We Don't Know So Much

I find it shocking in this respect that we might feel as if there were no beauty, or that beauty couldn't be discovered, or that, also, there might be a reason not to continue to live.  Maybe beauty can't be compared against suffering, or maybe there's too long to wait.  Or maybe a lot of things.  I'm not talking delusional whipper-snapping drooling type laconic-removal-of-self-from-reality daydreaming, but about finding some hard work, a steady rhythm, if a bit slow moving and hard to change direction, and settling down into that groove for a while, only to find that you've misplaced the entire dimension of the room in your minds eye, and that the reality around you has been moving and shifting in ways subtle and large enough to birth tendrils of fear it is so grand, but soothing, too, in the way that it seems to cradle the thin spindle of saliva that is, well, what it is: your life.

Nobody Thinks They Are Normal

Now how the heck is that possible?

We're Confused

About who we are, what we like, who we like, and how we act in a given social situation.  I've seen it again and again (in the mirror mostly!).  We don't always know ourselves.  We find we like certain activities in theory only.  We like certain people who don't comport to other stated ideals, and we fall out of step with our own versions of ourselves often.

This isn't bad so much as predictable.  And, being predictable, we should be able to manipulate our duality of self to set some goals.

Are Women As Concerned with Pleasing Men as Men to Women?

I'd say the number one male fear is of early orgasm.  That is, premature ejaculation.  Of course, unless you're a super hero type male, this means you'll stop engaging in [presumably] sexual intercourse and she will go forward without becoming even halfway gloriously undone.

The assumption: your penis is what will make her orgasm, is perhaps endemic to the fear of premature ejaculation, but I'm thinking it is more about power and status--real men don't come early, and men who come quickly are not worthy of being with the partner they are with, because she's not getting as pleased as he is, and definitely not getting please quickly.

Thing is, guys, I know that, being a guy, having the pressure of making her orgasm through intercourse alone is entirely suffocating and unrealistic.   So there's a problem.  Plenty of women are having regular intercourse out there sans the orgasm (whatever you may think, this number is shockingly high, so the chance that she's faking with you, especially if you're only using one of your appendages, is correspondingly high).

But I'm wondering if women think they have to please guys as much as guys think they have to please women.  And I'm wondering as well what it is that's synonymous with premature ejaculation.

Do Strong Women Scare Men?

I don't mean politically powerful or well connected women.  I mean women who communicate very clearly, are not afraid to disagree (at the cost of their partner's discomfort), and are very firm and unapologetic regarding their own preferences.

Note that such people are often susceptible to other views.  They're not inflexible.  But you have to actually say something to them, and be willing to conflict, essentially, overtly and explicitly, with what you firmly know is their preference.

And what it seems is that people try to appease, they try to placate, and this just leads to frustration on both sides.  There's something cultural about this, but I can't put my finger on it.

Anyway, there's a few women I've known who are strong in this respect--and I'm not saying this pejoratively or with judgement, just trying to be descriptively accurate--and the universal response from most men to these women is one sentence: "She frightens me."

Why?  Honestly.  Why?

By the way.. The point isn't to die.

It is to live a decent life.  By standards that we come up with through trial and error and judgement.  I don't want to save up all of my moral code to be written on my coffin.  I also don't want my coffin to predate the maximal amount of peace and stability here and now.

Matching External/Internal

Is it normal to live an interior life that is vastly different from the exterior life presented to the world on a daily basis?  Is it possible that the mom of the two children named Clifton and Ashton is in fact a rock star punk mom, one who does not see herself as a mother so much as as a rebel who also happens, by circumstance, to be a mother?  Is it possible that more people are more like this, telling themselves, that is, who they are separately from who it is they are, than not?  If that's the case, how are we to reliably find predictable behaviors or modes of conversation with common roots, without sort of "outing" people's inner identity?

Or maybe that's the ploy.  Maybe we should appeal to everyone as if they are duplicitous in self, and see what they tell us when we recognize their true selves?

And I wonder how long the true self goes on?  Is the retired high school science teacher really a Bodhisattva?

We play with secret identities all the time.  Don't we?

Or are there a cadre of people out there who are uniquely concurrently themselves both internally and externally?  If the exist, do they know they exist?  If they know they exist, do they know that the other ones, the discordant ones, also exist?  If so, do they feel superior?  If not, why not?  Or is it always the discordant ones who feel superior?

It is strange to think that two people might interact, over the purchase of coffee lets say, and find themselves signaling information about their internally viewed selves (and the internally viewed self's superiority) at the same time, information which may not even land perceptibly on the brain it was intended to land on.  And that's even more frightening, because it means that we--the discordant ones at least--are appealing to a group who either doesn't get us, or that we purposefully keep our appeals shrouded so much so as to become illogically non-communicative.