Mapquest, revenge, and "Finlandia" I

~~ Sunday evening ruminations, Part One


When you put an address in Mapquest and then click on "aerial map," you can use the slider to zoom in and get an up-close, detailed view of your target, or zoom out to put your target in perspective. Interestingly enough, although you can back up almost indefinitely to see your target's relationship to the neighborhood, the city, the state or the earth, when you try to zoom in too close, you get this message: "Data not currently available. Try zooming out or mapping a new location."

For me, being at odds with someone puts me in an emotional space similar to surfing Mapquest -- to be more accurate, an impatient kid surfing Mapquest who keeps flailing about with the slider.

I'd been dating a fellow for about a month when it became obvious that it wasn't going to work out. So the question became who was going to end it and how, further complicated by the advent of (insert genuflection here)... Deer Season.

First I psychoanalyzed every encounter I'd ever had with this man; marshaling every argument and zooming in on every bit of evidence to support my diagnosis of his control issues, his abandonment issues, his insecurity, his rudeness and his inability to punctuate without scattering a handful commas at random in every sentence.

The Guilty Party thus established, I moved on to composing scathing assessments of his behavior, zooming in on his marital status (and the reasons behind same), his selfishness, his inability to even feign interest in anyone's else's life or interests, and perhaps, as the final blow, to offer a few choice examples where I'd feigned interest. Or ...  faked it. Call it what you will....

We've all been there.  Zooming in to the point where we feel we're trapped in a spider web of  thinking and every thought just enmeshes us further. "Data not currently available"?  Not really the problem.  "Data making you nuts?"  That is the question.  And "try zooming out or mapping a new location" is not bad advice, for Mapquest OR an obsessing session.

So, madness looming and with no appropriate medications on hand, I tried to zoom back and see The Big Picture. What was the Big Picture again? Oh, right. We were going to have to break up. Probably. Unless he got his act together. Unless he changed. Unless he started treating me with respect and kindness.

Unless I got too lonely and decided we'd just let things go until Deer Season was over. 
Sigh. 
No, the Big Picture, seeing this thing in the context and perspectives of Life, The Universe and Everything, was we weren't a good fit. Truth to tell, I wasn't any better a fit for him than he was for me, and the Big Picture was not (really) when to end this … but how.