanity, or I can see them as the last pillar supporting humanity from crumbling. I can be cynical and realistic or romantic and idealistic. It's not just that I can be these things--I generally feel like I am all these things. I'm sarcastic and cynical and pessimistic by turns, but eternally hopeful and idealistic at the same time. I want to see the best in people but often, they just show their worst. Being optimistic and idealistic can translate into naivete, though--like Gatsby or The Quiet American--and I don't want that, either. I see it sometimes in others and I know I know better than to have blind faith in people; I'll just end up painfully disillusioned if I do.

I go back and forth between the two outlooks all the time. I can try to be one way or another but I don't like doing that, because that's not me. As I told someone last night, I just am what I am, and that happens to be a lot of different things at different times. I hate it when people make me feel like that's wrong, like things have to be black and white, one way or another. Like I'm wrong for seeing things so many ways and relating to them all. There's a lot that I don't understand, that I can't relate to, that I can't imagine, that I disagree with. But I love it when I meet someone who is able to explain the unimaginable to me in a way that I can understand. Without being open to other perspectives and trying to identify with others, how could you understand anything?

I also decided today that I don't like it when I feel like I have to "try" to be myself around people. I don't like pandering and I don't like compromising myself, even though intrinsically I like making people happy, and there's a lot of things I don't mind doing or just don't care about that I'm willing to compromise on, if it'll make others happy. I hate it when I realize that I'm acting in a way I don't like around certain people, because then I have to make an effort to be myself and not to let them bring out this behavior that doesn't feel like my own. It's just not that frequently that I find people that I feel comfortable being myself around. I hide a lot, even though I know I shouldn't--that's just how I am. I suppose it's because I know there's so much that's contradictory about myself that I don't let myself show that unless I feel like a person will understand that I'm not being overtly, obnoxiously hypocritical or mockingly facetious and arrogant. I suppose. I don't know.

People close to me are always telling me to speak up more, or be more assertive, and stuff like that, but I like flying below the radar. Sometimes other people will tell me I'm the kind of person that doesn't say much, but when I do say something, others listen because it'll be good. I don't think this is necessarily true. Often when I do speak up, people still talk over me or just don't listen. I'm also quiet a lot of the time, though, because I don't have anything to say about the topic at hand. If I don't have anything to say, it's probably because 1) I don't have a definitive opinion or 2) one of my biggest pet peeves is people who talk pompously about things they know nothing about. You want to talk about how Michael Phelps smoked pot? Congratulations, talk away. I don't really have anything to say about it, other than I think it's been blown way out of proportion. You want to talk about philosophy or music theory? Awesome. I'll listen, and I'll be interested. But I'm not going to tell you what I think of Plato's Republic, and I'm not going to argue you when you say Beethoven is better than Mozart, because I wouldn't have a bloody clue as to what I was talking about. I know who Plato is. I listen to Beethoven and Mozart's works. But I'm not going to pretend I am anything more than vaguely familiar with them in a very rudimentary way. I'm not going to bullshit about it. But if you want to recommend a piece to listen to and explain why you like it and what I should listen for, then fantastic.

And if you want to talk about the injustice of the admissions process at tier one colleges and universities, or modern American playwrights, or why TV news programs make me angry, or pretty much anything I write about on here, then just try and get me to STOP talking. But who wants to have a conversation about any of that? Hell, that's one of the main reasons I write so much on this stupid thing--who wants to ponder all this shit with me. Hahaha. Someone told me the other day that I should write a screenplay, and I asked what should I write about? They asked me in return, "Well, what do you have to say?" I said not a heck of a lot, but that was a silly untruth, and I didn't realize it until later on. I have a lot to say--I just can't always find ways to say it, let alone creative ways, or people who care to hear me. That's how it finds its way here. Which isn't exactly an awful thing. I'd hate it if I had absolutely nothing to say about anything ever.

I realized one of my problems when thinking about the "Future" is not that I don't know what I want to do--there's just way too many things that I want to do, and I can't make myself pick just one. I can't shut out everything else to specialize on one thing. I keep telling myself that I'm better off for picking one thing and learning a lot about it than knowing a shallow amount about a lot of things, but I don't feel like anything works like that. Everything's interdisciplinary, especially in the arts. Everything overlaps. There is no one single field. Even my specialized classes overlap. Everything in both my majors intersects all the time. And I know I mention this all the freakin time, but it's true. And I don't want to pick just one thing to focus on. I don't want to end up cornered into one field. Even though I sort of know in the back of my mind that that will never happen. And I don't want my voice to be any more limited than it already is. Which is quite a lot.

Meh. Too much thinking.

"I am a permanent transient..."

Yesterday I finished my honors paper on The Zoo Story / Peter & Jerry and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (Notes toward a definition of tragedy). I can't say I'm particularly satisfied with the last 1/3 of it, the part on The Goat, because I rushed. And I'm not happy about it because I really did want to do this right. I realized at the end of the semester that I should have made my paper on Sundance for American Independent Cinema my honors paper, but of course, how was I to know that that was the better idea at the beginning of the semester when I had to hand in my contract? I labored over my Sundance paper. By which I really just mean that I took the time to revise it and refine it until I was fully satisfied. I rarely do that. I didn't do that with Edward Albee and I should have. I just ran out of time.

I think I'm going to do it anyway. Part of the reason I ran out of time is I got caught up when I was doing research. I kept finding this awesome material and trying to fit it into my outline. Fitting it into the outline wasn't the trouble, because it related nicely. The trouble was having to write a longer paper than I anticipated once I added all the stuff I wanted to add to the outline.

My thesis was that Edward Albee's plays are as socially relevant now as they first were in 1958 when he began writing. I realized that even though The Zoo Story, his first play and the first Albee I ever read, and the only I've seen performed, is my first love, I might now love The Goat better. It makes sense though: The Zoo Story was written in the context of the 1950s and it was utterly explosive.

"[Albee's theme] is the enormous and usually insuperable difficulty that human beings find in communicating with each other. More precisely, it is about the maddening effect that the enforced loneliness of the human condition has on the person who is cursed (for in our society it is undoubtedly a curse) with an infinite capacity for love."

- George Wellworth (theater scholar)

Albee addresses this through a single character, the outcast Jerry, in The Zoo Story. The beauty of The Goat is that he addresses this difficulty to communicate and the curse of the "infinite capacity to love" through three of his four characters--a husband, a wife, and their son. The fourth character is the husband and wife's supposed best friend who serves to represent conventional society and their disdain for deviance from their standards. In the same way that a thirty-year-old Albee wrote The Zoo Story within the context of his times and the society of the '50s, a seventy-something Albee--a much more mature and controlled writer by this point--wrote The Goat to reflect society today. And as a member (or outcast?) of that society, I feel like I can appreciate it that much more because it's a world I know--not one I've read about or imagined.

(Note: Quick summary. The Zoo Story is a one-act about two men, Peter and Jerry. Peter is your typical 1950s middle class guy living the American Dream. Jerry is a social outcast living in a terrible boarding house with no family and friends, who cannot get even a dog to love him. Spurned by the world around him, Jerry finds Peter sitting on a park bench one day and tries to talk to him about his isolation. Peter, like everyone else, doesn't understand, so Jerry picks a fight with him, and as Peter holds a knife, Jerry impales himself with it. Jerry's ended his own life, but completely unraveled Peter's, breaking down the pretense everything he thought he knew.

Albee later added another one-act before The Zoo Story, called Homelife, in which Peter is in his apartment with his wife Ann, who tries talking to him about how, even though they have a great, smooth life, she could use a little excitement and chaos--a little imperfection. The main goal is to flesh out Peter's character and set him up for The Zoo Story, but it's nice on its own, too.

The Goat is the story of another man with a seemingly perfect life, Martin Gray. He has a perfect marriage with a woman he loves, Stevie, and a good son, Billy. He's just won what is basically the Nobel Prize of architecture, he's been commissioned to design a $200 billion city, and it's his 50th birthday. However, he is having an affair with a goat with whom he is in love. He tells his best friend Ross in confidence, but Ross tells Stevie, and the rest of the play explores how Stevie deals with the fact that her husband accepts that he is in love with and having sex with a goat, how she deals with the fact that he doesn't understand how this has ruined her life, how Martin deals with himself, and how Billy--a seventeen-year-old gay boy--deals with all of it.)

It's not that other writers don't address how restrained polite society creates feelings of rejection and loss in those who deviate from the norm. But what I love so much about Albee is that he does it with a great appreciation for the ridiculous. It's why so many classify him as "absurdist," even though he rejects that label (he's not a label kind of guy) and, strictly speaking, his plays are much more hopeful than the "more nihilist European absurdist playwrights." Regardless, his plays certainly have absurdist qualities, and it's my kind of humor exactly. The irony and wit, the ridiculousness and absurdity that doesn't take itself too seriously, yet serves to size up the seriousness of a situation--Albee's plays are incredibly balanced in these terms, and I love it.

One critics observes a common thematic thread (well, I guess it's more of a motif) running through several of Albee's play: "the chasm between people, [and] their inability to connect except through pain." When you realize he's been writing about the disconnect between people for fifty full years now, it's daunting. In a sense, it's quite true though. I think a lot of times I've connected with people through my pain, theirs, or mutual pain. And I mean "pain" broadly. Shared frustration with other people. General feelings of loss. Nothing earth-shattering, but still. I wonder why that is. We're the most open and vulnerable when in pain? We need companionship most when we're in pain? It attracts us. It humanizes others. I suppose that try as we might to believe otherwise, in the end we can't survive completely on our own.

You really can see how Albee grew as a writer between The Zoo Story and The Goat. As brilliant as The Zoo Story is, you can see what I'm sure many would condemn as "youthful" indulgence in it--Jerry's what is it, 5 page monologue? The play is hardly 45 pages long. The Goat is much more controlled in tone, and its thematic content is like a mature version of its predecessor, and it is, truly, a tragedy. Albee takes an absurd situation, and that is the "fact" of the play, the foundation; then out of the reactions to the situation, he carefully constructs this this gorgeous family tragedy. He uses what is considered to be an inhumane act to examine the humanity, addressing a host of related themes and ideas: the American dream, marital relations, parent/child relations, a loss of identity in middle age, the way an adolescent searches for identity, the desire to be understood, the way love hurts more than hate, the way it can overcome seemingly unforgivable acts--and the way, sometimes, it seems like love is not enough to overcome.

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Now playing: The Decemberists - O Valencia!

Remembering Andy Warhol

I just realized I never posted this. Oops.

So here it is. A bunch of people who knew Andy Warhol recalling different things about him for Interview. Andy Warhol fascinates me. He's something completely different from anything, really, that I've ever seen or known. That's why hearing what other people had to say about him and his work really interested me.

Glenn O'Brien: What did you learn from Andy?
Pat Hackett: Throw everything away! It only gives people material to build their misconceptions of you on.


WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST IMPRESSION OF ANDY?
Betsey Johnson: A silent, mysterious spirit.
John Giorno: I took hold of his limp hand, squeezed and held it, and we looked into each other's eyes. Andy hummed, "Ohhh!"

WHAT DID YOU LEARN FROM ANDY?
Irving Blum: The importance of going forward and keeping your focus.
Chris Stein: To relax. that might sound odd, but I always thought that he somehow managed to let things roll off him. And he could be invisible and a celebrity simultaneously.

That's something that I find particularly interesting: everyone seems to remember Andy as being a huge public figure, yet a willow-the-wisp who did more observing and listening than anything else.

Jill Selsman: Always listen, even if it seems like you're not listening, because there are some pretty good ideas out there from the most unlikely sources.
Paloma Picasso: Not to worry if people like you for the wrong reason. Just use that energy to build on it.
Nick Rhodes: To surround yourself with inspirational people.

Sigh. We do what we can. I guess you should be able to find inspiration in everything, but it's not always as easy as I think it should be, and sometimes finding the people that will inspire you the most is the hard part.

Robert Hawkins: Graciousness and humility equal beauty. How to pain the "kinetic cliche" brushstroke. (Swooshy S-shapes)
John Waters: To always have a sense of humor and to never brag and to make sure to praise what everyone else hates.
Debbie Harry: To be a good listener.
Francesco Clemente: That painting is alive. The notion of masterpiece is dead.
Stephen Shore: I watched him make aesthetic decisions. It was my first real exposure to aesthetic thinking. I also appreciated his sense of detached enjoyment of American culture.
Bebe Buell: That presentation is key. He was magical in his delivery.
Walter Steding: To have faith.
Patty D'Arbanville: To sit back and watch.
Cornelia Guest: To be interested in everyone and everything.
Ronnie Cutrone: 1) That art is a job like everything else; 2) That romantic love is all illusion; 3) That it's really hard to be famous and that everybody famous must deserve it even if I can't see it; 4) Don't waste time defining art (you can't), just do it; 5) That there are no bosses--we all serve art if we're good enough to get the job of making it.

At first I didn't understand what Shore meant, but I think I know now. The conscious framing of a photograph is an aesthetic decision. The choice of color, style, arrangement of anything - the clothes you choose to wear in the morning - I think I'd consider those aesthetic decisions.

I'll get back to Cutrone's comments another time. Too much to say to those. I think they're all interesting if not universally applicable lessons though.

Haha, also. It's so easy to demand someone to have faith. To actually have it is a whole different matter completely.

WHAT DID ANDY LEARN FROM YOU?
Benjamin Liu: Not all Asians are like Yoko Ono.

HAHAHA, love it.

Ivy Nicholson: He learned that a woman could love him. He once told me that he loved me more than his male friends because I was more masculine than them.
John Wilcock: ...Over the years I have noticed echoes of other things I said [in Andy's work]. Andy was like all true poets--bad poets imitate, good poets steal. He incorporated ideas from everywhere and everyone.

Creation is nice, but I think pure, completely original creation is extremely rare these days. But I do also think that reinterpretation is an offshoot of creation.

WHAT'S YOUR MOST VIVID MENTAL IMAGE OF ANDY?
Farrah Fawcett: What I remember most about Andy is that he was the only person I had ever met who seemed even more shy than I am around strangers.
Diane von Furstenberg: He was never alone. He was always surrounded by a group. At the time it was Fred Hughes, Candy Darling, Jane Worth (who became my first model). Andy was a voyeur. He did not communicate much, but made people pose and act in front of him. He always had a tape recorder or a camera on hand.
Ultra Violet: The first time I saw him lose his wig, I was unable to pull my eyes away when I saw a metallic metal snap embedded in the front part of his skull.

Yeah, that just freaks me out. :: Shudder ::
But I think it's so interesting that he was never alone, because I think he was perpetually lonely.

DID ANDY SAY ANYTHING THAT STUCK WITH YOU?
Walter Steding: "You're not the one who decides what's good."
Bob Colacello: "If I let myself have feelings, I'd commit suicide."
Nick Rhodes: "If you don't go, you won't know." He could easily become more enthusiastic about going to a dull event than a grand affair and it usually paid off.
Patti D'Arbanville: "Pretty will get you pretty far." He was right.
Vincent Fremont: "If you are not having fun with the work you are doing, then don't do it."

That's going to go on my wall.

TELL US SOMETHING MOST PEOPLE DON'T KNOW ABOUT ANDY.
Ivy Nicholson: We were threatened by one of his boyfriends, Rod la Rod. Andy took my hand and led me to the backseat of his car. He was on L.S.D. We soul kissed for one hour and a half. 100 percent love.
Chuck Close: Andy seemed to be part of that cliche, "What you see is what you get." But he was actually more than what people expected. I think he was earnest and serious.

Some people are more than what you expect. Some people are less. Some are just what you see. I think I'd always like to be more than what people expect. I mean, I don't think I would ever consciously try for that. I wouldn't try to not be myself. But it'd be nice if it just worked out that I was more than people expected. I would like that.

Ultra Violet: One time, alone on the fire escape at the Factory, I grabbed him and said, "Let's make love." He got stiff and cold as he resisted me. He let out a loud moan as he wriggled out of my embrace. I thought he was afraid of heights, but I realized he was afraid of me.
Francesco Clemente: He was lonely.
Stephen Shore: One day, when he came into the Factory, he asked me if I had happened to watch a certain movie that was on channel 2 late the previous night. It was a terrible 1930s tearjerker starring Priscilla Lane. I said that, in fact, I had. He asked me to tell him the story, because he said he had started to watch it but had begun to cry and cried himself to sleep. He added that when he woke up, the TV was off. His mother had looked in, saw Andy sleeping with the TV on, and turned it off.

I love that story. I don't know why, but there's something wonderful about it. I may figure it out day, but I don't think I want to. I think I'd just like to leave it as a little sketch like that.

Nick Rhodes: He sometimes liked to carry a fistful of loose diamonds in his inside jacket pocket. He was excited by the fact that nobody knew they were there.

I would have liked to meet Andy Warhol. No, not even. I would have liked to observe him. My dad says he saw him with Ultra Violet in the Village one day when he was young. I can't even fathom what it would be like to bump into that man on the street.

Robert Hawkins: Andy loved them more than they knew.
Susan Blond: He returned phone calls. Andy might buy a painting with a woman with her eyes crossed. He liked the mistakes in things.

I feel like that Robert Hawkins bit is true of a lot of people, though. I think most people love others more than they know. I love everyone more than they know. But in the big picture, isn't it kind of silly that they shouldn't know? Everyone should know how much they're loved. Yeah.

I also like the mistakes in things. I like the mistakes in people, too.

DID ANDY CHANGE THE WORLD? IF SO, HOW?
Elizabeth Taylor: Andy saw the world through different-colored glasses, ones that we will never imagine. He was fortunate but tortured. Torture of his kind seems to plague all great artists because of their vision. They see deeper, they think deeper, and they translate their ideas from the mundane to the realistic. Not that there will ever be anything realistic about Andy's vision. It will never be conceived as mundane or realistic--only poetic, and visionary, and mind-blowing.

I don't think you could ever really ask for more than that. I don't think I could, at least. Though, at the same time, I feel like he probably sacrificed so many basic human experiences - not consciously, I mean - to be that way. Rather, I feel like he probably lost out on so many basic human experiences in being that way. I like that contradiction in how I view him, though - I'm not sure if I should admire and respect what he did as an artist, or if I should pity him for missing out on so much.

Palomma Picasso: I'm not sure he changed the world. But he certainly figured out where it was going before anybody else.
Francesco Clemente: Real artists leave the world alone.
Walter Steding: No, he let it happen.

I like that. Those. All 3. It's a different perspective, a way I never thought about art and the world before.

Bob Colacello: Not as much as Ronald Reagan, but quite a bit. He identified the 20th-century cult of fame and promoted it. He legitimized photography, pornography, and television as art. I'm not sure if this was good or bad.

I don't know either, but I sure appreciate the first and last parts, and I definitely know others appreciate the middle, haha.

Bryan Ferry: He was the prime mover in opening the doors of the art-world to a much greater public.
Chris Stein: He changed the relationship between art and commerce, uptown and downtown.

That idea still blows my mind. I guess I got caught in that trap of thinking of art as something non-profitable, of thinking of artists as independent spirits who either are true to themselves or sell out for money, and that it's anathema for it to be otherwise. But Warhol really believed that art and business could - should, really - go hand in hand, that the best art was business art, commercial art. I still don't know if I can personally think that way, though.

Betsey Johnson: He brought art to the masses that the masses enjoyed.
Kenny Scharf: He redefined what it meant to be an artist and opened up all the boundaries that were so in place at the time. He made it okay to exist in the world outside the art world--the world at large.

I'm sure there are people who still can't handle that idea, that art is for everyone and everyone can appreciate art, and that "art" has a much broader definition than the one critics assign it. I'm not even sure if I fully can. But shouldn't it be that way? Shouldn't as many people as possible experience beauty and art and culture in whichever ways they can?

Even if you don't like Andy Warhol or his work or what he did or anything about him, you can't deny that if he'd never existed, today's world would be a vastly different place.

"All that hatred down there...

...All that hatred and misery and love. It's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue apart."
- Sonny ("Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin)

Sometimes it feels like the world is so empty. There are lifeless people, shells that don't hold anything, wandering around, chasing something that doesn't exist. Everything is an illusion and nothing truly exists and no one can feel a thing. There is no worth; there is no reason to persist or try. No one knows anything but what they think they see and hear, and all words have no meaning behind them - they are but empty vessels floating through our ears.

Other times it feels like the world is so full. Full of life. Full of love. Full of faith and hope and inspiration and reason. Intangible everythings. Peace and freedom and spirituality and purity. Some shadow and darkness, too, but it's outstripped, outshone, by the lilting grace of everything else. Then it feels like the world is so full of everything that nothing could possibly hold it in, and it shall explode into a supernova that glows with flames that are streams of golden, luminous life and dreams made palpable, that literally flow from our fingertips and lips and eyes and hair and heart. And this phoenixlike blast will be a blessing, a celebration and rebirth of all that is good.

Perhaps like a phoenix, though, the world is left in a state of ash, completely devoid of wonder - emptied - until the good people of the world fill it up again. They renew it over and over within themselves until the world is full once more. And unless the good people patiently and tirelessly work to refill, the world will never reach this apex, where only for a moment, all is right, and we can't want for more.

"Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together."

So today I had to read an excerpt of Russia: A History. I bet you can guess how much I enjoyed that. Once I woke from my coma-like stupor, I processed the fact that most of the...one page...on literature and arts in pre-WWI Russia discussed how they were a departure from the civic-minded stuff of tradition and a move towards modernism. My assignment was to write a "reaction paper" on this excerpt (for my Lit and Film class...go figure) and find parallels and contrasts between the two. The two what, I have no idea. So I started skimming a Wikipedia article on modernist literature, which cites "disillusionment" as one of its major thematic characteristic. This made me think of two things.

1) When Sam and I studied for the APUSH exam with the SparkNotes study cards, we decided that if there was a question on the exam that was about the early 20th century and we didn't know the answer, when in doubt, the answer was "disillusionment," because the word came up on every other card. It was ridiculous.

2) I feel like people like to use the word "disillusioned" with the word "alienated." If you're disillusioned, the general consensus probably is that you're alienated, too. So disillusionment and alienation were big modernist themes. Discontentedness was so common, it might as well have been trendy. Everyone felt society was fragmented and disconnected and everyone was trying to make sense of the whirlwind world of progress and industry and change. And so on and so forth.

Really, though, it's not uncommon for people to feel alienated from others and disillusioned with the world and socially isolated from everyone else and so on and so forth. But why is that? It seems like that shouldn't be a problem at all.

"Everyone is less mysterious than they think they are."
- Claire, Elizabethtown

At the core, everyone is human. Everyone shares the same basic foundation. People tend to go around thinking they're unlike everyone else, they don't fit in, etc. (guilty...) - even when they do. Everyone thinks that no one "gets" them, that no one understands or can understand. Really, we have no excuse for that. We all share the deep, innate connection of existing together as humans - it's so deeply buried, that we forget it exists. What is it about us that keeps us so guarded, that makes us completely disregard the common ties we have with everyone else? And what is it that makes us so afraid when we find "kindred spirits," people with whom we connect? Maybe that's just it: fear.

Uh, yeah, those last two questions don't really have anything to do with each other; I'm not really sure how I made that leap. But fear is another subject completely, and now, I have work to do.