To the victor the spoils; to the loser their pride

To the victor the spoils; to the loser their pride

Myopia is a condition that approximately 25% of the population currently has, simply put, it is when you can see things better that are close to you than that are far away. It is associated with a higher IQ. That's right, all those kids you teased for wearing glasses really were smarter than you. Sorry. Then again how many idiot studies have we all read. The more interesting part to me is to consider why that might be the case. I think it is a bit like video games. Did you know that people's IQ have had the most dramatic increases in the past few decades? IQ is a truly odd measure though and seems (from someone uneducated) that it is based on one's ability to learn. Therefor, it would mean the ability to figure out how to win in your current environment. Video games train us to think that way and with the increase in logic puzzles we give children, they certainly should be learning this faster. There is a video game principle that talks about a pay off level, forgive me geeky people for not knowing enough terms, but essentially the principle follows that people will work towards obtaining a goal, like an extra life or a prize gold coin, and they will be willing to under go challenges to do that for hours and hours and hours as long as they are given small encouragements. There is a burn out level though, where you find it is too challenging and you will simply turn off the game. So, as long as we can keep that build up coming, that small treasure, we should continue to keep playing the game.

I asked a friend of mine about the history of myopia and the development of it. He suggested that it is, for all intensive purposes, growing, quickly. He brought up an excellent point that a few hundred years ago, not being able to see as well was an impressive disadvantage. Now, we don't need to worry about it as much and you see it far more. Why would it be linked to a higher IQ though? I think I have a possible explanation: it increases IQ but you have to work harder to win in the same environment as everyone else. You, with a weaker sense, have to still navigate the same world, the same obstacles, and put the same things in order. You learn to do this through an impressive filtered lens-just a thought.

But if that were to be true, perhaps that could explain some other things as well. It is, at this point, relatively easy to correct nearsightedness but what about other problems with vision or hearing. Having ones that are less easy to solve, does it make people feel isolated? Literally having to see the world differently than everyone else, does that make one feel less able to connect?

Not to return to my perpetual thread of poly bashing but I have had a few odd realizations lately. It was asserted by a friend that I have more partners than anyone he knows in the poly world. I was taken aback by this announcement because I, at present, view myself as completely partnerless. I implored him to take it back as I was uniformly offended by such an accusation-with the strong positions I have taken against poly, seeing myself as the worst offender wasn’t something I was up for. The friend pointed out several people I have a good connection with as my partners but to me, they are all friends, they are people that I enjoy being around, people I trust and confide. He suggested that any intimate connection, including emotionally intimate, could be considered a relationship. I keep percentages instead. I have 30% friends for casual folks who know one aspect of me and to whom I say hello when I pass, I have 60% friends that I call when I want to go do something, want to talk for a while, and after that, it gets murky. Usually people higher than that are people I have kept as a significant partner and someone I imagined myself with; sometimes, it is a friend that I have had for a long time.

I had a fight recently with someone that I considered a friend when he thought that we were moving in a different direction, towards dating. He is poly and I simply don't want that for myself but he thought that our closeness, my desire to talk to him so often, my desire to be near him, meant we were moving forward. The problem with the scenario is that we were both using different vocabulary.

To the victor goes the language.

I think back to Eduardo and I felt with him and realize he was lying to me at some point but I don’t know how intentionally I think that was. He keeps insisting we had been friends the entire time: while I slept in his bed, while we talked as often as we did. If that’s true though, why is he so against that same thing now? I saw him briefly last week and had a wonderful conversation with him, felt close him, was energized by him. Then it crashed again. I hear it in his voice when he speaks to me, when he doesn’t use my name. Eduardo takes precautions, kind precautions; he never say her name, never alludes to her but we know she won. Ironically, I know more than I want to what she has won. When I am with him, when I hear the condemnation in his voice I hear my father too, I see my father at his desk, judging me, judging himself more and I see Daniel’s dream: my father about to board a train and Daniel telling him that he cant leave me again, that I need him but my father shakes his head and says he wanted to be there for me but never was. I know what that house is like and sometimes winning means staring through the pane glass windows at the picture perfect house. I want him to kiss me, to tell me he loves he, that its ok, that it’ll be ok, and I want to be the one to make him smile and I want to see him smile, more than I ever could put words to or let my mind even think. But I also don’t want my father. I already had to live through it once. Maybe forfeiting is winning but I miss what I lost: I miss my friend.

Then I think about this guy who wants a relationship with me. I think that I have said clearly what I want and what I don’t but it’s never that clear. Sometimes I enjoy being around him and sometimes I am reminded of everywhere else he would rather be and I know I shouldn’t have to give up. I think the problem remains in the vocabulary that is being used. I expected this guy to enter into our friendship with my vocabulary as I am the one against poly and I am, frankly, in the majority. But he has surrounded himself with like thinkers so naturally he is accustomed to using a different vocabulary and, as I was entering his life, he assumed I was take on his. Where could that leave a poor little lost girl?

Deaf.

When I tried to end things recently with someone he became defensive and insisted that I was young and silly. I have to assume that even in my world, he found a way to win. Since that point any time I have mentioned anything of slight emotional significance with another guy he has put up this wall announcing why he is not able to pursue any type of relationship with me. For a while it would hurt me, as I would feel like it was yet again someone telling me that I wasn't good enough but it happened again last night. I was driving home from a wonderful evening with a friend and telling this guy about the night and he did the same thing. He said that I was simply a guilty pleasure and he didn't gain anything by talking to me, which started to set me off till I thought about his actions. He asks me to date him. Tells me he wants me. Calls me many nights. I’m not a waste of his time in his mind, he enjoys it but he needs to have this, to the loser goes the pride. And that’s ok.

This boy questioned me about it over and over since the conversation and I finally had to concede to him that I didn’t have the attraction to him that he required of me. I didn’t find him sexy I didn’t want a romantic spark to develop and that frankly his bourgeois bored me. He doesn’t want anyone in his life that doesn’t want him in every single way. In some ways he is much like me. I tried to explain to him how I felt-I don’t need anyone who only has the capacity to view me as a guilty pleasure, I am far too smart, too interesting for that but then when we can only get to one conversation, well he has every right to be bored. I just wish that were the entire truth. Truth, like language, favors the strongest. And I was escorted out, a lecture about my failure to be more than one-dimensional followed along with some harsh words about how shallow I was for not appreciating him. For him, he won a moral victory against a heathen. I’m not so sure I would have agreed but to the player, his pride.  He had a way survive, not matter what words he needed to speak.

There is a lake in Russia that is 25 million years old and because its in Russia and buried deep in a country that loses much to darkness and ice, it has remained minimally touched, hidden and it thrives with over 200 species that exist only there. Is that winning? Is being forgotten and living in a state of perpetual motion the victory? I suppose it will always be survival.

It’s in the Bible too right? God will only throw at you what you can handle? How much can I? Lately, I've thought maybe it’s more than I ever knew. I used to be addicted to checking facebook, seeing how evan’s relationship was progressing. I haven't in half a year now. I think still think about it but I have a way to survive and that is without checking. I used to think that I wanted all of these things: marriage, career, amazing friends who would be there for me unconditionally, a cute little house near the ocean. For the first time in years I can honestly say that I am tremendously content being single. I don’t have to explain why I missed a call, I don’t have to worry about which friends he gets on with, I don’t have to think about who has to sacrifice when this bill comes in twice as high, I don’t have to do that right now, and I’m kinda good with that. I can just make one decision and that can be enough. I don’t have to make our decision. I feel good about this. Consolation prize?

We have a winner and we have a loser. For a second lets talk about what happens when you win. Was out the other night with someone who won a small prize with me and he let out the most fearsome scream I have ever heard. Think primal scream after you have slaughtered a beats type scream. Walls shook, animals scurried. I quizzed him about it for a while after regaining my precious and fragile hearing and he heralded that all men did that, it was a way to be free, to not be contained. Yes, in fact my first thought was ‘oh no, not hippy liberal’ but, thank goodness, I don’t believe that was it at all. For him, it really was a moment to release and it is something he values above all else: a lack of confinement, rules and restrictions. He fired back with an equally pressing question for him: why didn’t I scream. I didn’t answer him. Took me a while to know why I didn’t need to do that and in the shower the next morning (best thinking place besides under my tent) I realized that I hated it because of what it was: a way to not be restricted. For me, winning is being safe, means not having to burry my head under covers when I turn the lights out at night, it means not having to run up the stairs when I’m home alone. All of those rules and restrictions to me are winning; they are the mark of defeating chaos and to a stretch, beating the devil. Announcing that I have figured out how to make the rules work for me, help me. Moreover, they are a mark of cooperation, of acceptance and respect. Think of it like this: for him, screaming meant he didn’t have to be bound by silence, by the acceptability of being quiet; for me, keeping quiet meant that someone would have to invest in me to hear me, it meant someone would stay in control of themselves when during an intense moment and wouldn’t be the one to lose control and hit me again. His winning celebration meant I had just lost.

If you think about who goes on to be successful it is entirely about how you win, it is about maximizing the rules, using them to get the attention you need and then stretching them just enough to further your belief. It is about using the vocabulary that is out there to make a new sentence. Evolution is about winning.

I say it all the time: I don’t understand poly. I hear about marriage and am confused. What does that even mean? I have a traditional view of marriage and don’t understand why another community so against tradition would want to use the same word. So I ask. Well the word has been around for so long (not as long as you think) it doesn’t have anything to do with religion (so what does it mean to you exactly), government stole the term when they appropriated it for business mergers etc. (are we equating all of this to a barter). Truth is I think I would do better if I could understand the terms but they get muddled. Pretty sure I am losing that battle quickly but I suppose I shall eventually have the home turf advantage.

I have the most amazing book that I need to permanently borrow from the library, and yes Eduardo has already frowned upon this idea. The book is a collection of wins from losses: haunting stories that remain only because of their tragedy but remain they do. A story of an island that is going to disappear, an island with homes, with people, with a history, that has eight inches left above the water. A story of an island that emerged entirely from bird dropping, do with that what you will. And a story of an island where a man grew up hearing a voice playing in his head, conversations entirely in another language, a language he never knew existed until one day he was introduced to someone who had actually heard the same language spoken years and years early; they married, the only woman who would ever understand him. He won.

In the end that is who shall always win, what shall always win. We set up the arguments and these obstacles for ourselves constantly: what did he mean when he said this? Will this lake be polluted and die? Over and over we strain ourselves to come up with that extra life, but that's who wins. Now we all need glasses. Now we all adapt. Its in what we tell ourselves after disappointment, its in our justification, its in the vocabulary that paints us the hero.

I needed a friend the other night, when I was told being a guilty pleasure wasn’t ever going to make me good enough to talk. I was up for a long time thinking about the losses, the pain that goes with it, of the moment you know that you’ve lost. Thinking about whom I've lost. Experiences I've lost. My trip to Spain. My perfect photo. My late night phone call to someone who understands. Then I got it. If I just changed my game. If I changed what it meant to win, if I allowed my loss to have a hint of victory, a small component: then I win. Then I survive. And I evolve.