Cynicism and the feeling that every romantic comedy is just trying to sell me "Love"

Almost a week ago I tried to explain to my mother what a cliche really is. Putting aside the fact that "trying to explain what something really is" is a cliche itself, what I tried to explain is how a cliche feels and all the things they remind me of : corporate jingles, the live air advertisements on reruns of I Love Lucy for Carnation Condensed milk, and the canned grocery store ads the seem to be running longer and longer every time I walk in Kroger/WalMart/Giant Eagle and slowly replacing the soft rock, smooth jazz and the sporadic and ever cliched "clean up on aisle #" of the last decade. I'm not sure what my mother said to bring up the subject (though I'm sure it was something about summer Sunday School) but I told her that whatever she had said was a little of a cliche. She didn't understand because she couldn't remember hearing anyone else saying it before, which is exactly where my explanation of the essence of cliches becomes important. The reason that I associate cliches with on air ads and store special announcements is because when I hear them it sounds like someone is trying to sell me something. I don't think my mother understood, which is one of the many reasons my mother is such an amazing person (not a cliche or attempt to earn brownie points, FYI). I also tried to explain to her my perpetual fear and second guessing of my own motives that spring from my constant analyzing and interrogating of myself and she didn't understand why I did that either. But I believe that she can actually live with these things I think are awful cliches and work in a job that I think is full of them without giving a moment's thought to the idea that maybe all these phrases have been engineered to be catchy and still 100%, obviously, blatantly true in all situations. (Which is what makes cliches spread and more importantly sell their ideas.) So my mother can live life without every really being sold to or swindled because she never really gives a thought to the marketing.

Exactly how terribly awful and cynical is it for me to feel that my mother is trying to sell me something every time she utters a cliche, even if I know she never really thinks of them that way?

Anyways, moving past how cool my mom is, the interesting thing about cliches is that one person can just think of cliches as true and always say them like they were fact and another person can see them as complete scams, a marketing ploy fabricated just to sell you an idea you could have had on your own. In other words a cliche is fact and fraudulent simultaneously and what anyone sees in it is really only a part of its nature as a whole.

The day after I talked to my mom about cliches I had another thought (it was a very thought provoking weekend) though it was a bit different and requires a bit of storytelling before I can get to the point. The week before last I was drawn in to thinking about my past more than I normally do because of my neighbor. She keeps asking me questions about my past to help clarify some worries she has been having. But the whole thing led to a pretty lengthy internal dialogue that went through my head on the day in question

Mental dialogues with a person I have already been talking to are one of my stranger habits but they usually allow me to think with a level head about the things that have been bothering me.

The most relevant part of my mental discussion to the rest of this post was the part where I was describing myself as being conflicted, meaning that my head is in constant turmoil (my thoughts might be a little dramatic). I even went on to say that I was conflicted morally and spiritually and often conflicted even with love... but maybe that was a good thing because it made my love more honest and less about just finding someone to get married to and have kids with. That was where the more sensible part of my brain caught up to the rest of my train of thought and pulled the brakes.

During this entire imagined interchange I had been sitting outside with a bowl of calico beans (which were extremely delicious and were loaded with bacon and ground beef -- YUM!) and watching bees of all sizes pollinate flowers that were a safe distance away from me. As I approached the climax of what had become a long winded thought I started watching a tiny wasp that had flown in to the bunch of flowers. The wasp wasn't very big compared to its company hovering over the queen anne's lace however it stuck out because even if only seeing it for a moment I think most people would notice that it had a needle sticking out from behind it that was longer than the whole insect would be. It was a beautiful shiny black all over and would hover lightly in place before it would reach out and cling to a cluster of flowers but its abdomen stuck out at an unnatural angle and just made the needle at its bottom even more visible. From years of biology I knew that the needle was actually a thin tube called an ovipositor and is used for laying eggs, and this one was so long because it's used to lay eggs inside of things, inside trees and other insects. The weird thing is that I finished recalling my biology lesson the same moment my speech stopped.

I was trying my hardest to figure out exactly what I meant by "a love more honest and less about just finding someone to get married to and have kids with." And then I asked myself if I was saying that the love everyone else feels is the same as this wasp's ovipositor? Just some adaption that humans have to encourage our propagation? And was I really saying that my love is different and better just because I think spend more time fretting about who I like than every other person I know?

My imagined dialogues are really just self-centered; dramatic is a euphemism that keeps me from worrying about it. Really though, who's imagined dialogues wouldn't be all about them? 

At this point, rather than telling myself that my whole speech was a really stupid thing to think and then going over all of my neighbors outraged reactions at being so heinously marginalized by my comment, my thoughts continued with the questions. "If love really is just an adaptation, what would that mean for religion and philosophies of love? Would love really mean anything then?" Then I got to the probably the most cynical question that I have ever asked in my life "What if the philosophies of love were all lies? Isn't it convenient that every major religion and philosophy of ethics has love at its heart which is coincidentally the exact same thought that brings together most couples that have children and continue the species? What if religion and philosophy all say that love is the most important thing in your life because they were all designed to keep us going as a species or even as a religion (I always like the Simpsons episode where Homer shows Marge a Catholic pamphlet titled Plop Till You Drop, discouraging contraceptives). Or maybe as humans we are hardwired to say that love is the answer to our problems and it's just instinct to crave it." Maybe this is all b.s. and all of my thoughts about it are either conspiracy theories or are hardly scientifically plausible but they worry me. What bothers me the most about them is that when I think about church or U2charists and the repetition of love is what matters, love is the answer, Peace/Love/and Saving the Planet, like a Buddhist mantra it seems like the whole idea has gotten old but the priests and rock stars keep pushing it relentlessly, pleading with us to love others and to love God almost like they're trying to sell us on it, like after 2000-some years it's a cliche.

I know there are a lot of you who don't feel this way, and I don't want to argue with you, that's why I'm writing this as a blog rather than telling it to you face to face, but I have to think that you're like my mother, you don't feel the selling, you only feel the truth in the statement.

And if you don't agree with me ask yourself this: priests and novelists, rockstars and daytime TV show hosts all push love and caring out to their audiences like they need to defend it, like it is being attacked when clearly it's not. Why? There is no one around threatening to crush the life out of it, no one pushing any other idea to replace it. What I see is a lot of people who don't see enough love in the world and are trying to sell more people on it through sermons, songs, and tales that seem a little farfetched and they are not really defending it, they are trying to compete for our attention, they are advertising.

I don't think love is bad and I think it's like many other things that people are trying to sell, it's good and healthy like organic foods (which is another thing they sell at my church these days). But then I get back to my original fear of cliches; that there is truth in them but the idea is somehow changed by the marketing of it. It's not any less true but it's somehow less pure.

Maybe I am just kidding myself though and I'm just clinging to some unrealistic fantasy of true love that I got out of a fairy tale/Disney movie or maybe I'm thinking that somehow the thought of love is spoiled when it is spoken and that no one could do it justice. I don't think either of those are true though because then no sensible person would spend time trying to talk about it.

Maybe it just seems to me that their passion for love is misplaced, and maybe that's just because talking about it is so damn hard that most people end up talking about how great it is and how it changed their life, just like the people on Proactiv infomercials have had their lives changed and "Your life could be changed too! Just call ..." Maybe the big problem with people talking about love is that they haven't yet figured out how to talk about it without making it sound like an ad. I think it's hard for me to talk about anything really important while still sounding sincere.

To throw in a cliche of my own, the whole thing is just the difference between sugar and corn syrup, in your soft drinks one make them pure and refreshing and the other tastes the same at first but after drinking it too many times it leaves a crappy taste in your mouth that is impervious to toothpaste and mouthwash. =) (It's hard for me not to think that if ever I give a defense of love in this post it's going to be a cliche as well)

I really want to believe that I am a good person, that there is more to me than just a cynical person who has a knack for honing in on delicate subjects that are handled poorly. I really would like to believe that I care about love and talking about it because some part of who I am really needs to sort this out and that it's not just the cynical and false parts of me that are fueling this entire thought. That part, if it's there is what wants something more real than advertised love. And if that part of me is there searching for something real in love, then isn't that a reason to actually give a crap about other people and actually trying to love them? (At least that would give it a chance to find that reality.)

More importantly if some part of me like that exists, isn't that a clue that there actually might be something out there that satisfies it? And wouldn't it be great to have something that couldn't be torn down by that calculating cynical part of me as just an advertisement or a downright lie that I believe in just to keep the cynicism at bay?

Even if it's not there, there is always something about love or at least good relationships that makes a difference when cynicism is concerned. When I'm with my girlfriend, or my family, or a really good friend, pretty much whenever I don't feel so alone; I don't spend time thinking about how people can make love feel fake and spun in the same way supermarket ads can be. Essentially when I actually feel some kind of love, the cynicism disappears and I have a chance to see how fragile it really is.

}            //That means "the end" in C++

*I thought I would experiment with the quote tool today rather than banish all my interesting thoughts to footnotes way at the bottom of the page or fill up my paragraphs with parenthetical text