Who?
Phone conversation last night yielded some interesting thoughts. We can never really know someone else. By "know", I mean knowing a person as he or she really is, and there you can see where the problem lies. All we can know of any one person is what they project of themselves to us. If I were to meet one person and project myself to be a Silly Airheaded Cheerleader (and I bet you I could pull it off damn well, too), if that person never met anyone that I knew, that is what I would be to them - and they would never know any different. To them, I really would be a Silly Airheaded Cheerleader. If I were diligent enough in maintaining this image to that person, they would, a few years down the line, claim to know me very well, but in actual fact they wouldn't know me at all (insofar as "me" is the "real" me).
Even the "realness" of me is arbitrary. Who's to say I'm not really a Silly Airheaded Cheerleader? And what is the standard of "realness"? If the standard of "realness" is the character that comes most naturally to me and the person I am most of the time, then theoretically all I would have to do to is be that character more often. Would it be real? Or is it the character I was "born" with that is real? In which case, growing up would automatically make my character "unreal"...
Anyway, my point was that we can never really know anyone, not even ourselves. And if to know someone is to love them, then surely love is some kind of huge farcical delusion. What a frightening thought.
[01:10 Update]: I don't condone the stereotyping of characters either (e.g. Silly Airheaded Cheerleader), and yes I'm well aware characters are more complex than that, but hey, if stereotype will get my point across...
Besides, I've always been rather partial to the idea that deep (or maybe not so deep) within me, a Silly Airheaded Cheerleader lives, repressed, waiting to get out.