Against All Odds, Indeed

Sometimes the universe sends you all sorts of synchronistic ideas and thoughts and it's kind of beautiful and I enjoy it.

I have been thinking about relationships and love and heartache a lot. I've seen movies about relationships and love and heartache, I've read books about relationships and love and heartache. I've had conversations about relationships and love and heartache. I've listened to songs about love and relationships and heartache.

Have I ever, listened to songs about love and relationships and heartache.

Yeah, I can't stop listening to the Glen Hansard album. It's kind of ridiculous, the obsession, really.

And I can't help but think when I am listening to it that this would make a fabulous break up album.

I am very much not in the market for a break-up, mind you. Quite the opposite really.

But this is also what I have been thinking about lately. Break-ups come without warning. Usually. Or they come with warnings that we don't see, or don't want to see. And we can have that experience over and over again--that experience of a break-up happening and pulling the ground out from beneath our feet--and still, STILL, we have to jump into the next relationship full out! With both feet! No hesitation. Or else we are surely doomed for that hesitation.

Even if we recognize that "I've been here before and it eventually hurt. It has hurt every time before. It has hurt, say, eight times before. Eight times I have had my heart broken or broken a heart, and it hurt, it hurt, it hurt, and still, when I try to again I have to forget that all happened."

This is something different than selective memory. This is some version of selective amnesia.

I think it is tricky.

It would seem, by the basic principles of behavior modification, that once we fall in love, or some version of love, and we love and then are hurt--that we wouldn't ever do it again. Or perhaps that resolve wouldn't happen the first time, but by the second or third time it would seem almost self-abusive to knowingly enter this situation again.

And yet we do it over and over as if it were the first time. Or we have to aspire to do this or guarantee certain failure. What is that all about?

Again, synchronistically, This American Life is all about break-ups. I just listened to the segment on Break-Up Songs. It's great, and it totally makes me think--I should have done this every time I have gone through a break-up. I should have written a song, and then by now I'd have an entire album of songs. I just need someone to help me write the music. And then maybe I'd have to learn how to play the guitar. Because the best break-up songs are played on the guitar and not on the piano.

Do you remember where you were for every break up you've ever been through? I think I remember the ones where I was broken up with better than when I was doing the breaking. What's that all about?

I saw Eurydice on Saturday night. It was also about relationships and love and heartache. I am glad I saw it, though when all was said and done I was a touch underwhelmed. It might have been the circumstances--I had to spend more than I wanted to spend on a "General Admission" ticket--which ended up meaning sitting on a stool behind the last row of audience. Second Stage is a great space, and succeeds in making most of the house feel pretty intimate, but that far back I still felt a bit.... removed, I guess. And the play itself has a slight distancing quality, so the two combined did not help.

Now that I think about it, that play also has something to do with breakup songs. Because Orpheus' songs of loss are in one respect just that. Break up songs--right? So this has been going on for ages. Even the Greeks knew about break-up songs, they just didn't have Phil Collins to write them.

Otherwise, I spent a delightful weekend in Poughkeepsie where I got to sleep a lot and shop at malls. There was a little culture sprinkled in when we visited DIA: Beacon, which was really pretty great.