Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Musings on the Mafia
I'll never get answers to any of these questions, because nothing on this Earth could induce me to get near enough to killers to ask them anything, but they're still worth contemplating:
Is there any shred of similarity between how wiseguys are portrayed in movies
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/9880/movies.html
and what they're really like, I mean other than very basic things like them being Italian and criminals? We Americans find them glamorous and fascinating, to our everlasting shame, but are they REALLY more so than any bunch of thugs that operate in this country who're NOT being the theme in a steady stream of films and HBO series, or is that just the myth that's inexplicably developed around them?
Very few Mafiosos die of old age... so why does anyone not born into one of the families ever even THINK of joining? Can people really believe themselves to be so invincible that they're certain they'll have a long and happy life in La Cosa Nostra?
Tangentially, why would anyone enter into any sort of business agreement with a Mafia family? I don't mean the businesses that're forced into paying protection $, I mean the accountants, lawyers and others who could choose to NOT take dirty $ but don't make that choice. Is there anyone whose stress level is so low in the fast-paced modern world that they need to have that constant fear of ending up dead, or wishing they were dead, because they ticked off some guy in a shiny suit whose last name ends with a vowel?
And the really big one; knowing that the Mafia will pursue anyone who steals from them until the end of time, with a hideous death to follow in the very likely event that the thief is found, why, WHY, is anyone stupid enough to cook the books or hold $ back or in any other way appropriate their funds? If you've got a death wish, there've gotta be easier ways of fulfilling it; what's the psychology of those who convince themselves that they're going to cheat the Mafia and get away with it?
I'd be interested to know how Mafia types see US. Do they view everyone outside their circle as weak, foolish, maybe less than human? Are they amused or disgusted at our obsession with them, or just indifferent? Do they ever wish they had normal lives and could hang around with us, or would they never want to mingle with us even if they could?
What's it like to be one of them, to be inside their heads? How do they incorporate thoughts of who they're going to murder that day with their mental reminders to pick up their dry cleaning and buy some wine for dinner? How little of an excuse do they generally think they need to kill someone... how do they reason through the pros and cons of, say, blowing away someone who gets into a fender bender with them? Are there certain crimes that're beneath them, such as stealing a pack of gum? How do they view women other than their sainted mothers, when the women they get to know tend to be from Mafia families, or prostitutes? Given their patriarchal-ness, do they automatically look down women? Do they have female lawyers, for example, or do they only trust men? Do any of them watch cartoons, or eat Captain Crunch, or are they all "dead serious" because of what they do for a living? Are they allowed any individuality, like if one of them loved rap and wanted to dress accordingly, could they do that, or is there an explicit rule for everything... or a desire to all be alike? Do any of them enjoy things like fine art and poetry, or is that sort of appreciation unable to coexist with the necessity of being a killer?
I guess it all boils down to; how does their psychology differ from that of ordinary people? What's the mentality of a member of a group dedicated to a rule of terror, not from a military or political standpoint, not in reaction to poverty and deprivation, but because... I can't even give a because, other than the desire of evil to express itself. Is that why this has been in the back of my mind all day, because I've finally noticed that with evil people of any variety we only hear about what makes them do violent, anti-social things, and nothing about how their minds work in general? Why do we think we can figure them out without the big picture? To understand the nature of evil, you need to know more than just what might have led directly to them doing evil deeds, you need to know everything about how being evil (not crazy, which complicates things, but "just evil") makes a person different in EVERY aspect of mental functioning from a normal person; is this why evil so often goes unchecked, because we simply don't understand evil people and so can't outthink them?
As far as I know, no study's been done about that sort of thing; isn't that odd, when you think of it? And a little scary...
Is there any shred of similarity between how wiseguys are portrayed in movies
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/9880/movies.html
and what they're really like, I mean other than very basic things like them being Italian and criminals? We Americans find them glamorous and fascinating, to our everlasting shame, but are they REALLY more so than any bunch of thugs that operate in this country who're NOT being the theme in a steady stream of films and HBO series, or is that just the myth that's inexplicably developed around them?
Very few Mafiosos die of old age... so why does anyone not born into one of the families ever even THINK of joining? Can people really believe themselves to be so invincible that they're certain they'll have a long and happy life in La Cosa Nostra?
Tangentially, why would anyone enter into any sort of business agreement with a Mafia family? I don't mean the businesses that're forced into paying protection $, I mean the accountants, lawyers and others who could choose to NOT take dirty $ but don't make that choice. Is there anyone whose stress level is so low in the fast-paced modern world that they need to have that constant fear of ending up dead, or wishing they were dead, because they ticked off some guy in a shiny suit whose last name ends with a vowel?
And the really big one; knowing that the Mafia will pursue anyone who steals from them until the end of time, with a hideous death to follow in the very likely event that the thief is found, why, WHY, is anyone stupid enough to cook the books or hold $ back or in any other way appropriate their funds? If you've got a death wish, there've gotta be easier ways of fulfilling it; what's the psychology of those who convince themselves that they're going to cheat the Mafia and get away with it?
I'd be interested to know how Mafia types see US. Do they view everyone outside their circle as weak, foolish, maybe less than human? Are they amused or disgusted at our obsession with them, or just indifferent? Do they ever wish they had normal lives and could hang around with us, or would they never want to mingle with us even if they could?
What's it like to be one of them, to be inside their heads? How do they incorporate thoughts of who they're going to murder that day with their mental reminders to pick up their dry cleaning and buy some wine for dinner? How little of an excuse do they generally think they need to kill someone... how do they reason through the pros and cons of, say, blowing away someone who gets into a fender bender with them? Are there certain crimes that're beneath them, such as stealing a pack of gum? How do they view women other than their sainted mothers, when the women they get to know tend to be from Mafia families, or prostitutes? Given their patriarchal-ness, do they automatically look down women? Do they have female lawyers, for example, or do they only trust men? Do any of them watch cartoons, or eat Captain Crunch, or are they all "dead serious" because of what they do for a living? Are they allowed any individuality, like if one of them loved rap and wanted to dress accordingly, could they do that, or is there an explicit rule for everything... or a desire to all be alike? Do any of them enjoy things like fine art and poetry, or is that sort of appreciation unable to coexist with the necessity of being a killer?
I guess it all boils down to; how does their psychology differ from that of ordinary people? What's the mentality of a member of a group dedicated to a rule of terror, not from a military or political standpoint, not in reaction to poverty and deprivation, but because... I can't even give a because, other than the desire of evil to express itself. Is that why this has been in the back of my mind all day, because I've finally noticed that with evil people of any variety we only hear about what makes them do violent, anti-social things, and nothing about how their minds work in general? Why do we think we can figure them out without the big picture? To understand the nature of evil, you need to know more than just what might have led directly to them doing evil deeds, you need to know everything about how being evil (not crazy, which complicates things, but "just evil") makes a person different in EVERY aspect of mental functioning from a normal person; is this why evil so often goes unchecked, because we simply don't understand evil people and so can't outthink them?
As far as I know, no study's been done about that sort of thing; isn't that odd, when you think of it? And a little scary...
Monday, June 20, 2005
Father's Day
This one's a toughie; my father is a genuinely sick and evil person, who was pretty grim during my early childhood, and by the time I was 12 had decided that I was a "monster not fit for human company" and treated me accordingly. Still, only a 2-dimensional comic book villain never has a single positive moment ever, and here's what I've come up with:
We were at a mall shopping for Christmas gifts for my mother, and he was inexplicably willing to go into a t-shirt shop; I can't remember how it happened, but he ended up buying me a t-shirt, which he said he'd "surprise Mom" with by putting it under the tree for me... and that was probably the 1st cool shirt I ever had.
There was a Mexican restaurant that we used to go to that had a blended fruit drink (licuado) that, because it cost more than the soda I'd usually have, my mother didn't want me to get, despite it having nutritional content that a parent should WANT a kid to consume, and my father voted her down, admonishing her to "not be cheap about food," and to let me have it.
I could only think of one more, but it's a biggie, because he actually went well out of his way for me; in the days before we had a VCR (we were the last people in the Western hemisphere to get one), there was a very special program that was coming on towards the end of a school day that I was naturally still desperate to see. The timing of the show was such that all I had to do to see it was leave school during last period, which was study hall, so I wouldn't miss any classes... but my mother refused to come and get me early. I was willing to part with some of my precious birthday and Christmas $ from my grandparents to pay a senior to drive me home, but my mother declared them unable to safely drive a child around (despite the DMV thinking differently), and vetoed that as well. There was no public transportation available, and a cab ride was outside my reach, so I was out of luck, as always... until I saw my father walk into the library. Once the shock wore off enough for me to move my legs, I gathered up my books, went home with him and watched the show, which was frankly enhanced by my mother hanging around with her lower lip out, sulking because she'd failed to prevent me from seeing the show and him from taking an action against her wishes.
He didn't manage to carry off the day perfectly, as he lied to my mother and told her that I'd been "rolling around on the floor" with my boyfriend when he showed up, which, ignoring the fact that it would NEVER occur to me to do anything that would surely get me in trouble, was physically impossible in the narrow walkway we and a bunch of other kids were lined up along the floor in, AND we were under the ever-watchful eyes of several adults at all times, who could hardly be imagined to be willing to ever let us do such a thing even if it WERE possible; fortunately, my mother was a library volunteer, and, although she automatically discounted any protestation of innocence I ever made, she knew that what he was claiming simply could never have happened, but he sure TRIED to convince her otherwise. Why he'd make such an outrageous accusation on a day he'd felt kindly enough towards me to make a once in a lifetime effort on my behalf is best left to psychologists; what's most astonishing was that he made the effort itself.
If YOUR father made at least a cursory effort to raise you decently, I hope you showed him a little love today; if you yourself are a father, I hope you're making sure YOUR kids never have to make posts like this, and that your Father's Day made you feel happy to be a dad.
We were at a mall shopping for Christmas gifts for my mother, and he was inexplicably willing to go into a t-shirt shop; I can't remember how it happened, but he ended up buying me a t-shirt, which he said he'd "surprise Mom" with by putting it under the tree for me... and that was probably the 1st cool shirt I ever had.
There was a Mexican restaurant that we used to go to that had a blended fruit drink (licuado) that, because it cost more than the soda I'd usually have, my mother didn't want me to get, despite it having nutritional content that a parent should WANT a kid to consume, and my father voted her down, admonishing her to "not be cheap about food," and to let me have it.
I could only think of one more, but it's a biggie, because he actually went well out of his way for me; in the days before we had a VCR (we were the last people in the Western hemisphere to get one), there was a very special program that was coming on towards the end of a school day that I was naturally still desperate to see. The timing of the show was such that all I had to do to see it was leave school during last period, which was study hall, so I wouldn't miss any classes... but my mother refused to come and get me early. I was willing to part with some of my precious birthday and Christmas $ from my grandparents to pay a senior to drive me home, but my mother declared them unable to safely drive a child around (despite the DMV thinking differently), and vetoed that as well. There was no public transportation available, and a cab ride was outside my reach, so I was out of luck, as always... until I saw my father walk into the library. Once the shock wore off enough for me to move my legs, I gathered up my books, went home with him and watched the show, which was frankly enhanced by my mother hanging around with her lower lip out, sulking because she'd failed to prevent me from seeing the show and him from taking an action against her wishes.
He didn't manage to carry off the day perfectly, as he lied to my mother and told her that I'd been "rolling around on the floor" with my boyfriend when he showed up, which, ignoring the fact that it would NEVER occur to me to do anything that would surely get me in trouble, was physically impossible in the narrow walkway we and a bunch of other kids were lined up along the floor in, AND we were under the ever-watchful eyes of several adults at all times, who could hardly be imagined to be willing to ever let us do such a thing even if it WERE possible; fortunately, my mother was a library volunteer, and, although she automatically discounted any protestation of innocence I ever made, she knew that what he was claiming simply could never have happened, but he sure TRIED to convince her otherwise. Why he'd make such an outrageous accusation on a day he'd felt kindly enough towards me to make a once in a lifetime effort on my behalf is best left to psychologists; what's most astonishing was that he made the effort itself.
If YOUR father made at least a cursory effort to raise you decently, I hope you showed him a little love today; if you yourself are a father, I hope you're making sure YOUR kids never have to make posts like this, and that your Father's Day made you feel happy to be a dad.
Sunday, June 19, 2005
Crunches and the telepathic parrot
I think that may qualify as my coolest title ever.
Something happened tonight that's left me spooked and distracted. I did 1500 abdominal crunches (no, that's not a typo-not bad for a woman pushing middle age, don't you think?), which is my normal #, and towards the end my lower back was feeling sort of odd, but I wasn't paying attention, as the crunches kill my neck and I have to focus on holding it steady to minimize the pain. When I was done, I stood up, and discovered to my dismay that my lower back was NUMB, and that pins and needles were shooting down my backside, which was also a little numb. I've never had any hint of this happen before, and it's making me nervous, because I don't know if I'm suddenly pressing on a nerve the wrong way or some such thing, or if next time it'll be worse, or if I'm doing actual damage, or... well, I can come up with all sorts of scary scenarios, but I'm going to stay rational and try to find a site that lets you ask exercise-related medical questions and see what I can figure out.
Also tonight, there was a Jane Goodall special on Animal Planet called "When Animals Talk," which featured, among other interesting critters (such as giant rats that locate land mines), an African gray parrot called N'Kisi, who has a vocabulary of 1077 words, speaks in sentences, and shows the ability I've read of before in parrots to demonstrate that he knows what the words he's using mean (see the article "Polly Wanna Ph.D.?" in the January 2000 issue of Discover)... all of which pales beside what double-blind testing (using photos in sealed, unlabeled envelopes) shows is an astounding ability to know what's in his owner's mind:
http://www.sheldrake.org/nkisi/
http://www.scientificexploration.org/jse/abstracts/v17n4a1.php
They did full-on scientific testing here, and N'Kisi wildly outperformed what he could have done by random chance, even though, being an animal that couldn't understand that he was being tested, he tended to chatter on about things other than what they wanted him to focus on when they were doing some of the tests. Makes you wonder if maybe some of the other people who think their pets are reading their minds might be onto something; after all, it'd be pretty odd if only this one creature had developed telepathy... that'd be a heck of a mutation. From my own experience as an animal communicator, I know that we humans can pick up on their mental state, and send simple commands, but it's fascinating to have some scientific confirmation that they can read US.
Goodall's explanation of why an animal might have telepathic ability will sound familiar to my long-time readers; since a creature's survival depends in large part on its ability to sense what's going on around it, and with its fellow creatures, telepathy would have clear benefits. Maybe we'll see some more tests being done on telepathic animals now that they've achieved such impressive results, and maybe, just maybe, that'll lead to some brave scientist somewhere being willing to do some real testing on humans, not with nonsense like trying to guess playing cards, which involves tiny, precise details that our telepathy would NOT be designed to pick up (as that sort of thing would NOT confer an additional survival advantage), but with simple photographic images sent between, say, twins, or mothers and children ... and who knows what they might discover we're able to do if they just TRY.
Something happened tonight that's left me spooked and distracted. I did 1500 abdominal crunches (no, that's not a typo-not bad for a woman pushing middle age, don't you think?), which is my normal #, and towards the end my lower back was feeling sort of odd, but I wasn't paying attention, as the crunches kill my neck and I have to focus on holding it steady to minimize the pain. When I was done, I stood up, and discovered to my dismay that my lower back was NUMB, and that pins and needles were shooting down my backside, which was also a little numb. I've never had any hint of this happen before, and it's making me nervous, because I don't know if I'm suddenly pressing on a nerve the wrong way or some such thing, or if next time it'll be worse, or if I'm doing actual damage, or... well, I can come up with all sorts of scary scenarios, but I'm going to stay rational and try to find a site that lets you ask exercise-related medical questions and see what I can figure out.
Also tonight, there was a Jane Goodall special on Animal Planet called "When Animals Talk," which featured, among other interesting critters (such as giant rats that locate land mines), an African gray parrot called N'Kisi, who has a vocabulary of 1077 words, speaks in sentences, and shows the ability I've read of before in parrots to demonstrate that he knows what the words he's using mean (see the article "Polly Wanna Ph.D.?" in the January 2000 issue of Discover)... all of which pales beside what double-blind testing (using photos in sealed, unlabeled envelopes) shows is an astounding ability to know what's in his owner's mind:
http://www.sheldrake.org/nkisi/
http://www.scientificexploration.org/jse/abstracts/v17n4a1.php
They did full-on scientific testing here, and N'Kisi wildly outperformed what he could have done by random chance, even though, being an animal that couldn't understand that he was being tested, he tended to chatter on about things other than what they wanted him to focus on when they were doing some of the tests. Makes you wonder if maybe some of the other people who think their pets are reading their minds might be onto something; after all, it'd be pretty odd if only this one creature had developed telepathy... that'd be a heck of a mutation. From my own experience as an animal communicator, I know that we humans can pick up on their mental state, and send simple commands, but it's fascinating to have some scientific confirmation that they can read US.
Goodall's explanation of why an animal might have telepathic ability will sound familiar to my long-time readers; since a creature's survival depends in large part on its ability to sense what's going on around it, and with its fellow creatures, telepathy would have clear benefits. Maybe we'll see some more tests being done on telepathic animals now that they've achieved such impressive results, and maybe, just maybe, that'll lead to some brave scientist somewhere being willing to do some real testing on humans, not with nonsense like trying to guess playing cards, which involves tiny, precise details that our telepathy would NOT be designed to pick up (as that sort of thing would NOT confer an additional survival advantage), but with simple photographic images sent between, say, twins, or mothers and children ... and who knows what they might discover we're able to do if they just TRY.
Saturday, June 18, 2005
How honest should you be?
The sad truth is; not very.
I read an article today that claimed that people who sucked up at job interviews were far more likely to get hired than those who spoke, GASP, about their qualifications for the job; pretending that you think the company and/or the interviewer are wonderful wins over, not just being open and honest, but over what's supposed to be the procedure for being interviewed... and let's not forget that that procedure is itself often filled with gross distortions of the truth, with successful liars having a better chance at being hired than if they'd been honest.
A movie I saw a few days ago included women talking about how it was necessary to lie about how many men they'd had sex with to their current men, because no man wants a woman who's had too many partners, or more partners than he's had... and then went on to cover how men lie about THEIR # of sex partners to seem more studly.
These things made me remember something in Discover, from the R&D section of the October 2002 issue, called "Lies and Nothing but the Lies";
"Our penchant for bending truth is so pervasive that we delude even ourselves, says Robert S. Feldman, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He and his colleagues videotaped 121 pairs of unacquainted college students during 10-minute introductory conversations. The researchers then asked one student from each pair to watch the tape and report every instance in which he or she had lied. Before viewing the tapes, most of the subjects said they had been completely honest. But faced with the evidence, 60 percent realized they had fibbed at least once. Those who lied did so three times per conversation, on average, with one subject squeezing in 12. 'We were surprised that the level of lying was quite high-and so were the students,' Feldman says. He also found that men and women lied at roughly the same rate but apparently for different reasons. 'Women tended to lie in order to make the people they were talking to feel better about themselves. Men tended to lie to make themselves look better,' he says. One male student told a woman he was the lead singer in a rock band that had just signed a recording contract, although the band did not exist. The research has made Feldman wary of day-to-day conversation: 'I'm more skeptical about what I hear, and I'm much more sensitive to what I say.'"
So, even in casual conversation, lying is more likely to happen than not, even if we aren't aware of doing it... and when we do something automatically in social situations, it's usually a sign that it's what we as a culture subconsciously see as "correct" behavior.
Then, there are the endless lies that we ARE conscious of; if our opinion is sought about something personal to the questioner, we'll usually lie if we don't consider whatever it is to be genuinely praiseworthy, whether the subject is a new haircut or sexual technique. When we're trying to get people to like us, we pretend to agree with what they say and to enjoy what they enjoy. When we speak to people in authority, we tell them what we think they want to hear. When we're trying to get an ambivalent person into bed, we'll say ANYTHING.
We SAY we value honesty, but the truth is that if we were ACTUALLY honest with the people in our lives, I mean 100% honest, we'd be resented and disliked by everyone, including those who've said that "honesty is the best policy" all their lives, and if the people in our lives were 100% honest with US, we'd be devastated and outraged by what we'd learn, and shun them as a reward for their honesty.
People don't really want to hear the truth, they want to be told whatever will make them feel good... and that's exactly what you'll tell them, for the most part, if you want to get ahead at work, get along with your family, have friends, and have a romantic partner who's willing to sleep with you.
Is that why some of us, especially those who, like me, keep their identities a secret, have blogs... so that we have somewhere we can pass along our truth to other members of the human race without negative repercussions in our lives? Hmmmmmmmm...
I read an article today that claimed that people who sucked up at job interviews were far more likely to get hired than those who spoke, GASP, about their qualifications for the job; pretending that you think the company and/or the interviewer are wonderful wins over, not just being open and honest, but over what's supposed to be the procedure for being interviewed... and let's not forget that that procedure is itself often filled with gross distortions of the truth, with successful liars having a better chance at being hired than if they'd been honest.
A movie I saw a few days ago included women talking about how it was necessary to lie about how many men they'd had sex with to their current men, because no man wants a woman who's had too many partners, or more partners than he's had... and then went on to cover how men lie about THEIR # of sex partners to seem more studly.
These things made me remember something in Discover, from the R&D section of the October 2002 issue, called "Lies and Nothing but the Lies";
"Our penchant for bending truth is so pervasive that we delude even ourselves, says Robert S. Feldman, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He and his colleagues videotaped 121 pairs of unacquainted college students during 10-minute introductory conversations. The researchers then asked one student from each pair to watch the tape and report every instance in which he or she had lied. Before viewing the tapes, most of the subjects said they had been completely honest. But faced with the evidence, 60 percent realized they had fibbed at least once. Those who lied did so three times per conversation, on average, with one subject squeezing in 12. 'We were surprised that the level of lying was quite high-and so were the students,' Feldman says. He also found that men and women lied at roughly the same rate but apparently for different reasons. 'Women tended to lie in order to make the people they were talking to feel better about themselves. Men tended to lie to make themselves look better,' he says. One male student told a woman he was the lead singer in a rock band that had just signed a recording contract, although the band did not exist. The research has made Feldman wary of day-to-day conversation: 'I'm more skeptical about what I hear, and I'm much more sensitive to what I say.'"
So, even in casual conversation, lying is more likely to happen than not, even if we aren't aware of doing it... and when we do something automatically in social situations, it's usually a sign that it's what we as a culture subconsciously see as "correct" behavior.
Then, there are the endless lies that we ARE conscious of; if our opinion is sought about something personal to the questioner, we'll usually lie if we don't consider whatever it is to be genuinely praiseworthy, whether the subject is a new haircut or sexual technique. When we're trying to get people to like us, we pretend to agree with what they say and to enjoy what they enjoy. When we speak to people in authority, we tell them what we think they want to hear. When we're trying to get an ambivalent person into bed, we'll say ANYTHING.
We SAY we value honesty, but the truth is that if we were ACTUALLY honest with the people in our lives, I mean 100% honest, we'd be resented and disliked by everyone, including those who've said that "honesty is the best policy" all their lives, and if the people in our lives were 100% honest with US, we'd be devastated and outraged by what we'd learn, and shun them as a reward for their honesty.
People don't really want to hear the truth, they want to be told whatever will make them feel good... and that's exactly what you'll tell them, for the most part, if you want to get ahead at work, get along with your family, have friends, and have a romantic partner who's willing to sleep with you.
Is that why some of us, especially those who, like me, keep their identities a secret, have blogs... so that we have somewhere we can pass along our truth to other members of the human race without negative repercussions in our lives? Hmmmmmmmm...
Friday, June 17, 2005
Another way I differ; perceived value
One of the countless ways that my psychology differs from that of the rest of the human race (if this were a movie, that line would be moving you towards grasping that I'm actually an alien planted here on Earth for probably evil purposes, but that's not what it means here, honest) is the way any sacrifices I make to obtain something, whether object or goal, affect the value I place on whatever it is... and, as always, it greatly puzzled me when I discovered how everyone else looked at it.
If you're normal (and granted, the fact that you read my blog means you might not be, lol), if you purchase something with your own $, especially $ you worked for, you value it more than if it were given to you, and if you invest significant time and effort into achieving a goal, you value it more than if you just lucked into it.
I, on the other hand, was excited to learn the term "opportunity cost" in economics class in college, because it meant that one of my most basic principles had an actual name; the concept is that every choice you make means that you lose out on all the other choices you could have made, in other words all the other ways you could have spent your time, effort and $. I'm sure you've figured out how that applies to the topic; from my earliest childhood, if I had to pay my own $ for something, I suffered endless agony over all the things I COULD have had with that $ and never would, and so of course valued something given to me MORE than one I paid for, as the given thing meant that I still had that $, and I likewise valued things I got effortlessly more than those I had to work for, because the former meant that I hadn't given up any of my limited time and energy to get something, and the latter meant that I HAD.
But, didn't I FEEL anything, such as excitement or pride, when I'd earned $ or achieved a goal, to make me value the end results? I was brought up to believe that everything I did fell under the heading of the minimum that was expected of me, not as praiseworthy or even noteworthy, so I viewed anything produced by my toil about like a military trainee feels after digging a hole as punishment; worn out by the effort, not seeing anything to brag about, and probably got alot of abuse along the way. These days, I might feel a vague satisfaction when I accomplish something, and sometimes I'm briefly excited when something at the far edge of my abilities works out, but all of that pales beside how happy I WOULD have been if someone else had come along and done it all for me.
Now, if only someone could read my mind and type up my blog entries for me... ;-)
If you're normal (and granted, the fact that you read my blog means you might not be, lol), if you purchase something with your own $, especially $ you worked for, you value it more than if it were given to you, and if you invest significant time and effort into achieving a goal, you value it more than if you just lucked into it.
I, on the other hand, was excited to learn the term "opportunity cost" in economics class in college, because it meant that one of my most basic principles had an actual name; the concept is that every choice you make means that you lose out on all the other choices you could have made, in other words all the other ways you could have spent your time, effort and $. I'm sure you've figured out how that applies to the topic; from my earliest childhood, if I had to pay my own $ for something, I suffered endless agony over all the things I COULD have had with that $ and never would, and so of course valued something given to me MORE than one I paid for, as the given thing meant that I still had that $, and I likewise valued things I got effortlessly more than those I had to work for, because the former meant that I hadn't given up any of my limited time and energy to get something, and the latter meant that I HAD.
But, didn't I FEEL anything, such as excitement or pride, when I'd earned $ or achieved a goal, to make me value the end results? I was brought up to believe that everything I did fell under the heading of the minimum that was expected of me, not as praiseworthy or even noteworthy, so I viewed anything produced by my toil about like a military trainee feels after digging a hole as punishment; worn out by the effort, not seeing anything to brag about, and probably got alot of abuse along the way. These days, I might feel a vague satisfaction when I accomplish something, and sometimes I'm briefly excited when something at the far edge of my abilities works out, but all of that pales beside how happy I WOULD have been if someone else had come along and done it all for me.
Now, if only someone could read my mind and type up my blog entries for me... ;-)
Thursday, June 16, 2005
A lesson in psychology from "Beauty and the Geek"
This series continues to be interesting. In tonight's episode, they showed another romantic attachment forming, just as I predicted; the guy used the massage techniques they'd been taught to relieve the tension and back pain of one of the girls, with them alone in a bedroom and her lying down on the bed, and what usually happens under those circumstances happened... they started sharing a sense of intimacy.
What was really exciting, though, was what I learned about human behavior; have you ever wondered why some people, especially men, with poor social skills seem to go out of their way to make matters worse by being loud, rude, pushy, bossy, or just plain manic, often done in a way that implies that they think they're doing a Robin Williams imitation, although they have only his freneticism, not his funniness? I've always seen a variety of possible reasons for this; desire for attention, immaturity, lack of understanding of what others find appealing, trying too hard and overshooting the mark, burning off nervous energy... and I still think that these sorts of things are probably present to some degree in most of these cases, but when one of the geeks explained why one of his fellow geeks was acting this way, I instantly understood that he'd nailed it, as only an "insider" could. He said something along the lines of:
"It's better to be a buffoon and think that people are disliking you because of that, than to be yourself and have to accept that people dislike you for who you actually are."
Makes perfect sense, doesn't it? I used to feel somewhat impatient with this type of person, realizing that they'd be better liked and accepted if they made no effort than all that negative effort... but now, I feel really sorry for them.
If you, or someone you know, has adopted that method to shield yourself from the dislike of others, here's my advice; yes, if you're socially awkward, physically unattractive (it's hard for a good-looking person to NOT learn social skills, since they're in such high demand), and intelligent, yes, some people will automatically dislike you, and there's no point in telling you to not take it personally, because often it IS personal... but it's not going to kill you, and after a while you'll barely notice, so give up the used car salesman routine and just be yourself, and you'll be disliked overall by FAR fewer people than currently. Even better, if people like you, they'll be liking the REAL you, not the goofy persona... and isn't that what it's all about?
What was really exciting, though, was what I learned about human behavior; have you ever wondered why some people, especially men, with poor social skills seem to go out of their way to make matters worse by being loud, rude, pushy, bossy, or just plain manic, often done in a way that implies that they think they're doing a Robin Williams imitation, although they have only his freneticism, not his funniness? I've always seen a variety of possible reasons for this; desire for attention, immaturity, lack of understanding of what others find appealing, trying too hard and overshooting the mark, burning off nervous energy... and I still think that these sorts of things are probably present to some degree in most of these cases, but when one of the geeks explained why one of his fellow geeks was acting this way, I instantly understood that he'd nailed it, as only an "insider" could. He said something along the lines of:
"It's better to be a buffoon and think that people are disliking you because of that, than to be yourself and have to accept that people dislike you for who you actually are."
Makes perfect sense, doesn't it? I used to feel somewhat impatient with this type of person, realizing that they'd be better liked and accepted if they made no effort than all that negative effort... but now, I feel really sorry for them.
If you, or someone you know, has adopted that method to shield yourself from the dislike of others, here's my advice; yes, if you're socially awkward, physically unattractive (it's hard for a good-looking person to NOT learn social skills, since they're in such high demand), and intelligent, yes, some people will automatically dislike you, and there's no point in telling you to not take it personally, because often it IS personal... but it's not going to kill you, and after a while you'll barely notice, so give up the used car salesman routine and just be yourself, and you'll be disliked overall by FAR fewer people than currently. Even better, if people like you, they'll be liking the REAL you, not the goofy persona... and isn't that what it's all about?
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
A different life
Is it human nature to wish we had totally different lives... at least some of the time? I don't suppose a dog wishes he lived in some other house, or a bear wishes he lived in some other forest, but we humans seem perpetually dissatisfied with our lives, even though in America nearly every one of us has a life that 99% of the people who've ever lived would do ANYTHING to have.
We all fantasize about being rich, famous, sexually irresistible, etc, but that's not what I mean about different lives; I mean when we think about having a realistic life, just not the one we have. It seems like everyone I know periodically says something about wishing they had a life that bears little resemblance to the one they're blessed with; they might keep their same loved ones in this other life, but they'd work less, play more, have less stress, more $, live in the country rather than the city, or the city rather than the country, be running marathons instead of being coach potatoes... all stuff that's possible, but that they don't think they can get from where they are.
My husband, for example, has dreams of living out in the country, despite the fact that the 1st time he realized that it'd take a 2-hour round-trip drive to get to an electronics store, a Thai restaurant, or a supermarket that sells blue corn tortilla chips, not to mention that we probably couldn't have DSL or digital cable, he'd be scrambling back to the city... and more to the point, he's far too lazy to do the upkeep work on the acres of land he envisions our home being on, or to care for the farm animals he imagines having.
I'm sure that some people's other-life dreams are similarly bad fits for their personalities, but I'm curious about the rest; if there's another way to live that's attainable by you, or at least mostly so, why not go for it? And; if you had that life, would you be fantasizing about the one you have now? Is it just that humans always think the grass is greener, that we're never satisfied?
All of this came into my mind today while watching an episode of "Twilight Zone," the one where the actor believes himself to be the man whose life he's portraying in a movie; dissatisfied with wealth, fame and a glamorous ex-wife, he longs to be a simple businessman with a regular family, and wills the movie set to become real... and when the wife from the movie shows up, he hustles her out of his "office" before it can change back into a set, vanishing from our reality into the one he's created with his thoughts.
There are several other episodes of "Twilight Zone" that deal with being able to get a very different life; a bored millionaire goes back a few decades to the time of his youth with the help of the devil (played by Julie Newmar!!), a time-travel helmet takes men between a recent time and a while ago, with dissatisfaction all around, and a harassed man dreams of a simpler time and a town called Willoughby that doesn't actually exist, but that he reaches anyways when... well, I won't give it away, as that one's too good to not see it without knowing the kicker. Interesting, isn't it, how the earlier, simpler time seems to be the goal more often than not? Is there something in us that rebels against our ever more complicated, mechanized, computerized lives, which we're not remotely biologically programmed to live, or is it just that life in the past was different than life now?
Are we too far from our true nature... or just a contrary species... or both?
We all fantasize about being rich, famous, sexually irresistible, etc, but that's not what I mean about different lives; I mean when we think about having a realistic life, just not the one we have. It seems like everyone I know periodically says something about wishing they had a life that bears little resemblance to the one they're blessed with; they might keep their same loved ones in this other life, but they'd work less, play more, have less stress, more $, live in the country rather than the city, or the city rather than the country, be running marathons instead of being coach potatoes... all stuff that's possible, but that they don't think they can get from where they are.
My husband, for example, has dreams of living out in the country, despite the fact that the 1st time he realized that it'd take a 2-hour round-trip drive to get to an electronics store, a Thai restaurant, or a supermarket that sells blue corn tortilla chips, not to mention that we probably couldn't have DSL or digital cable, he'd be scrambling back to the city... and more to the point, he's far too lazy to do the upkeep work on the acres of land he envisions our home being on, or to care for the farm animals he imagines having.
I'm sure that some people's other-life dreams are similarly bad fits for their personalities, but I'm curious about the rest; if there's another way to live that's attainable by you, or at least mostly so, why not go for it? And; if you had that life, would you be fantasizing about the one you have now? Is it just that humans always think the grass is greener, that we're never satisfied?
All of this came into my mind today while watching an episode of "Twilight Zone," the one where the actor believes himself to be the man whose life he's portraying in a movie; dissatisfied with wealth, fame and a glamorous ex-wife, he longs to be a simple businessman with a regular family, and wills the movie set to become real... and when the wife from the movie shows up, he hustles her out of his "office" before it can change back into a set, vanishing from our reality into the one he's created with his thoughts.
There are several other episodes of "Twilight Zone" that deal with being able to get a very different life; a bored millionaire goes back a few decades to the time of his youth with the help of the devil (played by Julie Newmar!!), a time-travel helmet takes men between a recent time and a while ago, with dissatisfaction all around, and a harassed man dreams of a simpler time and a town called Willoughby that doesn't actually exist, but that he reaches anyways when... well, I won't give it away, as that one's too good to not see it without knowing the kicker. Interesting, isn't it, how the earlier, simpler time seems to be the goal more often than not? Is there something in us that rebels against our ever more complicated, mechanized, computerized lives, which we're not remotely biologically programmed to live, or is it just that life in the past was different than life now?
Are we too far from our true nature... or just a contrary species... or both?
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Medical surprises from Discover
You've probably read many times that there's no such thing as an aphrodisiac, that people who think that consuming a given thing boosts their libidos are just experiencing the placebo effect or wishful thinking, that all the things that people have believed for centuries were having an effect were just the result of thousands of people fooling themselves... and now, from the June 2005 issue of Discover, page 11, comes the following:
"Oysters do boost the libido, say U.S. and Italian chemists. They find the shellfish are rich in rare amino acids that, especially when eaten raw, trigger an increase in sex hormones."
Just watch, it's only a matter of time before other supposed aphrodisiacs are also found to contain something that boosts libido; this is yet another case of the arrogance of scientists who figure that if they haven't found proof that something works yet, it in fact doesn't work, no matter how many people say otherwise from personal experience.
The BIG surprise in this issue was from an article entitled "Discover Dialogue: Physician Nortin Hadler, The Doctor Who Doesn't Check His Cholesterol":
"For three decades Nortin Hadler, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been rigorously examining statistics generated by his medical colleagues' practices and arriving at startling conclusions about their effectiveness... He has also taken on heart treatment, testifying before Congress and the Social Security Advisory Board and publishing papers arguing that very little data back up the value of modern treatments like bypass surgery and angioplasty."
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!! These VERY serious medical procedures, which we've been led to believe are not only beneficial but necessary, are being done withOUT there being all sorts of proof that they do what we think they do? :-O
When the interviewer asks him, "Under what circumstances do you think bypass surgery is appropriate?," his reply is:
"None... there's only one subset of the population that's been proved to derive a meaningful benefit from the surgery, and that's people with a critical defect of the left main coronary artery who also have angina. If you take 100 60-year-old men with angina, only 3 of them will have that defect."
Alot more than 3% of those men are being given the surgery, though... major, MAJOR surgery, when there's almost no chance of it helping them. That's absolutely terrifying.
What about the many people who've had the surgery who claim it's helped them? Hold onto your hats:
"In one controlled trial of surgery for angina, half the people with the condition underwent an operation in which doctors merely made a skin incision and closed it up; in the other half, the patients had a particular kind of bypass. The numbers from each group whose symptoms were significantly alleviated were about the same. Angina is particularly susceptible to the placebo effect because the anticipation of pain adds to the intermittency of it."
Is it just me, or does this seem INSANE? Why have I never heard this before, why didn't they scream loud enough for every one of us to hear that the surgery didn't do any more than a placebo? And it gets worse:
"Even if surgery could be proved to alleviate the discomfort, you'd have to consider if that offsets the risks of bypass surgery-about half the patients suffer severe depression after the surgery, a third suffer measurable memory loss, and many never go back to work again. Then there are the added risks of any major surgery."
Given all of this, why are they still doing these surgeries at all, much less as a standard treatment? WHY?
And guess what else is apparently a waste of time? When asked, "why do you object to the widespread prescription of statins, the cholesterol-lowering drugs?," he replied:
"In men with normal cholesterol levels, the risk of death for those between ages 45 and 65 over the course of the next five years is only a fraction of 1 percent lower than it is for men with high serum cholesterol in the same category. The most thorough study to date had some 3,000 men with 'high' cholesterol levels take a statin every day for five years, while 3,000 similar men took a placebo. When all was said and done, there was no difference in cardiovascular deaths between the two groups."
No difference. We've been whipped into a frenzy about our cholesterol levels, good cholesterol, bad, HDL, LDL, the whole 9 yards, for many years now, and... no difference. This ties in with something I've read several times; that high cholesterol does NOT cause heart disease, that there's never been any actual proof that it does.
Still, they prescribe like mad, and again we have to ask; why? Heinlein used to say that the answer to "Why do they?" is almost always "Money"; when Dr. Hadler was asked, "If the data are not prompting so much interventional cardiology, what is?," he answered:
"Money. Interventional cardiology is what supports almost every hospital in America-it's an enormous part of our gross domestic product. Every year in this country we do about half a million bypass grafts and 650,000 coronary angioplasties, with the mean cost of the procedures ranging from $28,000 to $60,000. There are a lot of people involved in this transfer of wealth. But no Western European nation has such a high rate of those procedures-and their longevity is higher than ours."
Greedy doctors, greedy hospitals... that's the one thing about all this that's NOT a surprise.
"Oysters do boost the libido, say U.S. and Italian chemists. They find the shellfish are rich in rare amino acids that, especially when eaten raw, trigger an increase in sex hormones."
Just watch, it's only a matter of time before other supposed aphrodisiacs are also found to contain something that boosts libido; this is yet another case of the arrogance of scientists who figure that if they haven't found proof that something works yet, it in fact doesn't work, no matter how many people say otherwise from personal experience.
The BIG surprise in this issue was from an article entitled "Discover Dialogue: Physician Nortin Hadler, The Doctor Who Doesn't Check His Cholesterol":
"For three decades Nortin Hadler, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been rigorously examining statistics generated by his medical colleagues' practices and arriving at startling conclusions about their effectiveness... He has also taken on heart treatment, testifying before Congress and the Social Security Advisory Board and publishing papers arguing that very little data back up the value of modern treatments like bypass surgery and angioplasty."
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!! These VERY serious medical procedures, which we've been led to believe are not only beneficial but necessary, are being done withOUT there being all sorts of proof that they do what we think they do? :-O
When the interviewer asks him, "Under what circumstances do you think bypass surgery is appropriate?," his reply is:
"None... there's only one subset of the population that's been proved to derive a meaningful benefit from the surgery, and that's people with a critical defect of the left main coronary artery who also have angina. If you take 100 60-year-old men with angina, only 3 of them will have that defect."
Alot more than 3% of those men are being given the surgery, though... major, MAJOR surgery, when there's almost no chance of it helping them. That's absolutely terrifying.
What about the many people who've had the surgery who claim it's helped them? Hold onto your hats:
"In one controlled trial of surgery for angina, half the people with the condition underwent an operation in which doctors merely made a skin incision and closed it up; in the other half, the patients had a particular kind of bypass. The numbers from each group whose symptoms were significantly alleviated were about the same. Angina is particularly susceptible to the placebo effect because the anticipation of pain adds to the intermittency of it."
Is it just me, or does this seem INSANE? Why have I never heard this before, why didn't they scream loud enough for every one of us to hear that the surgery didn't do any more than a placebo? And it gets worse:
"Even if surgery could be proved to alleviate the discomfort, you'd have to consider if that offsets the risks of bypass surgery-about half the patients suffer severe depression after the surgery, a third suffer measurable memory loss, and many never go back to work again. Then there are the added risks of any major surgery."
Given all of this, why are they still doing these surgeries at all, much less as a standard treatment? WHY?
And guess what else is apparently a waste of time? When asked, "why do you object to the widespread prescription of statins, the cholesterol-lowering drugs?," he replied:
"In men with normal cholesterol levels, the risk of death for those between ages 45 and 65 over the course of the next five years is only a fraction of 1 percent lower than it is for men with high serum cholesterol in the same category. The most thorough study to date had some 3,000 men with 'high' cholesterol levels take a statin every day for five years, while 3,000 similar men took a placebo. When all was said and done, there was no difference in cardiovascular deaths between the two groups."
No difference. We've been whipped into a frenzy about our cholesterol levels, good cholesterol, bad, HDL, LDL, the whole 9 yards, for many years now, and... no difference. This ties in with something I've read several times; that high cholesterol does NOT cause heart disease, that there's never been any actual proof that it does.
Still, they prescribe like mad, and again we have to ask; why? Heinlein used to say that the answer to "Why do they?" is almost always "Money"; when Dr. Hadler was asked, "If the data are not prompting so much interventional cardiology, what is?," he answered:
"Money. Interventional cardiology is what supports almost every hospital in America-it's an enormous part of our gross domestic product. Every year in this country we do about half a million bypass grafts and 650,000 coronary angioplasties, with the mean cost of the procedures ranging from $28,000 to $60,000. There are a lot of people involved in this transfer of wealth. But no Western European nation has such a high rate of those procedures-and their longevity is higher than ours."
Greedy doctors, greedy hospitals... that's the one thing about all this that's NOT a surprise.
Monday, June 13, 2005
Odds and ends
And now we've reached the part of our program where I disgorge bits and pieces that are worth a mention but not complex enough to merit a full post:
First and foremost: my squirrel came back!!!! My husband spotted her and called me; by the time I got there, she'd scampered most of the way to a tree (she doesn't like him very much, and will sometimes run if she sees or hears him), but I saw enough to know it was her and not one of the babies (who are smaller and much slimmer), so I know she's alive and in good condition... she couldn't run and climb like that if she wasn't. I don't know if she's only going to visit sporadically, or if she's lost her tameness, or what else might be up, but as long as she's still here that's enough for now.
There's a show on Oxygen called "Talk Sex With Sue Johanson"; Ms. Johanson is a somewhat elderly woman... and isn't that what you expected? After all, what other kind of person could do a sex-talk show? An older MAN would be seen as a dirty old man. A younger man would put off men because of the idea of homosexuality, and put off women because of discomfort with sharing with a man, and suspicion of his motives. A younger woman would be someone that women feel competitive with and men want to impress rather than confide in. Is it a coincidence that the most famous sex therapist of all times, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, is a wizened little gnome of a woman?
And finally, a tidbit from Joel Osteen: In a past sermon, he talked about how God "can't" do good things for you if you're holding on to the hurt and pain of bad things that happened to you in the past (see my post of 8-16-04); tonight, he said that if you feel jealousy of, or even fail to feel happiness for, those people who seem to be getting all the goodies (even if undeservedly), God "can't" give you what you want... again, we have from him the karmic idea that radiating negative energy of ANY kind blocks good things from getting to you (and of course can bring the bad ones), and that radiating positive energy draws good stuff to you-kinda cool from a minister, don't you think?
First and foremost: my squirrel came back!!!! My husband spotted her and called me; by the time I got there, she'd scampered most of the way to a tree (she doesn't like him very much, and will sometimes run if she sees or hears him), but I saw enough to know it was her and not one of the babies (who are smaller and much slimmer), so I know she's alive and in good condition... she couldn't run and climb like that if she wasn't. I don't know if she's only going to visit sporadically, or if she's lost her tameness, or what else might be up, but as long as she's still here that's enough for now.
There's a show on Oxygen called "Talk Sex With Sue Johanson"; Ms. Johanson is a somewhat elderly woman... and isn't that what you expected? After all, what other kind of person could do a sex-talk show? An older MAN would be seen as a dirty old man. A younger man would put off men because of the idea of homosexuality, and put off women because of discomfort with sharing with a man, and suspicion of his motives. A younger woman would be someone that women feel competitive with and men want to impress rather than confide in. Is it a coincidence that the most famous sex therapist of all times, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, is a wizened little gnome of a woman?
And finally, a tidbit from Joel Osteen: In a past sermon, he talked about how God "can't" do good things for you if you're holding on to the hurt and pain of bad things that happened to you in the past (see my post of 8-16-04); tonight, he said that if you feel jealousy of, or even fail to feel happiness for, those people who seem to be getting all the goodies (even if undeservedly), God "can't" give you what you want... again, we have from him the karmic idea that radiating negative energy of ANY kind blocks good things from getting to you (and of course can bring the bad ones), and that radiating positive energy draws good stuff to you-kinda cool from a minister, don't you think?
Sunday, June 12, 2005
"Embrace Diversity"
You've probably noticed a little something new in my upper right corner; I saw one like it, but with a different message, on someone's blog, followed the link to where you can get the so-called "webbands" of different kinds
http://openmind.clemish.com/webbands.php
and chose the one that I thought both looked the best with my minimalist decor and had the message I liked the best. I enjoy the thought of such a positive message being one of the 1st things a visitor to my blog will notice, and it'll give people who're surfing via "Next Blog" a little pause... especially since it overlaps that button and keeps it from being usable, lol.
Believe it or not, I don't have a story about how I struggled to get it to work; I copied the code as directed, and it worked perfectly the 1st time... who said miracles don't happen? ;-)
One of the greatest things about America is the access most of us have to diversity; it's also one of the best things about the internet. It's always amazed me when people fight AGAINST diversity; women who complain when men don't act according to female standards, men who do the same with women, people of every religion who can't stand it if someone worships a different deity (or none), or even worships the same deity in a different way, people who think that a trivial thing like skin color is so important that they'll hate people of a different color, people who think that anyone whose ancestors didn't live on the same patch of dirt that theirs did is to be disliked and distrusted, and, perhaps most astonishing, people who can't bear the thought that what other people do in the privacy of their bedrooms might be different than what they do... what possible justification, moral, ethical or even intellectual, can there possibly be for having any of these attitudes?
Diversity doesn't just mean differences in big things like religion or race; it also means being different in the little details of our lives. I think one of the reasons that people from other countries see Americans as childish is that as a culture we're mired in the teenage idea that we're all supposed to be alike; if someone wears different clothes, or styles their hair a different way, than the current fashion, we gossip and snicker as much as any high school student ever did. Once a new gadget becomes popular, anyone who doesn't have it is looked at askance, as if they didn't really belong in our society; as someone who refuses to get a cell phone, I can tell you that people act as if their lives can't roll smoothly on if I don't do everything they're doing... again, a totally teenage attitude. Embracing diversity applies at this level, too; it means letting people live their own lives, without taking it personally if they make different choices, and, and here's the kicker, realizing that unless some people dare to be different, new ideas will have a hard time making it into the public consciousness... and every advance we make, whether in art, science, politics or whatever, starts with a new and different idea, put forth by someone who's a little different than the rest of us.
What a bland, boring world this would be if we were all alike, or even if we were significantly more alike than we currently are. Diversity gives us many kinds of food, art, dance, music and other products of different cultures and experiences. Diversity gives us more paths to science, philosophy and spirituality. Diversity gives us an infinite # of different ways to be beautiful. Diversity is absolutely, positively, incontrovertibly a GOOD thing, and therefore we SHOULD embrace it as the enhancement to our lives that it truly is.
http://openmind.clemish.com/webbands.php
and chose the one that I thought both looked the best with my minimalist decor and had the message I liked the best. I enjoy the thought of such a positive message being one of the 1st things a visitor to my blog will notice, and it'll give people who're surfing via "Next Blog" a little pause... especially since it overlaps that button and keeps it from being usable, lol.
Believe it or not, I don't have a story about how I struggled to get it to work; I copied the code as directed, and it worked perfectly the 1st time... who said miracles don't happen? ;-)
One of the greatest things about America is the access most of us have to diversity; it's also one of the best things about the internet. It's always amazed me when people fight AGAINST diversity; women who complain when men don't act according to female standards, men who do the same with women, people of every religion who can't stand it if someone worships a different deity (or none), or even worships the same deity in a different way, people who think that a trivial thing like skin color is so important that they'll hate people of a different color, people who think that anyone whose ancestors didn't live on the same patch of dirt that theirs did is to be disliked and distrusted, and, perhaps most astonishing, people who can't bear the thought that what other people do in the privacy of their bedrooms might be different than what they do... what possible justification, moral, ethical or even intellectual, can there possibly be for having any of these attitudes?
Diversity doesn't just mean differences in big things like religion or race; it also means being different in the little details of our lives. I think one of the reasons that people from other countries see Americans as childish is that as a culture we're mired in the teenage idea that we're all supposed to be alike; if someone wears different clothes, or styles their hair a different way, than the current fashion, we gossip and snicker as much as any high school student ever did. Once a new gadget becomes popular, anyone who doesn't have it is looked at askance, as if they didn't really belong in our society; as someone who refuses to get a cell phone, I can tell you that people act as if their lives can't roll smoothly on if I don't do everything they're doing... again, a totally teenage attitude. Embracing diversity applies at this level, too; it means letting people live their own lives, without taking it personally if they make different choices, and, and here's the kicker, realizing that unless some people dare to be different, new ideas will have a hard time making it into the public consciousness... and every advance we make, whether in art, science, politics or whatever, starts with a new and different idea, put forth by someone who's a little different than the rest of us.
What a bland, boring world this would be if we were all alike, or even if we were significantly more alike than we currently are. Diversity gives us many kinds of food, art, dance, music and other products of different cultures and experiences. Diversity gives us more paths to science, philosophy and spirituality. Diversity gives us an infinite # of different ways to be beautiful. Diversity is absolutely, positively, incontrovertibly a GOOD thing, and therefore we SHOULD embrace it as the enhancement to our lives that it truly is.
Saturday, June 11, 2005
A rebuttal to skeptics
I finally saw "Before Sunset" today, and in it there was a mention of something Einstein had said about the importance of "magic and mystery"; this naturally intrigued me, so I did a search, and finally came up with what I think is the quote that was being referred to:
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery--even if mixed with fear--that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man."
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh..... :-)
That quote is one of several translations of what he actually said, so we can't get too sucked into a word-by-word analysis, but think about what he's saying in general; that the mysterious (aka the unknown) is the basis of everything that we can discover or create, that if you can't perceive it you're not truly seeing, that our perception of the unknown is the basis for religion, and that his own religious feeling is based in it... this from the man who had arguably the greatest mind in human history.
This is where skeptics, and those in general that don't think anything exists beyond the matter and energies detectable by science, get stalled in their grasp of reality; they ignore the simple facts that we possess primitive senses that evolved to help us find food and mates and avoid predators and other dangers, NOT to perceive the fabric of existence or many of the things that make it up, and that our scientific instruments, far from showing that we now know everything that exists, prove that many things exist that we can't perceive with our senses, and that as time passes we're able to perceive more and more things that were always there, beyond our reach. These deluded folks point to science, and then ignore how wildly what science tells us is true has changed over the years and is continuing to change, and proclaim with arrogance and, let's face it, stupidity, that anything that hasn't already been discovered via science doesn't exist.
Even if I personally hadn't had many experiences with the unknown, I hope that I'm intellectually honest enough at my core to be certain that *I* wouldn't take that path, and would instead admit that we must be certain that we WILL keep finding ways to perceive things that we currently can't, that eventually other things will be shown to exist, just as radio waves and such have already been... that we do NOT know it all, and thus that when we sum up reality, we MUST include some element of the unknown to allow for future discoveries.
If you want to understand everything that is, as opposed to just chanting "no no no" about anything you can't see proof of rightthisminute, it's absolutely crucial to keep an open mind, because it's not likely that every aspect of existence will show up on your doorstep and reveal itself to you, or will be proven to exist by science in your lifetime; it may not be possible for us to grasp The Truth while bound by physical brains, but if you want to get as close as humanly possible you have to start by accepting that whatever you currently believe is an accurate analysis of the universe is almost certainly wrong, because you haven't seen it all yet... and then, you have to will yourself, FORCE yourself, to start seeing, and believe me that's not always easy (my "conversion" to accepting that animism exists is a good example; see my post of 3-16-04).
The thing that helped me let go of the idea that nothing other than "scientific reality" and those unknowns I'd personally experienced up to that point (ghosts and psychic phenomena) exist was a concept put forth in the movie "Contact"; the religious guy tells the scientist something along the lines of that she can't be the representative of the human race because 95% of people believe in something religious/spiritual, and she doesn't, and for her to think that nearly the entire human race is deluded and she's in the right meant that she was too arrogant to go on the mission... WOW!! This made me take a close look at what I believed, and made me realize that for any unknowns to exist there has to be a framework for them, they had to be made of something, guided by principles of some kind, tied into each other and physical reality in some way... in other words, there had to be a religious, spiritual or metaphysical backdrop for the things I knew to exist.
So here I am, forcing my mind open every day to see what drops in, blogging my way ever closer to... whatever it is I'm going to find out.
I challenge YOU to take your personal grasp of reality, of The Truth, as far as you can take it; be hardheaded, yes, be a doubter, don't believe everything you read, not even on this bog (you don't know me personally, so why should you believe anything just because *I* say it's true?), but if you or anyone you trust has had any experience beyond scientific explanation (if they haven't already revealed anything of this sort to you, ASK), and it's almost certain that one or more people you know HAVE had brushes with the unknown, take those things as a starting point for your own explanation of how the universe works. Try to describe reality in a way that includes all the unknowns provided for you as part of the whole, as they MUST of course be. See what you come up with... and don't forget to post it on your blog.
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery--even if mixed with fear--that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man."
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh..... :-)
That quote is one of several translations of what he actually said, so we can't get too sucked into a word-by-word analysis, but think about what he's saying in general; that the mysterious (aka the unknown) is the basis of everything that we can discover or create, that if you can't perceive it you're not truly seeing, that our perception of the unknown is the basis for religion, and that his own religious feeling is based in it... this from the man who had arguably the greatest mind in human history.
This is where skeptics, and those in general that don't think anything exists beyond the matter and energies detectable by science, get stalled in their grasp of reality; they ignore the simple facts that we possess primitive senses that evolved to help us find food and mates and avoid predators and other dangers, NOT to perceive the fabric of existence or many of the things that make it up, and that our scientific instruments, far from showing that we now know everything that exists, prove that many things exist that we can't perceive with our senses, and that as time passes we're able to perceive more and more things that were always there, beyond our reach. These deluded folks point to science, and then ignore how wildly what science tells us is true has changed over the years and is continuing to change, and proclaim with arrogance and, let's face it, stupidity, that anything that hasn't already been discovered via science doesn't exist.
Even if I personally hadn't had many experiences with the unknown, I hope that I'm intellectually honest enough at my core to be certain that *I* wouldn't take that path, and would instead admit that we must be certain that we WILL keep finding ways to perceive things that we currently can't, that eventually other things will be shown to exist, just as radio waves and such have already been... that we do NOT know it all, and thus that when we sum up reality, we MUST include some element of the unknown to allow for future discoveries.
If you want to understand everything that is, as opposed to just chanting "no no no" about anything you can't see proof of rightthisminute, it's absolutely crucial to keep an open mind, because it's not likely that every aspect of existence will show up on your doorstep and reveal itself to you, or will be proven to exist by science in your lifetime; it may not be possible for us to grasp The Truth while bound by physical brains, but if you want to get as close as humanly possible you have to start by accepting that whatever you currently believe is an accurate analysis of the universe is almost certainly wrong, because you haven't seen it all yet... and then, you have to will yourself, FORCE yourself, to start seeing, and believe me that's not always easy (my "conversion" to accepting that animism exists is a good example; see my post of 3-16-04).
The thing that helped me let go of the idea that nothing other than "scientific reality" and those unknowns I'd personally experienced up to that point (ghosts and psychic phenomena) exist was a concept put forth in the movie "Contact"; the religious guy tells the scientist something along the lines of that she can't be the representative of the human race because 95% of people believe in something religious/spiritual, and she doesn't, and for her to think that nearly the entire human race is deluded and she's in the right meant that she was too arrogant to go on the mission... WOW!! This made me take a close look at what I believed, and made me realize that for any unknowns to exist there has to be a framework for them, they had to be made of something, guided by principles of some kind, tied into each other and physical reality in some way... in other words, there had to be a religious, spiritual or metaphysical backdrop for the things I knew to exist.
So here I am, forcing my mind open every day to see what drops in, blogging my way ever closer to... whatever it is I'm going to find out.
I challenge YOU to take your personal grasp of reality, of The Truth, as far as you can take it; be hardheaded, yes, be a doubter, don't believe everything you read, not even on this bog (you don't know me personally, so why should you believe anything just because *I* say it's true?), but if you or anyone you trust has had any experience beyond scientific explanation (if they haven't already revealed anything of this sort to you, ASK), and it's almost certain that one or more people you know HAVE had brushes with the unknown, take those things as a starting point for your own explanation of how the universe works. Try to describe reality in a way that includes all the unknowns provided for you as part of the whole, as they MUST of course be. See what you come up with... and don't forget to post it on your blog.
Friday, June 10, 2005
Lessons from "Everybody Loves Raymond"
One of the things that made this one of the funniest shows of all times is that the writers had a solid grasp of human nature, and are able to show us things that seem extra-funny because they really nail how people think, feel and act. Today, they showed some classic manipulator ploys:
The manipulator (Peter), showed up at the home of his sister (Amy) and her still-new husband (Robert), and... never left. Manipulators realize that regular folks find it almost impossible to say "Get out" or "Stop it," and thus that they can just show up wherever they want to be and do whatever they feel like doing, knowing that no one is willing to point out that they're making life unpleasant for others.
Peter cooks some food and washes some dishes... and gets Amy to give him not only Robert's shirt, but his underwear as well (much to Robert's dismay). Manipulators realize that if they do a couple of nice things, they can use that as currency to get all sorts of stuff that they want, including things that aren't reasonable for them to have.
Here's the big one; Robert and Amy have a movie date planned with Ray and Debra, and when the latter couple shows up, Peter acts as if it's a given that he's invited (which is itself a manipulator ploy), and, when Robert informs him otherwise, he turns to Ray and Debra and asks if THEY have a problem with him going... asks smugly and pointedly, KNOWING that there's not one person in a million who's able to say something like, "Yes, I have a problem with you coming along" to anyone's face, and thus that Ray and Debra would say they had no problem with him going even though of course they did. This allowed Peter to turn on Robert and announce, "It looks like it's just YOU that have a problem with me going," which makes Robert look like this mean person who isn't doing what the others want, with the added benefit of forcing him to protest in his own defense, which in turn makes people see him as defenSIVE, and thus somehow in the wrong, when in fact he's defendING, a totally different thing... a true manipulator's masterstroke.
In a recent episode, light was shed on a mysterious manipulator pattern; why verbal attackers will so often tell an intelligent person that they're stupid, or someone with a particular skill that they're bad at that thing, when those specific slights are glaringly untrue (see my post of 7-21-04) and so seem like they couldn't possibly have any impact on the intended victim. Robert pulled a trick on Ray and Debra that was part of his police training; he gave them alleged intelligence tests, and then told them, 1st that Debra had scored higher than Ray, which we of course expected as she's clearly the smarter one, and then later on that he did the scoring wrong, and Ray's score was the higher of the 2. This revelation caused Debra to go to pieces, which it turns out was the entire point of the trick, which teaches police officers that to break through a person's defenses you attack whatever it is that they base their sense of self most strongly on.. which shows why attackers use this ploy, and why it usually works.
A stunning example of this concept in action came on an ad I saw for the new season of "The Real Gilligan's Island." I'd seen a piece of the 1st episode, enough to grasp that some of the contestants don't like one of the Mary Anns, a woman who, as one might imagine, is beautiful with a dead-perfect body (on which she wears nearly nothing); in the ad, these folks are shown going on and on about a tiny mole she has between her eyebrows, and how it's driving them crazy, and they just can't stand it... in other words, they've zeroed in on the only element of what we know is the biggest deal about her, her looks, that can remotely be construed as a flaw, and that's what they've chosen to slam her on-the psychological equivalent of a bullet to the heart.
Manipulators suck, let's face it, AND they win most off the time, because even the stupidest of them have an instinct about how to push our buttons; if you can remember that you need to speak up when they're behaving inappropriately, and NOT get sucked in when they attack you where you're most vulnerable, though, you can beat them every time... thus striking a blow for us all.
The manipulator (Peter), showed up at the home of his sister (Amy) and her still-new husband (Robert), and... never left. Manipulators realize that regular folks find it almost impossible to say "Get out" or "Stop it," and thus that they can just show up wherever they want to be and do whatever they feel like doing, knowing that no one is willing to point out that they're making life unpleasant for others.
Peter cooks some food and washes some dishes... and gets Amy to give him not only Robert's shirt, but his underwear as well (much to Robert's dismay). Manipulators realize that if they do a couple of nice things, they can use that as currency to get all sorts of stuff that they want, including things that aren't reasonable for them to have.
Here's the big one; Robert and Amy have a movie date planned with Ray and Debra, and when the latter couple shows up, Peter acts as if it's a given that he's invited (which is itself a manipulator ploy), and, when Robert informs him otherwise, he turns to Ray and Debra and asks if THEY have a problem with him going... asks smugly and pointedly, KNOWING that there's not one person in a million who's able to say something like, "Yes, I have a problem with you coming along" to anyone's face, and thus that Ray and Debra would say they had no problem with him going even though of course they did. This allowed Peter to turn on Robert and announce, "It looks like it's just YOU that have a problem with me going," which makes Robert look like this mean person who isn't doing what the others want, with the added benefit of forcing him to protest in his own defense, which in turn makes people see him as defenSIVE, and thus somehow in the wrong, when in fact he's defendING, a totally different thing... a true manipulator's masterstroke.
In a recent episode, light was shed on a mysterious manipulator pattern; why verbal attackers will so often tell an intelligent person that they're stupid, or someone with a particular skill that they're bad at that thing, when those specific slights are glaringly untrue (see my post of 7-21-04) and so seem like they couldn't possibly have any impact on the intended victim. Robert pulled a trick on Ray and Debra that was part of his police training; he gave them alleged intelligence tests, and then told them, 1st that Debra had scored higher than Ray, which we of course expected as she's clearly the smarter one, and then later on that he did the scoring wrong, and Ray's score was the higher of the 2. This revelation caused Debra to go to pieces, which it turns out was the entire point of the trick, which teaches police officers that to break through a person's defenses you attack whatever it is that they base their sense of self most strongly on.. which shows why attackers use this ploy, and why it usually works.
A stunning example of this concept in action came on an ad I saw for the new season of "The Real Gilligan's Island." I'd seen a piece of the 1st episode, enough to grasp that some of the contestants don't like one of the Mary Anns, a woman who, as one might imagine, is beautiful with a dead-perfect body (on which she wears nearly nothing); in the ad, these folks are shown going on and on about a tiny mole she has between her eyebrows, and how it's driving them crazy, and they just can't stand it... in other words, they've zeroed in on the only element of what we know is the biggest deal about her, her looks, that can remotely be construed as a flaw, and that's what they've chosen to slam her on-the psychological equivalent of a bullet to the heart.
Manipulators suck, let's face it, AND they win most off the time, because even the stupidest of them have an instinct about how to push our buttons; if you can remember that you need to speak up when they're behaving inappropriately, and NOT get sucked in when they attack you where you're most vulnerable, though, you can beat them every time... thus striking a blow for us all.
Thursday, June 09, 2005
Are rats psychic?
The area where I live is periodically plagued by rats; now, sadly, is one of those times. We have birdbaths for our beloved avian visitors placed by our patio, and this year the rats have decided to use them for their water supply; I'm literally seeing rats drinking from them about every 10 minutes or so all night long... and these rats are so huge and bold that no amount of yelling, brandishing blunt weapons, or banging around the landscaping deters them in the slightest. After many days of being badgered, my husband has belatedly put rat traps on the patio cover around the opening they climb down to the hanging birdbath from, on the bush they climb down to the pedestal birdbath from, and on the latter birdbath itself. There was no way they could get to the water without getting caught in a trap, or so we thought, so we prepared for a night of rodential slaughter.
Yeah, right.
Although you'd think that the only rats that could know anything about traps are those that died in them, they went from making almost non-stop trips down the chains to the hanging birdbath to not going near it; how did they KNOW? Yes, the traps have human scent on them, but so does everything out there; what would make them stop using their well-worn path to that water, the evil creatures? Are they PSYCHIC?!!
The only trap that went off last night was the one on the bush; it either fell off due to poor placement, or sprung off when it got set off by the bush shaking from being climbed on, and, with typical laziness, my husband refused to put it back, so the rats figured out how to jump past the trap on the birdbath (how did they KNOW not to jump onto the trap?) and drank their fill all night.
Rats: 1 Us: 0
Tonight, my husband somehow lost the ability to attach a trap to the bush, but laid extra traps along the lip of the birdbath; the only trap that closed tonight was when one especially thrill-seeking rat tried to leap past them to a clear spot and had a near miss... we had a few minutes of levity speculating that the rat had had to "go change its fur" because it had undoubtedly "pooped its pelt."
It was looking like we'd at least be able to block their access to the water, causing them to hopefully go hang out in someone else's back yard, when I heard a rustling, and looked out to see a rat stretched from the bush nearest to the hanging birdbath to the birdbath itself, and then scrambling onto it and drinking; as much as I loathe the filthy little beasts, I've gotta admit that I was pretty impressed. I thought I could make a sudden loud noise and scare it into scrambling up the chains and onto the traps, but even in its panic it remembered to jump across to the bush to make its escape.
Rats: 2 Us: 0
I sent my husband out with clippers, and he cut back the bush to the point where he thinks it won't be possible for the rats to cross to the birdbath; I'm not sure they won't show up with ropes, ladders or hang gliders, or at least have the courage to make a leap across, but we'll see. We'll also be putting out more traps tomorrow, assuming my husband can manage to remember to swing by Home Depot, and... if that doesn't work, what next, barbed wire? Land mines?
For any long-time readers who might be concerned about the safety of the squirrels, who also run around where the traps are being used, fear not; the traps don't go up until it's pitch black out, and come down before we go to bed. It's interesting, though, how one small rodent is loathed, and another is loved; as my husband said when one of our conversations went from how to kill the rats to what food to put out for the squirrels, "What a difference a fluffy tail makes"... to which I replied, "What a difference bad, destructive behavior makes." Not much he could reply to that one, given his own history of wrongdoing...
Yeah, right.
Although you'd think that the only rats that could know anything about traps are those that died in them, they went from making almost non-stop trips down the chains to the hanging birdbath to not going near it; how did they KNOW? Yes, the traps have human scent on them, but so does everything out there; what would make them stop using their well-worn path to that water, the evil creatures? Are they PSYCHIC?!!
The only trap that went off last night was the one on the bush; it either fell off due to poor placement, or sprung off when it got set off by the bush shaking from being climbed on, and, with typical laziness, my husband refused to put it back, so the rats figured out how to jump past the trap on the birdbath (how did they KNOW not to jump onto the trap?) and drank their fill all night.
Rats: 1 Us: 0
Tonight, my husband somehow lost the ability to attach a trap to the bush, but laid extra traps along the lip of the birdbath; the only trap that closed tonight was when one especially thrill-seeking rat tried to leap past them to a clear spot and had a near miss... we had a few minutes of levity speculating that the rat had had to "go change its fur" because it had undoubtedly "pooped its pelt."
It was looking like we'd at least be able to block their access to the water, causing them to hopefully go hang out in someone else's back yard, when I heard a rustling, and looked out to see a rat stretched from the bush nearest to the hanging birdbath to the birdbath itself, and then scrambling onto it and drinking; as much as I loathe the filthy little beasts, I've gotta admit that I was pretty impressed. I thought I could make a sudden loud noise and scare it into scrambling up the chains and onto the traps, but even in its panic it remembered to jump across to the bush to make its escape.
Rats: 2 Us: 0
I sent my husband out with clippers, and he cut back the bush to the point where he thinks it won't be possible for the rats to cross to the birdbath; I'm not sure they won't show up with ropes, ladders or hang gliders, or at least have the courage to make a leap across, but we'll see. We'll also be putting out more traps tomorrow, assuming my husband can manage to remember to swing by Home Depot, and... if that doesn't work, what next, barbed wire? Land mines?
For any long-time readers who might be concerned about the safety of the squirrels, who also run around where the traps are being used, fear not; the traps don't go up until it's pitch black out, and come down before we go to bed. It's interesting, though, how one small rodent is loathed, and another is loved; as my husband said when one of our conversations went from how to kill the rats to what food to put out for the squirrels, "What a difference a fluffy tail makes"... to which I replied, "What a difference bad, destructive behavior makes." Not much he could reply to that one, given his own history of wrongdoing...
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Husband = MORON
Until recently, my husband's greatest claim to moron fame was constantly leaving a small fortune in equipment clearly visible in the back seat of his car, and treating my warnings about theft with the arrogant condescension he uses for anyone who's so foolish as to consider issues of safety, culminating in, you guessed it, his car being broken into and cleaned out (I blogged about this on 9-1-04); originally, he tried to pass off the value of the missing items as "only" $1000, but, knowing his policy of lying to me to downplay the severity of his wrongdoings, I gradually changed my comments about the missing items to having them be worth over $1000, then $2000, and now OVER $2000, and he's never tried to correct me, so I know I still haven't reached the ACTUAL value of the missing items.
A few months after the theft, he set an even greater act of moronicism into motion; he had a piece of equipment that needed to be mailed to its company of origin to be repaired, and he put it in a (very large) box, sent it out... and we never saw it again, and it's been a year and a half. How did this happen? He lives his life around task avoidance, so he resists making necessary phone calls to check and follow up on things, even when it's wildly to his disbenefit to act that way; although he received NO contact from the company about the item (as one would normally expect to get, about what they wanted to do to it and how long it might take), he refused to contact THEM and see what was up, despite repeated and increasingly impassioned requests for him to do so, and ample opportunity for him to do so. Finally, as the weeks and then MONTHS passed, he claimed he was calling and leaving messages, or calling and getting promises of callbacks that never came; he refused to hammer them with more frequent calls, or, finally, to give ME the # and the technical info necessary to explain what I was trying to find out about... and he always gave me the impression that he was trying to find out what was happening with the item within the repair center, that they were dragging their feet getting it fixed and sent back.
Something snapped in my mind a couple of days ago, and I demanded that he tell me the name of the company and the product, went to that company's website, registered to use it, and sent them an email asking where our item was and when they were going to send it back. Today, I got an email from them, informing me that they'd NEVER GOTTEN IT. Horrified, I confronted my husband, and he admitted that he'd found out over a YEAR ago that they'd never gotten it, and, as he'd long since lost the tracking info, he had no way to find out where the post office had actually sent it, and knew it was gone forever; he'd been LYING to me all that time, trying to keep alive my belief that the stupid thing was sitting on a shelf at that company, unrepaired and waiting for someone to figure out how to fix it rather than having to replace it (we've had past experiences with it taking big chunks of months for other tech items to be fixed), or that they'd lost the identifying info for who owned it and it was just a matter of contacting the right person who'd figure out which orphaned item was ours... anything other than that the post office, which granted sucks big time, could permanently lose such a big box that had been sent registered and certified, and thus was trackable (unless the sender is STUPID enough to lose the tracking #), and that he'd deceived me about his never having had any indication from them that they'd received the item. I've had over a year of extra stress about this issue because my husband's priority was to put off for as long as possible my finding out that he'd LOST a piece of equipment worth $2200 due to stupidity, stubbornness, and laziness on his part.
You know what, I should change the title of this post, because I'M the one who's the moron in this scenario; I know, I KNOW that he's a pathological liar, that he can't be trusted with pretty much anything, that he's utterly incapable of handling any shred of responsibility or of doing anything right without endless supervision and assistance, and that the central tenet of his existence is to conceal his endless screwups... so I NEVER should have allowed this situation to even get past the 1st couple of weeks without results or the phone # to call, not where such an expensive piece of equipment was concerned. It's just that I'm always so busy, so stressed, so TIRED, and I have to handle all of my stuff, all the household stuff, all the couple stuff, AND monitor all of HIS stuff even though he gets nasty about it despite his extensive history of fouling up, and even though he's supposed to be an adult and thus capable of handling his own personal issues... and I never considered that there was a worst-case scenario beyond any that I'd ever imagined going on, and that he was covering it up and preventing me from taking action when there was still time to.
To my husband, who reads my blog, I send a 2-word message... no, not THAT one, because I don't put profanity on here, but this one: NEVER AGAIN. From this point on, I don't care HOW nasty you get when questioned about tasks and processes you haven't completed; *I* can be WAY nastier than you can, and if necessary I'll prove that as part of making sure that you don't get any more chances to throw thousands of dollars away because you can't be bothered to hold onto important documents, make a frigging phone call, act in a timely manner, or show an ounce of common sense... whatever it takes, there will NOT be a repeat of your recent performance.
Count on it.
A few months after the theft, he set an even greater act of moronicism into motion; he had a piece of equipment that needed to be mailed to its company of origin to be repaired, and he put it in a (very large) box, sent it out... and we never saw it again, and it's been a year and a half. How did this happen? He lives his life around task avoidance, so he resists making necessary phone calls to check and follow up on things, even when it's wildly to his disbenefit to act that way; although he received NO contact from the company about the item (as one would normally expect to get, about what they wanted to do to it and how long it might take), he refused to contact THEM and see what was up, despite repeated and increasingly impassioned requests for him to do so, and ample opportunity for him to do so. Finally, as the weeks and then MONTHS passed, he claimed he was calling and leaving messages, or calling and getting promises of callbacks that never came; he refused to hammer them with more frequent calls, or, finally, to give ME the # and the technical info necessary to explain what I was trying to find out about... and he always gave me the impression that he was trying to find out what was happening with the item within the repair center, that they were dragging their feet getting it fixed and sent back.
Something snapped in my mind a couple of days ago, and I demanded that he tell me the name of the company and the product, went to that company's website, registered to use it, and sent them an email asking where our item was and when they were going to send it back. Today, I got an email from them, informing me that they'd NEVER GOTTEN IT. Horrified, I confronted my husband, and he admitted that he'd found out over a YEAR ago that they'd never gotten it, and, as he'd long since lost the tracking info, he had no way to find out where the post office had actually sent it, and knew it was gone forever; he'd been LYING to me all that time, trying to keep alive my belief that the stupid thing was sitting on a shelf at that company, unrepaired and waiting for someone to figure out how to fix it rather than having to replace it (we've had past experiences with it taking big chunks of months for other tech items to be fixed), or that they'd lost the identifying info for who owned it and it was just a matter of contacting the right person who'd figure out which orphaned item was ours... anything other than that the post office, which granted sucks big time, could permanently lose such a big box that had been sent registered and certified, and thus was trackable (unless the sender is STUPID enough to lose the tracking #), and that he'd deceived me about his never having had any indication from them that they'd received the item. I've had over a year of extra stress about this issue because my husband's priority was to put off for as long as possible my finding out that he'd LOST a piece of equipment worth $2200 due to stupidity, stubbornness, and laziness on his part.
You know what, I should change the title of this post, because I'M the one who's the moron in this scenario; I know, I KNOW that he's a pathological liar, that he can't be trusted with pretty much anything, that he's utterly incapable of handling any shred of responsibility or of doing anything right without endless supervision and assistance, and that the central tenet of his existence is to conceal his endless screwups... so I NEVER should have allowed this situation to even get past the 1st couple of weeks without results or the phone # to call, not where such an expensive piece of equipment was concerned. It's just that I'm always so busy, so stressed, so TIRED, and I have to handle all of my stuff, all the household stuff, all the couple stuff, AND monitor all of HIS stuff even though he gets nasty about it despite his extensive history of fouling up, and even though he's supposed to be an adult and thus capable of handling his own personal issues... and I never considered that there was a worst-case scenario beyond any that I'd ever imagined going on, and that he was covering it up and preventing me from taking action when there was still time to.
To my husband, who reads my blog, I send a 2-word message... no, not THAT one, because I don't put profanity on here, but this one: NEVER AGAIN. From this point on, I don't care HOW nasty you get when questioned about tasks and processes you haven't completed; *I* can be WAY nastier than you can, and if necessary I'll prove that as part of making sure that you don't get any more chances to throw thousands of dollars away because you can't be bothered to hold onto important documents, make a frigging phone call, act in a timely manner, or show an ounce of common sense... whatever it takes, there will NOT be a repeat of your recent performance.
Count on it.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
The war on... sick people
If you're not sick, you will be once you've read this:
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050607/ap_on_go_su_co/scotus_medical_marijuana
which gives us the latest from the Supreme Court:
"In a 6-3 decision, the court on Monday said those who smoke marijuana because their doctors recommend it to ease pain can be prosecuted for violating federal drug laws, overriding medical marijuana statutes in 10 states."
There are disclaimers about how they're not going to be targeting sick people, but if that's so, why go to such lengths to be sure they CAN? I don't buy the idea of, "Don't worry about this new restriction on you/new power we have over you, because we're not gonna use it, honest"; if they weren't ever going to use it, they wouldn't be laying the groundwork.
Groundwork to deprive sick people of, and take legal action against them for, something they need to control their level of suffering.
The justification for this is:
"The Bush administration, like the Clinton White House before it, has taken a hard stand against state medical marijuana laws, arguing that such statutes could undermine the fight against illegal drugs."
Um, excuse me, aren't there already countless drugs that a doctor can prescribe that are illegal to procure withOUT a doctor's prescription, including many that are used "recreationally," like marijuana usually is? Just because marijuana's been illegal for a long time, well before its medical uses were discovered, why should that make a difference? When people are SUFFERING, isn't the more important issue the relief of that suffering, NOT whether something that would help them has been made illegal because people were smoking it and... eating lots of cookies?
The point is made in the article that
"John Walters, director of national drug control policy, defended the government's ban. 'Science and research have not determined that smoking marijuana is safe or effective,' he said."
This is of course true, but it's a valid argument against allowing marijuana use by the ill if and only if it's followed by a statement along the lines of, "... and therefore, we're going to invest lots of $ starting right now so that we CAN determine these things"; the lack of such a statement tells me that the concern that marijuana might not be helping, or could even be hurting, the sick people is FAKE, and is just being mouthed to make them sound better.
Know WHY there's no research backing up the medicinal value of marijuana? Because it's an illegal substance, even for medical researchers, and they'd have to get special permission to possess it in order to study it, AND get someone to pay for what would be controversial research, which would be made harder by the fact that they couldn't expect any gov't $... and they KNOW that. Pointing to the lack of a sort of research that's been made essentially impossible to conduct is grossly disingenuous... SHAME on them!!
Doctors need to be allowed to do their jobs as best as they can, and that means that they should be able to prescribe ANYTHING that will reduce human suffering; if they discover than HEROIN would help these desperate people control their agony, I think it should be given to them, and marijuana should be permitted without a moment's hesitation.
The Yahoo article fails to mention a more prevalent medical use for marijuana; the suppression of nausea, which can literally be a life or death issue for patients with things like AIDS and cancer, for whom the nausea can be so horrific that they can't eat. One of my own uncles owes his life to marijuana; his nausea was so bad that he couldn't keep ANYTHING down, not even water, so he'd smoke half a joint, take his medicines and vitamins, eat a meal, drink some fluids, and hope it'd all be far enough into his body to not come shooting back out when the nausea returned. Why are they no longer talking about the nausea-relief angle... is it the connection to AIDS? There's a grim thought for you...
The Yahoo article DOES make the final important point on this issue:
"Allen St. Pierre, executive director of NORML, which favors legalization of marijuana... said the decision points up a large difference between the administration and the public.
'The disconnect is so wide here,' St. Pierre said. 'In no circumstance where voters have the opportunity to weigh in have they said no to medical marijuana.'"
Damn straight. Wake up, Washington; the American people want all possible treatments to be made available to those who are sickest, and if you're smart you'll back down gracefully on this one before the media starts showcasing dreadfully ill people whose suffering you won't allow to be relieved... before the voters start contemplating the need for greater compassion in our elected officials.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050607/ap_on_go_su_co/scotus_medical_marijuana
which gives us the latest from the Supreme Court:
"In a 6-3 decision, the court on Monday said those who smoke marijuana because their doctors recommend it to ease pain can be prosecuted for violating federal drug laws, overriding medical marijuana statutes in 10 states."
There are disclaimers about how they're not going to be targeting sick people, but if that's so, why go to such lengths to be sure they CAN? I don't buy the idea of, "Don't worry about this new restriction on you/new power we have over you, because we're not gonna use it, honest"; if they weren't ever going to use it, they wouldn't be laying the groundwork.
Groundwork to deprive sick people of, and take legal action against them for, something they need to control their level of suffering.
The justification for this is:
"The Bush administration, like the Clinton White House before it, has taken a hard stand against state medical marijuana laws, arguing that such statutes could undermine the fight against illegal drugs."
Um, excuse me, aren't there already countless drugs that a doctor can prescribe that are illegal to procure withOUT a doctor's prescription, including many that are used "recreationally," like marijuana usually is? Just because marijuana's been illegal for a long time, well before its medical uses were discovered, why should that make a difference? When people are SUFFERING, isn't the more important issue the relief of that suffering, NOT whether something that would help them has been made illegal because people were smoking it and... eating lots of cookies?
The point is made in the article that
"John Walters, director of national drug control policy, defended the government's ban. 'Science and research have not determined that smoking marijuana is safe or effective,' he said."
This is of course true, but it's a valid argument against allowing marijuana use by the ill if and only if it's followed by a statement along the lines of, "... and therefore, we're going to invest lots of $ starting right now so that we CAN determine these things"; the lack of such a statement tells me that the concern that marijuana might not be helping, or could even be hurting, the sick people is FAKE, and is just being mouthed to make them sound better.
Know WHY there's no research backing up the medicinal value of marijuana? Because it's an illegal substance, even for medical researchers, and they'd have to get special permission to possess it in order to study it, AND get someone to pay for what would be controversial research, which would be made harder by the fact that they couldn't expect any gov't $... and they KNOW that. Pointing to the lack of a sort of research that's been made essentially impossible to conduct is grossly disingenuous... SHAME on them!!
Doctors need to be allowed to do their jobs as best as they can, and that means that they should be able to prescribe ANYTHING that will reduce human suffering; if they discover than HEROIN would help these desperate people control their agony, I think it should be given to them, and marijuana should be permitted without a moment's hesitation.
The Yahoo article fails to mention a more prevalent medical use for marijuana; the suppression of nausea, which can literally be a life or death issue for patients with things like AIDS and cancer, for whom the nausea can be so horrific that they can't eat. One of my own uncles owes his life to marijuana; his nausea was so bad that he couldn't keep ANYTHING down, not even water, so he'd smoke half a joint, take his medicines and vitamins, eat a meal, drink some fluids, and hope it'd all be far enough into his body to not come shooting back out when the nausea returned. Why are they no longer talking about the nausea-relief angle... is it the connection to AIDS? There's a grim thought for you...
The Yahoo article DOES make the final important point on this issue:
"Allen St. Pierre, executive director of NORML, which favors legalization of marijuana... said the decision points up a large difference between the administration and the public.
'The disconnect is so wide here,' St. Pierre said. 'In no circumstance where voters have the opportunity to weigh in have they said no to medical marijuana.'"
Damn straight. Wake up, Washington; the American people want all possible treatments to be made available to those who are sickest, and if you're smart you'll back down gracefully on this one before the media starts showcasing dreadfully ill people whose suffering you won't allow to be relieved... before the voters start contemplating the need for greater compassion in our elected officials.
Monday, June 06, 2005
The shape of karma
Does karma fill the entire universe, or if, as seems very likely, there are multiple universes in a 10- or 11- dimensional omniverse, does karma fill it all? Without knowing that, it's hard to narrow the choices down as to karma's possible shapes; as of the last I heard, the universe is shaped like a saddle, it's stuck to a brane that's a ripply plane, and the branes are all in an omniverse that's a very long and thin cylinder... if you think karma fills all of one of these entities, that'd give you its shape. I think it's entirely possible that karma expands until it bumps into the edges of reality, but that doesn't intuitively feel like the right choice; it seems to me like karma, which is largely generated by our thoughts, feelings and souls, should be concentrated around our planet, and of course any other planets with intelligent beings (which statistically must be out there)... there's no proof of this, but that's my starting point for lack of a better one.
Does karma expand outward from Earth in a sphere, or in an uneven but vaguely spherical shape? There's no reason to assume that just because it's increasing with each bit of energy that gets produced that it's doing anything as prosaic as just spreading out, I suppose; it could grow outwards in rings, rays, spirals, ever-shifting blobs like in a lava lamp, or in an exotic geometric form... or in some shape beyond human imagination, of course (which goes double if it's growing in more than 3-4 dimensions).
Does karma pass into one of the parallel universes predicted by string theory and collect there? Does it coalesce like a cloud, or form bubbles, or just fill it up like water being poured into a glass?
Does karma permeate the omniverse? Does it drift through it in wisps like smoke, or line it like spiritual tissue paper, or make intricate lacings throughout it like a spiderweb?
Where do our souls, which are made of karma, go when we die? Is karma in 2 sections, the part affecting the living and the part consisting of souls? Do souls all hang out together, do they form a cube or pyramid or octahedron, or do they freckle the universe, or omniverse, with dots of karma?
How about the shape of karma at the local level? We know from string theory that everything is made of tiny strings of energy, and I think that either karma is made of those strings, or those strings are made out of karma, but what shape(s) does karma take collectively as it's generated en mass by our actions, thoughts and feelings? Does karma shoot away from us along a line, does it encase us in a shell, does it form a halo around our heads or a coil around our bodies?
As I was typing the above, I remembered a Scott Adams quote; "I suspect that the only way time can be infinite is if the past connects to the future like some huge Mobius strip-wormhole kind of deal." A Mobius strip is a one-sided surface, which you can read more about here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%F6bius_strip
So, I'm thinking about shapes of karma, and the one-sidedness concept joins in, and I know that karma has to be more "substantial" than just a strip... and then I thought, maybe it's a Klein bottle, which looks like an enclosed form but in fact has no inside or outside:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_bottle
http://torus.math.uiuc.edu/jms/Images/klein.html
http://www.math.rochester.edu/misc/klein-bottle.html
A Klein bottle needs 4 dimensions to exist, but we've probably got 11 dimensions, so we could have something like that, or even something with only one "side" throughout all the dimensions, such that you could travel along it forever in any direction and never reach a boundary of any kind... ahhhhhhh, if that's not the real shape of karma, it oughta be!! :-)
Does karma expand outward from Earth in a sphere, or in an uneven but vaguely spherical shape? There's no reason to assume that just because it's increasing with each bit of energy that gets produced that it's doing anything as prosaic as just spreading out, I suppose; it could grow outwards in rings, rays, spirals, ever-shifting blobs like in a lava lamp, or in an exotic geometric form... or in some shape beyond human imagination, of course (which goes double if it's growing in more than 3-4 dimensions).
Does karma pass into one of the parallel universes predicted by string theory and collect there? Does it coalesce like a cloud, or form bubbles, or just fill it up like water being poured into a glass?
Does karma permeate the omniverse? Does it drift through it in wisps like smoke, or line it like spiritual tissue paper, or make intricate lacings throughout it like a spiderweb?
Where do our souls, which are made of karma, go when we die? Is karma in 2 sections, the part affecting the living and the part consisting of souls? Do souls all hang out together, do they form a cube or pyramid or octahedron, or do they freckle the universe, or omniverse, with dots of karma?
How about the shape of karma at the local level? We know from string theory that everything is made of tiny strings of energy, and I think that either karma is made of those strings, or those strings are made out of karma, but what shape(s) does karma take collectively as it's generated en mass by our actions, thoughts and feelings? Does karma shoot away from us along a line, does it encase us in a shell, does it form a halo around our heads or a coil around our bodies?
As I was typing the above, I remembered a Scott Adams quote; "I suspect that the only way time can be infinite is if the past connects to the future like some huge Mobius strip-wormhole kind of deal." A Mobius strip is a one-sided surface, which you can read more about here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%F6bius_strip
So, I'm thinking about shapes of karma, and the one-sidedness concept joins in, and I know that karma has to be more "substantial" than just a strip... and then I thought, maybe it's a Klein bottle, which looks like an enclosed form but in fact has no inside or outside:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_bottle
http://torus.math.uiuc.edu/jms/Images/klein.html
http://www.math.rochester.edu/misc/klein-bottle.html
A Klein bottle needs 4 dimensions to exist, but we've probably got 11 dimensions, so we could have something like that, or even something with only one "side" throughout all the dimensions, such that you could travel along it forever in any direction and never reach a boundary of any kind... ahhhhhhh, if that's not the real shape of karma, it oughta be!! :-)
Sunday, June 05, 2005
A behavioral oddity
From the May 2005 issue of Discover (yes, I'm still shamefully far behind in my reading), in an article called "Think Tank," comes the following:
"The most important discovery in the last 25 years in systems neuroscience is the function of the dopamine neurons in the midbrain... the neurons fire brief bursts of spikes when a monkey is rewarded, but after a while the response to the reward goes away and instead the neurons respond to sensory stimuli that predict that a reward will be received in the near future."
HUH?!!
If the reward stops being exciting, that's one thing, but if the reward is still compelling enough that just the thought of getting it in the near future is stimulating, why would the response to the reward itself go away? Like so many other aspects of psychology, this is totally counterintuitive, but since it's been shown to exist in monkeys, and thus is almost certain to exist in humans, it's worth thinking about.
Sometimes people talk about feeling let down when they get some longed-for thing that they'd been all excited about receiving; that could be an example of this concept in action. The way that people who're wealthy enough to have everything tend to be miserable much of the time could certainly suggest that having gets old, that we have an intrinsic need to want things, to feel the desire for things we don't have. In the relationship arena, we've all seen people who were eagerly pursuing someone until they got them, after which they immediately lost interest. I think we could even make a case that those who talk about the journey or process being what's important, rather than the destination or result, are examples of this idea.
Clearly, then, this odd reaction scenario applies to humans, too... but WHY? What evolutionary advantage do we gain from it? I can see the benefit of being revved up by cues that a reward is on the way, as that would make us ready to grab it and more likely to actually get it, but why lose the rush from the reward itself... why not have responses to BOTH things to maximize our likelihood of going for the gold?
This one's got me stumped. It'll still be useful, though, both by providing a biological explanation for previously inexplicable emotional responses and by suggesting a useful tool for motivating other people; if a just handing over a reward isn't getting it done, switch to offering the idea that a reward might be forthcoming.
Does anyone besides me see this possibly tying into the equally counterintuitive concept of intermittent reinforcement, which refers to how we tend to pursue a thing more ardently if our efforts are only sporadically rewarded, even to the point of becoming obsessive about the pursuit (see my post of 9-10-04)? Hmmmmmmm.......
"The most important discovery in the last 25 years in systems neuroscience is the function of the dopamine neurons in the midbrain... the neurons fire brief bursts of spikes when a monkey is rewarded, but after a while the response to the reward goes away and instead the neurons respond to sensory stimuli that predict that a reward will be received in the near future."
HUH?!!
If the reward stops being exciting, that's one thing, but if the reward is still compelling enough that just the thought of getting it in the near future is stimulating, why would the response to the reward itself go away? Like so many other aspects of psychology, this is totally counterintuitive, but since it's been shown to exist in monkeys, and thus is almost certain to exist in humans, it's worth thinking about.
Sometimes people talk about feeling let down when they get some longed-for thing that they'd been all excited about receiving; that could be an example of this concept in action. The way that people who're wealthy enough to have everything tend to be miserable much of the time could certainly suggest that having gets old, that we have an intrinsic need to want things, to feel the desire for things we don't have. In the relationship arena, we've all seen people who were eagerly pursuing someone until they got them, after which they immediately lost interest. I think we could even make a case that those who talk about the journey or process being what's important, rather than the destination or result, are examples of this idea.
Clearly, then, this odd reaction scenario applies to humans, too... but WHY? What evolutionary advantage do we gain from it? I can see the benefit of being revved up by cues that a reward is on the way, as that would make us ready to grab it and more likely to actually get it, but why lose the rush from the reward itself... why not have responses to BOTH things to maximize our likelihood of going for the gold?
This one's got me stumped. It'll still be useful, though, both by providing a biological explanation for previously inexplicable emotional responses and by suggesting a useful tool for motivating other people; if a just handing over a reward isn't getting it done, switch to offering the idea that a reward might be forthcoming.
Does anyone besides me see this possibly tying into the equally counterintuitive concept of intermittent reinforcement, which refers to how we tend to pursue a thing more ardently if our efforts are only sporadically rewarded, even to the point of becoming obsessive about the pursuit (see my post of 9-10-04)? Hmmmmmmm.......
Saturday, June 04, 2005
SQUIRREL BABIES!!!!!!!!!!
After over 2 agonizing months of waiting (see my post of 3-29-05), of watching my little angel girl become the Pamela Anderson of the squirrel world with enormous, bloated teats (TWELVE of them!!), of knowing that she was, in fact, a female (we'd always thought she was a boy, lol) and nursing a litter, I finally, FINALLY saw the babies today!! They are, without a doubt, the cutest creatures to ever walk the Earth!! :-)
Here's the progression of events:
A couple of weeks ago, we had some loud and protracted construction here, and the squirrel, which had been coming every day forever, was obviously freaked out, and first didn't come at all for several days, then just came along on the fence (where she'd take food from me if offered), then vanished again for 5 days... right at the time we were expecting the babies to show up, GRRRRRRRRRRRR.
Last night, I non-coincidentally had a dream about a squirrel; it looked "wrong," as its body shape and color were "off," but it smiled at me (yes, SMILED), and I knew it was "mine"; when I woke up, I wondered if that meant I'd be getting a squirrel visit today.
Late this afternoon, I walked into the kitchen, looked out the window, and saw a sweet furry face; my 1st reaction was "there she is!!", but almost immediately I saw a 2ND face, and thought "she's brought a baby!!", instantly followed by, "they're both far too small to be her... this is 2 babies here withOUT their mother."
My EXTREME excitement at seeing the little darlings (which are about 2/3 of adult size, and so technically are more like adolescents than babies) was mitigated by 2 unpleasant realizations:
1) The unexpected absence of their mother might mean that she's abandoned the territory to the babies (or, in theory, that she's hurt, or sick, or worse), and thus that it might be a long while before she returns, or that we might never see her again; she's utterly irreplaceable in our hearts, so, no matter how many babies there are, it's not worth it if we lose HER, both because we love her and because she's semi-tame and I can pet and hand-feed her.
2) It's normal for ground squirrels to have EIGHT babies (and given how bloated the mother was with milk, and how swollen all 12 teats were, with the fur rubbed off around them, it seems as if she MUST have nursed a sizable litter), if it turns out that the ones I saw today are all there are, that means that it's likely that the other babies, which only had a 10% chance of reaching adulthood according to what I've read, are... are...
{dead}
... well, let's hope that they're in my neighbors' yards eating THEIR ornamental plants and staking out new territories.
Without their mother's example to follow, the babies we've got won't have the incentive to come and be hand-fed, so I'm looking at a potentially lengthy taming process before I can have close squirrel contact if my angel girl doesn't return soon; I hope I don't have to do things the hard way, but I'm not counting on it... I'm launching right into acclimating them to me with the goal of getting them to take food from me as soon as possible.
I'm certain that the mommy has been bringing them to my yard (as opposed to their wandering in by accident), because the babies knew where to dig up her nut caches, and, more importantly, knew to climb up onto this one big pot and drink mud out of it like she does; I'd have given ANYTHING to have seen those visits, but most of the day neither my husband nor I can be standing at the window looking around, so for all we know they've been coming for WEEKS, just not at times that we're available.... and maybe there were more babies then, sigh...
Although what we've got is far from the mob of babies we'd hoped for, and we have to worry about when we'll see our angel girl again, the 2 newcomers have already charmed us with their curiosity, playfulness, and the sometimes-clumsiness of creatures that're still trying to grow into their limbs. One of them is significantly larger and more aggressive than the other, and has exhibited mounting behavior with the smaller one, so naturally we're assuming that they're a male and a female; we've been fooled before, though, so we're keeping an open mind. If they ARE of opposite sexes, we then have to wonder if, relatedness notwithstanding, they're going to be a breeding pair; animals naturally do what's right, mating-wise (with humans as the glaring exception), so it must be ok if that's what's up, and it'd have the bonus of meaning that neither of them will be taking off in search of its own territory.
Despite the sudden onset of never before encountered camcorder problems (naturally), I got some priceless footage of the little darlings nuzzling each other and even wrestling a little, as well as climbing and eating everything in sight; still, my husband would of course like to see them live, and I'm dying to see more of them, so we've laid out enough food to feed an elephant, of every kind we could think of, to lure them in and see what they prefer, and... now, all we can do is wait and see what sort of squirrel visits we'll get next.
I'm going to be climbing the walls tomorrow until I see some fuzzy, elfin faces; I'm so excited to be a "grandma" at last, to have the chance to watch squirrel babies up close, and of course there's still hope of seeing more babies, and their mother... keep your fingers crossed for me!! :-)
Here's the progression of events:
A couple of weeks ago, we had some loud and protracted construction here, and the squirrel, which had been coming every day forever, was obviously freaked out, and first didn't come at all for several days, then just came along on the fence (where she'd take food from me if offered), then vanished again for 5 days... right at the time we were expecting the babies to show up, GRRRRRRRRRRRR.
Last night, I non-coincidentally had a dream about a squirrel; it looked "wrong," as its body shape and color were "off," but it smiled at me (yes, SMILED), and I knew it was "mine"; when I woke up, I wondered if that meant I'd be getting a squirrel visit today.
Late this afternoon, I walked into the kitchen, looked out the window, and saw a sweet furry face; my 1st reaction was "there she is!!", but almost immediately I saw a 2ND face, and thought "she's brought a baby!!", instantly followed by, "they're both far too small to be her... this is 2 babies here withOUT their mother."
My EXTREME excitement at seeing the little darlings (which are about 2/3 of adult size, and so technically are more like adolescents than babies) was mitigated by 2 unpleasant realizations:
1) The unexpected absence of their mother might mean that she's abandoned the territory to the babies (or, in theory, that she's hurt, or sick, or worse), and thus that it might be a long while before she returns, or that we might never see her again; she's utterly irreplaceable in our hearts, so, no matter how many babies there are, it's not worth it if we lose HER, both because we love her and because she's semi-tame and I can pet and hand-feed her.
2) It's normal for ground squirrels to have EIGHT babies (and given how bloated the mother was with milk, and how swollen all 12 teats were, with the fur rubbed off around them, it seems as if she MUST have nursed a sizable litter), if it turns out that the ones I saw today are all there are, that means that it's likely that the other babies, which only had a 10% chance of reaching adulthood according to what I've read, are... are...
{dead}
... well, let's hope that they're in my neighbors' yards eating THEIR ornamental plants and staking out new territories.
Without their mother's example to follow, the babies we've got won't have the incentive to come and be hand-fed, so I'm looking at a potentially lengthy taming process before I can have close squirrel contact if my angel girl doesn't return soon; I hope I don't have to do things the hard way, but I'm not counting on it... I'm launching right into acclimating them to me with the goal of getting them to take food from me as soon as possible.
I'm certain that the mommy has been bringing them to my yard (as opposed to their wandering in by accident), because the babies knew where to dig up her nut caches, and, more importantly, knew to climb up onto this one big pot and drink mud out of it like she does; I'd have given ANYTHING to have seen those visits, but most of the day neither my husband nor I can be standing at the window looking around, so for all we know they've been coming for WEEKS, just not at times that we're available.... and maybe there were more babies then, sigh...
Although what we've got is far from the mob of babies we'd hoped for, and we have to worry about when we'll see our angel girl again, the 2 newcomers have already charmed us with their curiosity, playfulness, and the sometimes-clumsiness of creatures that're still trying to grow into their limbs. One of them is significantly larger and more aggressive than the other, and has exhibited mounting behavior with the smaller one, so naturally we're assuming that they're a male and a female; we've been fooled before, though, so we're keeping an open mind. If they ARE of opposite sexes, we then have to wonder if, relatedness notwithstanding, they're going to be a breeding pair; animals naturally do what's right, mating-wise (with humans as the glaring exception), so it must be ok if that's what's up, and it'd have the bonus of meaning that neither of them will be taking off in search of its own territory.
Despite the sudden onset of never before encountered camcorder problems (naturally), I got some priceless footage of the little darlings nuzzling each other and even wrestling a little, as well as climbing and eating everything in sight; still, my husband would of course like to see them live, and I'm dying to see more of them, so we've laid out enough food to feed an elephant, of every kind we could think of, to lure them in and see what they prefer, and... now, all we can do is wait and see what sort of squirrel visits we'll get next.
I'm going to be climbing the walls tomorrow until I see some fuzzy, elfin faces; I'm so excited to be a "grandma" at last, to have the chance to watch squirrel babies up close, and of course there's still hope of seeing more babies, and their mother... keep your fingers crossed for me!! :-)
Friday, June 03, 2005
"Beauty and the Geek"
Amazingly for someone who mostly ignores what's on regular TV unless it's a movie, I saw ANOTHER interesting show today (it came on after "Blue Collar TV" on the WB, and I got sucked in before I could find something else to watch from my endless digital cable listings); it sounds like yet another romantic hookup type program, but it's not... or so they're claiming for now. It starts out with a group of men that, as the title implies, are smart, of varying degrees of unattractive and poorly-dressed, and totally socially inept (ie have never been on a date, never kissed a girl, are virgins at nearly 30), and women who are, not just beautiful, but dumb as rocks; the premise is that they pair up, the women try to make the men socially acceptable, the men try to stuff some knowledge into the women's heads, and competitions will show who's done the best at it... and of course, eliminations occur at the end of each show based on who the winners nominate and the others vote for, and the winners get $250K.
Time will tell if there's a built-in twist, but even if they didn't intend one there still is one: Dr. Joyce Brothers once said that if you put ANY straight man and woman on a deserted island together, a romance WILL eventually develop, as that's how we're programmed to behave; that concept operates everywhere men and women spend alot of time around each other, and so is bound to become a factor even with such shy and awkward men and picky women. In fact, it already IS a factor, as one of the women has developed an obvious interest in one of the men (NOT her game partner, which livens things up even more), and has started to pursue him... and I'm betting that that won't be all the romance that blossoms during the course of the show.
This "reality" series will be far more interesting than any of the various combinations of hotties that've been thrown together for other shows, or the one (one?) with an "average" guy with hot babes (can you imagine it ever being done the other way around?); super-hot women and men just short of the absolute bottom of the dating food chain, with the former forced to get to know those they'd never spare a minute to in real life, and the latter in a situation where they're guaranteed extensive contact with those they'd never dare approach, much less get to know... stay tuned, folks, human nature will be clearly on display in the weeks to come.
Time will tell if there's a built-in twist, but even if they didn't intend one there still is one: Dr. Joyce Brothers once said that if you put ANY straight man and woman on a deserted island together, a romance WILL eventually develop, as that's how we're programmed to behave; that concept operates everywhere men and women spend alot of time around each other, and so is bound to become a factor even with such shy and awkward men and picky women. In fact, it already IS a factor, as one of the women has developed an obvious interest in one of the men (NOT her game partner, which livens things up even more), and has started to pursue him... and I'm betting that that won't be all the romance that blossoms during the course of the show.
This "reality" series will be far more interesting than any of the various combinations of hotties that've been thrown together for other shows, or the one (one?) with an "average" guy with hot babes (can you imagine it ever being done the other way around?); super-hot women and men just short of the absolute bottom of the dating food chain, with the former forced to get to know those they'd never spare a minute to in real life, and the latter in a situation where they're guaranteed extensive contact with those they'd never dare approach, much less get to know... stay tuned, folks, human nature will be clearly on display in the weeks to come.
Thursday, June 02, 2005
Childhood clothing oddities
Throughout my entire childhood, my mother's clothing philosophy, at least for MY clothes, was to wait until stuff was WAY out of style and on the mega-clearance racks at K-Mart, and then she'd get it. Do you remember in the early 80's when a white shirt with a rainbow across the front was the hot item, soon to be followed by an endless variety of other styles of rainbow clothes? As always, my mother ignored my frenzied pleas to have something cute while it was "in," but as soon as it was OUT she got me a bunch of different ones on sale. When mesh shirts over t-shirts were in for about 5 minutes, she managed to get me a couple of dorky shirts with ATTACHED mesh, and I got stuck with several sailor shirts when those made a similar brief appearance in stores; when patterned jeans, including those that looked like flowers had been painted on them, made it to the clearance racks, there was my pants wardrobe for college and beyond. The strangest example of how she went out of her way to make me look as weird and different as possible was with the terry-cloth shirts; I had at least TEN of them, all cut the same way (indented waist, low scoop neckline, cap sleeves), and of 3 different varieties (plain, with shiny stripes, and with designs on the front), and I've never seen any evidence that those shirts ever existed other than in my closet... I never saw them advertised, or in stores, or on anyone else, or in any of the retrospectives that've been done on 80's clothes-and that's not a hyperbole, either, I mean NEVER. Were they something that some local company made by mistake and fire-saled off to K-Mart, where only my mother bought them?
I cringe to contemplate what people must have thought seeing me wearing that sort of stuff, especially since it was ALL I had, and thus all I wore... and I wore those things until my mid-20's, too (because I couldn't afford to complete the process of replacing my entire wardrobe until then, and I had to wear SOMETHING), how grim is THAT?
What's even worse, in a way, is what happened the one and only time in my entire life that my mother actually got me clothes that were still in the stores on the regular racks; this wasn't due to generosity on her part, but because I'd had such a huge growth spurt that, even though she was perfectly happy for me to go to school with high-waters, even SHE couldn't deny that I needed all new pants for the 8th grade school year. We'd moved at the end of my 7th grade year, during which I'd been sent to school in patterned polyester stretch pants and turtlenecks layered with short-sleeved polyester shirts (none of which my peers were wearing, needless to say, and you've gotta wonder what sick train of thought led her to design this uniform for an innocent child), and I was faced with being able, wonder of wonders, to get proper clothing with which to meet my new schoolmates for the 1st time.
The central garment in this story is Dittos jeans, which is what every girl except me was wearing in those days. The closest I'd gotten was a pair of pants with that same sort of seam over the butt (aka "saddle seat") that my mother had gotten me as a concession to my endlessly pointing out the total lack of overlap between my clothes and anyone else's; she ripped out the tags with the no-name brand on them, and instructed me to tell anyone that asked if they were Dittos or not, "Why do you ask, can't you tell?"... which, as you might imagine, despite how clever SHE thought this was, did NOT fool anyone, so she might as well have saved what little $ she spent on them and not bothered. In our new city, there wasn't any polyester child's clothing in the stores, and there WAS an abundance of Dittos in every color of the rainbow; in fact, unless you wanted to pay more and get actual bluejeans like Levi's, which of course wasn't an option, Dittos were all there was for school pants... and thus the previously undreamed-of process of buying clothes that weren't already 6 months out of style began. I can close my eyes and still see them; red, hot pink, green, dark purple, lavender, and sky blue, some with the saddle seat and some with the double-barred back seam. When I started school in the fall, ready to strut my stuff in my Dittos wardrobe, I looked around at my classmates at the private school I'd be attending from then until college, and...
... no one but me was wearing Dittos.
That's right, I was in the one school in America where the girls totally ignored the current fashion; instead, they were wearing "Salt of the Earth" jeans, which I'd never heard of, never saw in any ad or store, and which a Google search of comes up blank... I don't know what store they were all shopping at, or what it was about that brand that made it the only acceptable one, but I DID know that, after all my high hopes, I had the wrong clothes AGAIN, and had been instantly branded as an outsider AGAIN.
Given the nightmarishness of my early-life clothes experiences, perhaps it's not a coincidence that now, when I'm pushing middle age and can afford to wear pretty much anything, all I wear is basic jeans and thrift-store t-shirts... while eagerly reading Vogue every month. As long as everything I wear is clean and hole-free (which it always is, of course) and my socks match, I'm in the upper 5% of my peer group (geeks), so, although I greatly enjoy the artistry of couture, in my actual life clothes have become pretty much a non-issue, which is really how it should ideally always have been.
I sure hope that that old saying about how clothes make the man (or woman) doesn't apply to what I wore in my formative years, though, lol.
I cringe to contemplate what people must have thought seeing me wearing that sort of stuff, especially since it was ALL I had, and thus all I wore... and I wore those things until my mid-20's, too (because I couldn't afford to complete the process of replacing my entire wardrobe until then, and I had to wear SOMETHING), how grim is THAT?
What's even worse, in a way, is what happened the one and only time in my entire life that my mother actually got me clothes that were still in the stores on the regular racks; this wasn't due to generosity on her part, but because I'd had such a huge growth spurt that, even though she was perfectly happy for me to go to school with high-waters, even SHE couldn't deny that I needed all new pants for the 8th grade school year. We'd moved at the end of my 7th grade year, during which I'd been sent to school in patterned polyester stretch pants and turtlenecks layered with short-sleeved polyester shirts (none of which my peers were wearing, needless to say, and you've gotta wonder what sick train of thought led her to design this uniform for an innocent child), and I was faced with being able, wonder of wonders, to get proper clothing with which to meet my new schoolmates for the 1st time.
The central garment in this story is Dittos jeans, which is what every girl except me was wearing in those days. The closest I'd gotten was a pair of pants with that same sort of seam over the butt (aka "saddle seat") that my mother had gotten me as a concession to my endlessly pointing out the total lack of overlap between my clothes and anyone else's; she ripped out the tags with the no-name brand on them, and instructed me to tell anyone that asked if they were Dittos or not, "Why do you ask, can't you tell?"... which, as you might imagine, despite how clever SHE thought this was, did NOT fool anyone, so she might as well have saved what little $ she spent on them and not bothered. In our new city, there wasn't any polyester child's clothing in the stores, and there WAS an abundance of Dittos in every color of the rainbow; in fact, unless you wanted to pay more and get actual bluejeans like Levi's, which of course wasn't an option, Dittos were all there was for school pants... and thus the previously undreamed-of process of buying clothes that weren't already 6 months out of style began. I can close my eyes and still see them; red, hot pink, green, dark purple, lavender, and sky blue, some with the saddle seat and some with the double-barred back seam. When I started school in the fall, ready to strut my stuff in my Dittos wardrobe, I looked around at my classmates at the private school I'd be attending from then until college, and...
... no one but me was wearing Dittos.
That's right, I was in the one school in America where the girls totally ignored the current fashion; instead, they were wearing "Salt of the Earth" jeans, which I'd never heard of, never saw in any ad or store, and which a Google search of comes up blank... I don't know what store they were all shopping at, or what it was about that brand that made it the only acceptable one, but I DID know that, after all my high hopes, I had the wrong clothes AGAIN, and had been instantly branded as an outsider AGAIN.
Given the nightmarishness of my early-life clothes experiences, perhaps it's not a coincidence that now, when I'm pushing middle age and can afford to wear pretty much anything, all I wear is basic jeans and thrift-store t-shirts... while eagerly reading Vogue every month. As long as everything I wear is clean and hole-free (which it always is, of course) and my socks match, I'm in the upper 5% of my peer group (geeks), so, although I greatly enjoy the artistry of couture, in my actual life clothes have become pretty much a non-issue, which is really how it should ideally always have been.
I sure hope that that old saying about how clothes make the man (or woman) doesn't apply to what I wore in my formative years, though, lol.
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
"Strip Search"
You can imagine what I THOUGHT this TV show was going to be about, lol, but the premise for this VH1 program turns out to be, "Men compete for a contract with a traveling male strip revue troupe." That sounded promising (hey, I'm married, not DEAD), so I watched it... and ran head-on into human nature.
Everyone knows what male strippers look like; tall, tan (or non-white), muscular, handsome. Everyone also knows what strippers need to be able to do to allow them to BE strippers rather than, say, models; dance and exude sexual energy. Why, then, were the applicants for this competition primarily homely, flabby, pasty, sporting guts and love handles, unable to dance, and with no clue whatsoever as to what to do with their bodies to project a sexual vibe? What went through these men's heads that made them think that, although they possessed NONE of the qualifications to be male strippers, they still had a shot? Are they CRAZY?
There's a classic "Cathy" cartoon where she and her friends are at the pool, and see a hugely fat man in a tiny Speedo who looks relaxed and happy to have his body hanging out, unlike the women, who are agonizing over every bodily flaw, real or imagined, that they have. They express dismay that HE is fine with his body when none of them are satisfied with their own, far closer to acceptable, bodies; he, meanwhile, is looking at one of them and thinking, "She'd be cute if she lost some weight." There are several good lessons about human nature there, but the applicable one is that, even with the advent of metrosexuality, and the belated emergence of male sex symbols that actually have fantasy-worthy bodies rather than just attractive faces, lots of men still have no idea how they rate lookswise, or even that they're BEING rated on things like whether they have a flat stomach, muscle definition, or a butt.
Don't get me wrong, fellas, I don't think you have to be mountains of muscle to be hot; on the contrary, I think that a sleeker but still well-defined body is FAR more attractive, as exemplified by my buddy Wes in the shirtless photo he posted on his terrific blog
http://www.wesoteric.com/blog-archives/05-30-2005/its-time-for-another-crayon-haiku-2/
and I also think that a wide variety of male body shapes that are healthy and strong without being chiseled or lean are very attractive... but to be a STRIPPER, of either gender, you need to have blatant sexual cues in how your body looks, which means big boobs for women and big muscles for men (sadly, it also means shaving the chests, which bums me out no end).
The most entertaining thing about this TV show was what most of the guys thought of as "dancing"; when they saw themselves bobbing, flapping and stomping on video, they probably died of shame... if not directly, then indirectly from the laughter of their friends. And as for dancing SEXY... does anyone besides me wonder how the gender that's biologically programmed for sexual pursuit can be so clueless as to how to BE sexy? What is this issue that straight, white American men have with moving their hips and undulating their bodies... do they think their balls will drop off if they do those things?
Anyways, that's my latest foray into reality TV; what's next, do you suppose, a competition to get guys for porn movies, where they'll whip out a ruler at the auditions? ;-)
Everyone knows what male strippers look like; tall, tan (or non-white), muscular, handsome. Everyone also knows what strippers need to be able to do to allow them to BE strippers rather than, say, models; dance and exude sexual energy. Why, then, were the applicants for this competition primarily homely, flabby, pasty, sporting guts and love handles, unable to dance, and with no clue whatsoever as to what to do with their bodies to project a sexual vibe? What went through these men's heads that made them think that, although they possessed NONE of the qualifications to be male strippers, they still had a shot? Are they CRAZY?
There's a classic "Cathy" cartoon where she and her friends are at the pool, and see a hugely fat man in a tiny Speedo who looks relaxed and happy to have his body hanging out, unlike the women, who are agonizing over every bodily flaw, real or imagined, that they have. They express dismay that HE is fine with his body when none of them are satisfied with their own, far closer to acceptable, bodies; he, meanwhile, is looking at one of them and thinking, "She'd be cute if she lost some weight." There are several good lessons about human nature there, but the applicable one is that, even with the advent of metrosexuality, and the belated emergence of male sex symbols that actually have fantasy-worthy bodies rather than just attractive faces, lots of men still have no idea how they rate lookswise, or even that they're BEING rated on things like whether they have a flat stomach, muscle definition, or a butt.
Don't get me wrong, fellas, I don't think you have to be mountains of muscle to be hot; on the contrary, I think that a sleeker but still well-defined body is FAR more attractive, as exemplified by my buddy Wes in the shirtless photo he posted on his terrific blog
http://www.wesoteric.com/blog-archives/05-30-2005/its-time-for-another-crayon-haiku-2/
and I also think that a wide variety of male body shapes that are healthy and strong without being chiseled or lean are very attractive... but to be a STRIPPER, of either gender, you need to have blatant sexual cues in how your body looks, which means big boobs for women and big muscles for men (sadly, it also means shaving the chests, which bums me out no end).
The most entertaining thing about this TV show was what most of the guys thought of as "dancing"; when they saw themselves bobbing, flapping and stomping on video, they probably died of shame... if not directly, then indirectly from the laughter of their friends. And as for dancing SEXY... does anyone besides me wonder how the gender that's biologically programmed for sexual pursuit can be so clueless as to how to BE sexy? What is this issue that straight, white American men have with moving their hips and undulating their bodies... do they think their balls will drop off if they do those things?
Anyways, that's my latest foray into reality TV; what's next, do you suppose, a competition to get guys for porn movies, where they'll whip out a ruler at the auditions? ;-)
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Return of the karmic cartoon
If you're a long-time reader, you might remember me posting on 12-11-04 about an amazing animated short, "Bumble Beeing," that I saw on a program called "Jump Cuts" on the Comedy Channel; in it, a bug that's smashed on a windshield talks about how it had wanted to make a meaningful contribution... does that ring a bell? If not, or if you're a more recent reader, do yourself a favor and don't read any more of this post until you've watched the cartoon, which can be found here (be sure to have your sound turned on)
http://billyblob.com/cartoons/bumble-beeing/
Did you watch it? If not, I'll finish the plot to show you why I LOVE this piece, which I've discovered was shown at the 2003 Sundance Festival; the wipers finish off the bug and coat the windshield with its remains, such that the driver can't see where he's going... the car crashes into a tree, and the trunk pops open... and a little girl with a taped mouth stands up in it. The way this little work of art presents the idea of how you can get what you ask for, and then some, in a way you never thought of, blew me away, and still does.
I searched all over online for that clip after I saw it on TV, and all I could find was 30 seconds or so of it on the Comedy Channel's website; I looked again today, and it was GONE... so I did a new search, and found that its creator, Billy Blob, now has a website with the longed-for clip as well as several others of his. I'd highly recommend that you watch "Karma Ghost," located here
http://billyblob.com/cartoons/karma-ghost/
because it gives a very clever explanation of how karma works; there are little "karma ghosts" everywhere, and every time the main character interacts with anything in a negative way, be it with a human, dog, car or trash can, a "ghost" leaves the victim and jumps to him, putting on a shirt that describes the wrong he did over its old shirt which described the wrong the victim had previously done... interesting idea, isn't it, that you can directly inherit some of another person's, or animal's, or even an object's karma (which is nothing more than energy, remember), and have it undergo a change to customize it to your situation? That's a reasonable way to see how karma moves around, once you remove the actual ghosts; we MIGHT be getting it from whatever we interact with, rather than creating it, at least some of the time. The other cool concept in the cartoon is that once the man collects enough karma ghosts, they work together to "get" him, thus causing his death; while most people obviously don't die from bad karma, it certainly happens that backloads of karma, + or -, can and do all descend on us at once.
Mr. Blob seems to be a kindred soul; I look forward to seeing more of his work in the future.
http://billyblob.com/cartoons/bumble-beeing/
Did you watch it? If not, I'll finish the plot to show you why I LOVE this piece, which I've discovered was shown at the 2003 Sundance Festival; the wipers finish off the bug and coat the windshield with its remains, such that the driver can't see where he's going... the car crashes into a tree, and the trunk pops open... and a little girl with a taped mouth stands up in it. The way this little work of art presents the idea of how you can get what you ask for, and then some, in a way you never thought of, blew me away, and still does.
I searched all over online for that clip after I saw it on TV, and all I could find was 30 seconds or so of it on the Comedy Channel's website; I looked again today, and it was GONE... so I did a new search, and found that its creator, Billy Blob, now has a website with the longed-for clip as well as several others of his. I'd highly recommend that you watch "Karma Ghost," located here
http://billyblob.com/cartoons/karma-ghost/
because it gives a very clever explanation of how karma works; there are little "karma ghosts" everywhere, and every time the main character interacts with anything in a negative way, be it with a human, dog, car or trash can, a "ghost" leaves the victim and jumps to him, putting on a shirt that describes the wrong he did over its old shirt which described the wrong the victim had previously done... interesting idea, isn't it, that you can directly inherit some of another person's, or animal's, or even an object's karma (which is nothing more than energy, remember), and have it undergo a change to customize it to your situation? That's a reasonable way to see how karma moves around, once you remove the actual ghosts; we MIGHT be getting it from whatever we interact with, rather than creating it, at least some of the time. The other cool concept in the cartoon is that once the man collects enough karma ghosts, they work together to "get" him, thus causing his death; while most people obviously don't die from bad karma, it certainly happens that backloads of karma, + or -, can and do all descend on us at once.
Mr. Blob seems to be a kindred soul; I look forward to seeing more of his work in the future.
Monday, May 30, 2005
Freedom
What better topic for Memorial Day? Freedom is indescribably precious, and we have it because of the men and women of the American armed forces, past and present; today, and every day, my gratitude goes out to every person who has served, or is currently serving, in our military... everything I have, I have because of their willingness to fight to protect us and our country.
Most people who've always had freedom take it for granted; it's hard to imagine what it'd be like to NOT be free when you're used to having a wide range of choices for everything in your life. Throughout history, and in the present day in some cultures, people have been restricted as to what sort of work they could do, what clothes they could wear, whether or not they could go to another town, and on and on; the degree of freedom of action that we enjoy would have been unimaginable to most of the people who have ever lived on this planet.
As I've gotten older, though, I've seen more and more that having freedom in the legal sense isn't enough; that feeling of freedom needs to get inside of you for you to be FULLY free... and conversely, since people such as monks and others of dedicated religious focus have been known to say that they feel totally free despite the lack of freedom of action they actually have, that it's possible to be free from the inside out. Who do you think is freer in the deepest sense, then; an American who because of fear, trauma or whatever doesn't feel free even though technically they are, or someone living under a totalitarian regime with no outer freedom whose spirituality or mental state allows them to FEEL free even though technically they're not?
Ideally, of course, we'd be free inside and out... but how do we achieve that? How do we take the fullest advantage of the freedom that so many men and women have died to provide us with? Some people have had easy enough lives that it's natural for them to feel free inside, but for those of us who grew up under the regimes of parents that made Stalin look like a piker, or who've been victimized in ways that make fear a constant roadblock to internal freedom, is there a way out other than becoming a monk or a nun?
In the bad old days of zoos and circuses, animals like lions and tigers used to be displayed in tiny, bare cages that left them with nothing to do but pace back and forth on their little patches of concrete. When they started taking the poor creatures out of the cages and putting them in more proper enclosures, they discovered a terrible thing; the animals continued to pace back in forth over an area the same size as the cages... the cages had become internalized, and their minds couldn't accept that their level of freedom had increased, or, worse, simply didn't WANT to alter their familiar, dreadful patterns to take advantage of their greater freedom. In an odd parallel, some friends of mine recently adopted a couple of cats that had been kept in cages for a few weeks, and the animals freaked out so much over being turned loose in a house that they had to be penned up in a small bathroom at 1st, and then gradually introduced to bigger areas of the house until they felt ready to roam all around.
Humans have a tendency to react to increased freedom by pushing the new limits, and leaping beyond them if possible; the escapades of teens with their 1st driver's licenses, and college students in that 1st quarter out from under parental supervision, are ample proof of that. Some of us, though, "internalize the cages," probably as a survival mechanism to keep from being crushed emotionally by unbearably restrictive circumstances, and our minds keep us trapped in them long after the actual "cages" are gone; in my case, for example, since my parents were more like wardens than family, I spent my entire childhood and early adulthood doing nothing but reading and watching TV during non-work/school hours, and, if you stretch that to include working on the computer, that's all I do NOW... the urges that "normal" people have to go out, to see new things, to hang out with people, to travel, simply don't exist for me. As another example, I have a friend who's an incest victim, who from an early age tried to eliminate anything attractive or feminine about herself in order to deflect the abuse; over 2 decades after the molestation ended, the only thing that's changed is that she was recently able to start carrying a purse.
I'm luckier than my friend, because, while she still has the suffering along with the "cage," I've always been able to "escape" via my imagination and my love of learning, and so suffered fairly little in the past, and of course not at all now; does that make me more "free" than she is, though, just because I'm happier? I don't think that freedom and happiness or misery are necessarily related, so... I'd say no. How CAN someone with an "internal cage" become free, then, if a good life doesn't do the trick?
There's an old saying that "the truth will set you free"; by leaving the spiritual desert of my earlier life behind, and seeking not just truth but Truth, am I becoming free in the way that matters most, the sort of freedom that the dedicatedly religious lay claim to? Is the pursuit of spirituality, the opening of the mind, the embracing of the unknown, the acceptance of the energies that create reality, a path to true freedom? As recently as a couple of years ago, I'd have scoffed at the idea, but now, as I see myself moving beyond the things that had previously been dark clouds on my emotional horizon as my spirituality deepens, I have to say... yes.
Will I need to grasp all of the truth before being fully free, or will I have to achieve inner freedom in order to see the truth? I hope I find out soon...
Most people who've always had freedom take it for granted; it's hard to imagine what it'd be like to NOT be free when you're used to having a wide range of choices for everything in your life. Throughout history, and in the present day in some cultures, people have been restricted as to what sort of work they could do, what clothes they could wear, whether or not they could go to another town, and on and on; the degree of freedom of action that we enjoy would have been unimaginable to most of the people who have ever lived on this planet.
As I've gotten older, though, I've seen more and more that having freedom in the legal sense isn't enough; that feeling of freedom needs to get inside of you for you to be FULLY free... and conversely, since people such as monks and others of dedicated religious focus have been known to say that they feel totally free despite the lack of freedom of action they actually have, that it's possible to be free from the inside out. Who do you think is freer in the deepest sense, then; an American who because of fear, trauma or whatever doesn't feel free even though technically they are, or someone living under a totalitarian regime with no outer freedom whose spirituality or mental state allows them to FEEL free even though technically they're not?
Ideally, of course, we'd be free inside and out... but how do we achieve that? How do we take the fullest advantage of the freedom that so many men and women have died to provide us with? Some people have had easy enough lives that it's natural for them to feel free inside, but for those of us who grew up under the regimes of parents that made Stalin look like a piker, or who've been victimized in ways that make fear a constant roadblock to internal freedom, is there a way out other than becoming a monk or a nun?
In the bad old days of zoos and circuses, animals like lions and tigers used to be displayed in tiny, bare cages that left them with nothing to do but pace back and forth on their little patches of concrete. When they started taking the poor creatures out of the cages and putting them in more proper enclosures, they discovered a terrible thing; the animals continued to pace back in forth over an area the same size as the cages... the cages had become internalized, and their minds couldn't accept that their level of freedom had increased, or, worse, simply didn't WANT to alter their familiar, dreadful patterns to take advantage of their greater freedom. In an odd parallel, some friends of mine recently adopted a couple of cats that had been kept in cages for a few weeks, and the animals freaked out so much over being turned loose in a house that they had to be penned up in a small bathroom at 1st, and then gradually introduced to bigger areas of the house until they felt ready to roam all around.
Humans have a tendency to react to increased freedom by pushing the new limits, and leaping beyond them if possible; the escapades of teens with their 1st driver's licenses, and college students in that 1st quarter out from under parental supervision, are ample proof of that. Some of us, though, "internalize the cages," probably as a survival mechanism to keep from being crushed emotionally by unbearably restrictive circumstances, and our minds keep us trapped in them long after the actual "cages" are gone; in my case, for example, since my parents were more like wardens than family, I spent my entire childhood and early adulthood doing nothing but reading and watching TV during non-work/school hours, and, if you stretch that to include working on the computer, that's all I do NOW... the urges that "normal" people have to go out, to see new things, to hang out with people, to travel, simply don't exist for me. As another example, I have a friend who's an incest victim, who from an early age tried to eliminate anything attractive or feminine about herself in order to deflect the abuse; over 2 decades after the molestation ended, the only thing that's changed is that she was recently able to start carrying a purse.
I'm luckier than my friend, because, while she still has the suffering along with the "cage," I've always been able to "escape" via my imagination and my love of learning, and so suffered fairly little in the past, and of course not at all now; does that make me more "free" than she is, though, just because I'm happier? I don't think that freedom and happiness or misery are necessarily related, so... I'd say no. How CAN someone with an "internal cage" become free, then, if a good life doesn't do the trick?
There's an old saying that "the truth will set you free"; by leaving the spiritual desert of my earlier life behind, and seeking not just truth but Truth, am I becoming free in the way that matters most, the sort of freedom that the dedicatedly religious lay claim to? Is the pursuit of spirituality, the opening of the mind, the embracing of the unknown, the acceptance of the energies that create reality, a path to true freedom? As recently as a couple of years ago, I'd have scoffed at the idea, but now, as I see myself moving beyond the things that had previously been dark clouds on my emotional horizon as my spirituality deepens, I have to say... yes.
Will I need to grasp all of the truth before being fully free, or will I have to achieve inner freedom in order to see the truth? I hope I find out soon...
Sunday, May 29, 2005
An encouraging dream oddity
We all dream every night, whether we remember it or not; I've often wished to be in the "not" category, because, although I have the occasional lucid dream (which is when you know you're dreaming) in which I can do anything I want, and fairly smokin' sexual dreams a handful of times a year, a greater # of my dreams are some degree of nightmare... that's the dark side of an over-active imagination. Although I have a dismaying # of different types of nightmares, by far the most common are "pursuit nightmares," which are just what they sound like; the pursuer is generally someone unknown to me, or even unseen, but periodically it's the killer from my favorite horror movie series, "A Nightmare on Elm Street," Freddy Krueger... who one astonishing dream revealed to be symbolic of my father, which is probably why he's a recurring character. There was nothing unusual about having him in a dream, as I did last night; the new element was when, exhausted, I was hiding, and could hear him coming, then see him coming, and any moment he was going to see ME... and a force field of flickering white light sprung up between me and him. I understood instantly that this light would prevent him from seeing or otherwise sensing me, and it did; his glance passed over me without reaction, and he continued on down the... wherever it was we were, and eventually he was gone, and I was free to walk away unharmed.
???!!!
This is literally the 1st time in my entire life that an outside agency intervened to save me from harm in a dream; when the force field came on, I "knew" that it was "the white light of goodness," and I knew it was there to save me, but not why, how, or from what source... and I haven't recently encountered any new person or situation that could lead to me believing subconsciously that I'm suddenly safe, or safER, so I'm totally at a loss.
This might sound trivial to you, but I had grisly nightmares every single night of my life until recently, when they've undergone a major reduction, which I blogged about on 4-6-05; my conclusion there was that my increasing spirituality has brought me more positive energy, which has brought about many positive changes in my emotional life, one of which was the reduction in nightmares... but could it also have given me some sort of unconscious idea that something (someONE?) is exerting, or is willing to exert, a protective force over me? Religious folks often feel as if God, Allah, etc is watching over and protecting them; could there be a connection?
With these questions uppermost in my mind, I'm going to sleep now...
???!!!
This is literally the 1st time in my entire life that an outside agency intervened to save me from harm in a dream; when the force field came on, I "knew" that it was "the white light of goodness," and I knew it was there to save me, but not why, how, or from what source... and I haven't recently encountered any new person or situation that could lead to me believing subconsciously that I'm suddenly safe, or safER, so I'm totally at a loss.
This might sound trivial to you, but I had grisly nightmares every single night of my life until recently, when they've undergone a major reduction, which I blogged about on 4-6-05; my conclusion there was that my increasing spirituality has brought me more positive energy, which has brought about many positive changes in my emotional life, one of which was the reduction in nightmares... but could it also have given me some sort of unconscious idea that something (someONE?) is exerting, or is willing to exert, a protective force over me? Religious folks often feel as if God, Allah, etc is watching over and protecting them; could there be a connection?
With these questions uppermost in my mind, I'm going to sleep now...
Saturday, May 28, 2005
Dual-effort tech triumph
My husband really justified his existence today; check the sidebar, and you'll see a new clock... click where it says "calendar" (after hovering over it to see the cool pulsing effect), and the clock will slide up and a guess-what will replace it. How cool is THAT?!! :-)
For those of you who miss the old flash clock, or want to see what it was, or maybe want to put it on your site, you can see it, and the other styles available, here
http://www.clocklink.com/ENG/gallery.htm
The one I'd had is the green version of the 1st one in the gallery.
As you might expect, there's a story behind the new addition; I almost didn't even GET the new addition, because my analysis of the source code of the blog I originally found it on didn't provide me with a URL to get access to the flash file, and the URL that WAS there led to a site with lots of cool stuff but not the clock/calendar combo. I was stumped... until I asked my husband for help.
He was cranky and put-upon, as he always is when asked to do anything, but he revealed that the URL I'd been looking at is something necessary when you use flash, as it accesses the site that'll make sure you're using the right plug-in, and thus has nothing to do with the actual flash file... that was a new one on me, but then again I don't know anything about flash, so that's no surprise.
Because the owner of the site I found the clock on had her own domain, she didn't have full URL's in her source code for the files she was using, and that made it tricky to "find" the file and download it; it also made me wonder if it was her original work, NOT something in the public domain, which would mean that I shouldn't just take it... this concern was doubled by the realization that there was no comment in the code indicating the name or site of the creator, and usually something this slick DOES have that. Much to my relief, I found the site where the flash programmer for what's actually meant to be a watch rather than a clock had offered up several versions of his work for free downloads
http://ptnuke.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=132
which means it IS ok to use it... WHEW!! My husband got the file, and I uploaded it to an online file storage site
http://ripway.com/
which gave me a URL to use in the html code that would access the file and actually put it in the sidebar... it was unfamiliar to me, but I managed to alter the size parameters (it's tricky working with pixels, because I don't intuitively have any idea of how big any given # of pixels is the way I would with inches or fractions thereof) and remove a centering command to make it fit nicely in my sidebar. I saved my template changes, republished my blog, brought it up in a new window, and...
... the clock was on a GREEN background.
My husband had told me that the background was transparent, and I foolishly listened to him and failed to actually LOOK; naturally, a green background was specified in the code, so I changed it to white, added some more space above and below to prevent overlapping onto other elements that was going on in some browsers (important site design rule that I learned the hard way-check every change in ALL your browsers), and... the result is what you see. I hope you get as much of a kick out of it as I do. :-)
As a bonus today, I'm including the URL to one of the cutest tech things every created; it's called an iGuy, and it's a doodad you put your iPod into to give it a body (including a BUTT) and posable arms and legs... it can even STAND. It's so darling that it makes me want to get an iPod just to be able to have an excuse to get it; if other people agree, and I can't imagine they wouldn't, whoever invented it is about to become a billionaire. Check it out here:
http://www.speckproducts.com/iguy.html
For those of you who miss the old flash clock, or want to see what it was, or maybe want to put it on your site, you can see it, and the other styles available, here
http://www.clocklink.com/ENG/gallery.htm
The one I'd had is the green version of the 1st one in the gallery.
As you might expect, there's a story behind the new addition; I almost didn't even GET the new addition, because my analysis of the source code of the blog I originally found it on didn't provide me with a URL to get access to the flash file, and the URL that WAS there led to a site with lots of cool stuff but not the clock/calendar combo. I was stumped... until I asked my husband for help.
He was cranky and put-upon, as he always is when asked to do anything, but he revealed that the URL I'd been looking at is something necessary when you use flash, as it accesses the site that'll make sure you're using the right plug-in, and thus has nothing to do with the actual flash file... that was a new one on me, but then again I don't know anything about flash, so that's no surprise.
Because the owner of the site I found the clock on had her own domain, she didn't have full URL's in her source code for the files she was using, and that made it tricky to "find" the file and download it; it also made me wonder if it was her original work, NOT something in the public domain, which would mean that I shouldn't just take it... this concern was doubled by the realization that there was no comment in the code indicating the name or site of the creator, and usually something this slick DOES have that. Much to my relief, I found the site where the flash programmer for what's actually meant to be a watch rather than a clock had offered up several versions of his work for free downloads
http://ptnuke.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=132
which means it IS ok to use it... WHEW!! My husband got the file, and I uploaded it to an online file storage site
http://ripway.com/
which gave me a URL to use in the html code that would access the file and actually put it in the sidebar... it was unfamiliar to me, but I managed to alter the size parameters (it's tricky working with pixels, because I don't intuitively have any idea of how big any given # of pixels is the way I would with inches or fractions thereof) and remove a centering command to make it fit nicely in my sidebar. I saved my template changes, republished my blog, brought it up in a new window, and...
... the clock was on a GREEN background.
My husband had told me that the background was transparent, and I foolishly listened to him and failed to actually LOOK; naturally, a green background was specified in the code, so I changed it to white, added some more space above and below to prevent overlapping onto other elements that was going on in some browsers (important site design rule that I learned the hard way-check every change in ALL your browsers), and... the result is what you see. I hope you get as much of a kick out of it as I do. :-)
As a bonus today, I'm including the URL to one of the cutest tech things every created; it's called an iGuy, and it's a doodad you put your iPod into to give it a body (including a BUTT) and posable arms and legs... it can even STAND. It's so darling that it makes me want to get an iPod just to be able to have an excuse to get it; if other people agree, and I can't imagine they wouldn't, whoever invented it is about to become a billionaire. Check it out here:
http://www.speckproducts.com/iguy.html
Friday, May 27, 2005
Are you a geek?
Here are a few questions to help you figure it out:
1) You have
a) a computer that you share
b) your own computer
c) more than one computer
d) enough computers to equip a lab
2) If you had to give up either your DSL connection or food, you'd
a) N/A-you don't have DSL
b) give up the DSL
c) hang onto the DSL for a couple of days, until you got really hungry
d) hang onto the DSL until you fell into a starvation coma
e) call a medical supply warehouse and order an IV and a lifetime supply of glucose solution
3) How often do you get so caught up with what you're doing on the computer that you realize 5 or more hours have gone by and you haven't had anything to eat or drink, or even been to the bathroom?
a) Never
b) Sometimes
c) Frequently
d) Twice a day
4) Your wardrobe is best described as
a) whatever's currently in style
b) nice clothes of different kinds for different occasions
c) jeans and t-shirts, with bonus points if the shirts
i) are freebies from tech companies
ii) are decorated with graphics that relate to scifi or cartoons
iii) have stains and/or holes
5) Your meals
a) are skillfully prepared by you
b) are basic but homecooked
c) are microwaved or takeout
6) The word "convention" brings to your mind
a) people gathered together for business purposes
b) people gathered together to view and buy stuff related to scifi, horror, fantasy, anime, gaming and comic books
7) Your home decor has
a) all the standard stuff
b) the standard stuff accented with items related to science, roleplaying games, cartoons, etc
c) piles of computer equipment, a few pieces of furniture, and boxes full of books, magazines, papers and outdated hard drives
8) You see these abbreviations all the time... but for how many of them can you say what they stand for?
a) http
b) html
c) URL
d) CSS
9) a) If you're male, have you forgotten what you look like with short hair, a clean-shaven face, and nice clothes?
b) If you're female, have you forgotten what you look like with makeup, a sexy outfit and high heels?
10) What's your reaction to the following joke: There are 10 kinds of people... those that understand binary and those that don't.
a) HUH?
b) Hahahahahaha!!
No, I don't have some random scoring system to tell you how much of a geek you are based on your answers; you already know, right? In case you were wondering, the abbreviations stand for hypertext transfer protocol, hypertext markup language, uniform resource locator, and cascading style sheets. The punchline of the joke is that in binary, you represent 2 as "10." And yes, these examples were all taken from how my husband and I and some of our friends are.
Why didn't I include questions about technical expertise? Because many people who have that are "normal" people these days, not geeks, and plenty of geeks can't program beyond tweaking the html of a pre-fab template; geekdom requires being overly-involved with computers, granted, but it's also about being part of a subculture that likes certain sorts of things and can't be bothered with others that're standard in the wider culture.
When I met my husband, I didn't own a computer, didn't know how to use one, and had never been online; now, I'm about the geekiest female we know. Do you suppose geekdom is contagious? ;-)
1) You have
a) a computer that you share
b) your own computer
c) more than one computer
d) enough computers to equip a lab
2) If you had to give up either your DSL connection or food, you'd
a) N/A-you don't have DSL
b) give up the DSL
c) hang onto the DSL for a couple of days, until you got really hungry
d) hang onto the DSL until you fell into a starvation coma
e) call a medical supply warehouse and order an IV and a lifetime supply of glucose solution
3) How often do you get so caught up with what you're doing on the computer that you realize 5 or more hours have gone by and you haven't had anything to eat or drink, or even been to the bathroom?
a) Never
b) Sometimes
c) Frequently
d) Twice a day
4) Your wardrobe is best described as
a) whatever's currently in style
b) nice clothes of different kinds for different occasions
c) jeans and t-shirts, with bonus points if the shirts
i) are freebies from tech companies
ii) are decorated with graphics that relate to scifi or cartoons
iii) have stains and/or holes
5) Your meals
a) are skillfully prepared by you
b) are basic but homecooked
c) are microwaved or takeout
6) The word "convention" brings to your mind
a) people gathered together for business purposes
b) people gathered together to view and buy stuff related to scifi, horror, fantasy, anime, gaming and comic books
7) Your home decor has
a) all the standard stuff
b) the standard stuff accented with items related to science, roleplaying games, cartoons, etc
c) piles of computer equipment, a few pieces of furniture, and boxes full of books, magazines, papers and outdated hard drives
8) You see these abbreviations all the time... but for how many of them can you say what they stand for?
a) http
b) html
c) URL
d) CSS
9) a) If you're male, have you forgotten what you look like with short hair, a clean-shaven face, and nice clothes?
b) If you're female, have you forgotten what you look like with makeup, a sexy outfit and high heels?
10) What's your reaction to the following joke: There are 10 kinds of people... those that understand binary and those that don't.
a) HUH?
b) Hahahahahaha!!
No, I don't have some random scoring system to tell you how much of a geek you are based on your answers; you already know, right? In case you were wondering, the abbreviations stand for hypertext transfer protocol, hypertext markup language, uniform resource locator, and cascading style sheets. The punchline of the joke is that in binary, you represent 2 as "10." And yes, these examples were all taken from how my husband and I and some of our friends are.
Why didn't I include questions about technical expertise? Because many people who have that are "normal" people these days, not geeks, and plenty of geeks can't program beyond tweaking the html of a pre-fab template; geekdom requires being overly-involved with computers, granted, but it's also about being part of a subculture that likes certain sorts of things and can't be bothered with others that're standard in the wider culture.
When I met my husband, I didn't own a computer, didn't know how to use one, and had never been online; now, I'm about the geekiest female we know. Do you suppose geekdom is contagious? ;-)
Thursday, May 26, 2005
How observant are you?
Unless you're reading this from another planet, you're human, and if you're human the answer to that question is; not very... according to an article called "What Do Animals Think?" in the May 2005 issue of Discover. The central figure of the article is Temple Grandin, PhD, whose doctorate is in animal science, and who is "perhaps the best-known autistic person in America." It's probably not a coincidence that Grandin picked the field she did, because she feels a certain kinship with animals:
"In her new book, 'Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior,' Grandin examines the surprising similarities between an animal's mind and an autistic mind--her own. 'Autistic people,' she writes, 'are closer to animals than normal people are.'"
"'You can't get anything past a cow,' she writes. She knows this partly because you can't get anything past an autistic person either."
"The difference between a normal person's mental clutter and the intense, detailed absorption of an autistic person's visual concentration closely resembles the difference between humans and animals."
We've all wondered at some point about what animals are thinking and feeling, whether we're pet owners or just animal lovers, and Grandin has shown herself to be astonishingly accurate in seeing things as animals do and predicting how they'll react; this has led her to be a sought-after consultant in the world of animal husbandry... many advances in the humane treatment of "food animals" have come from her, and the article says "Grandin has done more to improve animal welfare than almost any human alive."
Non-autistic people do NOT see as much as we think we do:
"When Grandin teaches people how to handle livestock, the subtext isn't so much what she notices-she takes that for granted, after all. It's what ordinary people don't notice and, especially, how they don't notice. The surprise that normal people feel when they realize how much Grandin sees has been more than matched over the years by her surprise at how much ordinary people fail to see. The difference can be summed up in a relatively simple manner, though the underlying biology is complex. A cow sees everything in detail and responds to details. Like an autistic person, its fears are hyperspecific because its perception is hyperspecific. But normal humans tend to see only what they expect to see.
We're used to the idea that human thought is abstract. But what Grandin points out is that even the sensory perception of ordinary humans is abstract as well. 'Normal people,' she writes, 'see and hear schemas, not raw sensory data.'"
"It's easy to imagine an engineer not being able to visualize a design flaw in a complex structure. What's harder to take in is the everyday blindness of ordinary people. Humans, Grandin writes, 'are built to see what they're expecting to see, and it's hard to expect to see something you've never seen. New things just don't register.' Animals, on the other hand, 'definitely act like they see everything.' New things not only register to cows, they positively throb with significance."
"... there's plenty of scientific evidence to suggest that Grandin's right. Normal humans are good at seeing the big picture but bad at what Grandin calls 'all the tiny little details that go into that picture.' For normal humans, the big picture isn't created by accumulating lots of sensory details. It's created by filtering out detail. 'The price human beings pay for having such big, fat frontal lobes,' Grandin writes, 'is that normal people become oblivious in a way animals and autistic people aren't. Normal people stop seeing the details that make up the big picture and see only the big picture instead.' The result, as she puts it, is that 'normal human beings are blind to anything they're not paying attention to.' And the parameters of our attention can be incredibly narrow.
Like autistic people--and unlike normal humans--animals have direct access to the raw sensory data that an ordinary human brain sifts out. Grandin argues that animals and autistic people are specialists, masters of individual skills and individual senses, whereas ordinary people are generalists. What normal humans specialize in is mental association. The principal difference between a human brain and the brain of a pig, for instance, is an immensely larger neocortex in the human. Humans appear to have evolved that layer of the brain to handle the interconnections and associations that produce what we happily call thought and the conscious mind. The only way to keep the association area of the human brain from becoming overloaded is to strictly limit our access to raw sensory data. Like animals, we see everything. But unlike animals, we process only a fraction of what we see"
"Grandin uses an awkward but powerful word to describe the perceptual fog that normal humans live in. She calls it 'abstractification.' It means the ability to live in our thoughts, surrounded by 'our ideas of things.' 'Normal human beings,' she writes, 'are abstractified in their sensory perceptions as well as their thoughts.'"
Isn't that mindboggling? We think we're so observant, hardly anyone would say that they weren't, yet it turns out that compared to an autistic person we see, really SEE, very little... and yet we base all our judgments on what little detail we take in. I wondered in my last post if ghosts might be around us all the time, and I know that many people will pooh-pooh that idea right away because they haven't seen any evidence of this, or of any of the other things I talk about here... but, can they, or any of us, be really SURE about what we're seeing, given how little detail we apparently notice? There could be all kinds of evidence right in front of us, and we aren't picking up on it... the way we tend to almost never notice the unfocused tips of our noses that're ALWAYS along the bottom of our visual range-heck, I'd NEVER noticed the tip of MY nose until I read "The Invisible Man" and the hero realizes that he can no longer see any of HIS nose, which made me look down and see MY nose for the 1st time in my life.
What else is there right out in the open that we don't see, don't notice, don't grasp the significance of, or have subconsciously written off as known and/or trivial? If we could have the superior perceptions of an autistic person for a day, would we see a bunch of unexpected and unexplainable variations in light, shadow, the way the house creaks and wind sighs through the eaves, that would make our hair stand on end? If we could be spared the need to withdraw from stimuli that afflicts autistics, and make ourselves focus, REALLY focus, on the details we've been missing... what would we see?
Or who?
"In her new book, 'Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior,' Grandin examines the surprising similarities between an animal's mind and an autistic mind--her own. 'Autistic people,' she writes, 'are closer to animals than normal people are.'"
"'You can't get anything past a cow,' she writes. She knows this partly because you can't get anything past an autistic person either."
"The difference between a normal person's mental clutter and the intense, detailed absorption of an autistic person's visual concentration closely resembles the difference between humans and animals."
We've all wondered at some point about what animals are thinking and feeling, whether we're pet owners or just animal lovers, and Grandin has shown herself to be astonishingly accurate in seeing things as animals do and predicting how they'll react; this has led her to be a sought-after consultant in the world of animal husbandry... many advances in the humane treatment of "food animals" have come from her, and the article says "Grandin has done more to improve animal welfare than almost any human alive."
Non-autistic people do NOT see as much as we think we do:
"When Grandin teaches people how to handle livestock, the subtext isn't so much what she notices-she takes that for granted, after all. It's what ordinary people don't notice and, especially, how they don't notice. The surprise that normal people feel when they realize how much Grandin sees has been more than matched over the years by her surprise at how much ordinary people fail to see. The difference can be summed up in a relatively simple manner, though the underlying biology is complex. A cow sees everything in detail and responds to details. Like an autistic person, its fears are hyperspecific because its perception is hyperspecific. But normal humans tend to see only what they expect to see.
We're used to the idea that human thought is abstract. But what Grandin points out is that even the sensory perception of ordinary humans is abstract as well. 'Normal people,' she writes, 'see and hear schemas, not raw sensory data.'"
"It's easy to imagine an engineer not being able to visualize a design flaw in a complex structure. What's harder to take in is the everyday blindness of ordinary people. Humans, Grandin writes, 'are built to see what they're expecting to see, and it's hard to expect to see something you've never seen. New things just don't register.' Animals, on the other hand, 'definitely act like they see everything.' New things not only register to cows, they positively throb with significance."
"... there's plenty of scientific evidence to suggest that Grandin's right. Normal humans are good at seeing the big picture but bad at what Grandin calls 'all the tiny little details that go into that picture.' For normal humans, the big picture isn't created by accumulating lots of sensory details. It's created by filtering out detail. 'The price human beings pay for having such big, fat frontal lobes,' Grandin writes, 'is that normal people become oblivious in a way animals and autistic people aren't. Normal people stop seeing the details that make up the big picture and see only the big picture instead.' The result, as she puts it, is that 'normal human beings are blind to anything they're not paying attention to.' And the parameters of our attention can be incredibly narrow.
Like autistic people--and unlike normal humans--animals have direct access to the raw sensory data that an ordinary human brain sifts out. Grandin argues that animals and autistic people are specialists, masters of individual skills and individual senses, whereas ordinary people are generalists. What normal humans specialize in is mental association. The principal difference between a human brain and the brain of a pig, for instance, is an immensely larger neocortex in the human. Humans appear to have evolved that layer of the brain to handle the interconnections and associations that produce what we happily call thought and the conscious mind. The only way to keep the association area of the human brain from becoming overloaded is to strictly limit our access to raw sensory data. Like animals, we see everything. But unlike animals, we process only a fraction of what we see"
"Grandin uses an awkward but powerful word to describe the perceptual fog that normal humans live in. She calls it 'abstractification.' It means the ability to live in our thoughts, surrounded by 'our ideas of things.' 'Normal human beings,' she writes, 'are abstractified in their sensory perceptions as well as their thoughts.'"
Isn't that mindboggling? We think we're so observant, hardly anyone would say that they weren't, yet it turns out that compared to an autistic person we see, really SEE, very little... and yet we base all our judgments on what little detail we take in. I wondered in my last post if ghosts might be around us all the time, and I know that many people will pooh-pooh that idea right away because they haven't seen any evidence of this, or of any of the other things I talk about here... but, can they, or any of us, be really SURE about what we're seeing, given how little detail we apparently notice? There could be all kinds of evidence right in front of us, and we aren't picking up on it... the way we tend to almost never notice the unfocused tips of our noses that're ALWAYS along the bottom of our visual range-heck, I'd NEVER noticed the tip of MY nose until I read "The Invisible Man" and the hero realizes that he can no longer see any of HIS nose, which made me look down and see MY nose for the 1st time in my life.
What else is there right out in the open that we don't see, don't notice, don't grasp the significance of, or have subconsciously written off as known and/or trivial? If we could have the superior perceptions of an autistic person for a day, would we see a bunch of unexpected and unexplainable variations in light, shadow, the way the house creaks and wind sighs through the eaves, that would make our hair stand on end? If we could be spared the need to withdraw from stimuli that afflicts autistics, and make ourselves focus, REALLY focus, on the details we've been missing... what would we see?
Or who?
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Inspiration from "The Others"
If you haven't seen the abovementioned terrific suspense/horror movie
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMoreMovieProductDetails.action?channel=Movies&subChannel=sub&movieID=127891&displayBoxArt=true#Full
don't miss out on a real treat; skip this post, because it contains SPOILERS for the movie... and if, after you see "The Others," which you really should, you still want to know how I've tied it into my spiritual imaginings, the post will still be here.
I was blown away by the idea of a family of ghosts, with no memory of having died, being "haunted" by the living in such a way that they believed the living to be ghosts; sure, movies like "Beetlejuice" have shown ghosts being bothered by people living in "their" houses, but not, as far as I'd previously seen, have any of them set it up so that the ghosts can't usually see or hear the living, as if the 2 categories live on totally different planes that don't quite touch most of the time rather than really living in the same house.
Which, when you think about it, could well be the case.
If you believe in ghosts, or at least have an open mind, ask yourself this; when a ghost isn't visible, audible or otherwise perceptible, where is it? Is it there but IMperceptible, or is it doing something in another dimension (might there be a dimension called "Heaven" by its inhabitants?), and can it or can't it see us from there? If spirits reside in another dimension, do we perceive them because there's overlap of sensory data in "thin" spots sometimes, and/or maybe because some are "drawn" back here by unfinished business? COULD it be that generally they aren't aware of us? I'd like to believe that they're NOT hanging around, watching us, but the reliable people within my family's circle of acquaintance who see ghosts as naturally as they see anything else assert that they ALWAYS see some, wherever they are, and that some people have their own personal escort; when my uncle was, we thought, terminally ill, a "seeing" friend told us that he saw a sizable group with him, and my father and I saw one of these in what was one of the most amazing experiences of my life... but I try not to think about the ramifications of this too much, as the thought of possibly being observed all the time is distinctly uneasy-making.
Here's the idea that REALLY makes me uneasy, though: How sure can we be that our reality is the true one, or the truEST one, that we're actually alive and doing all the things we think we're doing? What if the reason that time doesn't exist the way we think it does (as quantum physics has proven) is that time is OVER for us, because we're essentially ghosts running through the same experiences forever like a CD on an infinite loop?
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMoreMovieProductDetails.action?channel=Movies&subChannel=sub&movieID=127891&displayBoxArt=true#Full
don't miss out on a real treat; skip this post, because it contains SPOILERS for the movie... and if, after you see "The Others," which you really should, you still want to know how I've tied it into my spiritual imaginings, the post will still be here.
I was blown away by the idea of a family of ghosts, with no memory of having died, being "haunted" by the living in such a way that they believed the living to be ghosts; sure, movies like "Beetlejuice" have shown ghosts being bothered by people living in "their" houses, but not, as far as I'd previously seen, have any of them set it up so that the ghosts can't usually see or hear the living, as if the 2 categories live on totally different planes that don't quite touch most of the time rather than really living in the same house.
Which, when you think about it, could well be the case.
If you believe in ghosts, or at least have an open mind, ask yourself this; when a ghost isn't visible, audible or otherwise perceptible, where is it? Is it there but IMperceptible, or is it doing something in another dimension (might there be a dimension called "Heaven" by its inhabitants?), and can it or can't it see us from there? If spirits reside in another dimension, do we perceive them because there's overlap of sensory data in "thin" spots sometimes, and/or maybe because some are "drawn" back here by unfinished business? COULD it be that generally they aren't aware of us? I'd like to believe that they're NOT hanging around, watching us, but the reliable people within my family's circle of acquaintance who see ghosts as naturally as they see anything else assert that they ALWAYS see some, wherever they are, and that some people have their own personal escort; when my uncle was, we thought, terminally ill, a "seeing" friend told us that he saw a sizable group with him, and my father and I saw one of these in what was one of the most amazing experiences of my life... but I try not to think about the ramifications of this too much, as the thought of possibly being observed all the time is distinctly uneasy-making.
Here's the idea that REALLY makes me uneasy, though: How sure can we be that our reality is the true one, or the truEST one, that we're actually alive and doing all the things we think we're doing? What if the reason that time doesn't exist the way we think it does (as quantum physics has proven) is that time is OVER for us, because we're essentially ghosts running through the same experiences forever like a CD on an infinite loop?
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Intelligence loses yet again
In my post of 5-13-05, I described some sad evidence about how negatively we view intelligence as reflected in a person's language skills; to summarize, a study at Stanford showed that the use of big words in writing led to readers giving a LOWER intelligence rating for the writer, and political analysts say that shorter words and sentences, and more basic language, are more effective in speeches, and get the speaker seen as everything from more honest to more confident... in other words, that the way most intelligent, educated people naturally speak and write is counter-productive to getting them judged positively.
I contacted the primary researcher for the Stanford study, Dr. Daniel Oppenheimer, and he kindly sent me a version of his paper (I assume that he took out alot of statistical stuff that I'm not qualified to understand); from it, I learned that people's judgments of the intelligence of the authors of written passages is so little related to reality that if they print out identical passages in fonts that are easy to read and less easy to read, making it clear that the researchers and NOT the writers chose the fonts, people rated the passages in the harder to read fonts as being written by less intelligent authors... that's right, the EXACT same passage is judged as being from a less intelligent person if the FONT is made less readable, although that has nothing whatsoever to do with the author, much less their intelligence.
The judging of intelligence is even more fickle than that; he also tested how readers would react to passages printed with low toner, and found that they rated the intelligence of a writer HIGHER from the low toner copies!! The explanation for this, which I guess one needs a PhD in cognitive psychology like Dr. Oppenheimer to have foreseen, is that when people's 1st reaction to something they're supposed to judge is, "Oh look, this is messed up," they become consciously aware that it'll be harder to read and that this will impact them negatively, and thus over-correct and rate the author's intelligence as higher than it would be if they were reading from a clear copy.
As disheartening as these results are, they provide a useful hint for those bloggers who get creative with their fonts; it looks cool, but people may be misjudging your intellect as a result. I'd be interested to know if things like yellow text on a red background and other colorful combos popular among younger bloggers affect readers' judgments as to their intelligence, and if so in which direction.
Today, I got hit with "helpful hints" in Cosmo (April 2005 issue-I'm behind in my reading) from an article misleadingly entitled "The Art of Seduction" even though it's about influencing people in general rather than about what it sounds like. The 1st one, about the "right" way to tell a story to a group of people, was mildly dismaying; "If the story is about you, make yourself the butt of the joke, because even if you climbed Mount Kilimanjaro or saved the day, it can be annoying to listen to someone talk about herself in that way." Say WHAT? If you do something impressive, it ANNOYS people to hear about it unless you make it into a JOKE?!! No one likes a braggart, of course, but is it really true that we can't even give a factual report about something impressive we've done without it being a problem? This "hint" targets competency in general rather than intellect in particular, but wait, it gets better.
The next "hint," from Caren Neile, PhD, director of the South Florida Storytelling Project at Florida Atlantic University, is to speak more slowly; "Taking the pace of your speech down a notch makes you seem less anxious and skittish... It projects a kind of confidence and importance that invites people in." Yes, nervous people might speak too quickly, but they might also speak slowly and hesitantly, whereas a confident person might charge boldly forward, verbally speaking... right? The intelligent and educated people I know generally speak more quickly than average when making other than idle social chitchat; their ideas are well thought out and often felt strongly about, they have the vocabularies to not need to flounder for words, and so they tend to move briskly from point to point... whereas the less intelligent people I know tend to plod along more slowly in their speech. The only really bright people I can think of who speak slowly are those who are shy and/or with poor verbal skills, who simply can't go any faster without stumbling over their own tongues, so to my mind the idea of speaking more slowly, NOT to prevent sounding like an auctioneer or otherwise be better understood but simply to make a better impression, is in the same category as using smaller words and shorter sentences... the idea being to mimic the average person, who is of average intelligence, and thus to win general approval.
The heading of the next section of the article made me want to scream; "Don't Show Off Your Smarts." I wish I was joking. They advise (asterisks are mine), "... even when you're armed with convo-starting current events or a fabulous anecdote, you still want to ***** act a tad naive so you don't seem, frankly, obnoxious." ***** If you know something interesting, you're supposed to FAKE being some clueless twit who accidentally just happens to know it?!! Yes, according to them; "Next time you're trying to stoke a conversation with some interesting tidbit, ***** couch your smarts in an unintimidating way ***** by introducing the topic with something like 'Wow, I learned this cool thing recently...'" In other words, sound like a kid passing along something rather than like an adult discussing something; do you suppose they'd DARE suggest this tactic in a MEN'S magazine?!! Would any man be willing to pass along information this way? It kills me that a women's magazine is instructing intelligent women to sound like morons to be considered likable... and that, again, the central idea is that you have to pretend that you don't know more than anyone else does, that you're average just like they are, rather than intelligent and knowledgeable.
I'm sure it's no coincidence that I read this article so soon after reading the other ones about this topic, and collectively they hammer home a crucial lesson that'll probably benefit me at some time in the future when I have to deal with people other than geeks and other intellectuals and try to impress them or garner their liking; in general, though, although I've always tried to hold off on the $10 words when I'm talking to regular folks so I don't get blank stares and admissions that they don't know what I'm talking about, I'm just not willing to dumb myself down to the level that studies and experts say would get me the highest rating of intelligence and likability from the general population.
For anyone out there who thinks that my vocabulary and ability to express complex thoughts makes me UNintelligent, and who's going to dislike me because I don't pretend to not know anything except by accident, I have a statement of the kind they prefer; it contains only short words, and there are only 2 of them... and the 2nd word is "you."
I contacted the primary researcher for the Stanford study, Dr. Daniel Oppenheimer, and he kindly sent me a version of his paper (I assume that he took out alot of statistical stuff that I'm not qualified to understand); from it, I learned that people's judgments of the intelligence of the authors of written passages is so little related to reality that if they print out identical passages in fonts that are easy to read and less easy to read, making it clear that the researchers and NOT the writers chose the fonts, people rated the passages in the harder to read fonts as being written by less intelligent authors... that's right, the EXACT same passage is judged as being from a less intelligent person if the FONT is made less readable, although that has nothing whatsoever to do with the author, much less their intelligence.
The judging of intelligence is even more fickle than that; he also tested how readers would react to passages printed with low toner, and found that they rated the intelligence of a writer HIGHER from the low toner copies!! The explanation for this, which I guess one needs a PhD in cognitive psychology like Dr. Oppenheimer to have foreseen, is that when people's 1st reaction to something they're supposed to judge is, "Oh look, this is messed up," they become consciously aware that it'll be harder to read and that this will impact them negatively, and thus over-correct and rate the author's intelligence as higher than it would be if they were reading from a clear copy.
As disheartening as these results are, they provide a useful hint for those bloggers who get creative with their fonts; it looks cool, but people may be misjudging your intellect as a result. I'd be interested to know if things like yellow text on a red background and other colorful combos popular among younger bloggers affect readers' judgments as to their intelligence, and if so in which direction.
Today, I got hit with "helpful hints" in Cosmo (April 2005 issue-I'm behind in my reading) from an article misleadingly entitled "The Art of Seduction" even though it's about influencing people in general rather than about what it sounds like. The 1st one, about the "right" way to tell a story to a group of people, was mildly dismaying; "If the story is about you, make yourself the butt of the joke, because even if you climbed Mount Kilimanjaro or saved the day, it can be annoying to listen to someone talk about herself in that way." Say WHAT? If you do something impressive, it ANNOYS people to hear about it unless you make it into a JOKE?!! No one likes a braggart, of course, but is it really true that we can't even give a factual report about something impressive we've done without it being a problem? This "hint" targets competency in general rather than intellect in particular, but wait, it gets better.
The next "hint," from Caren Neile, PhD, director of the South Florida Storytelling Project at Florida Atlantic University, is to speak more slowly; "Taking the pace of your speech down a notch makes you seem less anxious and skittish... It projects a kind of confidence and importance that invites people in." Yes, nervous people might speak too quickly, but they might also speak slowly and hesitantly, whereas a confident person might charge boldly forward, verbally speaking... right? The intelligent and educated people I know generally speak more quickly than average when making other than idle social chitchat; their ideas are well thought out and often felt strongly about, they have the vocabularies to not need to flounder for words, and so they tend to move briskly from point to point... whereas the less intelligent people I know tend to plod along more slowly in their speech. The only really bright people I can think of who speak slowly are those who are shy and/or with poor verbal skills, who simply can't go any faster without stumbling over their own tongues, so to my mind the idea of speaking more slowly, NOT to prevent sounding like an auctioneer or otherwise be better understood but simply to make a better impression, is in the same category as using smaller words and shorter sentences... the idea being to mimic the average person, who is of average intelligence, and thus to win general approval.
The heading of the next section of the article made me want to scream; "Don't Show Off Your Smarts." I wish I was joking. They advise (asterisks are mine), "... even when you're armed with convo-starting current events or a fabulous anecdote, you still want to ***** act a tad naive so you don't seem, frankly, obnoxious." ***** If you know something interesting, you're supposed to FAKE being some clueless twit who accidentally just happens to know it?!! Yes, according to them; "Next time you're trying to stoke a conversation with some interesting tidbit, ***** couch your smarts in an unintimidating way ***** by introducing the topic with something like 'Wow, I learned this cool thing recently...'" In other words, sound like a kid passing along something rather than like an adult discussing something; do you suppose they'd DARE suggest this tactic in a MEN'S magazine?!! Would any man be willing to pass along information this way? It kills me that a women's magazine is instructing intelligent women to sound like morons to be considered likable... and that, again, the central idea is that you have to pretend that you don't know more than anyone else does, that you're average just like they are, rather than intelligent and knowledgeable.
I'm sure it's no coincidence that I read this article so soon after reading the other ones about this topic, and collectively they hammer home a crucial lesson that'll probably benefit me at some time in the future when I have to deal with people other than geeks and other intellectuals and try to impress them or garner their liking; in general, though, although I've always tried to hold off on the $10 words when I'm talking to regular folks so I don't get blank stares and admissions that they don't know what I'm talking about, I'm just not willing to dumb myself down to the level that studies and experts say would get me the highest rating of intelligence and likability from the general population.
For anyone out there who thinks that my vocabulary and ability to express complex thoughts makes me UNintelligent, and who's going to dislike me because I don't pretend to not know anything except by accident, I have a statement of the kind they prefer; it contains only short words, and there are only 2 of them... and the 2nd word is "you."
Monday, May 23, 2005
What makes a true friend?
I spent today shopping and having dinner with one of my oldest and dearest friends. She has no interest in karma or spirituality. She knows nothing about science, psychology or couture. She has never been online, and wouldn't know what a blog was if asked. I'm an old married lady, but she still lives with her parents although she's in her 40's. Aside from trivial things, like both finding it attractive when a man has a hairy chest and both liking the flavor of blue raspberry Icees, we have nothing in common. It doesn't sound like we should have any basis for friendship, does it?
We can talk nonstop for hours; we've never run out of things to say. I honestly couldn't tell you what we talk ABOUT most of the time... we just have a smooth flow of communication in which the metamessage of caring is more important that what's being said.
She's totally accepting of me; she's never demanded that I justify my often-unusual preferences or choices, or tried to argue me out of them.
I'm totally accepting of her; she's one of the unfortunate souls whose beauty is 100% INternal, and although I was considered a hot item when we met, and she was the butt of jokes, I befriended her and was always good to her... she told me at one point that I was one of only 2 people in her life who'd ever been a true friend.
When we shop, I help her look for things for herself most of the time rather than looking for things for myself; I've taught her how to put herself together as attractively as possible, to allow her to feel better about herself... which has allowed a once-doormat to get enough self-esteem to stand up for herself and be her own person.
When we have dinner and she gets a salad and I don't, she gives me some of hers so I have something to eat... including most or all of her croutons. She's taught me generosity of spirit, about giving in the purest sense; important lessons for the child of selfish, stingy parents.
NOW is there any confusion as to why we're friends?
True friendship isn't about liking the same things or doing the same activities; a true friend accepts you where you're good (and understands that if it isn't harmful it's ok even if it's not their style), offers help where you need it, and makes you a better person. Did you EVER consider those qualities as requirements in a friend? Why not... what could be more important? How much do you suppose we're missing out on in the modern day, where we can't be bothered to really get to know someone unless they have an overwhelming amount of surface things in common with us? How many times has karma sent you someone who could enrich you, and who you in turn could enrich, only to have you and/or them be unwilling to make the effort to get to know each other because you didn't have the easy route of mutual interests?
People used to think I was nuts for being willing to attempt friendship with anyone who offered it, even if the offerer was the sort of person that everyone turned their noses up at; in retrospect, that's one of the smartest decisions I ever made.
We can talk nonstop for hours; we've never run out of things to say. I honestly couldn't tell you what we talk ABOUT most of the time... we just have a smooth flow of communication in which the metamessage of caring is more important that what's being said.
She's totally accepting of me; she's never demanded that I justify my often-unusual preferences or choices, or tried to argue me out of them.
I'm totally accepting of her; she's one of the unfortunate souls whose beauty is 100% INternal, and although I was considered a hot item when we met, and she was the butt of jokes, I befriended her and was always good to her... she told me at one point that I was one of only 2 people in her life who'd ever been a true friend.
When we shop, I help her look for things for herself most of the time rather than looking for things for myself; I've taught her how to put herself together as attractively as possible, to allow her to feel better about herself... which has allowed a once-doormat to get enough self-esteem to stand up for herself and be her own person.
When we have dinner and she gets a salad and I don't, she gives me some of hers so I have something to eat... including most or all of her croutons. She's taught me generosity of spirit, about giving in the purest sense; important lessons for the child of selfish, stingy parents.
NOW is there any confusion as to why we're friends?
True friendship isn't about liking the same things or doing the same activities; a true friend accepts you where you're good (and understands that if it isn't harmful it's ok even if it's not their style), offers help where you need it, and makes you a better person. Did you EVER consider those qualities as requirements in a friend? Why not... what could be more important? How much do you suppose we're missing out on in the modern day, where we can't be bothered to really get to know someone unless they have an overwhelming amount of surface things in common with us? How many times has karma sent you someone who could enrich you, and who you in turn could enrich, only to have you and/or them be unwilling to make the effort to get to know each other because you didn't have the easy route of mutual interests?
People used to think I was nuts for being willing to attempt friendship with anyone who offered it, even if the offerer was the sort of person that everyone turned their noses up at; in retrospect, that's one of the smartest decisions I ever made.
Sunday, May 22, 2005
Is anyone an expert on romantic relationships?
There are certainly many who CLAIM to be, some with actual degrees in psychology, some with careers as couples therapists (did you know that you do NOT have to have a degree to call yourself a therapist?)... and it never ceases to amaze me how little clue they generally have.
A standard line of thought from them, and the one that always amuses me the most, is to claim that all successful couples do, don't do, say or don't say certain things... ridiculous things that I can't imagine that ANY couple has EVER handled that way. They describe elaborate communication rituals that, even if any woman independently came up with them, no man would participate in beyond the grunts and groans that men typically come out with when their women try to get them to discuss the details of the relationship or to drag deep thoughts and feelings out of them. They detail behavior patterns, emotional reactions and mindsets that are totally contrary to both male and female relationship norms. They talk about the regular occurrence of novel sexual, romantic, and couple-time activities that shows a total lack of grasp of how human beings fall into ruts and have no interest in climbing out, even if it's to their benefit. They insist upon the necessity of wild spontaneous goings-on that only the idle and childless wealthy would have the time and ability to do.
It should come as no surprise that many of these folks are either single or have failed in at least one marriage; most notably, one of the best-known female relationship gurus, Barbara De Angelis, has been married FIVE times, and her 3rd husband was fellow guru John Gray, author of "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus"... so why do we listen to these people?
There's an old saying; "A woman marries a man expecting him to change, and he doesn't... and a man marries a woman expecting her not to change, and she does." This is certainly an over-generalization, but it points up 2 of the most important things to remember when trying to form a lasting relationship:
1) Do NOT put on a fake persona, or fake any part of how you interact with your prospective partner, as you can NOT keep it up forever, and more importantly you're being deceptive, and that'll come back to bite you eventually. If you can't show your true self to a person, either you lack what it takes to have a long-term relationship, or they're too immature to handle normal human failings and so are themselves lacking... or of course both.
2) Do NOT delude yourself that you can change the other person, or that you can prevent them from gradually changing as they mature and grow. You can't expect your partner to be like your same-sex or friends, or like you (unless you're gay, in which case I wouldn't pretend to be able to offer advice); men and women are DIFFERENT, and will STAY different, and will grow and change in different ways over the years... so if you can't handle socks on the floor or panties drying on the shower rod, or the other irritating things each gender does, you're not ready for a long-term relationship yet.
To these, I'd add 3 others:
3) Don't confuse lust and infatuation with love; you can NOT love a person until you've known them long and well enough to see what's lovable about them, so if you're talking about love within a few weeks, or even months, of meeting someone, you're very likely heading for a fall.
4) Don't confuse having things in common plus sexual attraction with love; someone too like you will usually bore you sooner or later, and, more importantly, it's too easy to get too close too fast with such a person, and to not realize that they differ from you in crucial ways before it's too late.
5) Don't enter into a relationship with unrealistic expectations. Don't think that your relationship will be like what you see in the movies, or even like what your parents had; expect it to be hard work, with plenty of fighting and aggravation and not getting your way, and fairly dull much of the time... in other words expect it to be like LIFE, and if your mate has the same perspective you'll do ok.
There will certainly be people whose relationships are exceptions to the above, just as there are people who married as teenagers, or after only knowing each other a few weeks, who manage to beat the odds and be together forever, but they WILL apply to most people... which is more than the so-called experts can say about THEIR advice.
A standard line of thought from them, and the one that always amuses me the most, is to claim that all successful couples do, don't do, say or don't say certain things... ridiculous things that I can't imagine that ANY couple has EVER handled that way. They describe elaborate communication rituals that, even if any woman independently came up with them, no man would participate in beyond the grunts and groans that men typically come out with when their women try to get them to discuss the details of the relationship or to drag deep thoughts and feelings out of them. They detail behavior patterns, emotional reactions and mindsets that are totally contrary to both male and female relationship norms. They talk about the regular occurrence of novel sexual, romantic, and couple-time activities that shows a total lack of grasp of how human beings fall into ruts and have no interest in climbing out, even if it's to their benefit. They insist upon the necessity of wild spontaneous goings-on that only the idle and childless wealthy would have the time and ability to do.
It should come as no surprise that many of these folks are either single or have failed in at least one marriage; most notably, one of the best-known female relationship gurus, Barbara De Angelis, has been married FIVE times, and her 3rd husband was fellow guru John Gray, author of "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus"... so why do we listen to these people?
There's an old saying; "A woman marries a man expecting him to change, and he doesn't... and a man marries a woman expecting her not to change, and she does." This is certainly an over-generalization, but it points up 2 of the most important things to remember when trying to form a lasting relationship:
1) Do NOT put on a fake persona, or fake any part of how you interact with your prospective partner, as you can NOT keep it up forever, and more importantly you're being deceptive, and that'll come back to bite you eventually. If you can't show your true self to a person, either you lack what it takes to have a long-term relationship, or they're too immature to handle normal human failings and so are themselves lacking... or of course both.
2) Do NOT delude yourself that you can change the other person, or that you can prevent them from gradually changing as they mature and grow. You can't expect your partner to be like your same-sex or friends, or like you (unless you're gay, in which case I wouldn't pretend to be able to offer advice); men and women are DIFFERENT, and will STAY different, and will grow and change in different ways over the years... so if you can't handle socks on the floor or panties drying on the shower rod, or the other irritating things each gender does, you're not ready for a long-term relationship yet.
To these, I'd add 3 others:
3) Don't confuse lust and infatuation with love; you can NOT love a person until you've known them long and well enough to see what's lovable about them, so if you're talking about love within a few weeks, or even months, of meeting someone, you're very likely heading for a fall.
4) Don't confuse having things in common plus sexual attraction with love; someone too like you will usually bore you sooner or later, and, more importantly, it's too easy to get too close too fast with such a person, and to not realize that they differ from you in crucial ways before it's too late.
5) Don't enter into a relationship with unrealistic expectations. Don't think that your relationship will be like what you see in the movies, or even like what your parents had; expect it to be hard work, with plenty of fighting and aggravation and not getting your way, and fairly dull much of the time... in other words expect it to be like LIFE, and if your mate has the same perspective you'll do ok.
There will certainly be people whose relationships are exceptions to the above, just as there are people who married as teenagers, or after only knowing each other a few weeks, who manage to beat the odds and be together forever, but they WILL apply to most people... which is more than the so-called experts can say about THEIR advice.
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