Since this blog is being read by absolutely no one

...I'll take advantage of that for my own purposes. (that seems to be the thing to do these days). I heard that there are so many blogs and so many other things competing for our time that each blog has basically one follower - the one writing it. After all those years we kept our diaries secret, we finally leave one open for the world to read and they're too busy.

Ha!

So...what would you talk about when you knew no one was listening?

Suicide of course. This is a funny one, actually, because I'm going to diagram for you how the people die who many want to live, and the people who arguably many people probably wish were dead are still alive to piss them off.

Some people care what others think of them. Other people don't.  Which group of people would you want in your life? - those who care what you think of them, naturally. It's kind of waste of energy to be around people who don't care about you since all your efforts go unnoticed or unappreciated.

But what basically is a therapist/counselor/psychologist/psychiatrist (and even your priest and your best friend) telling you when you open yourself up to them and tell them all about what is making you so depressed? Take care of yourself first. Don't cast your pearls to the swine. Don't allow yourself to be too vulnerable. Don't share so much, people will take advantage of that.

Share just enough so that people will find interest in you, but dont' share so much that they are overwhelmed or burdened by you.

That's a bit vague, don't you think?

Especially if you're a man and you see the cover of all those woman's magazines in the grocery store checkout lane (I've often wondered if the reason that the line doesn't move any faster is because the cashiers are being paid to sandbag so that the customers will have more time to buy chewing gum, batteries, and magazines).
The woman's magazines all say how men are rotten because they never open up and share their feelings; they say that the men they want are the ones who can show their emotions and be "deep" with them.

But wait - don't we live in a paternalistic male-dominated society?

Yes, what's your point?

Well if you're  a woman and you know that the world has you by the throat because you're not a man, when you go looking for a man aren't you going to be searching for one of the guys that has other people by the throat so you can hopefully share in the spoils of his conquests? Women want a guy who's confident, strong, and arguably dominant so that when he's out there earning his living and managing their mutual affairs that he can slay all the enemies, dragons, and other forces that get in his way.

...and then when the woman realizes he's strong enough to treat her like all those other things she wants him to dominate, control, and defeat, she somehow can't figure out why.

The alternative is the guy who's emotionally as vulnerable as the woman is; a guy who's learned to be open and expressive about his feelings so that he can share them with her. The women love this....for a while. Suddenly they realize that any guy who opens up with this kind of ease will get his little candy ass bruised and beaten (if not slaughtered) by all those other dominant forces that are out kicking ass and taking names.

So what women want doesn't really exist - A guy who's strong enough to be a US Marine and White Knight while he defends the righteous and noble and slaughters the demons and devils, who then can instantaneously turn himself into a soft, cuddly teddy bear who brings home flowers and writes poetry.

When the Myers-Briggs interest inventory came out and put us all into four codes- meaning that of the eight choices, your answer to 200 questions would classify you into four of them with opposite polar classifications, I became a freak for sure. We often say that if something is "one size fits all" then it won't fit anyone very well. Of the four choices I/E, N/T, F/S, P/J, I am one of the few people who is very close to the middle on all four scales. They call me "lateralized". You might think that a person who could fall into either one catagory or the other if only a few of the 200 questions were answered differently would be well adapted and well balanced.

Not so, say the shrinks. They blame us for making their test look bad. I was told by one "doctor" that my answers were very "inconsistent". Hmm....let's see - Meyers/Briggs takes what are really only about 25 questions and asks each one of them 8 times by changing the wording slightly. They say this is done to try and pin down the people who don't obey the instructions to the test and answer each question on one's first impulse. But imagine a person who can't be that impulsive, and does contemplate each question, and then envisions or remembers situations where sometimes the answer was A, on other days in different situations the answer was B.

The real world is a lot more like that last scenario, where things are unique and must be judged in the moment on the merits. But if you actually take the test that way, the test administrator will accuse you of screwing up their results and say you are "inconsistent".

How did deep and introspective and capable of elaborate consideration with a stake in the outcome become a liability like "inconsistent"?

I started out talking about suicide. I'll do that later, because apparently in writing this out I'm not so obsessed about dying right now.

Go figure.