The Collapse of Irrelevant Macro-Constructs

S: Oh god, what a disaster…

M: It as just a misunderstanding…

S: I know it was, but I don’t think I can convince my mother that it was. And she had to drag racism and everything into it.

M: I thought you didn’t subscribe to race-neutral perspectives? Especially after living in Hamilton?

S: But I don’t see it in this situation. I’ll admit now that race may be a factor in my mother’s work, but there’s nothing in that woman’s behaviour to suggest that her being mean came from being racist. Frankly, I think she’s getting her just desserts for what she did to I__. So even if it’s racist, she was a lot worse.

M: So that’s why you didn’t help?

S: She said “you are treating us like shit.” My mother saying something like that. Is she any better then?

M: I think you’re deluded.

S: Excuse me?

M: You thought they might be friends.

S: Is that a wrong expectation to have? That tenants and landlords can be friends? I was friends with G, or if not friends, at least friendly. And I don’t agree with her fighting fire with fire. She embarrasses me. This isn’t the first time she’s gotten pissed off at someone and acted totally uncivilized.

M: You’re bringing up the past again.

S: It’s not called “bringing up the past” if the past was never resolved satisfactorily. It’s called this is one in a very long line of like incidents. It’s like precedents in law. Was Althea ever like this?

M: That’s up to you. So far you seem to think it was mostly my fault.

S: Sorry.

M: That’s fine. I understand you need to work out your real life issues, but if it’s just wish fulfillment for you, why are you making it my fault? Please understand, I’m just curious.

S: Well, I don’t think it’s your fault, because I have no idea what Althea is like. Or rather, I guess I do, she’s a very nice person. So I know it’s the situation that caused whatever friction that occurs. And *I* don’t think it’s your fault – *you* think it’s your fault.

M: Friction?

S: You feeling overworked. And feeling burdened. And perhaps not doing your best.

M: I guess that’s how you feel about your mother too.

S: Yes, so I tried to make that mirror real life. But it’s not wish fulfillment. You’re wrong there.

M: Isn’t it?

S You were never a wish fulfilment. Just the opposite.

M: That makes more sense then. So you can’t admit that you might be the one who is wrong in real life, therefore your are building a situation where I admit that I am wrong.

S: Yes, pretty much. But the reason for creating your psychological profile is not because I can’t admit it in real life…it’s more like…so that I can start to see things in that perspective if it’s not me who’s first leading me towards it.

M: Ah, like reading novels for life lessons instead of accounts of real events makes the lesson easier to digest.

S: Yes, I suppose. I suppose the whole K situation is also in this vein. Well, I make you the lamb for myself, I suppose.

M: I think you meant goat.

S: Right, a goat named Miracle.

M: They don’t happen.

S: What?

M: Miracles don’t happen. You thinking they might be friends…

S: I thought that since they’re both…first generation immigrants, from ex-communist countries, it might give them some common language, some common experience. But I did sort of anticipate this, in a jokey worst scenario sort of way. I jus t didn’t think they’d really start screaming at one another 10 minutes after we moved in.

M: Are you all right?

S: You know I’m all right and I will never be all right. As long as I live with my mother, this sort of thing will continue to happen. And she says she doesn’t make my life difficult! It’s not the amount of extra work she needs me to do. It’s her attitudes and actions towards other people which don’t jibe with mine, yet I can’t change her, so I have to stand by and watch someone close to me commit things I would consider immoral. It’s the same reason as in high school, really, why I was so desperate to live alone.

M: I think what H said before was right. You have to tolerate how other people run things. You can’t have everything your way.

S: That’s not it. It’s just that when I live with my mother, very few things are my way. Like the furniture I left behind, for example. I’d rather be generous to new tenants and just give them the stuff – but my mother would insist I sell it. She doesn’t let me do things my way. So even worse than standing by and watching someone do something immoral, I find myself doing things I don’t want to do.

K: Why don’t you just tell her?

S: That won’t change anything.

K: Give her enough of a shock and she might change.

S: Or it might kill her. I don’t have the same relationship as you and your mother, I’m afraid.

K: You’re just making up excuses to avoid a confrontation. You need to be more assertive. Even Marcelle is to a certain extent. Would you kill someone who hurt someone dear to you? You can’t even ask your roommates to stop washing dishes when your mother is sleeping.

S: Because they have a right to wash dishes during the day. My mother is the one with special needs that everyone else has to accommodate. There it is again – her needing things to be her way. It doesn’t even have to be overt actions.

K: and yet you support taxes going to people with disabilities?

S: What does that have to do with anything?

K: You support the populace accommodating people with disabilities, yet you don’t support those around you accommodating your mother, who has certain needs?

M: he’s actually right.

S: Whose side are you on?

M: I’m always on your side. I’m on the side of the you who is the best that you could be.

S: What are you suggesting?

M: I think you are biased against her.

S: Of course I am. She’s done some pretty awful things to me. It’s hard not to be biased against someone who’s locked you out of the house and beaten you and thrown things at you. I’m trying not to be, but it’s pretty difficult. And where do you think I got my ability to tolerate other people? I can live in this house now and not feel angry towards the landlady because I’ve had to live in the house of someone I disliked for so long, so in comparison, this is nothing.

M: But your mother apologized.

S: And yet she would do it again.

K: Just sever ties.

S: I can’t do that.

K: Why?

S: responsibility. And no, I don’t want a confrontation. I had bad cramps after their shouting match today. And that was between the 2 of them.

M: They weren’t that bad.

S: They were certainly not normal.

M: If you can’t sever ties, you’re just going to have to live with it.

S: I can’t bring myself to do that either. That would mean I would have to fundamentally change my values.

K: So you’re going to go on like this?

S: I wish I was more useful.

K: All you did was start crying.

S: I’m very tired.

K: it wouldn’t have been any different had you been well.

S: You’re right, probably not. But that came more from the root dilemma we just talked about rather than the fact that they were arguing, or even what they were arguing about.

M: meta-meta…

S: I want to think the best of people. And I’m upset she doesn’t.

K: She’s right, you are deluded.

M: I didn’t mean that.

K: What did you mean?

M: She’s mapping a weird historical fantasy over this.

S: I am not.

M: Yes, you are. I don’t mean derived from the series, no, but you have this romantic ideal of some sort, which is not the situation now. She might understand the political relations between the two countries better than you. It might be racism.

S: I don’t think it is.

M: On what basis? Even you noticed she was laughing when she was talking to R_______.

S: Yes, but she’s being nice to me. My mother came to the house and started picking on things wrong with it, saying it’s not the first floor blah blah blah. That’s one of my mother’s problems – she always picks out something to blame before she picks out something good to say about something. So D____ said she was hard on him.

M: You don’t know that D was referring to that.

S: No, you’re right, I’m guessing. But I’m not mapping a historical romantic fantasy over this. Or at least, even if I am, it’s not a wrong expectation that two people coming out of similar socio-political background would get along. I’m not mapping things over in a fangirly sort of way. Though I would love to talk to them…but they aren’t my constructs.

K: You talked to other people’s constructs before.

M: She can’t. It doesn’t make sense. It would just make her more deluded.

S: I am not deluded!

M: What answers could they give you anyway? Taking other people’s constructs – but if you take them up you’re still talking to yourself.

S: Well, I get answers from you, don’t I? And the people on the forum already gave me some answers. Real people, not constructs. I was basing my expectations from that in part.

M: But those are a different generation of people. Young people have less concerns about larger socio-political questions. You can’t take the people on the forum as representative of a how two nations see one another.

S: well, isn’t it more logical to think that a segment of the population represents the population rather than to assume that they are the reverse? “Do you work in a pet shop?”

M: That’s true. But you should have thought more about it. It’s not that simple.

*****

S: I’m still angry.

M: At whom?

S: Everyone. Including myself. I should have pursued the Mississauga offers.

M: There was no way you would know this would turn out like this.

S: Oh, so I’m no longer deluded?

M: You still are. It was not your fault for not anticipating conflict, but it was your fault for hoping things would turn out really well.

S: That’s no comfort.

M: That’s not my job.

S: I suppose I still want reassurance from abstract constructs. But that’s even less their job than yours. If they have a function.

M: Their function is mostly entertainment.

S: That’s their primary function. They have other latent functions. I just want people to get along. That’s what the stories are meant to be about, I think – even the ultimate event of discord is refigured as a possibility of concord. I just want to actualize it at a smaller human level, that’s all. If that makes me deluded, then so be it. I especially want these two nations and its people to get along. We had such a long history together of struggling together to spread what we thought was right to the rest of the world. I don’t want an environmental war to find us in the position of fighting over resources, and I don’t want us to start competing over who’s the better capitalist.

M: I don’t think it was ever working together to spread what was right to the rest of the world. You’re descending into romanticism again.

S: At least that was what some people thought, and that was the official party mandate, even if some leaders had ulterior motives. As I said, plus those people in the forums. It’s like, so young people can see positive traits in one another following decades of diplomatic unity, and two post-menopausal women over here just couldn’t be civilized? I’m greatly upset over this. And my mother trying to assert her Canadian citizenship to another immigrant – that’s totally useless. It was just a friendly question about where she was coming from and she took offence. I was trying to make things work with a larger socio-historical framework in mind but she wasn’t helping. You might call that framework a delusion, but isn’t it better to hold these frameworks and try to get along rather than be petty?

M: But wouldn’t those same frameworks mean that you reject individuals who are your cultural enemies?

S: No. I would never approach individuals affiliated with an ex-enemy nation of my nation coldly based on their affiliation. Would you?

M: I think I would.

S: Really?

M: You haven’t fought a war. But you watched those documentaries. The woman said she didn’t feel sorry for what she did and she would do it again.

S: But that was during war. You lived among your enemy nation.

M: And in some ways they never ceased to be an enemy nation…I’m not proud of it, but I’m just trying to say…don’t be so high and mighty about your objectivity, because you’re not being objective in many other ways.

S: I know I’m not. That’s exactly where I’m being high and mighty – it’s because I choose to be a romanticist.

M: You can afford to be one now.

S: But I’m not going to be the lone wanderer in a sea of fog either. I am not subtracted from society – which is why I am doing what I can, at a small human level between two people that I know. You can call the impetus behind a hero of lesser causes a delusion, but is it really so wrong?

M: Have you ever thought that they might not get along because they are too similar?

S: Yes, I did, but as I said, it was a worst-scenario jokey sort of way. I think they are very similar – two highly intelligent women put through the communist meatgrinder when they were young to make them headstrong and independent, and then they both had to come over here and struggle again with the Western European / American culture. Both bringing up the next generation with no man in the family. It’s made both of them guarded and no-nonsense with a chip on their shoulder and a way of exploiting – ok not exploiting – but mining their environments for maximum personal gain for themselves and their families, as a strategy for survival. Ong married to Atwood. So maybe they could have been friends in another context, but when they are doing business it invariably can’t work.

M: This makes an interesting mirror story for the one about I__.

S: Yes, it does, doesn’t it? I’m still angry, but I guess it all becomes fodder for academia. That’s the only thing that makes me feel better…