Dichroic Reflections

Up and down and still somehow....

Ampersand Topic: going up/going down (This can be interpreted any way you like.)

I was going to write about my love of gravity-based sports, but as I planned an entry on the odd view I get of other people’s relationships from reading their journals, I realized how well that ties into this topic.

For a long time, my theory has been that relationships are sine waves:

The horizontal axis is time, and the vertical axis represents how good or bad the relationship is at any moment. Basically, the idea is that all relationships, especially romantic ones, have cyclical ups and downs (profound, I know). Good ones are shifted upward on the vertical axis, so they have less time when things are really bad; bad ones are shifted down. Abusive ones have lots of drastic ups and downs, but gradually the downs get much bigger than the ups. (I’d illustrate all of these, but my .gif files are misbehaving.)

The odd thing about eavsdropping on someone else’s life is that you never know where someone is on their sine wave, at least not until you’ve gotten to know them for a while. When Natalie grumbles about an argument with Prufrock, or Badsnake is in a down period when she feels like her family is paying her less attention, or Baggage has been squabbling with his Girl-Unit, it can look like an impending break-up .... until you read on to see the love in a later entry. (One of Badsnake’s, from a while back, is sweet and memorable: "They love me. They really love me.")

I get two lessons from this: first, I tend to read the same diaries every day. Absurd as it sounds, I get to worrying about all of these people. I think I tend to read mostly people who are basically happy, so I don’t have to worry much.

Second, I’ve learned, over the years and largely from the college relationship where I learned so much else, that sometimes, when things are going badly, but you’re sure of the basic bones of the relationship, that the best thing to do is hunker down and just wait it out.

Which is not to say things with Rudder are going badly at the moment, at all, at all.