31 July 2025

Yesterday was good, I got some unexpected birthday presents with the arrival of two packages. The first was some tshirts my queen had made for our New Orleans trip and the second package was some armor I ordered for my crusader costume. The steel armor was coated in oil and will need to be maintained to prevent rust. Currently I have to wipe off the excess oil so the armor can be handled. All this made me think of a rap line, “What’s puppy love to a marriage?” What I wondered about the line was why isn’t the daily grind romantic? The idea of puppy love or a new thing has a honeymoon phase and the new thing is more exciting than long standing structures. For one, the regular occurrence becomes the norm and we stop noticing it, humans are really good at normalizing extreme behaviors in many different directions, it’s a little scary. Additionally the longest relationship would be the rarest situation since only one couple will reach that point. Similarly 50% of relationships will be below average, that’s statistics. Humans need to have two systems for reward, for the short and long term. Short term pleasure to get us excited into coming back, but in the long term we can’t have a big jolt of excitement since over 50 years that would get normalized and no longer be effective. Here’s where I turn to the soul, or the mind, I say “in the beginning was the word”, a place for a person to turn inward; less pleasure and more satisfaction. Describing what I mean by satisfaction is difficult, perhaps I can explore it again sometime, for now it’s a new thought brought by my original question.