Question for the kids

Do you think it’s disgusting and wrong to subsist almost entirely on a diet of corn nuts and Coca Cola?

Good, me neither.

Secrets, secrets…

Remember that rhyme from when you were a kid? “Secrets, secrets are no fun. Secrets, secrets hurt someone,” you’d chant if you found your friends whispering. The problem is the rhyme doesn’t tell you who that “someone” is. Well, it’s all of us.

Secrets are strange. They’re a detour from the natural human urge to be social and to share. They inspire a wide range of emotions and thoughts: excitement, fear, shame, anger, confidence, trust, and almost anything else we’re capable of feeling.

Secrets, no matter their subject, are meant to do one thing — to keep someone (or something) from being hurt. The problem is, secrets rarely, if ever, live up to their supposed function. Sometimes we keep secrets to save someone else’s feelings. The problem is, if that person finds out about our secret, the hurt is two-fold — they are hurt by the secret itself and further hurt that you kept the secret. We never see it as someone’s attempt to save our feelings; we see secret-keeping for what it is at its core — lying.

We also keep secrets for ourselves, because we’ve been hurt, or because we think that sharing the secret will hurt us more than the secret itself. The problem is, when you engage in secret-keeping, you’re never being fully honest with others around you. You’re presenting a false version of yourself to the world, and you’re most likely filtering all of your reactions through the veil of secrecy you’ve set up for yourself.

Now, I don’t think that we should have to reveal everything about ourselves to everyone we meet. There are things that can be kept private. But the difference between privacy and secrecy is that privacy does not involve deception and, given the right circumstances, private information can be shared without fear.

I also don’t think that it is anyone’s responsbility to keep tabs on goings-on for everyone. But there is a way in which we owe it to our friends — and ourselves — to create an honest and open environment.

Secrets hurt the keeper and the one being kept from the truth. We need to start trusting ourselves and those around us more. If you really feel that you cannot be honest with someone in your life, perhaps you should think about why, and decide if it is worth being friends with someone you feel you have to deceive. And we need to think about those who keep secrets from us, and how that dishonesty impacts our relationships.

Secrets, secrets are no fun. Secrets, secrets hurt someone. Me.

Trying it on

One of the benefits of living in Old Town is that you get to spend your weekends with dinosaurs that wear balloon crowns. Disney World, Shmisney World, people, THIS is the place to be.

Matt and our new best friend.

Like a rest stop on the road to self-actualization

Look, I think it’s awesome if you’re happy with your life, I really do. And I’m glad if you’ve grown up and realized that sometimes you acted like an ass and you’ve genuinely made a change. 

I know that it must have been very hard for you to deal with all of that crippling self-doubt and all the loathsome feelings you had for yourself that can really only be tallied in pshyciatrist’s bills. Therapy was a good investment and you should be proud of yourself for confronting the problem head-on.

It must be great to be surrounded by a group of people who don’t know about your bad behavior — people who hear stories of the person you used to be and say, “There’s no way you did that. You’re just not like that. I know you.” 

You must relish your status as a reform success story. “Well, there was a time that I would have….” I know how difficult it is to convince people that you’ve done wrong and that your goodness is not innate, but is something for which you worked very hard and so is inherently worth more than the goodness that comes from someone who was just born nice.

I can appreciate the way that you want to tie your nice-person present into your mean-person past to make one whole, continuous Line of Nice. I know that reaching into your deep, dark past and illuminating it with the glow of your newfound sense of self-satisfaction, cleaning out the Cobwebs of Deceit and setting traps for the rodent wrong-doings that lurk in the corners is an important part of the preparation for your trip to the mythic Land of The Reformed (which, perhaps by design, borders on Anti-Depressants Township). I wouldn’t want to interfere with your journey.

But please know, as you pack up your car and set off down the Road to Self-Actualization …

THIS. WEIGH. STATION. CLOSED.

Oh, Monday nights

My head feels like someone poured cement in my ear and now it’s setting. I have been under the weather since last Wednesday, which is so far from being fun that it’s gone through the whole fun cycle and is now straddling a line akin to the fascism-communism divide.

I’m watching SuperGroup and I just now realized that Evan Seinfeld has the exact same facial expressions as my friend Brandon. That’s crazy. Sebastian Bach is like a gazelle.

I’m adjusting to life with the kitties, though I think that I might be slightly allergic, which was never a problem before … but now, of course, it is. They’re two cuties and I’m glad to have them for the moment. I realize, though, that it’s been some time since I had a pet and it’s infinitely easier to live without one. That doesn’t mean I don’t miss Con – because I do, every day – but I realize that things are a lot easier when it’s just me to look out for. When the kitties go home, I’m definitely going back to a pet-less existence.