On the other hand, I thought in the middle section that we were eventually going to find out that the main character had faked her amnesia so she could fool around without her girlfriend complaining. Perhaps I’ll believe that she did, so the whole thing seems even.

“I don’t separate emotions and other mental processes.”

I do. I can mentally stand fifty feet away from my emotions (or other’s emotions) and take notes, thinking, “My, isn’t this interesting,” in the midst of an emotional frenzy. And afterwards I’ll dispassionately analyze the entire situation. My Vulcan brain.

I broke up with a girlfriend that way once. We had a big fight, and she “punished” me by not contacting me for two weeks. Bad mistake. It gave me time to think things over, and I concluded that (a) we didn’t love each other, (b)we didn’t have enough in common to be friends, and (c) the sex was lousy. Therefore there was no reason to continue the relationship. I didn’t give her the full analysis, of course. That would have been cruel, particularly since I think the sex was okay for her. Needless to say, it wasn’t much of a relationship in the first place, and lasted less than six months.

This is just the way my mind works– different from yours, but neither better nor worse. The two of us, however, had better never try to pair up. Disaster in the making!

“After all, most intellectual consideration is simply a blind for self-justification.”

Funny, I’d say exactly the same thing about emotional consideration. Bias on both our parts, I suspect.

Jana C.H.
Seattle
Saith WSG: To everybody’s prejudice I know a thing or two.

I was listening to WNYC’s summer documentary program, Radiolab (which is just about the most awesome thing ever, you should check it out), and they were doing an episode on Memory & Forgetting.

One of the subjects covered during the hour was a musician who, after having contracted a nasty infection that wasn’t caught quickly enough, had the worst case of amnesia on record. When he woke up in the morning, it was as though he’d woken up for the first time, every time. When he wrote something down, he immediately forgot that he’d written it and was completely disassociated from it. When he would sit down, he would forget having sat down or even how he’d gotten in the chair. And so on.

And yet… he never forgot his wife. Couldn’t remember his children’s names, but every time his wife would visit him in the hospital, it was as though he hadn’t seen her in some time, but he did remember her. And he remembered their love. She could enter the room and be greeted with a particularly passionate kiss, leave, come back a minute later, and be greeted in pretty much the same way.

Also, as an aside, whenever he had the opportunity to sing, he would seem to come back to his old self.

So yeah. Love remains.

I don’t separate emotions and other mental processes. After all, most intellectual consideration is simply a blind for self-justification.

Pantheism, however skeptical, is my emotional response to the world. Lesbianism is my emotional response to patriarchy.

I’m intelligent enough to realise there might be some confirmation bias at work here.

Actually, I was a pantheist when I was a Neo-pagan. A lot of Pagans are.

Jana C.H.
Seattle
Saith JcH: Neo-pagans are not the same as New Agers. They have their faults, but they’re not the New Agers.