Two alternate opinions

I love finding opinions that differ from mine in interesting ways. Here are two.

Re my distaste for Genghis Khan, a friend replied:

“Status: terminally monogamous. Ironically, it was my girlfriend that first showed me this song a few days ago. I honestly just tuned out the lyrics as silly when I heard the name Genghis Khan, but I just googled them. It’s sort of sad, and I’m totally going to be projecting now, because it’s a lot like what my first relationship was like (many moons ago before I’d ever heard the term “polyamorous”).

Anyway, the lyrics: the guy feels jealous and possessive and hates himself for it. And that pretty well describes how I saw myself during that first relationship. Now, I sort of bristle when I see situations where a philosophy that lives mostly in the frontal lobe is being given dominance over emotions that live all over our brains. For me, that philosophy was “love is not possession” and it’s a hard argument to beat (and really not one you’d want to beat). But you also can’t argue with emotions. The idea of my then-girlfriend being with -her- girlfriend hurt terribly. Was it “right”? No, love is not possession. Did my emotions care whether or not it was right to feel that? No, they didn’t. “And I don’t have the right / To ask where you go at night / But the waves hit my head / To think someone’s in your bed”

What should I have done in that situation? I should have left before we hurt each other more. But neither of us had scraped together enough self-esteem to end it until an ugly ending. The non-judgmental thing would have been, “I need this, but you can’t give it to me. That hurts, but we should part as friends.” So now having been forced to read the lyrics to this silly song… ( ;P ) It makes me a little sad for a guy that is beating himself up because he thinks he’s the “I’m a bad person” flavor of “wrong”. It reminds me that we’re all pretty fucked up in the head and a relationship is about finding somebody compatibly fucked up and working on making room for each other’s fuckedupitude. If one person is poly and the other person isn’t, nobody is wrong. There just isn’t room for a relationship there. Which isn’t what I think the song is saying. I think the guy is mad at himself for feeling the way he does.”

Re the poem “air and light and time and space“, which I loved, a different friend said:

“I’ve seen this poem several times, and honestly it’s always confused me why people see this as such a positive message. I’ve never seen it as something nice to hear, and I think I’m finally able to articulate why. I think most creators see this and see inspiration to not make excuses to get their ideas out. I read the hyperbole in the second half as a sort of “some people are creative, and some people just aren’t, no matter what sort of preparation they make for themselves.” This seems to discourage people who don’t see themselves as creative to try being creative, ’cause they just “don’t have it,” and I really, really dislike this attitude.

I feel like I went through my whole life thinking I wasn’t creative until a few years ago when I did exactly what the spirit of the first half of the poem was describing, in that I set aside some space, time, and money to do the thing I was interested in doing, and it ended up being a really great experience. I also doubt it would’ve been good had I not prepared at all, due to the scope of what I was trying to accomplish. This poem seems to doubt the ability of people who – like me – are only occasionally struck by the need to make something new and interesting, but that creative process is still meaningful to them.

At any rate, I think it’s cool if you draw inspiration from this, and I hope my rambling doesn’t rob you of that. I felt like I had some insight when seeing this for the 4th time or so, and I just needed to get it out. Maybe other people share this experience when reading this poem and might appreciate seeing their opinion corroborated on some level or something.”

Cheers guys!