Second Verse, Same As the First

1. The Rebel Sell: Why the culture can't be jammed, Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter

For various reasons, I've always been the kind of person who falls into things very quickly. To a certain extent, I suppose that implies a certain superficiality to my feelings; a Romeo-esque love of love, and when I was younger I think that was certainly the case, before I started to get into the nuts and bolts of relationships.

Well, that and I was desperate to get laid.

Sometimes I feel disturbingly open and simple; if the cliche of people is that of an iceberg, 80% (or whatever it is) below the surface, I feel like I'm one of those ancient Greek amphitheaters where you can stand at the top and see and hear everything with perfect clarity. I don't want to close up, I don't want to pull back from things, but often it seems I have little or no choice if I want to avoid emotional distress. At the same time, I would never want to miss out on something because I was shutting myself off from it. I think I'd rather be hurt trying to make something work than never, ever try. This also bleeds into my martyr complex, which finds the notion of suffering in the name of romantic passion rather attractive. I'm not much of a fan of it, but I always seem to find myself in the same sort of situations, so I don't think I can realistically deny that about myself.

Chuck Klosterman makes an interesting point in one of his essays: people are never self-aware. People who think they're extroverts often actually act introverted, as they perceive themselves as constantly monopolizing conversations. People who think they're creative understand themselves as creative in the typical, societally-understood paradigm of creativity; that is, they subscribe to someone else's definition of what it means to be creative, which is the exact opposite of true creativity, and so forth. So, maybe I'm not quite as obvious as I fear?