When Jane Goodall went to live among the gorillas, it was so that she could study and observe their behavior, their complex
social order, and understand their basic drives and motivations. From what I understand, she eventually came to be accepted
as one of them, and some critics have said that her presence among them led to a discernable breakdown of their social structure.
It seems to be an instance where the act of observation actually affected that which was being observed, much in the same
way that Heisenberg once postulated that the conjugate quantities within a physical system could not be measured with
infinite precision: As you increase the accuracy with which you measure one, you decrease the accuracy with which you measure
the other. In short, perception affects reality.
Studying the weather, on the other hand, is different. You can study and measure and even predict, to a degree, what
the weather will do. But in the end, the weather will do whatever it's going to do. You can't reason with a stormfront, or
argue with an earthquake.
It's kind of how I feel trying to understand women.
It seems to me that the cornerstone of scientific accumen is repeatability. On Monday, I did this one thing under
this set of conditions, and here's what happened. On Tuesday, I did the same thing under identical conditions and got the
exact same results. On Wednesday, same thing, slightly different conditions, identical results. You vary things up, you do
them over and over, you study, observe, record, measure; you postulate and extrapolate, using everyhing you know already...and
that's how theories come about. Theories are routinely expanded, challenged, built upon, and even abandoned with frequency.
This is why I don't understand women and never will. Because you could take the same exact woman under the same conditions,
do or say the same exact things at different times, and get completely opposite results.
At one point you could say "Honey, you look great today!" and she would melt. The next day you could say the same
exact thing at the same exact time of day, and she would try to stab you.
I suppose there could be a million reasons why she'd try to stab you, but it seems like almost all of those reasons
could be recognizable beforehand and the situation could be avoided, but this doesn't seem to be the case. If a woman's behavior
can be explained theoretically at all, it would seem to be more along the lines of entropy, which states that the universe
is descending into chaos and that all matter and energy will one day exist as white noise and useless background radiation.
This all may seem rather clinical and unemotional, but the fact is that I just won't allow myself to react emotionally
to all the let-downs and rejections. I have to believe what I've been able to observe from the relationships of others, that
it can work and that there are decent people out there.
And in that sense, I suppose, I'll also have to acknowledge that the one constant in all of my dysfunctional relationships
has been me, and while I can't accept responsibility for the insanity of others, I can choose a different path than anger
and bitterness.
