Something new.

Sometime soon (probably never) I plan to move all of my para-geography work-related posts to a new blog. I'll let you all know when that happens.

Right now I wan to talk about something that happened last night. Whether or not it happened TO ME is up to interpretation.

Sometime around two, I think, I was awakened by the sounds of someone screaming, a woman. It took me a while to figure out what was going on, but something was obvious from the very beginning. Whoever was yelling was PISSED. At first I assumed that whoever was being yelled at was some kind of zen-master buddha, not raising his/her voice in such a hurricane of insults. Then, after I woke up a little more, I realized that whoever was yelling was probably just on the phone. I'm assuming that she wasn't just raising her voice because of a bad connection.

I think she was pacing. Sometimes I could hear what she was saying, but most of it was muffled. However, a couple of things came through very clearly. I heard "I can't believe you..." "Why didn't you say..." and "How could you?". Far more frequently I heard "gave me an STD" and just about every variation on "Fuck you."

Even half-asleep it wasn't hard to figure out what was going on.

To her credit she wasn't crying, or didn't seem to be actively doing so. She wasn't wasting the emotion on passively being upset with the guy who had "done this to her."

[ An interjection: if she is concerned about having contracted an STD from someone because of frequent unprotected sex, the first person she has to blame is herself for not being smart about it, followed by the guy (or possibly girl, I don't know), if he lied about it. However, blame does and should go to her first. Anyway...]

At first I thought about going and, politely, asking her to please, keep it down, since I was trying to sleep. After quickly letting that scene play out in my mind, I thought I might have better luck politely asking her to turn lead into gold. So I just sat back and waited. And listened.

I'm a little ashamed to admit that I listened for so long. I mean, I didn't really have any other choice (yes I did), but I guess that's not the bad part. I really enjoyed listening.

I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand I feel bad for listening to what is obviously a very emotional moment in someone's life. Of course she wasn't really keeping it a secret. But that's not really the point, now is it?

No. The point was, and the question that I was asking myself, was, Am I taking joy out of this poor woman's pain? Jesus, I hope not, thought I in my half-awake musings. That's a whole problematic world to deal with.

That sort of deep soul-searching is not very well handled when half-asleep, I have found. It took me some time, but I was able to "figure out" (at least enough to calm down) what I found so entertaining in the interaction going on next-door.

It was all that anger. I know a lot of people who prefer to stay away from it at any cost, but I've always found it really exhilerating, so long as I'm not too involved. This woman was boiling with it, I could almost feel it coming through the wall, the floor. I can only imagine what it must be like to actually burn like that. I don't like conflict, but I love anger.

So there's voyourism involved too. Like reality TV (which I hate). I like seeing powerful emotions acted out by those around me. When I see something like what I witnessed last night I am always reminded by how dulled are the emotional responses people in "polite society" wield. It makes civilization easier, but arguably less interesting.

I encourage anyone who's read this far to have a really powerful emotion today. In public. See how it makes you feel. Maybe you'll like it.