Thoughts du Semaine

[moon_custafer]

1.It occurred to me yesterday that the social lie for which I am most grateful is not the one everyone thinks of, where you're not required to give an honest answer to questions like "does this outfit make me look fat" or "what do you think of my new hairdo/car/thesis statement etc," but the sort where it is permissible to answer the casual question "so, where are you from," when visiting abroad, with the name of the city you've lived in for the last ten years instead of giving the history of your life, which as a kid I always felt compelled to do (and it only got worse when I realized I had been born in the hospital of a city forty minutes away from my home town and I had to add that to the explanation).

2. Before there was a Napoleon, who did delusionals think they were ? My money's on Julius Caesar.

Comments

[theengineer.livejournal.com]

Yes!! Absolutely! It's been only in the last year or so that I finally realized that I could just say "Toronto" now instead of my life story, and it felt like such a weight lifting!

[theengineer.livejournal.com]

Before there was a Napoleon, who did delusionals think they were ? My money's on Julius Caesar.

Ah, ah, ah. You're only counting the male delusionals here.

I think for female delusionals, the Virgin Mary has always been popular.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Hm -- good point.

I've also noticed that the stereotypical lunatic in pre-modern literature often seems convinced s/he either has control over, or is being attacked by, stars and planets; the equivalent of abducted-by-aliens-fantasies I suppose. It makes me wonder if people were/are being plagued by hallucinations of lights.