"the best thing you've got going for you is your willingness to humiliate yourself"*

i was watching something rather horrible on tv this evening and i got to wondering -- does love truly require one to make a dumbass of oneself? really? because that sort of thing is too painful for me to witness in stories, let alone in real life. seriously, watching fifi and i cringe and groan our way through even such wonderful cinema as as good as it gets is like watching guys watch someone get kicked in the nuts. it's just that painful. in fact, anyone acting that way around me would be in serious danger of me deciding to put him out of my misery. and his own, of course. it's the humane thing to do.

yet, some would have us believe that this is the indicator of true love. you just stop caring about yourself and are willing to do practically anything to be able to be with the other person. and it's usually painful -- but it works on tv. now, this could just be an attempt to make people feel better for making fools of themselves, because they often do. but if you think about it, doesn't it just make the line between "devoted" and "stalker" even thinner than it already is? yes, little john cusak standing out in the rain with his boombox is a powerful image. but if anyone else tried it -- well, quite frankly, it would just be scary. n'est-ce pas? and don't even get me started on the balcony scene in romeo and juliet. i side with tybalt. give me a sword, and we'll just run the little bastard through.

i suppose you could make the argument that if no one ever went out on a limb, no one would ever know. and there's some validity to that. but really. what if you just ask straight out instead of turning yourself into a sideshow act and vicariously humiliating everyone who comes near you in the meantime? yeah, it might hurt. but won't it ultimately hurt less? of course, one has simply to ask any third rate social scientist to get confirmation that logic and rationality tend not to characterize human thought processes (unless one asks an economist... they tend to cling to that assumption of rationality. duh, of course the pretty theories won't work in the real world that way. but they also like to pretend they're hard scientists. silly wabbits).

it just worries me, that's the long and short of it. i'd rather not be party to it, or even near it. if dumbass works for you, that's great. pat pat pat with a ten foot pole (and only if i really have to). stay the hell away from me; i don't want to watch. thanks all the same.


*yes, that quote is from as good as it gets. i guess it's just my reference for awkward and painful.