Keep one eye on the door, keep one eye on the bed

Sometimes if I'm drinking water in my room and get bored before I empty my glass, I'll pour whatever is left into my bamboo's pot. It's mostly for convenience, but part of me also gets a kick out of sharing drinks with a plant.

Whenever the occasion serendipitously arises for me to notice it, I'm disturbed and amused by how some of the words we use most frequently and casually in our day-to-day vocabulary are also the least precise. If you ever find yourself trapped with a few others in an elevator and have nothing better to do than discuss your particular internal definitions of a common conceptual word, you'll likely find that each of you has a slightly to widely variant idea about what the word exactly means.

The most eye roll-worthy example of this phenomenon is the word dating. Most of us have had between one and thirty-three conversations about how (depending on your age and how positively you test for the clap) dating can denote anything from a single, casual night at the movies to an ironclad agreement between two consenting adults after weeks or perhaps months of introductory canoodling.

More recently, a conversation with GR got me thinking about jealous. In my lexicon, things look something like this:

Envy (n): a discontent feeling state in which one person wishes that they had some object or quality that another person possesses.
Jealous (adj): an active state in which a person resentfully desires that they had some object or quality that another person possesses, rather than the possessor.

In Lindaland (which may or may not coincide with OtherPeopleLand), jealousy is not only distinct from envy, but is really the deadlier sin and the greener-eyed monster. Envy is a self-pitying pouter that doesn't necessarily begrudge the Envied, while Jealousy walks around with his fight face on.

My definitions allow me to rationalize why jealousy, but not envy, tends to be a problem in intimate relationships. Trouble brews when Jim feels as though his relationship-sanctioned "possession" of Sally has been threatened (whatever the cause, from her spending too much time with another man to the fact that she fawns excessively over her Bichon). Worried that Sally now "belongs" to someone or something else, when she rightfully belongs to him, what Jim feels is jealousy, complete with feelings of anger and resentment towards the offending usurper.

That brand of homicide-inducing emotion isn't envy. It was envy back in high school when Sally was dating Bob and Jim was merely the guy in Sally's math class, tortured by his wicked crush on her.

Based on the Lindaland definition, I'm not at all a jealous person. Besides the fact that I have opinions about autonomy that problematize me thinking of other people, even implicitly, as my possessions, when it comes to my social relationships, I feel secure. I know where I stand with people. Jealously, weasel that it is, hangs out with an insecure crowd.

Lindaland lexicon allows me to admit, however, that what I can be is extremely territorial. Just because I'm not worried about my lawn doesn't mean I want the neighborhood kids traipsing all over it.