And then the Leprechaun buggered off with the pot o' gold...

So, due to certain events and recent decisions I've dealt with in my life, I feel a strong need to write about the nature of Love, Relationships, and Dating in Modern Society.

The whole topic is rubbish, though, so why not root out the real source of the problem.

Just as I believe the Rebellion spirit that lives in us is the result of heavy indoctrination during youth, I fear that the modern concept of romance is likewise culturally ingrained into us. Raised on fairy tales of Sleeping Beauty and Prince Charming, it is essentially inevitable for children to grow up with severely warped perspectives on relationships. I personally had the misfortune of spending my formative years regarding these things, sequestered away in my church youth group, but more on that later.

The fundamental problem is the delusion of "The Perfect Other". Likely stemming from the Judeo-Christian that God is watching out for you, the idea essentially is that there is a Mr./Mrs. Right out there, just waiting for you. This sort of thinking can only exist in a universe that allows for an all powerful/all knowing God, or Fate, which is the same thing with a more secular coat of paint on it. Now, I won't deny that even in my social circle, I have married friends who I cannot imagine being involved with anyone else. That is a reactionary attitude, though. I cannot imagine them with other people, mainly because I have not really seen either of them with other people. The concept is foreign to me, likely not encouraging to the couple (who wants to imagine their significant other with anyone else?), and therefore largely frowned upon. Personal experience and social graces combine forces, and suddenly it's Destiny.

Except it's not Destiny. It's not Fate, or God, or any other invisible force. It is a convoluted combination of personal chemistry and compatibility, genetic predisposition, and a significant amount of compromise and work on the part of the people actually in the relationship. Those couples who were "made for each other" are likely the first ones to point out to you exactly how hard it is to live with their spouse/significant other, and will easily rattle off several issues that they are currently in the process of hammering out. They are still together because their personalities mesh in just such a way that they can get through with the relationship intact. But that is no guarantee it will last, even for the married ones. It is fallacious thinking to assume permanence simply because it is the way things are now. The couple may have worked through a lot. They may have overcome challenges that likely seemed absolutely insurmountable at the time (I can think of a half dozen examples of the top of my head for at least as many of my married/seriously commited friends). Issues which the couples managed to work through. But, I can also say with confidence that the key factor in every one of these situations was not divine providence. It was not the invisible hand of Fate, Destiny, or the Divine. It was the stubborn persistence of the poor bastards caught in the middle of it. I've watched small issues shatter "perfect" couples. I've seen a lack of persistence destroy casual couple and decades-long marriage alike. The fact that a relationship has not failed yet does not automatically assume that it cannot fail.

There is no such thing as a "soulmate". At best, there is "the ultimate accomplice". Someone who is conspiring with you against the forces of entropy and boredom. When you think about it, monogamous relationships are a bit bizarre for a species with attention spans as short as humans. Yes, they're convenient for stability while raising children, but beyond that, there is a decided lack of incentive to stay involved. There is likely a reason the words "stable" and "stagnant" both begin with the same three letters. I'm no linguist, unfortunately, but I'd be glad to hear from someone with a thought on that. Personally, I have the attention span of the average gray squirrel cranked up on pop rocks and mountain dew. And while I am fully aware that the rest of the human race does not share my weakness (Thank God), my cousin informed me recently that the average human intellect does not usually stray further than 6% off the baseline, one way or the other. Assuming I am truly exceptional, and have literally half the attention span of the most extremely inattentive person, that puts me at either 9% or 12% off the mark, respectively. In class, a full letter grade, but we're not talking about the difference between "Passing with Honors" and "Dismal Failure". This implies that I, with my miserable ability to stay on course, am at the very most, only slightly less capable of keeping my head on track. That means that most other people will eventually get bored by the same lack of variety that bores me (albeit not nearly as quickly). It seems odd that there is this expectation that, even though I have difficulty maintaining a single guiding thought in my head throughout one single paragraph, I will somehow be perfectly fine sticking to a single woman for the rest of my life. And, if some of the more extreme cases are to be believed, that I was supposed to be "true" to her all the way up till now as well.

We are raised on promises of Happily Ever After in Love, as well as other things. It's a load of bollocks, though (God Bless the UK). According to a hero of mine, Harris K Telemacher (as played by Steve Martin), "There is someone for everyone, even if you need a compass, pick axe, and night goggles to find them." I disagree. I believe the formula is that you find someone you are happy with, and then you use the compass, pick axe, and night goggles to keep the relationship together.

Just keep your nerve, batten down the hatches, and with a little luck, you can make it through, with all your friends looking on in awe saying "They were meant to be together."

Children of Revolution

Recent events have forced me to come to terms with an element of my world view that I never truly understood before. Two weeks ago, I was a rather complacent, middle-class, white, male American. I grew up in a land where you could be or do anything you really felt like, just so long as you didn't break too many laws in the process. I grew up in a middle class family, with the understanding that my parents would support me just so long as I didn't do anything too tremendously stupid. I knew my government wasn't paying too much attention, but that on some level they were at the very least passively supporting the people governed. I had a decent education, and learned all about how once upon a time, it wasn't really this way. And that somewhere, dangling off the edge of the map, it wasn't this way there either. "Here there be restrictions on social liberties, and slightly further out, there be monsters." I had a nice happy little something going on, with minimal effort required to keep it in place. The little talking box in the living room would whisper about those far away places, and sometimes show pictures of people who didn't look anything like me, miserable and suffering because they were so far away.

Yet, underlying everything, was this destructive instinct, buried deep. For some reason, I felt an almost instinctive distrust of uniforms, of political hierarchies, and of arbitrary boundaries. I knew that if the government had reason to look my way it was a bad thing, and a thing to be avoided. I heard the stories of great men and women, tilting at windmills and fighting the power, and I felt a kinship. I felt a stirring to go and do likewise.

Then, a shade over a week ago, one of those distant lands dangling off the edge of the map had their little election. I recognized one of the men running for office from my talking box, and I didn't like him. But what of it? That place was literally a world away, and none of my concern. The angry little man no one on my talking box seemed to like won his election in a landslide, and people said it was not so, that he had stolen the election. It was frustrating, but what could I do? I thought one of our politicians did a similar thing recently, and we all just grumbled about it.

But something went wrong. The people didn't grumble. The people rose up, and cried out "Shenanigans!" I heard their call, and something stirred in me. I listened to it, and I realized it didn't sound so different to my own voice. These people, they weren't so different. I am a child of technology, and binary is the same in all languages. Here were people with cell phones, and computers, and all the other gadgetry that defined my life. What is more, they were using those toys, those conveniences to fight back. On the internet, geography means nothing. Language is not a barrier, but rather an inconvenience. These people were fighting with blogs, and torrents, and twitters. I knew these things, and suddenly these weren't just people, these were my kin. These people were brothers and sisters in arms, likewise born children of technology. So I took up the call, used what tools I found close at hand, and threw myself into the fray.

I realize I'm no Iranian. I realize that my contribution is meager at best, and I could very easily just go back to my complacent life, play with all my shiny toys, and leave those people on the other side of the world to take on their own battles. My pathetic internet relay is one of a myriad, and I have no voice that change the world. Something in me would not permit this, though. Something in me screamed out "Fight!" Something in me woke up, and suddenly I was neck deep in someone else's fight. I've been trying to figure it out for days, and I've finally got it.

I am a child of Revolution. I am an American, a land founded on the principle that the people up top don't know better. The motto of my home state is "The Show Me State"; skepticism has been ground into me since day one. I was raised to believe that people should never fear their governments, but that governments should fear their people. I am a child of Don Quixote, windmills are made to be tilted at. Freedom is not a privilege, it is a right. Deep down within all of us, I believe there is a revolutionary that has been carefully groomed and prepared, because there could come a day when it is necessary to stand against the machine. Every young American who learns our history is taught to be a revolutionary, because if we ever forget that, we will lose the very thing this land was created for. We need to revolt against something. Especially now, with complacency rife and government corruption prevalent. It is a dangerous thing to raise children to honor those who questioned authority, and then present them with a ruling power that could very well be unworthy of the authority they have. It stews and simmers in us all, but we are free enough that we simply create fantastical fictions where it is not so, so we can feed our need to revolt. Movies and music, screaming out against the establishment, these things appease our cravings, but they don't remove them completely.

So when I found a gateway to revolution, a chance to finally unleash a lifetime's frustration at repression, it was a non-issue for me. Iranians were no different. If anything, they worship their revolutionaries even more than Americans, so that internal tension must have been even greater. The people who are throwing themselves into this, both Iranian and the web-based community at large, we are all doing what we were bred to do. Social repression, injustice, and violence towards a populace who did nothing to warrant it? It would be harder for us not to fight. My tools are meager, my life mostly safe, and my rage is largely impotent.

But I was raised singing the songs of angry men. I can't help but raise my own voice when I hear the chorus begin again. I support the Sea of Green.