all's well that fucking ends at some point

[substitute]

Everyone is in love with the wrong person lately. It’s a Situation Tragedy, in which the same people end up dead on the floor at the end of each episode, stiffening and cooling as the laugh track roars on and on.

I remember experiments done with baby primates who had been separated from their mothers. They were given wire frame mothers to hug. The little primates preferred the wire frame mothers that had terry cloth on them so they were a bit softer. I think I’m going to go to the Sav-On and see if they have any of those.

Preferably with the cloth, you know, but one can’t be so picky these days.

We’re an unhappy bunch a lot of the time, but I wouldn’t trade these friends for any others. We fall in and out of love with each other, or crash our cars into each other, or accidentally eat each others’ lunches, but we can still talk about it reasonably most of the time and get somewhere that we can all live.

I want to freeze this moment and work on it, fix it, make things better, but all the time I’m trying to figure things out I’m getting older and my life is oozing away.

Comments

[so-gracefully.livejournal.com]

right, and the other option they gave to the baby monkeys was a wire 'mother' without the terry cloth but with a bottle of formula or whatever--some kind of nourishment, anyway. and the babies would nearly always go to the soft, comforting 'mother' rather than the one who would feed them. the end result was that emotional sustenance can be considered just as important as, if not more so than, physical sustenance. that study is why they have programs where people go to the hospital and cuddle crack babies and things like that, and help those babies grow up to be healthy.

(something interesting, though: a serious drawback of harlow's whole study was that once those baby monkeys got older, their behavior was bizarre and violent, and when they reached maturity they had problems mating. those that did actually have babies treated them very coldly and didn't know how to take care of them. i think that's because he picked monkeys that actually did have mothers, separated them, and raised them in the cages. that kind of thing was okay in the 50s-60s, but would be considered animal cruelty today, i think. i apologize for rambling about this, but this is one of those times that someone brings something up and i'm excited to have opportunity to talk about it because i think it's so interesting.)