Plotting and planning.

Payback Time: Why Revenge Tastes So Sweet

Acts of personal vengeance reflect a biologically rooted sense of justice, they say, that functions in the brain something like appetite. Alternately voracious and manageable, it can inspire socially beneficial acts of retaliation and punishment as well as damaging ones. The emerging picture helps explain why many people who think they are above taking revenge find themselves doing nasty, despicable things, and how unconscious biases pervert what is at bottom a socially functional instinct.

"The best way to understand revenge is not as some disease or moral failing or crime but as a deeply human and sometimes very functional behavior," said Dr. Michael McCullough, a psychologist at the University of Miami. "Revenge can be a very good deterrent to bad behavior, and bring feelings of completeness and fulfillment."
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Using brain-wave technology, Dr. Eddie Harmon-Jones, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, has found that when people are insulted, they show a burst of activity in the left prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that is also active when people prepare to satisfy hunger and some cravings. This increased activity, Dr. Harmon-Jones said, seems to reflect not the sensation of being angry so much as the preparation to express it, the readiness to hit back.

The expression itself is all pleasure. In one recent experiment, psychologists demonstrated that students who were ridiculed were far less likely to avenge themselves on an offensive peer if they had been given a bogus "mood-freezing pill," which they were told blocked the experience of pleasure.

"We've shown many times that expressing anger often escalates and leads to more aggression," said Dr. Brad Bushman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan who conducted the study, "but people express it for the same reason they eat chocolate."

Now I have to admit, I think about acts of revenge about 500 gazillion times more than I execute them - usually because my plans are so elaborate and depend on so many factors that their actually happening is a near impossibility. That, and I'm scared of the consequences sometimes, or that my carefully-thought-out plan might backfire and adversely affect me.

But apparently there is a biological reason that I've been thinking of ways to get back at fuckwit. After all, before this incident, I was always the dumper, never the dumpee, and while I enjoy the pity I get from being the maligned one - well, it doesn't sit right with me. I'm supposed to always get my way! That's the way this world is supposed to work.

And of course, thoughts turn to revenge. There are a score of petty things I can do - but as always, the best one is to accidentally run into him with a hotter and smarter guy who is absolutely nuts over me. Seeing that fuckwit lives nowhere near me, this would've been rather hard to accomplish in the near future, or at least until he moves to LA. And then LA is a large city, so those hopes are dashed. He'd have to hear vicariously through his roommate that I was seeing people, and that's not as good as actually having to encounter me with a new beau in person.

Or so I thought.

Yeah, I might have gotten back in touch with cute British guy and have actually been good about responding to emails, as contrary to my leaving them in the inbox to collect (virtual) dust for months at a time. And I know that CBG has had a crush on me since we met last summer - but alas, nothing could happen then. (And to be honest, I am far more interested in his hotter younger brother, who has his JD/MBA and lives in the US, as opposed to England. But I digress.)

Lo and behold, CBG recently emailed to let me know that he had just bought his plane tickets to Southern California for the last two weeks of December. Ah, I can't be completely vain and assume that it's just to see me - his parents have a second home in Newport Beach. But I know that part of it is to see me as well. How do I know? Because he told me so.

And that is the beauty of it all. Did I mention that fuckwit's parents are on sabbatical this following year, and have rented a lovely house in Laguna Beach? For those of you who don't know Southern California geography, the Laguna Beach is 10 miles south of Newport Beach. Laguna is also about 8 miles north of Katie's beachhouse.

Odds are high that at some point over winter break, I'll be at the beachhouse. Odds are also high that I'll see CBG at some point down there, so I can meet his family (and hopefully his younger brother!) And Newport is fun and all, what with the enormous mall there - but really, I love Laguna. I'll take any excuse to go there. It's a cute artist's community with tons of charming shops and galleries. And it's a teensy city. Not so much a city as.. well.. a small town, I suppose.

Now, wouldn't it just be delightful if I happened to run into fuckwit's parents - or better yet, fuckwit himself - in the company of CBG? Did I mention that CBG is tall, cute, smart (MD/PhD from Oxford, of all lovely institutions) and has a British accent? And that as he's on his rotations, he only has enough free time to work out tons? Ah, but the heart flutters.

And he's absolutely crazy about me.

It's almost too perfect.

I just can't decide which would be more satisfying. To run into fuckwit or his parents.

Sweet revenge/fulfillment is so close, I can almost taste it.

(Yes, I know that December is a ways off. But this is excitingly viable, rather than just another fuzzy dream, which makes it.. well, exciting.)