Discussion
I'm so embarrassed to be genuinely invested in a sportsball.
Not because I think badly of other people for enjoying sportsball. I don't. It's a thing people like.
I've just always been a person who is like "I'm fine with watching absolutely no sportsball at all, thanks." I kept telling Spouse he was not allowed to notice that I was intently observing the game.
So I guess I'm watching the World Series.
I do think baseball is more challenging to watch than something like basketball or hockey, where the primary thing you have to do is watch the ball/puck.
In baseball, the stakes ratchet up slowly with every pitch, sometimes going all the way to something like 3 balls, 2 strikes, 2 outs, & bases loaded. It makes for an enjoyable tension, but it took me a long time to be able to follow the action AND process all the information to understand the context.
It's just weird to be human, ya know?
It's weird the way we emotionally attach ourselves to things. It's weird what we project onto them & how we incorporate them into our identity.
It can be a dangerous weakness (emotions are so manipulatable), but it also can build social bonds.
I often feel detached from a lot of the things other people are emotionally involved with. I tend to think of myself as extremely rational, but that's not really correct.
Nobody is purely rational, & I don't know that such a thing exists or if it does, whether it is comprehensible to humans.
I've never believed in Vulcans, you know? "Uh-huh. Your cultural mythology tells you that you are purely rational. Now, do you want to explain what "pure rationality" is?"
@artemis That aspect of Vulcan "rationality" was often explored, even in TOS.
#JennyHypertwin used to say "Love is complicated logic." and I kind of agree: feelings and intuition are heuristics we need to use because full logical analysis of real-world situations is often unfeasible. "Emotion" is evolution's way of hard-wiring some of those which turned out to be particularly important.
All that said, I'd say there's a huge gap between the amount of logic which should and could be brought to bear in many situations -- e.g. political choices -- and the amount which is, and powermongers loooove to take advantage of that (and promote it as Good).
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@woozle
Yeah, I suppose I really must be referring more to the cultural perception of what Vulcans are than to how the actual show portrays them.
Star Trek has always had a tendency to set up these ideas for their characters that can be questioned/explored/deconstructed.
They do usually start with something that feels very absolute & set-in-stone, though.
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But sometimes when you love someone & spend a whole lot of time with them, you start to enjoy the things they love.
I never go to Brewers games, but we do go with his family to watch a team in a lower league a couple times each summer. It's nice to get the baseball experience in a reasonably sized place with a reasonably sized crowd.
I think last night was the first time I had all my mental gears turning while watching the game. Helps to be watching such a high stakes game too, of course.