A Precursor

Here, I'm going to revisit a briefly touched on topic from a previous blog post.

"I have a few parasites of my own, and for once I'm not talking about the Fool. These are more vampires upon my time and energy than mental illness."

What do we consider our friends and peers, especially those whom we acquaint ourselves with through that amorphous realm we call the classroom? Through Nanotexts, Parasites and interactions further provoked by and because of these settings, I’ve come to learn the difference between @cephalopod and @vladislavxodasevic (the url doesn’t lie, he is not @nerbiotxiste), and Kai and Andrew the same as they have learned to tell Acelessthan3 from Danny.

But in this triumvirate, what role do we each play? As Jack (Joe? The man in the hat) put so concretely in a comment on one of my blogs, “And is this what you want? To be the host, to be the giver, to be the useful? Or maybe this role [is] symbiotic in your eyes; you extract joy from the parasitic encounters. Is that more accurate?” In short, what do we want from each other, from this interaction?

I responded in a separate post:

“I think you hit the nail on the head as the saying goes when you ask if I have been feeding, guesting, leeching ‘all along, under the mask of the host.’ Because when it comes down to it, is not the rule of the extrovert to do so?”

But that only answers the question of what I want, or rather what I do, in general. When we change scale and zoom in on the specific interactions that happen between Andrew, Kai and I, we find a quantum tangle of interlocking and overlapping wants.

“Acelessthan3 asks What do you want of me?”

Before I deleted the responses and effectively rebooted this update, Andrew had asked me if it was directed at anyone in particular. I lied and said something akin to “No one. Everyone. Anyone who cares to answer.” It was directed at him specifically in an attempt to goad him into giving me the biggest thing I want of him, his attention, to see some of that energy come my way.

I would be lying if I didn’t say that part of it had to do with the fact that I’m attracted to him and have been essentially since Nanotexts spring quarter. It’s not something we talk about, like the bats lurking in the shadows of the belfry, but the elephant in the room acts as an invitation.



Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you

In the perfectly parasitic relationship, we find that both these statements hold true. The included wants to use, the excluded wants to be used.

I have something Andrew needs: namely books, the ability and willingness to listen, to act as someone to bounce ideas off, to push him past these creative and innate barriers keeping him from producing. But despite all outward appearances, this host has his own agenda, seeking to leech and feed in a libidinous want for attention. And it can never be quite satisfied, is always “Hungry for love,” so the host invites again and again.

Then in this plurk: http://www.plurk.com/p/3oyhk2 a little after Andrew responded with this:



We find a short discussion about Ace/Danny in relations to Ceph/Kai and Vlad/Andrew, the kind of thing you would expect to find in a private plurk, the kind of thing I don’t think I was ever really meant to see. In a sense, it was Awkward Sauce.

I can’t speak much on the Kai/Andrew relationship except for what I’ve observed, which is a slight parallel to the Danny/Andrew as I know it. Insomnia manifests from this relation, perhaps the spreading of an infection. He wrote a lot about sleep in his last thought experiment so I think he’s been infecting her and not the other way around.

Kai and I seem to have more of a mutualist relationship than parasitic. We gain in each other an outlet, a vent for all those little frustrations that we don’t allow ourselves to express in the greater population of our peers. We foster in each other an openness that allows the id room to stretch.

But we also seem to share in what I’m sure Rickels would call an oral fixation, namely our cookie connection. We put food in each other’s mouths, just as we are able to put thoughts in each other’s heads.

We ingest the food, the cookies, the parasite of each other and so are interrupted. And we spread this infection as well with our inside jokes that carry over between irl interactions and plurk interactions, the private and the public. Andrew is infected, bacon snickerdoodle, anyone?