I grew up with a father who had two PhDs. One was in Rhetoric.
Dad could take neutral events and make you feel like they were war crimes. He could connect Abraham with Christmas. He could do almost anything rhetorically. Thousands of people loved this. Other people found it manipulative.
For good and for bad, it has influenced me.
When I catch someone doing something I’ve done or could do easily, and this thing hurts me so much that I want to cry, well, I want to have a good long cry about it, even if it takes a movie sympathetic to a war-criming SS guard such as The Reader to do it, and then I want to prosecute the perpetrator of the love crime. I want to show how very wrong she is. How bad she is. How evil she is. How reprehensible she is.
It’s not very fair of me and it’s not one of my nicer qualities.
I want love. I want to love and be loved. I want the warm messy comforting arms of love around me, holding me tight and cradling me into sleep.
