Day 24

So, every time I grow a beard, I stop getting ID'd at bars. Every time I shave it off, they ID me again. And the same goes for my buddy Jordan. So, depending on our respective facial hair decisions at any given time, often one of us gets waved through and the other is stopped at the door for ID.

The beard I have now is pretty scruffy. I've been growing it for about 3 weeks now, with minimal trimming. People say I look like the young Obe Wan Kenobe (from the prequils).

Enough about that.
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I wonder if the biggest problem with relationships (amongst us youngsters) is our well-fed vision of what they are supposed to be like. On top of movies and other media, we have all our friends insisting that their relationships are just amazing and perfect.

"Why isn't mine like that?" Truth is, nobody's is like that. Divorce lawyers have a time-tested saying: "The bigger the wedding, the shorter the marriage." I wonder if the underlying principle might be applied to people who constantly broadcast how great their relationships are.

I'm not sure that the basic literary plot is much like life. In literature, stories always resolve in one way or another as a result of their own internal mechanisms. Even prior to this, the greeks had their deus ex machina, the god or angel that improbably falls from the sky to solve a plot.

Life is like neither of these plot systems. Usually, relationships simply end - there is no tragedy, because life continues, people move on, memories fade, and new relationships eventually form. This kind of continuum makes for a boring fiction, which is why most autobiographies are snorers, and of the few good ones, there isn't much focus on love lives. In life, timing is replaced with happenstance, arguments usually undermine more than illuminate, and everybody, everybody can be the antagonist. Or, the protagonist.

Or, more accurately, neither. Dichotomizing the human condition is a exercise in arbitrariness. In life, if a person gets stabbed, they writhe around in pain and suffering, dying in a bodily way way that would tear away every bit of admiration we ever had for the hero who thrusts his mighty sword.

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