When something gives us a lot of pleasure, why do we start questioning it? Maybe because the things that usually give us pleasure are said to be not good for us…? Like, eating sweet treats or watching the telly all the time. We start perhaps looking at the things that give us pleasure with some suspicion, as if the very fact means that there is something forbidden about it, and therefore must not be indulged. I wonder if there is some religious austerity logic that gets embedded in our brains, that anything that is indulgent, pleasing, and so on must be the devil tempting us. Eve was after all tempted by an apple and look where that got us! Though for the life of me I wouldn't know what's to be tempted by an apple! So, I am telling myself, about quite a harmless activity that I am enjoying terribly, that I must curtail its frequency. I asked myself why and the answer stripped to its bones would be that the fact that I am having so much pleasure out of it means there must be something wrong about it, and as I am not finding anything inherently wrong, I am looking for something to fault in it by stretching its implications. In a way I am invoking a guilt mechanism in advance of the fact so to speak! Makes me also wonder if the things said to one in childhood or the austerities one is put through sort of leave a permanent regulating effect. You can't escape them no matter how much you try.

I spoke to an uncle after a long time today. I was told he was remembering me quite a bit. The fact is being the nostalgic person I am, I remember my childhood scenes and the favourite people in it quite a lot too. I am never one to forget a deeply cherished memory or person. But as I have evolved, the people of my childhood haven't. It's like I cannot relate to them as I did when I was a child and they don't seem to have the mental or emotional apparatus to relate to me. This uncle, every time I speak to him, makes it a point to ask me why I am still studying...at my age! When will I stop? And he says it so nonchalantly, innocently, benignly like he is enquiring after my well-being. I have no words to respond to him because he has no malicious intentions nor does he have a clue how this question appears to me. In a way this question doesn't appear to me as anything but ignorant but even so it leaves me dumbfounded and at a loss. Now it might be evident why I don't really feel so much like calling this uncle if you also take into account that I am by nature very resistant to making small talk calls. There is no sensible response I can give to this uncle to this almost certain question because it's not just the view but the entire worldview that's at issue here. And it's a worldview that's too firmly fixed at his age. So I just make some noncommittal noises… I wonder though if he can't even tell that such a question could annoy or hurt me... this complete lack of emotional intelligence seems the most bizarre to me, not the difference in worldview which can be easily attributed to him being a product of a different world...