rahvin, in a way i can back you up, in another i just cannot, especially these days. i agree with you on the difficulties connected with sharing feelings, because most people are not able to even understand what the fuck you are doing all alone in that desert trying to bring a precious gift ti them. they probably think you're pathetic, or wasting your time, and in the end they will think you show no coolness at all, bar returning to you on their knees after two years asking for a future, when of course you know how dramatically selfish and stupid they are and you are forcedly unable to develop any feeling towards them except for spite, disgust and in a few lucky situations pity. On one hand, i guess it's a cultural problem connected with stereotypes about a phase of life: especially until one's mid-twenties saying that you don't want to be attached to anyone is socially valured, no matter how much some young british writers try to tell us it should be different. On the other hand, people who follow this kind of alignment in doing so show their stupidity and their lack of courage: that's why the absence of reciprocation and the winter of the heart are likely to carry on even when you're fully grown up, just because people who were stupid before keep on being stupid after. The fact that they were following a silly canon is not really important per se as much as the reason why they did so: absence of constructive models worsens the situation, but in the end the real trouble comes from cowardice and lack of vision. It seems that very few people can appreciate the beauty of being continuously driven to give, obliterate the self, build and be surprised by the existence of reciprocation: most individuals think that they have no interest in doing so, and of course it is a self-fulfilling catastrophe, because you can't have a go at any absolute if you have no belief, this will be perceived, and no absolute will emerge. this is the part i agree with, if you were trying to convey such a message.
what i don't agree with, though, is the "no point" part. these days i have enormous problems with my own feelings (and i may be in denial, although god forbid, i don't need any more pain), but i still find that there's point beyond sense of pride or moral choice. take you and me: i guess there's reward in giving, and there's reward in feeling. this i know the moment i think of wanting you around if i'm in a difficult situation. so fuck the desert, because we can take the heat. take the other friend we're so concerned about: there's a natural desire of trying to save him from his sentimental dèbacle, and i guess this has meaning in itself. i am not afraid of having these realizations and inspirations cut down by stupidity or selfishness on the part of any of you, i just know it is so highly unlikely that i can call it impossible. this for generosity and affection in general.
if you want to keep to the topic of boy/girl type things, my personal impression is just that people like us should make up their own rules. my previous caveat - beware, idiocy comes first, pain comes announced second - tends to be ignored when we are faced by someone we find attractive or titillating, and we know where this got us: wasted feelings, drained energy, sleep lost over nothing. apart from the fact that, in a metaphysical perspective, you might have given and sown the good seed even if the other person refuses to admit - and this is good in and by itself -, the point is that i am convinced we will grow out of response to such titillation. in my personal experience, huge mistakes were made from wanting someone who looked apt to patch some disastrous side of my persona. what i failed to notice is that if it is disastrous it's not likely that i have good judgment about it: oh the wonder! take the guy i mentioned previously on the forum, the one who didn't move my car in the end: he looked like a man who could guarantee something simultaneously stable and profound (ie profound without loads of angst) to me, but what the fuck do i know about those two concepts put together? of course i made a mess and mistook his existential fear, of course driving him away for every problem, with an ability to consider such problems in an undramatic way. now i know, but it's not like i was dealing with something i know full well, say staying awake at night and wanting to destroy the world. so what i am trying to say is: albeit the unexplicable gimmicks of physical attraction will always produce the last word in sentimental matters - no matter how much i say it can also come later, but the only result of believing this is that it happens _to me_, and it's not a deal -, most problems on the topic we are discussing depend on the inability we've shown in the past to understand behavioral phenomena we didn't know, and we liked exactly because we mistook them for something else. yes, most people are greedy, selfish, they don't get involved, and once they get involved they want out: but this is _most_ people, not _all_ people.
I'm positive about the possibility of directing your feelings towards the deserving only: it entails some scary costs, like hating with a passion a lot of individuals and making loads of enemies, let alone the hypothesis that you might not be deserving, or you might be late, or you just be so fucked up you lose your mental faculties. And I know that, as you say, you're one of those who won't drop a thing, so I guess you can full understand that there might be such a light (go figure) at the end of the tunnel, otherwise you were not trying.
Another thing I know full well is that there's many small things that you receive from people you sort of love and if you don't really wait for more they can make you marginally happy, but this has nothing to do with what stated above.
What I'm not exactly positive about is what happens once you know how to avoid the retentive, the self-centered, the exploiting, the destructive, the envious. Apart from the hate towards them. My personal take about this, at 0.42 in the morning of what has been a pointless day, is that you want to shoot yourself, because it turns out that, all in all, they're not too hard to handle, and they can scar you but they won't break you for good. Which makes sense, because you won't go into a real panic and sweat blood and really think you're going to lose it if you know that you're dealing with someone who does not know what the fuck they are talking about, let alone what _you_ are talking about. This can happen in light forms, there might even be a slight sense of understanding.
But, contrary to what Manowar would say, what is _real_ (you know all the mythology) cannot but kill you, for a myriad reasons: mine are probably different from yours, maybe there is a common denominator, maybe it's just shit luck, maybe we are asking for it, i would not rule that out. This is an all different level, and my guess is: it's worthy to harbor feelings for something that is real (as you once said, "a table" would qualify), without a grip on them you will never understand a fuck of what you are doing anyway because it's not like you shut them out of the door, but especially because any decent human being wants to go down fighting. Manowar, again.
hyena (he touched by the heavens, his hellfire nears. how true)
