Precisely what you think

it’s not. I labored under the delusion, for a long time, that things were precisely as I perceived them to be. At some basic level it seems like this is an all too human response; the things I see, feel touch, and hear have to be as I perceive them because I am the center of my own universe. (And let’s be Real here for a second, and say that all humans are built with two basic mechanisms: survive and reproduce, and that the survival mechanism makes us inherently the centers of our own universe. It cannot be otherwise.) Something happened along my way that forced me to begin understanding the idea that things are generally misconstrued in our heads until they become a completely different argument.

Slavoj Zizek’s explanation of the Freudian Joke “The Borrowed Kettle”:

“The title refers to another kettle – the one in the joke evoked by the Freud to illustrate the strange logic of dreams: (1) I never borrowed a kettle from you; (2) I returned it to you unbroken; (3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you. Such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments, of course, confirms per negationem what it endeavours to deny – that I returned a broken kettle to you” (Zizek 1).

As consciousnesses we WANT to believe any of the first three, if only because they are the most ego-stroking in this particularly heinous situation: the blame is placed on the circumstances in other words. What we fail to realize in this turnaround is that while we are investigating the circumstances, the circumstances are busy revealing the truth, and the truth is rarely what you thought it was.

For an example:

Last night, as he left work, feeling awful about the extremely long day he’d had (meeting at 7:30 am—which meant I had to get up 5am—for two hours, followed by actual work work for the next 10 hours) and the summer cold he was developing. As per usual, he called his girlfriend who had gone to a friend’s birthday party. One thing was inordinately clear right away: she was preposterously drunk. They had decided earlier that he was just going to go home to his house and they would meet up the next day. Now she was begging him to come to her neck of the woods. He is resistant, but in the end as most men do, he acquiesces.

Five minutes after his arrival on the scene, it becomes shockingly apparent how drunk his girlfriend is when she vomits into her friend’s toilet.

Everybody there was sympathetic to the scene of a boyfriend coming home from a long day of work to a staggeringly drunk girlfriend that he must now care for. He even thinks to himself for a while, “Why the hell am I here? I should be home right now,” very egocentrically.

If only he could see the real meaning of his being there: without him there, she would have to walk home in that state (forty-five minutes of cute, drunk, white girl walking home by herself). Perhaps the world looked all around and said, “Him. He is the only one who can ensure that this girl gets home safely.” Perhaps his girlfriend knew, at some level, what she was really looking for in his coming over. And perhaps he even wanted to go over and party a little bit himself. What all of these circumstances are endeavoring to deny is that a potentially very bad situation was completely avoided with a simple gesture.

To those who would say, “She could’ve just slept at her friends house.” Well, yes and no. Yes, because she could’ve passed out right there on the futon and been fine; however, no, because she had to get up and be at work at 9 in the morning (on Monday). How many people want to get up an extra forty-five minutes earlier on Monday, probably with a blinding hangover, walk—in the extremely hungover state—forty-five minutes uphill in order to get home so you can start getting ready for work? I can’t imagine anybody WANTING to do that when you could stagger home drunk, barely remember the walk, SET YOUR ALARM, wake up thirty minutes before you go, do the quick-ready, and be out the door before you can say “Robert’s your father’s brother.”

Then again, I could be simply justifying her actions to myself in a vain attempt to justify to slight discomfort I endured (and it was truly only slight: I did get two jameson’s on ice in me in the few minutes I was at the party). Perhaps it’s precisely what I think it’s not.

At any rate, I think the idea that things are exactly what we think they aren’t keeps things all fluxed up, and that’s what keep my existence enjoyable.