Archive - 12 March 1999

Two entries in one day? Is that legal? Ah, who cares. I wanted to ramble, so I'm going to ramble. It's probably better for me than reading. At least if I'm working on my website, it looks like I'm doing work from a distance. Typing noises are coming from behind my monitor.

Don't ask my why, but I was thinking about Cerebus earlier today. My mind wanders a lot; I can't help it. Anyway, you don't need to be familiar with the comic to follow this thought, so don't worry about it. Here's the thing: Lately, the author (Dave Sim) has been examining relationships. Actually, he's been doing it for a while. Much speculation has been bandied about as to whether art is mirroring life, etc, etc. Dave has even been accused of being a misogynist, which I personally don't believe. I'm getting off track here, aren't I? Okay, anyway, just lately the main character, Cerebus, has finally been in a relationship with this woman he's been chasing for a while. And he got the relationship because of this piece of advice: "With the unhappy ones, all you have to do is be happy enough for two, every single minute for the rest of your life, and you've got them." Okay, I'm paraphrasing because I don't have the comic with me at work. But that's the main thrust.

My initial reaction to this was, oh, Dave's oversimplifying again; taking a spark of truth and pulling it out of context to make it seem brighter than it is. But just today, it occurred to me that that might very well describe me.

I won't go into a lot of detail here, because I suspect most of my regular readers already know about most of my romantic life before I fell in love with Matt, and because it's too much to get into right now. But it does seem to me that just perhaps, the problems with my previous relationships were related to the fact that my lovers weren't as happy as they could be... And I know for a fact that if I had to pick one single trait that I loved most about Matt, it's his good humor and the fact that he can almost always make me laugh. And I'm very uncomfortable when Matt isn't happy, even if I'm not the reason.

Oh, there's more to it than that. I have confidence in that. But it does worry me a little. Am I one of the "unhappy ones"? I like to think of myself as a relatively happy person most of the time. But maybe I'm not. I was depressed when I was in grad school - was that because I'm an unhappy one, or merely because I'm so introverted that I wasn't making any friends? Or maybe that's what it means to be an unhappy one. But I don't really think I'm unhappy. Or maybe I am. Look at all the space in this journal that gets devoted to whining.

Ah, I'll never know. It's just something that struck me. It's probably nothing. Just one of those ideas you have sometimes, and you want to write it down before you forget it...