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Revelations from 34th street.
Premeditation hurts worse than impulse.
I know, it's something so blindingly obvious you need to put on sunglasses before you read it, but even so, realizing that yesterday helped me figure out something that's been gnawing at me for a couple of months - the story someone told of taking pleasure in giving their siblings bad gifts and taking delight in their discomfort and unhappiness.
Because they'd have to have seen the item, know full well their sibling wouldn't like it, and go through with giving it to them anyway, for the purpose of laughing at them. At their disappointment.
Which is quite different, at least to me, from the teasing and sometimes physical altercations between me and my siblings. Those were incidental, impulsive, and as much discomfort and, on occasion, genuine physical pain as I know I caused them, I never planned it out days or weeks ahead of time. Because of that difference in intent - of impulse versus premeditation - and the difference in capacity to soothe a relationship after one kind of sibling incident or the other, while both can be called teasing, I can figure out how one gets to me and the other doesn't. Even discounting my own experiences.
Not to say that one's harmless and the other's harmful. More to say that it's nice to figure out why something managed to get to me and haunt me for a while. Because they knew exactly what sort of emotion they'd be causing well ahead of time, instead of giving into the immediate impulse without a struggle.
This is something I do a lot of - last Saturday someone said TV sports were good white noise, and I immediately said it was the lull of the crowds, the constant type of speech from the commentators, the familiar phonemes without the associated vocabulary which allowed one to listen to the sounds without the information. Sometimes one thing takes longer to parse out than others, is all.
I know, it's something so blindingly obvious you need to put on sunglasses before you read it, but even so, realizing that yesterday helped me figure out something that's been gnawing at me for a couple of months - the story someone told of taking pleasure in giving their siblings bad gifts and taking delight in their discomfort and unhappiness.
Because they'd have to have seen the item, know full well their sibling wouldn't like it, and go through with giving it to them anyway, for the purpose of laughing at them. At their disappointment.
Which is quite different, at least to me, from the teasing and sometimes physical altercations between me and my siblings. Those were incidental, impulsive, and as much discomfort and, on occasion, genuine physical pain as I know I caused them, I never planned it out days or weeks ahead of time. Because of that difference in intent - of impulse versus premeditation - and the difference in capacity to soothe a relationship after one kind of sibling incident or the other, while both can be called teasing, I can figure out how one gets to me and the other doesn't. Even discounting my own experiences.
Not to say that one's harmless and the other's harmful. More to say that it's nice to figure out why something managed to get to me and haunt me for a while. Because they knew exactly what sort of emotion they'd be causing well ahead of time, instead of giving into the immediate impulse without a struggle.
This is something I do a lot of - last Saturday someone said TV sports were good white noise, and I immediately said it was the lull of the crowds, the constant type of speech from the commentators, the familiar phonemes without the associated vocabulary which allowed one to listen to the sounds without the information. Sometimes one thing takes longer to parse out than others, is all.