my girlfriend is a muslim man

my girlfriend lydia and i "fight" exceedingly well. most arguments in life begin with a miscommunication; an action or some words are taken with personal interpretation instead of at face value. we all do it--the problem is in the space between what's said, what's meant, and how it's taken.

when lydia and i have a moment of confusion, we generally work through it quickly; lyds is amazing at getting past sides and into core meaning. she helps me a lot with language, explaining back to me how words i use can be interpreted several different ways, or when they come off as outright negative in nature. in the throws of irritation, we make it a point to listen to one another and it's amazing what can be discovered when the ego is stripped away and the walls of one or the other being "right or wrong" therefore removed.

lyds stayed home sick from work the other day; stress had been building in her until her body could take no more and it affected her physically. stress releases itself in interesting ways, and with lyds it became about control. with so much running through her mind--work, school, holiday travel, mortgage refinance--she began to focus more and more on the little things, those items we're not supposed to sweat (or so we're told).

returning home from work would bring about a whirlwind of activity; if a household item was out of place on the counter, lyds would hurriedly find a home for it, as the knick-knack had to be put away, and put away NOW. though things around her may have been steamrolling out of control, misplaced items on the counter could be easily dealt with; "work is kicking my ass, but i got the counter clean" helped her feel something had been taken off her mental plate.

we're all a little like this; when we feel we cannot control our surroundings, we then control what we can. on a personal level, it can be an easy manipulation of priorities; i play video games, because when i cannot force a club to look at my press kit or book me, i can take out my frustration by killing zombies.* i have friends who up and delete their entire myspace profile every so often. when the real world isn't making any sense, they delete the virtual world they play in for a sense of control. others i know of shuffle their top friends as a way of sending subtle messages without using words, because it's easier to show meaning than explain emotions, especially when examining emotions might involve introspection, something many people loathe to attempt.

religion can be a wonderful distraction and solution all in one; finding jesus after a divorce or bout with alcoholism, the fact a person just turned over a new leaf allows them to disown past actions, not acknowledge them.

"that was before i was enlightened!" the battle cry goes. thing is, you're still you through all of your changes; case in point, g.w. bush may no longer be an alcoholic, but he's still an asshole. like he didn't think his having been arrested for drunk driving would affect his family, he didn't think going to war with iraq would be anything but a feather in his historic cap. he didn't want his daughters to know he had ever been a drunken coke-head, and therefore raised a couple daughters who made the news a dozen times over thanks to chemical experimentation; likewise, no thought was, or is, given to military families who have to live with his search for a legacy.

such actions make avoidance on a societal level much worse than the personal one. the lowest rungs of any economic totem pole are generally pitted against one another by virtue of race, with the wealthy pulling the marionette strings. people with power have no interest in poor white trash noticing they have more in common with the black family down the unpaved street than they do the white, multi-millionaire ceo across town living on the high ground.

oil-rich arabs use the west as a tool for control of the poor and un-educated; if america is to blame for all their problems, an uprising against the sheiks won't happen. likewise the parallel line drawn between tough times in the arab world and women; already subjugated by the small-penised side of a religion, treatment worsens when times are tough. a man has no job? police threatening to jail protesters should he complain? well, better just beat the shit out of the wife to feel better. after all, she's a second-class citizen in her own country, a system set in place to keep distraction healthy, and a shining example of what happens when too much of everything is ignored in order to deal with anything of nothing.

(trust me, that makes sense; you might just have to read it twice)

so lyds are looking to avoid the non-issues for the issues now. for days, her tension of returning home and being hyper-cleaner in order to unwind built in me, so when she was home all day tense about what i thought was nothing, we both then re-interpreted something the other said in order to justify wanting to lash out.

fortunately, as said, once that happened, we stubbornly sat down and explained where we were each emanating from, and saw the silly involved in the argument.

would that all relationships could be so easily maintained.



*side note that has nothing to do with anything: guitar hero 3 is currently the hottest video game out there. like with sports games before it, an activity kids should be playing in reality--football, baseball, learning guitar--has been reduced to the next best thing, playing a video game based on it. it's silly and sad. not that i'm anti-video games, far from it. as soon as there's a way for me to kill zombies in real life, i'll put down the controller. promise.