Affliction of Affections

Well I was going to post about affections but before I begin with that, more specifically, I would like to talk about my computer. It is true we have a love/hate relationship, I love it when it works right and it hates me all the time because it never works right. With that said I think I can tell you that it decided for the first time in almost a month to start the shutdown process with no errors, I don't know how, and I am not going to question it. After all I owe great thanks to Kev for helping me set up my blog with all the fancy links, and maybe I got carried away with all of them but it is fun knowing how to do something. Soooo now on to the not so fun subject because I know little about it--afflictions--I mean affections, little Freudian slip there.
Affections are incomprehensible to me. They are fickle. Just like me with my computer, right now I hate it, When I started typing this I loved it. But I pushed my luck and now it won't shutdown again. Of course this is only an object and the magnitude of affection I feel toward it cannot compare to anything between humans, but it is an affection none the less. But maybe the things we love less we can hate less as well?
Then there is the affection I felt towards my fish, Pablo, I could say I loved my fish and there would be no doubt. I did love him but now he's dead and it's probably my fault, so my affections for my fish, have turned to this bitter self loathing--I am a fish murderer. I wanted to give him the world and make him happy, but instead I gave him and all expense paid trip to the septic tank that sits in our front yard. I was going to give him a proper burial but he was slimy by the time I decided what I wanted to do with him, so I flushed him. Sad but true.
Then there was the strange foreign man at work the other day that came in for passport pictures. Strangely he felt some kind of affection towards me, I don't think I was being overly nice or flirty, I was just trying to be a friendly helpful salesperson, he asked me if I wanted to come sit on his lap for a picture. This scared me a bit, and I hope in a way that he goes on his trip and decides to stay in whatever far country he is going to. I don't hate him because I have no basis on which to hate him, I don't know him, he may be a nice guy, or maybe its part of his culture, but it made me feel uncomfortable.
Then there are my affections towards people, seems I can never get them to come out the way I want. Little crushes and the sort. Nothing mutual. It's frustrating really. I wonder if I repulse them like my foreign friend repulses me? It's funny when we see people in the rose colored surreality of a crush, they never do anything wrong, and then one day you wake up and realize the monster you have been wanting, I don't know what causes the change but I know when it happens. Suddenly you have a disgust with the monster and with yourself for allowing the affection to go on for so long. Then there are times when you see the monster for all it is, and you are repulsed by the hideousness of it, but yet behind it all you can see the person you came to love that drew your affections from the beginning. Maybe that's real love--I don't know?
Can our affections be so fickle, that we hate and love the same thing. Can we really feel affection towards a fish we only owned for 5 days? Does a foreign traveler feel affection towards a nice helpful person just because they are nice and helpful, if so isn't that a sad world we live? We can't even be nice to people with out them taking it the wrong way. I think of that dumb movie Notting Hill, I don't know if you have seen it but, Julia Roberts character falls in love with Hugh Grants character in the first 5 minutes of the show, just because he is friendly and helpful. Is our generation so starved for affection that it has come to this? Is affection really all that deep, we all crave affection but for what? What meaning is there to have affections towards a computer, or a dead fish or someone who doesn't give me the time of day? I don't think affection is bad, I believe it can grow into something deep and strong, I am only posing the question of why we hold onto affections that will never be deep and real. My best guess is because of safety, we are comfortable in our routine, we are used to being fed all the Hollywood lies, and deep down we don't really believe them or do we? Can things ever be just how they are, or do we have to complicate them by tying affections to them? What if they can't what if we can't how do we deal with our affections in a way that allows us not to get tied up in them?