Sometimes I feel like I'm running in circles. Anything I say or do can be twisted around and thrown in my face. You can live your life trying to do good and you start understanding why some people don't even bother trying. When you're trying so hard and people take your good intentions and tell you how they're just about the most hurtful thing you could have done (when they know that's not what you meant, especially when they know that's not what you meant), you just feel like you should just be hurtful--maybe they'll see good intentions in it, or at least you won't feel betrayed. You can let them have their betrayal, shrug your shoulders and try to make peace with the fact that they were going to have their betrayal whether or not you wanted it.
Or maybe you keep trying because you actually care. You explode sometimes because the situation is so intolerable, but you keep your intentions pure and just take the abuse time after time. And it makes you feel really sad. Really sad.
It really drives away the incentive to be good intentioned when your good intentions aren't even taken into consideration. It's all how the final product made someone feel and their feelings are paramount to the fact that you could never possibly have meant to make them feel that way, until you're told that there was nothing you could have possibly been thinking that would make up for the way they decided to take everything and feel. Makes you feel like total crap. You can't do anything right. It's all your fault. Very sad.
Good friends should be able to laugh at themselves and at each other. If you can't do that, you're just going to bring everyone around you down and end up pretty down yourself. Be the first to laugh at your faults, instead of being the first to fault others for their laughs, especially when they are innocent.
Intentions are very important, the law and nearly every moral system acknowledge this. Malicious intentions should be punished more severely and have more guilt assigned to them. Good intentions should never be disregarded and be a mollifying factor in any judgment.
But why judge people, anyway? Life's too short.
Anywho. I'm finally reading this critical edition of The Waste Land. It seems like it might just be pretty elementary given the research I've already done on that literary masterpiece. That would be disappointing. I find that I expect a lot of books. WHen I finish them, I usually shrug my shoulders and say "it was ok." I rarely smash a book (had no problem ripping the Da Vinci Code) and I rarely go over the top on a book.
Something that I have always enjoyed about literary circles, critics and such is that unlike musical critics, they don't bend to trends in quite the same way. Pop songs become nostalgic anthems attracting a far greater following than they deserve, best-sellers and page-turners are so quickly replaced and forgotten that the ones that last become the true classics. There is generally a better (more universal though still creative) standard for quality literature. Granted, literature in general is more conservative as a medium of expression than some of its fellow arts and juries are hung over Joyce, Cummings, Hemingway and many others, but when you read a classic, a timeless tale, an epic, a work of art, you know it. When you hear a song that's will still be around in 30 years, you don't. When you see a painting, sculpture or experimental fom of art, unless it's in situ, it's tough to tell.
I guess it's funny: great artists don't often achieve fame in their lives, great musicians (and many crappy musicians) do achieve fame in their lives, and authors are a middling crowd sometimes gaining popularity (sometimes deserved, sometimes not), sometimes not gaining recognition for their work. It's an interesting game. I'm reading over what I wrote and there are so many exceptions, I'm not sure it holds, but it's how I feel about the general state of these things. Whatev.
Or maybe you keep trying because you actually care. You explode sometimes because the situation is so intolerable, but you keep your intentions pure and just take the abuse time after time. And it makes you feel really sad. Really sad.
It really drives away the incentive to be good intentioned when your good intentions aren't even taken into consideration. It's all how the final product made someone feel and their feelings are paramount to the fact that you could never possibly have meant to make them feel that way, until you're told that there was nothing you could have possibly been thinking that would make up for the way they decided to take everything and feel. Makes you feel like total crap. You can't do anything right. It's all your fault. Very sad.
Good friends should be able to laugh at themselves and at each other. If you can't do that, you're just going to bring everyone around you down and end up pretty down yourself. Be the first to laugh at your faults, instead of being the first to fault others for their laughs, especially when they are innocent.
Intentions are very important, the law and nearly every moral system acknowledge this. Malicious intentions should be punished more severely and have more guilt assigned to them. Good intentions should never be disregarded and be a mollifying factor in any judgment.
But why judge people, anyway? Life's too short.
Anywho. I'm finally reading this critical edition of The Waste Land. It seems like it might just be pretty elementary given the research I've already done on that literary masterpiece. That would be disappointing. I find that I expect a lot of books. WHen I finish them, I usually shrug my shoulders and say "it was ok." I rarely smash a book (had no problem ripping the Da Vinci Code) and I rarely go over the top on a book.
Something that I have always enjoyed about literary circles, critics and such is that unlike musical critics, they don't bend to trends in quite the same way. Pop songs become nostalgic anthems attracting a far greater following than they deserve, best-sellers and page-turners are so quickly replaced and forgotten that the ones that last become the true classics. There is generally a better (more universal though still creative) standard for quality literature. Granted, literature in general is more conservative as a medium of expression than some of its fellow arts and juries are hung over Joyce, Cummings, Hemingway and many others, but when you read a classic, a timeless tale, an epic, a work of art, you know it. When you hear a song that's will still be around in 30 years, you don't. When you see a painting, sculpture or experimental fom of art, unless it's in situ, it's tough to tell.
I guess it's funny: great artists don't often achieve fame in their lives, great musicians (and many crappy musicians) do achieve fame in their lives, and authors are a middling crowd sometimes gaining popularity (sometimes deserved, sometimes not), sometimes not gaining recognition for their work. It's an interesting game. I'm reading over what I wrote and there are so many exceptions, I'm not sure it holds, but it's how I feel about the general state of these things. Whatev.
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