Ambivalence + 2
I started drafting this post on August 3rd and haven’t finished it yet, so here.
One more robot learns to be something more than
A machine - when it tries the way it does - make it seem
Like it can love -
Earlier in The Ambivalence Series:
My first inclination is a deep feeling of ambivalence, of not being sure if I would even feel sad if he were to die. In a way it would be a nice closure, at last, for an abrupt ending for which I never received a reason, even a lame one.
But this can’t be right, can it? What kind of a crum-dum isn’t sure whether or not she cares if a man she once thought she loved croaks from cancer?
Maybe I am that crum-dum. Only one way to find out.
Equations.
This from my 7/10/2008 post, Ambivalence: the math, which is followed by:
I get out my list of events and assign two numbers to each entry: one number for giddiness and one number for grumpiness. I try to keep to a max value of 1 for either column, but, let’s be honest:
- I am female
- This is my chart and I am the boss
As I think of the values, I try and think, “How did I feel at the time the event happened?”
from my 7/14/2008 post, Ambivalence +1.
So, here I am with my table of data. I consider normalizing any event that contains a rating (giddy or grumpy) >1 such that the max value = 1.
“No,” I decide. “Hormones is hormones.”
What I never consider is simply adding the positive column and comparing its sum to the negative column. That would just be silly.
I know myself well enough to know that additional data points shape all previous data points. Which is to say, memories of the first date were that much brighter after the second date, which had a (+,-) of (0.6, 0). It’s as if each new event were squares of colored cellophane stacked on a light box, and as the relationship unfolded, so too did the cumulative hue of affection.
“Let’s get down to brass tacks,” I tell myself. I’m in the office, off the clock, and it’s late enough that the building’s air conditioning has clicked off. I’m undaunted. I’ve got feelings to crunch.
So, here’s the question. I know the cumulative affection rating is not simply additive. The most recent event is the event that has the most powerful impact on the running “How do I feel about this person?”
But how much more important (in terms of overall affection) is the most recent event versus all the events that have preceded it?
It’s exponential, I decide. I click over and look for basic parabola equations. (Remember those?) I find a Wikipedia entry on exponential weighting and find a smoothing function. “Could this be what I need?” I wonder.
What I want is an equation that describes this … (may or may not be continued)
Posted by Anittah Patrick on
October 25, 2008
Ambivalence +1
Living is the least important activity of the preoccupied man; yet there is nothing which is harder to learn…
Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. But the man who spends all his time on his own needs, who organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day… So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long.
– Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
And so I find myself trying to evaluate The Sum Of The Grumbly Factors vs. The Sum Of The Non-Grumbly Factors for a relationship that has long since moved past its useful shelf life. And why is this even vaguely intriguing to me? Well, the guy’s got cancer, and I’m feeling ambivalent, but I don’t trust my feelings, so I’m doing the math. You know, just to make sure. Because bar graphs = Truth, capital T!
I get out my list of events and assign two numbers to each entry: one number for giddiness and one number for grumpiness. I try to keep to a max value of 1 for either column, but, let’s be honest:
- I am female
- This is my chart and I am the boss
As I think of the values, I try and think, “How did I feel at the time the event happened?” So, for example, upon reading the handmade birthday card that accompanied one of the most thoughtful presents I’d ever received from a paramour, and upon seeing that he signed it with, “Love,” I must admit that at the time I got a little teary-eyed. But, upon being dumped less than ten business days later, the birthday card seen through that lens was a profound irritant, a splinter in the underside of my foot, and destined for a bitter end in a barbecue pit in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
I had to stay pure, though. I would not assign the total score for my birthday the-score-I’d-give-it-if-I-knew-that-shortly-I’d-be-getting-dumped. I would think critically about the gift, the card, the way he treated my friends at karaoke, et cetera and score the event as evenly as possible.
Similarly, I was not allowed to take into consideration the fact that his ex claims to have worn an ugly dress to their meet-up, or the fact that I ended up getting along with her possibly multiples more than I got along with him. Must! Limit! Scoring! To! Data! Available! At! Time Equals Then!
Now, the negative three of you who are actually reading this crazy blog post and looking at the numbers might be thinking:
- Woah, Anittah, you’re a total loonball
- Why come some events are giddy AND grumpy?
I will make no such effort to disavow you of the notion that I am a loonball and readily admit so. I should also caveat that part of my gusto for this ambivalence exercise has nothing to do with my ex, and that I don’t actually map out my reactions to events in this manner, and that all of this is admittedly hyperbolic so please simmer down and enjoy the ride. (Note that the previous sentence is mostly something that I am telling myself while patting myself softly on the head.)
With regards to giddy and grumpy:
… even a “happy” moment is tinged by dukkha. That is because neither the moment nor the experience is stable. Since the quality of happiness arises in dependence on external factors, it fades away as those factors disassemble. And in that gap is felt the trace, however subtle, of underlying dukkha. Since, furthermore, our lives are successions of such moments, dukkha is said to be “pervasive”…
… Our English term would have to have the following colorings (on an increasing scale of intensity):
faint unsettledness, irritation, impatience, annoyance, frustration, disappointment, dissatisfaction, aggravation, tension, stress, anxiety, vexation, pain, desperation, sorrow, sadness, suffering, misery, agony, anguish
… It is obvious that each of these qualities involves some degree of unease, so “unease” is how I translate the term for general usage.
- Glenn Wallis, What’s Dukkha
And so, yes, while the moment of him obliquely referring to me as his girlfriend as he drove my younger sister and I back from the beach was a happy one, there was also a “Now That It Is A Thing It Is Something That Could Be Lost” sprinkle of sadness. You can’t be someone’s ex-girlfriend if you were never their girlfriend to begin with, after all, better-to-have-loved-and-lost-be-damned.
To be continued…
Earlier:
Posted by Anittah Patrick on
July 14, 2008
tags: cancer, feelings, relationships
3 Comments
Ambivalence: the math
You are living as if destined to live for ever; you own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply… How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!
– Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
Last week I learned an ex-boyfriend has cancer.
A stunner, for sure, but rest assured that this was not a long-term, serious-serious relationship. Perhaps it could’ve been, but after sixteen weeks of what I thought were four to five nights a week of contented companionship, I was dismissed over a bad eighties tune whose chorus wails, “I wanna know what love is.”
So, you know, I have conflicted feelings about the relationship, as well as this person, so naturally this additional data point was a gooey gremlin that I had no idea how to handle.
So, I called my big sister in Chicago.
“Rahnee?”
“Nita?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s up?”
“My fake ex boyfriend has cancer.”
“Hmm. You okay?”
“Hmm,” I reply. I sigh deeply and pause. “I’m not very good with feelings,” I remind her.
“That’s not true,” she counters, ever the Feely McFeelerson.
“Whatever. I don’t know how to feel about this. I’m annoyed that it’s cancer.”
She gets it. We’ve discussed this before, our grumbliness at The Cancer Card. It’s got a brand name, and when you say So And So Has Cancer it’s all so easy to collect sympathy points. Less easy when you say So And So Has Obscure Disease That Lacks An Association And That No One Has Heard Of.
“You know how you feel. Trust yourself. Don’t be afraid to feel. You have a right to your feelings.”
Grr. I hate when big sister tells the truth.
“I’m going to do some math,” I reply.
She laughs.
“Ha, ha,” I faux-laugh back.
I wasn’t kidding.
* * *
My first inclination is a deep feeling of ambivalence, of not being sure if I would even feel sad if he were to die. In a way it would be a nice closure, at last, for an abrupt ending for which I never received a reason, even a lame one.
But this can’t be right, can it? What kind of a crum-dum isn’t sure whether or not she cares if a man she once thought she loved croaks from cancer?
Maybe I am that crum-dum. Only one way to find out.
Equations.
* * *
The question is this: how does the addition of the cancer thing alter the area under my affection curve?
* * *
Step one is to come up with some events that transpired over the course of our relationship that triggered feelings within me, good and/or bad. This is a relatively easy task as I have a good memory. There was the first date, when we walked around McCarren Park as if in slow motion, yapping about existentialism and art and the ridiculous heat. Later I found out that directly after this date, he reported to all of his friends that he had “a hot new girlfriend.” It was a good date. I remember that.
There was also the second date, and then the emails back and forth while he was on a pre-planned solo trip to Mexico. Oh, yeah, and our first trip to the beach. Ah, and then the second one, with my kid sister in the back seat, and him obliquely referring to me as his girlfriend. That was a really nice moment.
The list is coming along now, and part of me is wondering, “Aww, I can’t be ambivalent about his having cancer. It would be sad if he died.”
But then, more data points. Me finding out about his meeting up with his ex-girlfriend without telling me. That damned Foreigner song at the cafe we always started our mornings at. Being ignored for a week before being officially dumped. And then, more recently, having my friendly suggestion that we do brunch a few months ago go ignored, even after I had given the music video he created / directed a nice shout out on my blog.
I’m feeling grumbly again. Grumbly and ambivalent.
But what is The Sum Of The Grumbly Factors vs. The Sum Of The Non-Grumbly Factors, I wonder?
Well. Now I must quantify each data point, I think.
To be continued
