My Four Leafed Clover - Redux

Bloody hell I don't even know how to spell this: I thought I could do it on google hits: "four leafed" gives 49000 hits, "four leaved" 36000 so I thought I'd take the majority view, being a freedom loving democrat.

My reader will by now be accustomed to reading no updates of TTD at this stage of the week - too busy is the pathetic excuse. However today is an exception - for reasons which are unlikely to become clear at the moment.

So I thought I'd post on one of my favourite subjects: the psychology of embarrassment. In particular how it can be desired as a pathway to annihilation and (maybe) therefore renewal.

I've made all this up, btw. This is more homespun than a jumper your nan made for you when you were two and were too embarrassed to wear it even at that age.

So. It is possible to desire, even actively plot, a situation wherein you are humiliated, with the full knowledge of this outcome, and still to desire it. The reason is this. Let us assume there is issue x, about which you are to embarrass yourself. Issue x needs to be plausible, even real, but not, on the face of it, desperately important. However, there is also issue y, which really is bugging you, and which is probably only tangentially related to issue x, such as occurring in the same place of work (to take a random example).

Issue x can be used to bring issue y to a head, by facilitating a total humiliation related only to issue x (on the face of it) - thus allowing issue y to be solved without its own humiliations, though admittedly using the humiliations of issue x. But it might just be that x allows you a more noble, or pure, solution than tackling the, say, political issues of y.

Choose your humiliations, is my advice, I suppose: choose them well and decide how you wish to be remembered.