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2002-01-22 - 6:37 p.m. You know the little panicked moment of confusion you get when you're walking along the street, and someone who is walking the opposite way to you tries to step out of your way and you try to step out of their way, and you both step the same way? For the sake of brevity, I will refer to this activity henceforth as the "confusion dance". - Anyway, when you're riding a bike on the footpath (tsk, I know, I'm naughty but then it happens on bikepaths too, and riding on the road is only safe if the drivers are sane and know the rules, and you'd be surprised how many don't, but anyway, enough feeble attempts at self-justification...) you go through the confusion dance very, very much more frequently than you do when you're on foot. It's annoying - I try to remind myself that I'm lucky like in that Belle and Sebastian song, although not the boy on a bike bit in "Fox in the Snow", which is sad, but the other Belle and Sebastian song, the one that goes... "I'm lucky I can open the door and walk down the street" what was I talking about? Sorry, I get the feeling that the thread is going to get tangled here. Anyway, yes, I try to remind myself that I'm lucky to be riding at all, and I'm breaking the law, but nonetheless I get a little annoyed at the confusion dance and the frequency thereof. For this reason, I greatly prefer pedestrians who are facing away from me to ones who are facing towards me. The ones who are facing away don't see me; hence I can take all the responsibility for avoiding a collision (which it is much easier for me to take, since where I am on the footpath is a mere matter of steering rather than any extra work) and the possible additional stress of dealing with the "confusion dance" is thereby avoided. With pedestrians who are facing towards me, then even if the confusion dance doesn't ensue, there is still extra effort that needs to be taken to make sure that it doesn't. For example, with an away-pedestrian, I can ride straight toward them and duck around in the last couple of meters. It's perfectly safe because I go slowly, and I only do it anyway if there are obstacles on the footpath that need to be avoided. But with a towards-pedestrian, you have to "signal" early that you are not planning to try and kill them, by riding on the opposite side of the footpath to them at least 15-20 meters in advance. Anyway. - The worst situations usually occur on the bike path, where people run and walk also, and you get one group of people walking away from you and one walking towards you, and in order to pass the away-group you have to temporarily move towards the towards-group... but anyway. This is meant to be a metaphor, not a rant. - Ah, yes, so the metaphor, I don't know how natural this will seem after all the exposition, but the thing is the reason relationships are difficult is because the other person is always facing you, and inevitably you're going to end up in some kind of emotional equivalent to the confusion dance. Remember, the confusion dance arises not from any selfishness but actually from its opposite; both parties are trying to make life easier for the other person. And this is why, I think, there are all sorts of fantasies about what a partner should be like that are to do with them being static. Basically, if you can rely on them not to respond to what you do at all, then they are like the pedestrian who is facing away from you, and they're easy to get round. - Because, and this really is a big tangent now (the metaphor is done with) among the many things that love is, is one that rarely gets mentioned except in relation to it ending or being opposed or contradicted; but love is (or at least it can be) awful. I'm thinking of the Bruce Springsteen song "She's the one". I think it's a particularly brilliant song, actually, because the heartache that the song is about is caused by the protagonist's knowledge that a certain girl is, as the title suggests, "the one". It's the complete opposite of the fairytale fantasy that when you find "the one" all your troubles are over and you get to live happily ever after. Instead, the guy in this song is running away, sleeping with other women, lying and being deliberately cruel because he's desperately trying to escape from the fact that they were meant for each other. There is no happy ending to it. Knowing that she's "the one" doesn't make it any easier for him to cope with life, with who he is, with his past... - I don't know, I've been in love before and made a hash of it, and with J then she thought I was "the one" and that if only she'd been "the one" for me that would have solved the problem, but I think actually it would have made things much, much worse. - "If ya wanna end war 'n' stuff ya gotta sing loud" - Arlo Guthrie
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