Happiest Place on Earth

I was being geeky the other day and reading the blog for Final Fantasy XII (one of my favorite games for the PS2; heavily recommended for RPG and MMO buffs!) and I came across the lore entry for one of the characters in the game. Long story short, and without seeming both like a tremendous dork and ... well, a tremendous dork, the story of the character was that after seeing the world go through its dark ages a few thousand times, a sense of dejection compressed itself into hatred and then spurred the character's new found obsession in world annihlation; much the backstory of any cliche direct-to-DVD release or anime megalomaniac. However, it did get me thinking.

No, I'm not going to blow up the world, even if the majority of the things I write about tend to be dark, depressing, sarcastic, loathesome and full of hate for humanity. It got me thinking about what it means to be an observer and most importantly, how much influence our observations have upon our own supposed objectivity.

I've often said that people should strive to seek as any experiences as possible, a balance both between holding an open mind and a judgmental decision making power, but I've never quite noted how one is supposed to deal with the emotional impact other than thinking it out logically. Surely, our experiences do leave emotional impacts; it would make little sense for them not to, although we might sometimes aspire to be as cold as we wish. This lends a fundamental flaw to experiential learning; how do we maintain objectivity?

In nowhere is this more prevalent than in romance. With the amount of hurt feelings and the sheer impact love makes on people in general, it is the easiest for objectivity to be broken completely. Much like secondhand smoking, even observing the multitude of pain that erupts from such situations, for anyone who is slightly empathic, results in a dimmer view on the spirit of love. Unfortunately, this emotional sort of problem cannot be dealt with by logic; it must be dealt with some form of an emotional solution. Like solves like and sadly, while I loathe the idea of dealing with emotions in such a fashion, I will have no choice but to dismiss logic and simply state, 'people will get over it.'

I have immense respect for people with extremely high emotional tolerance, capable of bouncing back from anything that actually happens. Despite my inward hatred for such things as internal optimism, I can't help but admit that sadly, it is potentially the only vaccine against the invasive darkness of bad experience. For the rest of us lonesome fellows, the happiest place on earth isn't where we're starting, but hopefully a place we can find by our own means.

Tonight, I'm watching 'Dorm Life,' which is awesome. Hence, I am lazy.

Cheers.