well, neither. It was a neutral statement.

Have I been passionate about someone? Yes. Have to say yes. Love? That word is too amorphous for me. I don’t know what people mean when they say love. Passion, I can grok. And I have been/am passionate about people with whom I cannot have the relationship I desire. While I bask in the joy of what we can have, I am sometimes deeply pained by what we can’t. Sometimes I fantasize. But I am not obsessed. I accept what is and wonder whether I will ever experience what the potential I envision.

How to distinguish between a passion and an obsession? Not sure. Obsession implies something emotionally unhealthy. An obsession creates anxiety, drives people to destructive behaviors, and prevents the person from engaging in truly intimate relations. Usually, underneath an obsession, is a deep-seated lack of self-worth and fears that the person can’t yet face. While an obsessed person may feel ‘alive” at times, it is a double edged sword with a lot of feelings of frustration and self-loathing. And those who witness the one obsessed can usually see the darkness.

Passion nurtures a person. It is generative. While it may seem very one-track to others, they can see the light of it.

Many relationships fall somewhere in between. There is some combination of generative nurturing and some amount of frustration and self-loathing. It can be hard to determine where on the continuum your feelings for someone fall.

As for ego, I’m not sure if I agree with the Freudian compartmentalization of the personality. But, if you go with it, there is such a thing as healthy ego. It is the thing that supports self-confidence. Too little ego and you withhold what you have to offer the world. You don’t serve. Too much ego and you serve but with too much self-serving and valuing yourself far more than others.

When describing the ego you wrote about the “nearly unimaginable self-obsessiveness of professional athletes.â€? Where you see an “unimaginable self-obsesivenessâ€? I see an optimal confidence. I’m serious; don’t get persuaded by the sensationalism of the media – Terrell Owens, Kobe Bryant, and the rest. Focus more on the beautiful confidence of a guy like Troy Brown from the New England Patriots. 6 feet 180, 6th round pick, destined for obscurity – or not. This man would not say a kind word about himself if you held a gun to his head but if it’s third and long in the forth quarter and the game is on the line, there is no man that will prevent him from catching the pass …. Confidence – what a beautiful beautiful trait.. Some confuse their own confidence with an egotism – those are the people I never buy a second Guinness for. I’m intrigued by you idea of ego as demon possessor but I feel a little different. I feel that ego can be a good thing on some level. There is a blurry space where ego and confidence coexist. I know too many talented people who do not share their talents with the world because of a lack of confidence. These people suffer from a lack of ego. I find myself berating them with compliments hoping to build their ego to a level of confidence. Sometimes I need to do this in the mirror.

Our own Christopher Lydon has many critics, and they all say the same thing, he has too big of an ego. Yes he has an ego, but he brings the goods – it’s an ego built on a lifetime of questioning, learning. An ego that gives him the confidence to question world leaders and laymen alike. An ego that enables him to spark and provoke conversations on the big issues of our life. You may say the Christopher lydon has a big ego, but you must also say that Norman Mailer has a big ego, Tom Brady, Oprah, Picasso, Madonna, General Patton, Miles Davis, JFK, – the movers and shakers of our culture require a healthy ego.

Sorry for the late reply. I had to work three 15 hour days, WED, THU and FRI! Uhg… After my day was over I had a bite to eat and went straight to bed! No time for podcast or blogs. Ugh…

Anyways, from your post above I agree. All I was doing was taking the word “ego” and extrapolating it to the silliness of human nature (more in-tune with Latin literal meaning of ego: “I” or “self,” not arrogant ego, per se). But since “self” is part of ego. There is a sense of selfishness (or need) that can never be removed regardless if you take your guard down or not. It’s when the ego gets to be a burden that it can be bad. That’s all I was trying to say.

In regards to your post. I think that hierarchy is part of human nature only because no one lives in a perfect bubble. Even the word hierarchy doesn’t mean that we don’t have some sameness or similarities, either. I try to avoid absolutes. But hierarchy is something that is based on knowledge, class, race (like it or not), and just a general level of accomplishments one has achieved (monetarily and spiritually). Yes, pop culture does exagerate. But hierarchy would still exist even in a small clan in 10,000 B.C. Although less so.

In regards to the child-ego example…

You and I know that Tyrell Owens is a child in a mans body. But I’m sure there are some mature teenagers that are mature enough to see the same thing in T. Owens as we do. They have matured faster than others. So, all depends on what path one has reached. Wisdom does wonders. But that takes time and experience. A good example is Allen Iverson. He’s changed a lot! Just watch his interviews today vs yesterday.

One of my favorite parts of your post is the part where you said, “make a choice between retaining the insulters as friends – at the cost of their social standing and self-esteem – or accepting ostracization.”

I was lucky enough to have a revelation at the age of fourteen and realize that I was going to do what I wanted, not what everyone else thought I should do. It helped me not get caught up in the “do they accept me or not” trap. I didn’t care. Why? Because sometimes what they considred “cool” or “good” or “right” I rejected. Some things were “cool.” Like being invited to a football party. But I didn’t want to give in to that at the expense of being “fake.” So, I would always ask myself, “Is it worth it?”

But many people still struggle with this even late in their lives in part because of who they are (mentally and physically) and who they had around them as mentors now and back then. They have a hard time looking in the the future; i.e. seeing the big picture as well as the small picture.

Check this out:

http://teenadvice.about.com/library/weekly/aa101600d.htm

cut off his ear

and though it was quite gruesome

He sent it to

a lady who

He wished to make a twosome

While not impressed

with his distress

to nothing this amounted

But please remember anyhow

It was the thought that counted.

I’m sure you’ve heard people say- prick my finger for blood “I want to feel somethingâ€? – well, the obsession of love can be “something.â€? I felt it once – it was tangible, I could bite it. When the flame fizzled, I fell hard – but is that important? Does the falling negate the rise? I’m serious, I don’t know. When we get very drunk with friends and have the time of our life, does the hangover dread the next day take away from the previous night’s experience? Are they two separate things or not? I say yes, as long as the hangover does not infringe on “importantâ€? responsibilities the next day. The obsession I’m thinking about this time was the rebound from my five year relationship. I met a bartender from New Orleans who convinced me to move down there and move in with her and bar tend there. She was artistic and she could party – now this is what I’m talking about! Well, I was still talking about it after she dumped me and I was stuck in New Orleans. Luckily, New Orleans was a good place to be stuck at the time. My point is, for those few months, I felt a love that lifted me, something greater than the sum of my partial parts. Something that made me appreciate Lional Richee love songs, something that made me want to learn how to make homemade pasta (I’m not even a good microwaver), something that made me exclaim “I love youâ€? in the midst of making love, something that made me want to simply – want!

“A lark cannot help singing in the spring.� Vincent van Gogh Nov 1881 from a letter to his brother about his obsession with his cousin Kee Vos.

In the effort to convince Kee to return his affection, Van Gogh alienated most of his family. Most of the following is from the same Nov. 1881 letter to his brother.

“Never, no, never,� were the words Kee said to Vincent, leaving no doubt about her feelings. This hurt Vincent but did not dissuade him from the effort to gain her love. All it did was become more of a challenge to him. Was it his ego? Was it a beautiful passion?

Vincent says his persistent efforts in the face of “never, no, never,� might have been wrong but (and I love this quote) “we pick up the scent as we wander about, not as we sit idly by.�

“You may, Theo – you may hear it said of me that I want to force things, and expressions like that. Yet everyone knows how senseless force is in love!�

“By now you will realize that I hope to leave no stone unturned that might bring me closer to her, and that it is my intention: To go on loving her Until in the end she loves me too.�

Vincent writes that to love and not be loved back is better than to not love at all. This is powerful because (in my mind) he is saying that an obsession of love can be healthy if you do not put fear in the other’s heart. It is simply beautiful to love. “if you and I are in love then we are in love. And we keep a clear head and do not becloud our mind, nor curb our feelings, nor douse the fire and the light, but simply say, ‘Thank God, I am in love.’�

“Imagine what a real woman would think if she found that someone was courting her with reservations; wouldn’t she say something worse to him than ‘never, no, never!�’

“And they call me ‘the melancholy one’, and I ask you to congratulate me on my ‘never, no, never,! And I get very cross when people tell me that it is dangerous to put out to sea, observing that one might drown in it. I don’t get cross because I think they are wrong to say that, but because they seem to forget ‘that there is safety in the very heart of danger’�

“Whoever feels so ‘sure of his ground’ that he rashly imagines ‘she is mine, even before he has waged the soul’s battle of love, even before, I say, he has become suspended between life and death on the high seas, in the midst of storm and tempest – there is one who knows little of what a real woman’s heart is, and that will be brought home to him by a real woman in a very special way. When I was younger, one half of me once fancied that I was in love, and with the other half I really was. The result was many years of humiliation. Let me not have been humiliated in vain.”

(Shari Thurer would come in handy here.)

Is the ‘guard’ of ‘letting down one’s guard’ ego, or something closely related but perhaps not psychologically recognized? (Something yet unnamed?)

I *think* it’s ego…

And if that ‘absence of guard’ was the normal STARTING point for making acquaintances with others, interpersonal contentiousness might become a thing people looked back on as a barbarity of an older—and unlamented—culture.

If this sounds all together too mushy-warm-fuzzy, that’s cuz it is. But only because egos have become a vital self-defense layer in world obsessed with hierarchy – a world run by adults (or ARE they?). Hierarchy is the villain when friends cut-down other friends. The insulted must then make a choice between retaining the insulters as friends – at the cost of their social standing and self-esteem – or accepting ostracization. In youngsters, this isn’t an easy choice. Ego construction then becomes an arms race. (Adolescent put-downs are simply one common method of this escalation.)

The question, then, is whether hierarchy is a normal feature of ‘human nature’, or only massively exaggerated in the world’s currently dominant cultures.

I believe the latter (probably obviously).

I doubt that obsessions with hierarchy and ego would persist if adults behaved their ages instead of tediously perpetuating their puberties. For instance, the professional athletes whose egos are so big they must speak of themselves in the third person. For example, “Tyrell Ovens [an imaginary pro] needs the respect that only comes through the biggest contract.� Who’s speaking? His agent? Nope. His own biological mouth. Guys like this haven’t matured a day since their talents began garnering adulation in middle school. Their egos serve to shield the embarrassing presence of the twelve-year-olds hiding out within their powerfully honed bodies.

Much, much more importantly, this sort of monster-ego isn’t limited to athletes – hell, they run the world’s governments (although they’ve enough politesse and savvy to know better than to thump their chests like footballers). It’s hard to see from afar because (perceived) humility is a virtue crucial to voters. But the hapless staffers see the egos. They know the sordid truth, but keep mum in support of the pols’ sundry righteous causes.

Anyway, this sort of child-in-an-adult’s-body norm is as overdue for a junking as Freudian theories of sex-obsessed children and the like.

Or so say I while Chris talks Orwell ‘live’ on KUOW.

(But what the hell do I know!)

Anyway, thanks for (re-)joining the conversation, and please feel free to respond. I’m not looking for a ‘fight’ so much as I am the necessity, through critique, of refining my thoughts enough to be convincing. Thanks.

Us humans are such silly creatures…good thing we don’t have tail feathers. Each of us would be wagging them vigorously at various speeds. Each trying to impress his or her mates in our musical dancing matting ritual. Just beware of the dreaded “molt…”

I remember reading somewhere that the perfect mate is one that sees the best in you. Or, rather, seeing the best in you, through their eyes. That’s says a lot about ego. Kinda selfish. But then I thought about it and reversed the roles.

I had a friend that just made me crack up in laugher. I don’t know what it was. But some of the things they did was just funny. It was genuine. So, in my eyes that person was fun to be around. It would also make sense that that person would also want to keep getting the reactions from me as well. It was a feedback loop. They enjoyed the attention from me. Because not everyone thought they were funny. There’s the “ego” for ya.

Picture this. A group of seven people — myself included. This one girl telling a story about her day. At the end of the story she makes some grand hand gesture/facial expression trying to reenact something that happened to her. Two people chuckle. Three people smirk. I crack up laughing. And it was spontaneous laughter on my part. Great way to make a new friend, no?

And still to this day, if she tells a story I’d still crack up. This is a perfect example of her seeing the best in herself though MY eyes.

Give and take.