No, the reason Kim and I get along still, I think, is probably because we know when to quit with each other, to say, ok, I think they've had enough—we can maintain those boundaries and limits and know who the other is, because we're not saying, "I am, she is, we are one and the same." It's different than it is for either of us with the people we [respectively] crazily love, 'cause those relationships seem to hold this absolute urgence... Kim and I can take each other at face value when we need to, and read into things from context and memory when we need to...we can bend truth to be what it needs to be, yet it's still a maintenance of integrity, it's like size constancy with object observation, we know the moon is always the same size...it's that shifty sort of integrity whereby you always know what the other person means, or if you don't you can pretend, you don't have to spend hours hashing it out, begging the question with the minutiae of your soul...but with other people it gets distorted when we try to make things be what we want, make people believe what we want them to believe. Especially with people who are, despite our best perceptions, relatively new to us... Kim and I hardly knew each other for so long, and I still get the impression that I don't really know her, we don't really know anyone until the other person agrees that we do, it seems, so I wait for the connection, when we have those, "YOU UNDERSTAND!!!" moments. This relates, again, to last winter's epiphany, that although we believe we truly know someone, because we talk to them and have a supposed "psychic link," we never do really know. That especially applies early on in these relationships, because there's the tendency to want to generalize reactions and thoughts and beliefs to cover all instances of the other's existence...but oh, if only people were that simple! Instead, you get to know someone over time, no matter how well you connect at first. Heh, I mean, for various periods of time, I couldn't talk to Kim without being shot down. I didn't like it. But now Kim and I have that—I suppose that's it, then—lack of pretense... I try to maintain a lack of pretense with the guy, but it ends up with me wanting to have a different kind of authenticity, one of complete unadulterated truth, and then there's that certain point where to continue being authentic to the one person you can talk to means scaring that person away, so you have conflicting first-law imperatives—Should I always be absolutely truthful? Or should I always work to maintain what I have, even if that means omitting or fudging or rephrasing at times? Prof. McClelland said that that was the key, you learn eventually that you can't always tell that unadulterated truth to the one you love. He's something of a relativist, though—is that credible? It has some ring of truth, in this context...It's the Ayn Rand thing, can one ever hold something absolute, be absolutely honest? It'll always have bias, after all...I've "learned" that before, that fudging and muddling through are key. But then you almost want to merge souls with the person, to be one, but can you? Cosmically, is that allowed? Or needs must you always maintain that separation, if only to maintain being together? I'm visualizing the "Ben's Life" ideal couple, the people who can sit on the same bench coolly holding hands while not even looking at each other. It's a paradox—you can only be one by revealing all, yet to reveal all is to reveal how your minds differ, and thus push you apart, render you not one. It's sad...how does one transcend that? How does one maintain the idea, the insistence that, "No, I'm not crazy, please believe I'm not crazy, I can be normal for you," without even that insistence pushing the other person away by its need and its sharp, ferocious character? Is this the fundamental paradox we live with? Is this why we can only just muddle through, because our experiences are all tinged by earlier perceptions, rendering them different, the actor-observer bias, and we all think we're right, so we can't see that we're pushing others away by our fanatic insistence... I'm talking about different things, really, but the fundamental issue at hand remains: Do we all see things differently? Well of course we do, just like in "Washing Dishes"—if I were black, I wouldn't be me, and ditto for any other switching of that sort. We consist of both nature and nurture. But then again, in the end, it all comes down to the big question in there, "Will you marry me?" What if I'm just too crazy to remain in good graces? What if it's really just fundamentally my problem, that there's some fundamental hole in my soul I can't patch, and there it is, and it's keeping me from the person I love by its existence, by the things it makes me do and explain? If it's not fundamental, wouldn't I have recognized its existence as a personality trait by now? It's the question I asked Deej earlier: Don't you think that if I were racist I would have noticed by now? Well, likewise, wouldn't one think that if I were crazy, there would be some outward signs of it? Heh, but then there's the thought that, no, perhaps everyone just hides that from you, and they're really cringing inwardly at your very presence, like I've always thought that they do at my hair. Perhaps it's my jerkiness, I've always seen myself as a "jerk." Perhaps it even has to do with the way I've never really seen myself as a normal girl, I have dreams where I'm a guy, and that just makes sense in the scheme of things. Well, there we are then, spiraling and spiraling in these fractal, ever-repeating patterns of thought, the self-conscious downward spiral. How to escape it? Stop thinking about it. But it's only through mistakes and subsequent thought that we achieve consciousness, neh? At some point or another I'll have to think about it, I know that—hence my insistence at always resolving everything right away, making sure that all is ameliorated, everyone has the "right" perception of me...and that attempt at amelioration merely makes me seem guiltier of transgressions then I truly am. Back again to the top, neh?