Independent Little Anti-Diva

My friends are making me feel like a star. This week my friend Dragonfly decided to interview me for her blog. I'm still answering her questions, going on and on over them, perfecting my answers, looking for pictures I could provide for her to illustrate my answers, or simply to add a bit of randomness to them. In any case, it's like... I dunno... cool, to be considered by my friends as a good "interview subject". Make me feel like a diva...

It's of course all far from it, because my friends are basically sharing what the find interesting, like they always do, and Hyne knows that I'm as far from being a diva as... uhhh... George Bush is from being a hippie, anti-war, pro sexual enlightment and pro-abortion. I mean, I snort while laughing if I laugh too hard, and I eat with my hands if I don't have cuttlery close, or the cuttlery is hard for me to use. I resource to any excuse so I don't have to put on make up, hardly style my hair and wear clothes that must be first comfortable, and then be to my liking, please me, but hardly consider fashion or trends... I just follow my own vision, and that's often out of the charts. I drink beer and blurp, which has already made my boyfriend raise his pretty eyebrows. My poor Kari! Sure he thought the first time he might be dating a guy somehow in the body of a woman (which has been proven not to be far from reality... brain wise at least).

A thought about a good topic started forming today in my mind as I walked to the local convenience store from the office to get my daily Regular Coke fix. (Yes, I can't swear off the sewer waters of the yankee imperialism, as a friend of mine calls it.) The topic was the eternal battle between Dependence and Independence. Had this whole idea of overly thought concepts about what each of them are and why people can easily choose the less "desirable" choice for what's in their hearts.

Then, I had stuff to do, and then got lost reading e-mails from friends and aswering stuff, and so it was postponed. At one point a coworker and I went to run some errands, and we started talking on the way. It suddenly highlighted a side of this dependence and independence matter. You see, "independence" is the one concept considered desirable, but people time and again choose to be dependant. With this coworker it was brought to my attention that dependant people usually seek to justify their dependence and make it look as actually a matter of "independent choice". Often, these ways of dependence are easily breakable, like this case, where he has made himself dependant of his coworkers with car to take him to the office and then back home. The independent choice wouldn't be to get a car, though that's a choice, but to take the public transportation. However he chooses this dependant choice and justifies it as being an agreement, where he helps his coworkers by eventually dropping some symbollic amount to help out with the gas.

I'm not sure if that soothes his conscience (I believe it doesn't really much, and his words, his explanations are for the world), but it made me think about how other people could be using the same technique. People who don't leave their partners because "they are not that bad" or justify themselves by returning wrong doing with wrong doing, or people who don't take responsability of something they should, but instead consider that meddling in what's not their business is a compensating act, by "taking responsability" for "what's not really their responsability". (Yeah, a lot of people think that meddling is being responsible).

In my eyes, people rush into dependency because they would like to be independent without the responsability it takes to actually be independent. So they kid themselves, fall under dependency while weaving up stories to themselves about how actually independent they are. Oddly, under this denied dependency, due to the dependency itself, people expect to be helped, expect others to solve their problems, expect others to take care of what's not their business, just as they meddle into other people's business. This complicated net where everybody solves the things that are someone else's responsability is a scheme to escape from responsability, since actually solving other people's issues are not your responsability, and by making others responsible of your responsabilities, frees you from them.

As an existentialist I believe that you can't escape your responsability, and even though you wish to put it on other people, it is always your responsability. So, if you believe that your well being is someone else's responsability, your happiness is someone else's job, you may choose to leave it all up to others, but it's still your responsability. So, why to choose the evidently worse path? Do excuses actually are a good compensation for the lack of desired results? Or is it that people ditch responsability because they generally believe not to be up to the challenge of taking care of themselves? And if it is so, why is it so?

Their parents never let them learn how to be independent? Where they always told they couldn't do it? Mom and dad did their homework all the time, older people told them they knew better than them what was good for them?

This is a topic with a lot of questions and not so many answers and deductions, but still is interesting.