Learning blows.

This, apparently, is the week for old friends to come back from my checkered past to make me feel like a pile o' somethin' smelly. I assume they don't mean to do this. I have the proclivity to travel pile o' shitwise these days. At any rate, these people somehow draw out my worst traits and I tend toward several unlikable behaviors:

1. intellectual oneupmanship,
2. bluffing,
3. and sundry manipulative affection-demanding gestures.

While standing by the mailbox on the street with my roomie walking toward me and my world crumbly around the edges, I had an epiphany. It went like this:

I act exactly this way with my father and brothers. I am repeating impossible relationships in my life in hopes of solving a massive problem, i. e. my family. Instead of changing my behavior, I fall back into subconsciously ritualized behaviors as a last-resort survival tactic.

Epiphany, Part the Second: the rituals never work.

You can imagine how useless they are considering they go like this:

1. Oh yeah? Well I'm super smart and stuff!
2. Then I don't give a shit, I'm just fine over here and not miserable at all!
3. But I'm cute as a button, right? Don't you want to touch me?

No one ought to be on the receiving end of that, even if they deserve a little confusion in repayment for all the shit they put me through.

That's the end of today's psychology lesson. I hope you learned something.

I hope I learned something.