Monday, July 25, 2005
Joel Osteen describes karma again
In tonight's sermon, Osteen explained that to get something you really wanted, something important, something big, you had to 1st "plant the seed" in your mind that it really could happen, WOULD happen, and then you had to, guess what... think about it over and over. Sound familiar? It's exactly how I've always described how you can get karma to bring you the things you want; I've posted about it many times, as recently as a couple of days ago. It's astounding to hear a Christian pastor saying, not that you should pray to God all the time to get what you want, but that you should think about it all the time... a crucial difference, and an amazing one considering the source.
As usual, he illustrated his point with a story; there was a couple who were desperate to have a baby, and had failed for a long while, so they bought a little baby outfit and put it in the kitchen where they could see it all the time and thus keep the baby thoughts uppermost in their minds all the time... and naturally the wife got pregnant, and the baby did wear the outfit that Osteen credited for making the pregnancy happen. He of course always says or implies that God has done whatever it is that got done, but his point is that you have to do certain things in order for God to be able to give you the stuff you want; interesting mindset from someone who should believe in an omnipotent deity, don't you think?
Osteen's father was also the pastor of his church, so he's been saturated in hard-core religion his entire life, but still he persists in describing, in sermon after sermon, exactly the same karmic concepts I post about here, with the only difference being that he says that God will deliver to you instead of karma. His broadcasts are the only religious programming I've ever watched, and I got drawn into them without knowing anything about him or his ideas about how the universe works, just because I had the urge to watch him; is my interest in this pastor who unexpectedly talks about karma a coincidence? Of course not. Is it the result of karma bringing me the information I'm constantly asking for in the spiritual realm... or is this, as some of my Christian friends would suggest, God's way of telling me that He is in fact the engine of karma, and of bringing me to Him in a way that I can accept?
There was a time that I'd have recoiled from that sort of thinking, but now I'm able to hold my mind open, and make every effort to do so, because if there IS any sort of deity out there, I HAVE TO KNOW. I honestly dislike the idea of the existence of a being who's monitoring me all the time, not to mention judging me by standards that aren't quite my own, but imagine how my life would change if I could believe that some loving force existed out there somewhere that cared enough about me to make all this effort to make itself known to me.
It was so much easier when I was an indifferent agnostic; being a mystic is a tough road to follow. I can see now that I need to push myself harder on the God issue, and not let it just sit there in the "neither proved nor disproved" category.
I ask that karma send me information to settle the question of the existence of any forces in the universe that would be considered deities by human beings.
As to those forces, if they exist, whether called God, or Allah, or Goddess, or perhaps all of these and many more; if you're out there, and have any interest in expanding my awareness, I'm ready. I don't promise worship, or reverence, or prayers, but I can manage acknowledgment... for now.
I don't ask for much, do I? I can't wait to find out what, if anything, answers my request...
As usual, he illustrated his point with a story; there was a couple who were desperate to have a baby, and had failed for a long while, so they bought a little baby outfit and put it in the kitchen where they could see it all the time and thus keep the baby thoughts uppermost in their minds all the time... and naturally the wife got pregnant, and the baby did wear the outfit that Osteen credited for making the pregnancy happen. He of course always says or implies that God has done whatever it is that got done, but his point is that you have to do certain things in order for God to be able to give you the stuff you want; interesting mindset from someone who should believe in an omnipotent deity, don't you think?
Osteen's father was also the pastor of his church, so he's been saturated in hard-core religion his entire life, but still he persists in describing, in sermon after sermon, exactly the same karmic concepts I post about here, with the only difference being that he says that God will deliver to you instead of karma. His broadcasts are the only religious programming I've ever watched, and I got drawn into them without knowing anything about him or his ideas about how the universe works, just because I had the urge to watch him; is my interest in this pastor who unexpectedly talks about karma a coincidence? Of course not. Is it the result of karma bringing me the information I'm constantly asking for in the spiritual realm... or is this, as some of my Christian friends would suggest, God's way of telling me that He is in fact the engine of karma, and of bringing me to Him in a way that I can accept?
There was a time that I'd have recoiled from that sort of thinking, but now I'm able to hold my mind open, and make every effort to do so, because if there IS any sort of deity out there, I HAVE TO KNOW. I honestly dislike the idea of the existence of a being who's monitoring me all the time, not to mention judging me by standards that aren't quite my own, but imagine how my life would change if I could believe that some loving force existed out there somewhere that cared enough about me to make all this effort to make itself known to me.
It was so much easier when I was an indifferent agnostic; being a mystic is a tough road to follow. I can see now that I need to push myself harder on the God issue, and not let it just sit there in the "neither proved nor disproved" category.
I ask that karma send me information to settle the question of the existence of any forces in the universe that would be considered deities by human beings.
As to those forces, if they exist, whether called God, or Allah, or Goddess, or perhaps all of these and many more; if you're out there, and have any interest in expanding my awareness, I'm ready. I don't promise worship, or reverence, or prayers, but I can manage acknowledgment... for now.
I don't ask for much, do I? I can't wait to find out what, if anything, answers my request...
Sunday, July 24, 2005
"But my mother said..."
The phrase in the title is often heard in sentences like, "I wanted to color my hair red, but my mother said it wouldn't look good," "I wanted to move to Georgia, but my mother said it gets too hot in the summer," "I was going to take my vacation in May, but my mother said June would be better"... and I mean from people who've been adults for 2 decades, not from kids. What's the deal with this? Once your mother stops having direct power over your life, why would you even consider her usually-random suggestions aka attempts to control you, much less make your decisions based on her whims rather than your own wants for your own life? This just makes me NUTS, doubly so when people claim that they "can't" stand up to their mothers, and "can't" do other than what their mothers say is best. If YOU know people like this, here are a couple of examples of how I got my own mother to release the stranglehold she'd had on me my entire young life and grasp that she had NO power, control or influence over my adult life that you can pass along:
1) The scene: my wedding plans are in full swing, and my mother is being brought up to date on what's been decided, including the members of the wedding party:
Her: You can't have "those people" in your wedding party.
Me: Of course we can.
Her: You can't have a best man in a wheelchair.
Me: Yes, we can.
Her: What's that going to look like?
Me: Like my husband's best friend happens to be in a wheelchair.
Her: Well, you can't do it that way.
Me: It's not up for discussion; that's who he wants as his best man, and that's who he's having.
Her: (realizing belatedly that nothing she can say to ME will alter my then-fiance's choice) That's bad enough, but you can't have HER as your matron of honor.
Me: Yes, I can.
Her: What will people think?
Me: That she's a lovely person, because she IS.
Her: What if they find out what she is?
Me: Everyone already knows that she's a post-operative transsexual, and nobody cares.
Her: That's what you think.
Me: That's what I KNOW; the only person of my acquaintance who has a problem with transsexuals is YOU.
Her: Well, you can't have someone like that as your matron of honor.
Me: Wanna bet?
Her: If you're expecting ME to contribute towards your wedding, then...
Me: (interrupting her with gales of laughter) Have I asked you for one penny, or one shred of effort towards this wedding? I was never expecting any $ from you, and I don't WANT any $ that comes with strings attached of control of MY wedding; my future mother-in-law has kindly offered to pay for the entire thing, and she's not asking for ANY say-so in our plans in return, so you can just take that $5 you were planning to buy decision-making power over this wedding with and put it back in your purse.
Her: (shifting gears after a stunned silence) You'd better not be expecting me to socialize with that sort of person.
Me: Yes, I do, since we're all going to be sitting at the head table and she's certainly going to want to talk to all of my family, including you.
Her: I'm not going to talk to anyone who's that way.
Me: Let me make this clear to you; SHE has a definite invitation to the wedding, but YOU do NOT; your place at my wedding is conditional upon your treating my friend with the respect, courtesy and kindness she deserves as someone who's a good person who's done no harm to you or anyone... and if you can't do that, you will NOT be at the wedding, and I'll explain to the family WHY you aren't going to be attending. Unless you want them all to know what a prejudiced, close-minded, unpleasant person you really are, you make up your mind to extend your usual fake-sweetness act to ALL of my friends, or you're staying home.
She huffed, and she puffed, but she eventually saw that I wasn't joking, and, although her performance as mother of the bride was an all-time low in the history of Western civilization (she stayed on the opposite side of the hall from me all night), my friend never had any hint that my mother saw her as sub-human... and being able to totally dictate to the woman who'd dictated to ME all those years was one of the great triumphs of my life.
2) The scene: shortly after my marriage, my mother is trying to get me to run my home the way she wants:
Me: No.
Her: But you have to...
Me: No.
Her: But it's stupid if you don't...
Me: No.
Her: That's enough of that!! I said you need to...
Me: And *I* said NO. Do you live here? Is your name on the lease? Do you pay the bills? No? Well guess what; that means you have NO say in how things are done in this house, so don't waste your time trying to badger me into doing things your way... the time when you had anything to hold over my head to force me into following your rules is OVER. This is MY home, and *I* decide how things are run here.
Believe it or not, I had to go through that scenario with her THREE times before she gave up... she was that desperate to maintain control over me.
Was any of that difficult to do? Not in the slightest; the only thing that was ever difficult was having to go along with her nonsense, and my father's as well before he left her, all those years when I was financially dependent on them and had to knuckle under or live in a cardboard box in an alley.
Why is this so difficult for people to do? How can anyone who can't cut the apron strings and make decisions without maternal input ever be satisfied with their lives, when they're not masters of their own destiny?
This must be another one of those human-nature things that I'll never understand; trust me, though, if you've got some backbone, you CAN make sure that your mother/parents respect your right as an adult to live your life your way... and the feeling that comes with the realization that you and only you decide how to live your life is second to none.
1) The scene: my wedding plans are in full swing, and my mother is being brought up to date on what's been decided, including the members of the wedding party:
Her: You can't have "those people" in your wedding party.
Me: Of course we can.
Her: You can't have a best man in a wheelchair.
Me: Yes, we can.
Her: What's that going to look like?
Me: Like my husband's best friend happens to be in a wheelchair.
Her: Well, you can't do it that way.
Me: It's not up for discussion; that's who he wants as his best man, and that's who he's having.
Her: (realizing belatedly that nothing she can say to ME will alter my then-fiance's choice) That's bad enough, but you can't have HER as your matron of honor.
Me: Yes, I can.
Her: What will people think?
Me: That she's a lovely person, because she IS.
Her: What if they find out what she is?
Me: Everyone already knows that she's a post-operative transsexual, and nobody cares.
Her: That's what you think.
Me: That's what I KNOW; the only person of my acquaintance who has a problem with transsexuals is YOU.
Her: Well, you can't have someone like that as your matron of honor.
Me: Wanna bet?
Her: If you're expecting ME to contribute towards your wedding, then...
Me: (interrupting her with gales of laughter) Have I asked you for one penny, or one shred of effort towards this wedding? I was never expecting any $ from you, and I don't WANT any $ that comes with strings attached of control of MY wedding; my future mother-in-law has kindly offered to pay for the entire thing, and she's not asking for ANY say-so in our plans in return, so you can just take that $5 you were planning to buy decision-making power over this wedding with and put it back in your purse.
Her: (shifting gears after a stunned silence) You'd better not be expecting me to socialize with that sort of person.
Me: Yes, I do, since we're all going to be sitting at the head table and she's certainly going to want to talk to all of my family, including you.
Her: I'm not going to talk to anyone who's that way.
Me: Let me make this clear to you; SHE has a definite invitation to the wedding, but YOU do NOT; your place at my wedding is conditional upon your treating my friend with the respect, courtesy and kindness she deserves as someone who's a good person who's done no harm to you or anyone... and if you can't do that, you will NOT be at the wedding, and I'll explain to the family WHY you aren't going to be attending. Unless you want them all to know what a prejudiced, close-minded, unpleasant person you really are, you make up your mind to extend your usual fake-sweetness act to ALL of my friends, or you're staying home.
She huffed, and she puffed, but she eventually saw that I wasn't joking, and, although her performance as mother of the bride was an all-time low in the history of Western civilization (she stayed on the opposite side of the hall from me all night), my friend never had any hint that my mother saw her as sub-human... and being able to totally dictate to the woman who'd dictated to ME all those years was one of the great triumphs of my life.
2) The scene: shortly after my marriage, my mother is trying to get me to run my home the way she wants:
Me: No.
Her: But you have to...
Me: No.
Her: But it's stupid if you don't...
Me: No.
Her: That's enough of that!! I said you need to...
Me: And *I* said NO. Do you live here? Is your name on the lease? Do you pay the bills? No? Well guess what; that means you have NO say in how things are done in this house, so don't waste your time trying to badger me into doing things your way... the time when you had anything to hold over my head to force me into following your rules is OVER. This is MY home, and *I* decide how things are run here.
Believe it or not, I had to go through that scenario with her THREE times before she gave up... she was that desperate to maintain control over me.
Was any of that difficult to do? Not in the slightest; the only thing that was ever difficult was having to go along with her nonsense, and my father's as well before he left her, all those years when I was financially dependent on them and had to knuckle under or live in a cardboard box in an alley.
Why is this so difficult for people to do? How can anyone who can't cut the apron strings and make decisions without maternal input ever be satisfied with their lives, when they're not masters of their own destiny?
This must be another one of those human-nature things that I'll never understand; trust me, though, if you've got some backbone, you CAN make sure that your mother/parents respect your right as an adult to live your life your way... and the feeling that comes with the realization that you and only you decide how to live your life is second to none.
Saturday, July 23, 2005
The power of thought vs the laws of nature
My friend Melanie, whose excellent blog is here
http://converttheatheist.blogspot.com/
brought up an interesting point today; whether it's possible for the laws of nature to exist, for science to exist, for cause and effect to exist, if with our thoughts we can make things happen. On the one hand, it's a moot point, as all of those things clearly do exist, and there's no "if" about the power of thought, but on the other hand it's worthwhile to ponder how those things fit together.
Unlike some people, I don't see anything mystical about any of the aspects of karma, including the ability of our minds to reach out and touch the future (precognition), know the unknowable (telepathy), heal (sometimes called faith healing, but you don't need faith in a deity for it to work), and add threads to the tapestry of karma and thus determine its pattern; I see a force of nature, no more otherworldly than gravity or radiation. True, we can't perceive the energy of thought, or any of the other facets of karma, in action, and science cannot yet detect them, but we can't perceive, for example, radio waves or microwaves either, and throughout nearly all of human history scientific instruments to measure them didn't exist, but they were there nevertheless. I fully expect them to figure out how to detect the energies of karma in action eventually, hopefully in my lifetime; my guess is that, since the strings of energy that M-theory tells us make up everything in the omniverse are probably either karma, or made of karma, or karma is made of them, that once they start being able to track the behavior of strings they're gonna see some pretty wild stuff that'll turn out to be everything from spirits to souls to streams of thought energy shaping the fabric of spacetime.
So, karma's a force of nature, or it might make more sense to envision it as karma being what everything is made of, and the engine of karma being how all those energies interact with each other to form reality; the central point is that nothing to do with karma per se can interfere with the laws of nature, because it's PART of nature, and all the laws of physics refer to how the more visible parts of karma behave, so there's no problem with having both "camps" existing in general.
Ok, so what about the power of thought to alter reality specifically? I have to say right off the bat that I have no personal experience with most of the ways people can do this, although I'm reasonably confident that they work because it's fairly easy to do, and the exact method shouldn't really matter; the only one I can personally vouch for is affirmations (see my post of 1-12-04 if you want to see the specifics of how to do them), but I'll include the others in my explanation as best as I can (my apologies to those who use those other methods if I handle them poorly).
Thoughts are made of the energy of karma (or you could say with equal validity that karma is made of the energy of thought, which is why animism is a valid concept; see my post of 3-16-04 for details), and it seems reasonable enough that one "piece" of karma could join with others in various ways, in the same way that, for example, waves of both matter and energy do, doesn't it? Frankly, I don't see how thoughts could NOT become part of reality; the thing is, most of our thoughts are trivial, even random, often incomplete, backed by little or no emotion, not repeated, and, most importantly, not FOCUSED, so, although synchronicities happen all the time, as do other minor responses from karma, most of what we think doesn't do anything significant because we're not TRYING to do anything significant, in the same way that all the walking to the kitchen to get snacks that we do doesn't somehow magically send us to the top of Mount Everest even when we've covered the same distance as that trip would be, because little bits and pieces of effort in all directions do NOT equal a major journey.
Focus is the key; focused thought can accomplish miracles. It's a straightforward process; if you can send out thought "concentrated" into a given "shape," and do it over and over, preferably with emotion to back it up (as emotion is energy too), you can draw karma to you in that shape... even if the shape is of something that seems pretty much impossible. It's like what you'd do if you wanted a bird that's rare in your area to come hang out in your backyard; you'd put out the kind of food it likes, and maybe the sort of perch or nesting box it prefers, and, assuming you haven't spoiled your own plans by having a stalking cat or barking dog out there, you can probably lure the desired species of bird in eventually... the "species" of karma that represents your goal can be lured in the same conceptual way, but instead of the right sort of birdseed you need the right sort of thoughts.
Affirmations are the way I've been able to create those thoughts, but, because they require the use of "I statements," as in "I, Omni, will receive X," I don't see how you could use them to try to defy the laws of physics... well, I suppose I could in theory say "I, Omni, will be able to flap my arms and fly," but there's no way for karma to influence events to produce that result, and my understanding is that this is how affirmations work, NOT by doing anything magical.
What about magic, then, or "magick" as modern practitioners often call it to distinguish it from stage magic; assuming that it works, can it violate the laws of physics, as it tends to do in fairytales? My first answer is "no," because that'd be easy to see, study, and prove if it were being done... unless what it can do is more subtle things, like make the minute adjustments in brain chemistry that would make one person feel love for another, which is perhaps the most commonly used "spell." Thoughts are energy, but not infinite energy, after all, so you couldn't expect what your head generates to equal the force of a nuclear explosion or anything else huge, but could thoughts act directly on the physical world and alter even a little bit of it, thus, for example, making someone sick, or healthy, or in love... or dead, as voodoo practitioners claim to be able to do? Maybe. If you could do that, would it be in violation of the laws of physics, given that it's just a force acting on an object? It doesn't seem like it would be, but maybe it is; I'd need a physicist to make a ruling on that one.
If your thoughts COULD have a direct effect on matter, does that mean that you could theoretically use magick to cause even a small amount of matter (or energy) to, not just change, but change and/or act in a way that inarguably DOES violate the laws of physics? Do those laws apply to karma, fully and all the time, or is karma a way around the laws? I honestly can't say; it's an interesting thought, no pun intended.
Last, but far from least, there's prayer; this is the form of focused thought used by the most people, and of course the one that gets the most miracles attributed to it... and wouldn't some of those miracles possibly count as violations of the laws of physics? The folks doing the praying would say that their deity violated those laws, not their prayers, and this could be so, as the existence of a deity can NOT be disproved... but could their prayers be directly killing cancer cells and such? If magick can do it, it seems reasonable that prayer might, too; I just have no basis to judge which of those methods is stronger or can do a wider variety of things, or if in fact there's any difference between varieties of focused thought.
Because I have nothing to pray to, the only way I can think of to test if focused thought can in fact violate the laws of physics is to learn magick... and the ways that could lead to unintentional harm are so many that I'm not ready to risk it.
Not YET.
http://converttheatheist.blogspot.com/
brought up an interesting point today; whether it's possible for the laws of nature to exist, for science to exist, for cause and effect to exist, if with our thoughts we can make things happen. On the one hand, it's a moot point, as all of those things clearly do exist, and there's no "if" about the power of thought, but on the other hand it's worthwhile to ponder how those things fit together.
Unlike some people, I don't see anything mystical about any of the aspects of karma, including the ability of our minds to reach out and touch the future (precognition), know the unknowable (telepathy), heal (sometimes called faith healing, but you don't need faith in a deity for it to work), and add threads to the tapestry of karma and thus determine its pattern; I see a force of nature, no more otherworldly than gravity or radiation. True, we can't perceive the energy of thought, or any of the other facets of karma, in action, and science cannot yet detect them, but we can't perceive, for example, radio waves or microwaves either, and throughout nearly all of human history scientific instruments to measure them didn't exist, but they were there nevertheless. I fully expect them to figure out how to detect the energies of karma in action eventually, hopefully in my lifetime; my guess is that, since the strings of energy that M-theory tells us make up everything in the omniverse are probably either karma, or made of karma, or karma is made of them, that once they start being able to track the behavior of strings they're gonna see some pretty wild stuff that'll turn out to be everything from spirits to souls to streams of thought energy shaping the fabric of spacetime.
So, karma's a force of nature, or it might make more sense to envision it as karma being what everything is made of, and the engine of karma being how all those energies interact with each other to form reality; the central point is that nothing to do with karma per se can interfere with the laws of nature, because it's PART of nature, and all the laws of physics refer to how the more visible parts of karma behave, so there's no problem with having both "camps" existing in general.
Ok, so what about the power of thought to alter reality specifically? I have to say right off the bat that I have no personal experience with most of the ways people can do this, although I'm reasonably confident that they work because it's fairly easy to do, and the exact method shouldn't really matter; the only one I can personally vouch for is affirmations (see my post of 1-12-04 if you want to see the specifics of how to do them), but I'll include the others in my explanation as best as I can (my apologies to those who use those other methods if I handle them poorly).
Thoughts are made of the energy of karma (or you could say with equal validity that karma is made of the energy of thought, which is why animism is a valid concept; see my post of 3-16-04 for details), and it seems reasonable enough that one "piece" of karma could join with others in various ways, in the same way that, for example, waves of both matter and energy do, doesn't it? Frankly, I don't see how thoughts could NOT become part of reality; the thing is, most of our thoughts are trivial, even random, often incomplete, backed by little or no emotion, not repeated, and, most importantly, not FOCUSED, so, although synchronicities happen all the time, as do other minor responses from karma, most of what we think doesn't do anything significant because we're not TRYING to do anything significant, in the same way that all the walking to the kitchen to get snacks that we do doesn't somehow magically send us to the top of Mount Everest even when we've covered the same distance as that trip would be, because little bits and pieces of effort in all directions do NOT equal a major journey.
Focus is the key; focused thought can accomplish miracles. It's a straightforward process; if you can send out thought "concentrated" into a given "shape," and do it over and over, preferably with emotion to back it up (as emotion is energy too), you can draw karma to you in that shape... even if the shape is of something that seems pretty much impossible. It's like what you'd do if you wanted a bird that's rare in your area to come hang out in your backyard; you'd put out the kind of food it likes, and maybe the sort of perch or nesting box it prefers, and, assuming you haven't spoiled your own plans by having a stalking cat or barking dog out there, you can probably lure the desired species of bird in eventually... the "species" of karma that represents your goal can be lured in the same conceptual way, but instead of the right sort of birdseed you need the right sort of thoughts.
Affirmations are the way I've been able to create those thoughts, but, because they require the use of "I statements," as in "I, Omni, will receive X," I don't see how you could use them to try to defy the laws of physics... well, I suppose I could in theory say "I, Omni, will be able to flap my arms and fly," but there's no way for karma to influence events to produce that result, and my understanding is that this is how affirmations work, NOT by doing anything magical.
What about magic, then, or "magick" as modern practitioners often call it to distinguish it from stage magic; assuming that it works, can it violate the laws of physics, as it tends to do in fairytales? My first answer is "no," because that'd be easy to see, study, and prove if it were being done... unless what it can do is more subtle things, like make the minute adjustments in brain chemistry that would make one person feel love for another, which is perhaps the most commonly used "spell." Thoughts are energy, but not infinite energy, after all, so you couldn't expect what your head generates to equal the force of a nuclear explosion or anything else huge, but could thoughts act directly on the physical world and alter even a little bit of it, thus, for example, making someone sick, or healthy, or in love... or dead, as voodoo practitioners claim to be able to do? Maybe. If you could do that, would it be in violation of the laws of physics, given that it's just a force acting on an object? It doesn't seem like it would be, but maybe it is; I'd need a physicist to make a ruling on that one.
If your thoughts COULD have a direct effect on matter, does that mean that you could theoretically use magick to cause even a small amount of matter (or energy) to, not just change, but change and/or act in a way that inarguably DOES violate the laws of physics? Do those laws apply to karma, fully and all the time, or is karma a way around the laws? I honestly can't say; it's an interesting thought, no pun intended.
Last, but far from least, there's prayer; this is the form of focused thought used by the most people, and of course the one that gets the most miracles attributed to it... and wouldn't some of those miracles possibly count as violations of the laws of physics? The folks doing the praying would say that their deity violated those laws, not their prayers, and this could be so, as the existence of a deity can NOT be disproved... but could their prayers be directly killing cancer cells and such? If magick can do it, it seems reasonable that prayer might, too; I just have no basis to judge which of those methods is stronger or can do a wider variety of things, or if in fact there's any difference between varieties of focused thought.
Because I have nothing to pray to, the only way I can think of to test if focused thought can in fact violate the laws of physics is to learn magick... and the ways that could lead to unintentional harm are so many that I'm not ready to risk it.
Not YET.
Friday, July 22, 2005
Real-life commentary about the big words/intelligence issue
Online life isn't actually "real life," of course, so what I mean by that is quotes from regular people in a "social setting" (the lounge area of a forum), as opposed to summations by researchers and experts. In my post of 5-13-05, I talked about how a Stanford study had shown that people using big words in writing were seen as LESS intelligent than those who didn't (even if they're using them correctly, which IS a sign of intelligence), and that political analysts described the same sort of phenomena in speeches; the central concept is that people tend to view those with their same sort of word usage as being intelligent (even though most people are average, and so NOT intelligent, which refers to mental ability ABOVE the average level), and those with superior word usage as "INferior" in all sorts of areas, not just intelligence-wise... which shows us what value our culture puts on intelligence, and that the best thing a smart person can do with their brains is use them to figure out how to disguise their existence. {sigh}
Today, I stumbled upon a forum where I'd guess everyone posting is under 25, and nearly all of them are male; there was a thread that included posts on the above topic, and I immediately started envisioning a post of my own. After much internal debate, I've decided to not give a URL or other identifying info for this forum, so that they don't find their way here and get offended by my commentary on what they said; my primary intention is to learn from them, NOT to insult them, but I'm betting they wouldn't see it that way, especially since I wont be subtle with my rebuttals. I'm going to give exact quotes from their posts, altered only to put a polite mask over their profanity (as this is an all-ages blog), and then discuss the ramifications of what they've said. I'll preface that by pointing out that none of the posters shows any sign of being of higher than average intelligence, which makes them good mouthpieces for our culture, and, although their youth might make their opinions somewhat more extreme than older folks', I've seen no evidence of older people viewing intelligence any differently than younger adults, and the latter have the advantage of being more willing, on the whole, to bluntly say what they think. So:
"I hate people who use obnoxiously long words, and then deny that its to make them look smart. I mean, I use long words when they're in the best context, but I don't purposely seek to elongate my language."
So many people clearly agree with this guy, but they're WRONG; while obviously there ARE people who use big words, usually incorrectly, to try to sound smart, most people who use big words use them because they, and the people they regularly interact with, are intelligent and educated, and that's how they're used to talking, so they're NOT doing it to make themselves look smart... but they need to be aware that people will perceive them as doing just that.
"Smart people don't use long words, ever notice that?"
No, I haven't, because it just ain't so; could there be a clearer example of the "a person is smart if they sound like ME" phenomenon?
"The smarter people should be smart enough to know to use words that can easily be understood by those around them"
So, a smart person should instantly and psychically know the vocabulary level of everyone within earshot at all times, and tailor their every remark to the lowest common denominator? What he actually means, I'm sure, is that if a smart person is REALLY smart, as in sharp enough to understand how social conversations are supposed to work, they'll be aware that they need to talk at about a 7th grade level (which is what articles and speeches supposedly shoot for, so that most Americans can understand them-pitiful, isn't it?), which will keep listeners from feeling stupid and thus prevent negative social judgments... couldn't you just CRY?
"intelligent people use words that everyone can understand"
Not on THIS planet they don't; AVERAGE people use words everyone can understand, and intelligent people use words appropriate to their intelligence and the sorts of topics they discuss... but again, keep in mind that this guy speaks for many.
"why the f**k would you try to confuse people if you're trying to explain something to them?"
Why does he think that an intelligent person is TRYING to confuse people? It's HARD to talk at a 7th grade level when you're not used to it, and unless you're insanely conceited it'd probably never even occur to you that people aren't understanding your vocabulary in the 1st place, regardless of the level you speak at... would he prefer if all intelligent people assumed he was a moron and spoke to him in words of 1 syllable? No, because then he'd accuse them of being arrogant, patronizing, etc; he'd react that way even if they spoke to him at his exact vocabulary level, if he KNEW they were dumbing down their comments for him... in other words, if you can't convincingly fake being average, you're out of luck. The very idea that he thinks intelligent people must be TRYING to confuse others, as opposed to doing so unintentionally because their normal vocabulary is beyond the reach of whoever they're talking to, is kinda scary; the average are pretty quick to ascribe negative motives to the smart based on a few big words.
"that pisses me off to a very high degree... people trying to sound smart and then they say s**t like "just cause you didn't understand it doesn't mean it was a big word" holy f**k those f**king idiots... I mention to them that they should quit trying to look smart and they have the nerve to tell me I'm stupid!!! GARG!!!"
Where do I start, lol? People are clearly VERY poor judges of whether or not others are "trying to sound smart," but that doesn't stop them from believing in their judgment, and the judgment of others equally as misguided... and that's the important point to remember. It DOES often happen that a not very bright person falsely accuses a smart one of using a big word when they weren't (a shocking example from my own life was a woman who was a college graduate no less who didn't know what "immaculate" meant, and mind you she was Catholic!!); the lesson here is that there's no point in saying so, because the less intelligent person will likely see that as being called stupid, as this guy did, even though there's little chance of the smart person having meant or even thought that, as all they were focused on was self-defense... what a minefield this is!!
"there was this one time where I argued with this kid. He rattled off 6 dollar words like freakin' Shakespeare. But you could tell he was just insecure, because he wanted to get the respect of the audience by scaring them with big@ss words"
HOW could he tell that, this guy who thinks that anyone would believe that people would be SCARED by the use of big words? (Resentful and belligerent, sure, but scared? Not a chance.) Intelligent people use big words because it's natural for them to, and in a debate situation we go into our most intellectual mode to try to win (or at least those with sufficient brainpower do, there's the catch), and thus more big words will be used; insecurity has nothing to do with it, and in fact an insecure person would be too nervous to be able to produce big words they don't normally use. It's crucial to note what the perception of the average person is under these circumstances, though, because in the heat of a debate one's vocabulary becomes even more of a liability (grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr), and that has to be taken into consideration.
No matter how many times I see evidence of the true view people have of intelligence, it dismays me no end... and this is undoubtedly why karma keeps sending me this sort of thing, because I HAVE to stop getting worked up over it and just accept it as a part of human nature that it's in my best interests to be aware of and use when necessary. What the forum posts have made clear is that under any circumstances where an intelligent person speaks in an appropriate manner given their vocabulary within the hearing of an average person, all sorts of negative judgments are being made as to why they're speaking that way (anything to avoid the self-judgment of "This person is smarter than me"), and they're not even being given credit for their brains; people will use the most twisted analyses imaginable to turn even the most confident, friendliest intelligent person into some sort of pitiful and/or unpleasant creature, deserving of contempt rather than admiration, or even indifference.
If you're of average intelligence... 1st of all, congratulations, you're very lucky, because you naturally possess one of the most important characteristics a human being can have, the ability to fit in with, and be seen as intelligent and otherwise worthy by, society. From your lofty position, as you look around at the geeks and intellectuals of the world, I ask you; please, PLEASE, show some frigging mercy when dealing with smart people, and make a conscious effort to judge them fairly rather than finding a way to make every big word that exits their mouths into proof of bad qualities in them. When people around you express unfair judgments, show a little backbone and speak up, be the voice of logic and kindness; good karma will result.
If you're of above average intelligence... you know you're screwed, right? Unless you're a REALLY good actor with iron self-control, you're never going to be able to pass as one of "them," and they'll see that... and they are the majority, my friend, and they make most of the decisions that affect your quality of life. Try, TRY, to fit in, but be ready for the consequences of failure, and don't let it surprise you or make you doubt yourself. You can hang out with other bright people most of the time, but you're still going to meet average ones at parties, in most workplaces, and when you try to meet people to hook up with, so help yourself, AND help smart people in general stop getting such a bad rap, by embracing averageness. I hope that good karma will result from trying to achieve harmony with all sorts of people... but even if not, it's better than the negative energy you'll draw to yourself if you're made miserable by being an outsider.
I re-read the forum quotes, and winced as I did before at the harsh reality they represent; I've still got alot of work to do...
Today, I stumbled upon a forum where I'd guess everyone posting is under 25, and nearly all of them are male; there was a thread that included posts on the above topic, and I immediately started envisioning a post of my own. After much internal debate, I've decided to not give a URL or other identifying info for this forum, so that they don't find their way here and get offended by my commentary on what they said; my primary intention is to learn from them, NOT to insult them, but I'm betting they wouldn't see it that way, especially since I wont be subtle with my rebuttals. I'm going to give exact quotes from their posts, altered only to put a polite mask over their profanity (as this is an all-ages blog), and then discuss the ramifications of what they've said. I'll preface that by pointing out that none of the posters shows any sign of being of higher than average intelligence, which makes them good mouthpieces for our culture, and, although their youth might make their opinions somewhat more extreme than older folks', I've seen no evidence of older people viewing intelligence any differently than younger adults, and the latter have the advantage of being more willing, on the whole, to bluntly say what they think. So:
"I hate people who use obnoxiously long words, and then deny that its to make them look smart. I mean, I use long words when they're in the best context, but I don't purposely seek to elongate my language."
So many people clearly agree with this guy, but they're WRONG; while obviously there ARE people who use big words, usually incorrectly, to try to sound smart, most people who use big words use them because they, and the people they regularly interact with, are intelligent and educated, and that's how they're used to talking, so they're NOT doing it to make themselves look smart... but they need to be aware that people will perceive them as doing just that.
"Smart people don't use long words, ever notice that?"
No, I haven't, because it just ain't so; could there be a clearer example of the "a person is smart if they sound like ME" phenomenon?
"The smarter people should be smart enough to know to use words that can easily be understood by those around them"
So, a smart person should instantly and psychically know the vocabulary level of everyone within earshot at all times, and tailor their every remark to the lowest common denominator? What he actually means, I'm sure, is that if a smart person is REALLY smart, as in sharp enough to understand how social conversations are supposed to work, they'll be aware that they need to talk at about a 7th grade level (which is what articles and speeches supposedly shoot for, so that most Americans can understand them-pitiful, isn't it?), which will keep listeners from feeling stupid and thus prevent negative social judgments... couldn't you just CRY?
"intelligent people use words that everyone can understand"
Not on THIS planet they don't; AVERAGE people use words everyone can understand, and intelligent people use words appropriate to their intelligence and the sorts of topics they discuss... but again, keep in mind that this guy speaks for many.
"why the f**k would you try to confuse people if you're trying to explain something to them?"
Why does he think that an intelligent person is TRYING to confuse people? It's HARD to talk at a 7th grade level when you're not used to it, and unless you're insanely conceited it'd probably never even occur to you that people aren't understanding your vocabulary in the 1st place, regardless of the level you speak at... would he prefer if all intelligent people assumed he was a moron and spoke to him in words of 1 syllable? No, because then he'd accuse them of being arrogant, patronizing, etc; he'd react that way even if they spoke to him at his exact vocabulary level, if he KNEW they were dumbing down their comments for him... in other words, if you can't convincingly fake being average, you're out of luck. The very idea that he thinks intelligent people must be TRYING to confuse others, as opposed to doing so unintentionally because their normal vocabulary is beyond the reach of whoever they're talking to, is kinda scary; the average are pretty quick to ascribe negative motives to the smart based on a few big words.
"that pisses me off to a very high degree... people trying to sound smart and then they say s**t like "just cause you didn't understand it doesn't mean it was a big word" holy f**k those f**king idiots... I mention to them that they should quit trying to look smart and they have the nerve to tell me I'm stupid!!! GARG!!!"
Where do I start, lol? People are clearly VERY poor judges of whether or not others are "trying to sound smart," but that doesn't stop them from believing in their judgment, and the judgment of others equally as misguided... and that's the important point to remember. It DOES often happen that a not very bright person falsely accuses a smart one of using a big word when they weren't (a shocking example from my own life was a woman who was a college graduate no less who didn't know what "immaculate" meant, and mind you she was Catholic!!); the lesson here is that there's no point in saying so, because the less intelligent person will likely see that as being called stupid, as this guy did, even though there's little chance of the smart person having meant or even thought that, as all they were focused on was self-defense... what a minefield this is!!
"there was this one time where I argued with this kid. He rattled off 6 dollar words like freakin' Shakespeare. But you could tell he was just insecure, because he wanted to get the respect of the audience by scaring them with big@ss words"
HOW could he tell that, this guy who thinks that anyone would believe that people would be SCARED by the use of big words? (Resentful and belligerent, sure, but scared? Not a chance.) Intelligent people use big words because it's natural for them to, and in a debate situation we go into our most intellectual mode to try to win (or at least those with sufficient brainpower do, there's the catch), and thus more big words will be used; insecurity has nothing to do with it, and in fact an insecure person would be too nervous to be able to produce big words they don't normally use. It's crucial to note what the perception of the average person is under these circumstances, though, because in the heat of a debate one's vocabulary becomes even more of a liability (grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr), and that has to be taken into consideration.
No matter how many times I see evidence of the true view people have of intelligence, it dismays me no end... and this is undoubtedly why karma keeps sending me this sort of thing, because I HAVE to stop getting worked up over it and just accept it as a part of human nature that it's in my best interests to be aware of and use when necessary. What the forum posts have made clear is that under any circumstances where an intelligent person speaks in an appropriate manner given their vocabulary within the hearing of an average person, all sorts of negative judgments are being made as to why they're speaking that way (anything to avoid the self-judgment of "This person is smarter than me"), and they're not even being given credit for their brains; people will use the most twisted analyses imaginable to turn even the most confident, friendliest intelligent person into some sort of pitiful and/or unpleasant creature, deserving of contempt rather than admiration, or even indifference.
If you're of average intelligence... 1st of all, congratulations, you're very lucky, because you naturally possess one of the most important characteristics a human being can have, the ability to fit in with, and be seen as intelligent and otherwise worthy by, society. From your lofty position, as you look around at the geeks and intellectuals of the world, I ask you; please, PLEASE, show some frigging mercy when dealing with smart people, and make a conscious effort to judge them fairly rather than finding a way to make every big word that exits their mouths into proof of bad qualities in them. When people around you express unfair judgments, show a little backbone and speak up, be the voice of logic and kindness; good karma will result.
If you're of above average intelligence... you know you're screwed, right? Unless you're a REALLY good actor with iron self-control, you're never going to be able to pass as one of "them," and they'll see that... and they are the majority, my friend, and they make most of the decisions that affect your quality of life. Try, TRY, to fit in, but be ready for the consequences of failure, and don't let it surprise you or make you doubt yourself. You can hang out with other bright people most of the time, but you're still going to meet average ones at parties, in most workplaces, and when you try to meet people to hook up with, so help yourself, AND help smart people in general stop getting such a bad rap, by embracing averageness. I hope that good karma will result from trying to achieve harmony with all sorts of people... but even if not, it's better than the negative energy you'll draw to yourself if you're made miserable by being an outsider.
I re-read the forum quotes, and winced as I did before at the harsh reality they represent; I've still got alot of work to do...
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Criss Angel Mindfreak
Did you see it? Did you? If so, you'll undoubtedly share the following sentiment: AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!! If not, don't worry, it'll be on a bunch more times (and is also probably floating around online in a dozen places), so you still have plenty of chances... and you've GOT to see this series.
Criss Angel, whose website is here
http://www.crissangel.com/
is widely believed to be the finest illusionist in the world... and probably the finest who ever lived. His illusions are dramatic, highly original, and sometimes horrifying; in the 1st episode shown today, for example, he had people on the street stabbing a voodoo doll, and would instantly bleed from whatever part of his body corresponded to where the needle was on the doll (and I mean blood coming from his skin, not from blood packs being remotely set off under his clothes-he even bled from his nose), and then he was fully on fire for 45 seconds, calmly walking around engulfed in flames, and then he... but that'd be telling-watch the show if you want to see the trick he pulled while on fire and fully encircled with people.
Criss's unmatched skill as an illusionist, and his immense creativity with designing tricks, aren't all he brings to his performances; he's a singer and musician (I have 1 of his CD's-it's fab) who does all his own music, he's studied dance, gymnastics, and martial arts his entire life, which, combined with his bodybuilding, brings a unique and intense physicality to his illusions that's far beyond what anyone else has done, and his visual sense, as seen in his ever-changing image and spectacular theatrics, is original and cutting-edge. Some of this hasn't been shown in the series yet, as it's been focusing on his street performing, but I've seen what he can do on stage, both on TV and in person (in a tiny club setting in the round, where he did one of his tricks right under my table!!), and all I can say is hold onto your hats, because whatever he's come up with for these episodes is bound to be mindboggling.
And there's 1 more thing that makes Criss a dazzling performer; straight men will want to skip this paragraph. Go on down to the next paragraph, we'll wait for you. OK, here's the best part; the man is gorgeous. GORGEOUS. *G*O*R*G*E*O*U*S*. Even though he's cut his super-long hair down to moderately long, even though he's back to shaving his hairy chest (whimper), Criss is a GOD; he's Greek, so I suppose that makes him a Greek god, although I don't remember any of the male gods supposedly looking like this. The bone-structure, the eyes, the lips, the bod... oh that BOD... hang on while I put on the A/C, lol. At the risk of getting overly graphic, I feel compelled to add that, unless he's got socks somewhere other than on his feet, he's got... er... ahem... YOWZA!! Trust me, even if for some reason you have a pathological hatred of magic, watch him anyways, just to look at him; you'll see what I mean.
Thanks for your patience, fellas; I encourage you to watch Mindfreak despite the babe factor, because my husband has always been as blown away by Criss Angel as I am, and in his case the bulging, um, muscles obviously aren't an issue... in fact, he still proclaims the time we saw Criss perform as the finest performance of any kind that he's ever seen, and finds the element of danger in much of what he does to be particularly appealing.
I hope I've convinced you to watch; they're currently showing 2 half-hour episodes per week (why they don't just make an hour-long show is beyond me) starting at 10PM on Wednesdays on the Arts & Entertainment channel (A&E). As you can imagine, each episode is being shown many times; you can see a schedule here
http://spark.vo.llnwd.net/o1/crissangel/dvd_tv/tv.html
and a more extensive one here
http://www.aetv.com/aesearch/search.do?searchType=tv&initial=true&keywords=mindfreak
click on "More TV Listings " to see a bunch more showtimes.
Watch it watch it WATCH IT!! :-)
Criss Angel, whose website is here
http://www.crissangel.com/
is widely believed to be the finest illusionist in the world... and probably the finest who ever lived. His illusions are dramatic, highly original, and sometimes horrifying; in the 1st episode shown today, for example, he had people on the street stabbing a voodoo doll, and would instantly bleed from whatever part of his body corresponded to where the needle was on the doll (and I mean blood coming from his skin, not from blood packs being remotely set off under his clothes-he even bled from his nose), and then he was fully on fire for 45 seconds, calmly walking around engulfed in flames, and then he... but that'd be telling-watch the show if you want to see the trick he pulled while on fire and fully encircled with people.
Criss's unmatched skill as an illusionist, and his immense creativity with designing tricks, aren't all he brings to his performances; he's a singer and musician (I have 1 of his CD's-it's fab) who does all his own music, he's studied dance, gymnastics, and martial arts his entire life, which, combined with his bodybuilding, brings a unique and intense physicality to his illusions that's far beyond what anyone else has done, and his visual sense, as seen in his ever-changing image and spectacular theatrics, is original and cutting-edge. Some of this hasn't been shown in the series yet, as it's been focusing on his street performing, but I've seen what he can do on stage, both on TV and in person (in a tiny club setting in the round, where he did one of his tricks right under my table!!), and all I can say is hold onto your hats, because whatever he's come up with for these episodes is bound to be mindboggling.
And there's 1 more thing that makes Criss a dazzling performer; straight men will want to skip this paragraph. Go on down to the next paragraph, we'll wait for you. OK, here's the best part; the man is gorgeous. GORGEOUS. *G*O*R*G*E*O*U*S*. Even though he's cut his super-long hair down to moderately long, even though he's back to shaving his hairy chest (whimper), Criss is a GOD; he's Greek, so I suppose that makes him a Greek god, although I don't remember any of the male gods supposedly looking like this. The bone-structure, the eyes, the lips, the bod... oh that BOD... hang on while I put on the A/C, lol. At the risk of getting overly graphic, I feel compelled to add that, unless he's got socks somewhere other than on his feet, he's got... er... ahem... YOWZA!! Trust me, even if for some reason you have a pathological hatred of magic, watch him anyways, just to look at him; you'll see what I mean.
Thanks for your patience, fellas; I encourage you to watch Mindfreak despite the babe factor, because my husband has always been as blown away by Criss Angel as I am, and in his case the bulging, um, muscles obviously aren't an issue... in fact, he still proclaims the time we saw Criss perform as the finest performance of any kind that he's ever seen, and finds the element of danger in much of what he does to be particularly appealing.
I hope I've convinced you to watch; they're currently showing 2 half-hour episodes per week (why they don't just make an hour-long show is beyond me) starting at 10PM on Wednesdays on the Arts & Entertainment channel (A&E). As you can imagine, each episode is being shown many times; you can see a schedule here
http://spark.vo.llnwd.net/o1/crissangel/dvd_tv/tv.html
and a more extensive one here
http://www.aetv.com/aesearch/search.do?searchType=tv&initial=true&keywords=mindfreak
click on "More TV Listings " to see a bunch more showtimes.
Watch it watch it WATCH IT!! :-)
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
The karma of lessons learned
One of the surest ways to know that you've taken the right path is when karma rewards you for the choice you've made; this goes double when you're making a conscious choice to do things differently than you traditionally have in an attempt to improve your "karmic portfolio," thus demonstrating that you've learned an important life lesson. Why does karma concern itself with the learning of lessons? As best as I can figure it, when karma sends you something, and you handle it incorrectly, that disrupts the flow of energy, and that particular "shape" of energy keeps coming back, trying to pass through your life and onwards, such that you get the chance to make the same mistake over and over (as most people do) OR to break the cycle and get it right. If you figure out the right way to handle a situation, my experience is that, in response to the exultant burst of energy that accompanies the revelation, karma sends just that sort of situation to test you; if you actually manage to use the understanding you've gained, you'll be rewarded, but if you fail the cycle continues.
A few days ago, I encountered this awesome quote:
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The moment I read it, I saw that it applied to the difficulty I sometimes have with just letting disputes drop with online cockroaches, because it offends me right down to my bone marrow that people who wouldn't say boo to a goose in "meatspace" persist in coming into cyberspace and causing hooraws with total strangers, often devastating those without the ability to stand up to them, and wasting endless time and energy of people like me who want them to discover that they can't chase everyone off, can't hammer everyone into submission, can't always triumph just by being evil; it makes the karmic point that when you interact with people, their energy swirls around you, permeates you, can call forth similar energy from you, and thus possibly change you into the sort of person who produces that sort of energy. This means that a good person could induce you to become a better person, or, sadly, that you can become somewhat of a monster if you deal with those whose behavior is monstrous.
Although the abyss seemed to me a splendid symbol for how karma in many of its facets will "notice" you and become more overtly active in your life if you focus on it, I figured that Nietzsche probably meant it to refer to some obscure Germanic philosophical concept, but I looked him up at Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche
and found the following
"One of Nietzsche's central concepts is the will to power (Der Wille zur Macht), a process of expansion and venting of creative energy that he believed was the basic driving force of nature. He believed it to be the fundamental causal power in the world: the driving force of all natural phenomena and the dynamic to which all other causal powers can be reduced. That is, Nietzsche in part hoped will to power could be a "theory of everything," providing the ultimate foundations for explanations of everything from whole societies, to individual organisms, down to mere lumps of matter. In contrast to the "theories of everything" attempted in physics, Nietzsche's was teleological in nature."
where
"Theory of Everything in philosophy is an attempt to provide an overall explanation of everything in terms of certain fundamental or all-encompassing principles, ideas, themes or structures. This goes beyond the Theory of Everything in physics, since the philosopher is also trying to explain consciousness, morality, God, and so on."
and
"Teleology is the supposition that there is design, purpose, directive principle, or finality in the works and processes of nature, and the philosophical study of that purpose"
Sure sounds like my idea of the engine of karma, doesn't it?
Back to the main point: I read the quote, and saw that dealing too much with poisonous people would poison ME, and make me more like them, and thus that I needed to make a conscious effort to impose limits on how far I let things progress with such people, particularly online. That very night, I received a kit I'd won on eBay, and discovered to my dismay that it was missing EIGHT pieces, although it hadn't even been admitted on the auction page to be USED. I sent a sweet email to the seller asking him to send the pieces; he responded that he didn't have them, but he'd give me a refund. Sounds good, but all he did was refund the auction amount, not the ridiculous amount of shipping he'd charged, which far exceeded the amount I won the auction for; that's against Federal law (under which sending an item with missing pieces and not refunding all $ received is mail fraud), not to mention the almost as powerful PayPal policies, and was just a rotten stunt to pull when he'd made such a serious error. Still trying to be nice, I politely informed him that refunding a tiny % of the total he'd been paid in this situation wasn't acceptable, and that he needed to do a little more to compensate me for the reduced usability of the kit. He got belligerent, pointing to his "policy" of never returning any part of shipping as if that altered the law or PayPal's rules, accused me of trying to make him pay me "for receiving the kit," and asked me if I thought what was fair was for him to send me some random item for free as a bonus on top of that. I kept my cool, and sent him an email explaining what I was entitled to, that it was fair because HE should take the financial loss due to his error, not me, and asking him to come up with a fair % of the total to refund me to make up for the missing pieces (the kit is still usable, so to be karmically clean I wasn't even asking for a full refund).
Shortly after I sent it off, the quote came into my mind, and I re-read it; I saw that this was one of those times where I could easily get sucked into a protracted and ever-nastier battle online (it's happened before), and actually saw a mental image of the quote in an email... so I decided that, whatever his reply was, that would be the end of it, and screw the $ (NOT a normal way for me to think with regards to $, by the way). Not long afterwards, I started getting the urge to check the PayPal account, even though he hadn't sent any more emails and there was no reason to think he'd taken any action yet... and there it was, a FULL refund from the man who'd refused to refund more than a single-digit % of what we'd paid him.
I made the right choice, took a new path, and was instantly rewarded.
There's more, as there often is when karmic growth is involved: There's a movie that I'd missed the ending of, and then watched and missed the end of AGAIN, which really bothered me, especially since there hadn't been any more showings of it listed for the near future; I'd thought about it earlier today as one of the few "pending" things that was hovering over me (with this eBay nonsense being another, of course)... and when my husband switched the TV back to regular functioning tonight after we watched the latest arrival from Blockbuster Online, guess what was on the channel that it happened to be tuned to? You guessed it; this time, I DID see the ending. Karma was very efficient here; it combined synchronicity with giving me an added reward.
This sort of thing has happened to me over and over; next time YOU learn an important life lesson, watch out for the test, use what you've learned to pass it, and see how fast the reward comes.
A few days ago, I encountered this awesome quote:
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The moment I read it, I saw that it applied to the difficulty I sometimes have with just letting disputes drop with online cockroaches, because it offends me right down to my bone marrow that people who wouldn't say boo to a goose in "meatspace" persist in coming into cyberspace and causing hooraws with total strangers, often devastating those without the ability to stand up to them, and wasting endless time and energy of people like me who want them to discover that they can't chase everyone off, can't hammer everyone into submission, can't always triumph just by being evil; it makes the karmic point that when you interact with people, their energy swirls around you, permeates you, can call forth similar energy from you, and thus possibly change you into the sort of person who produces that sort of energy. This means that a good person could induce you to become a better person, or, sadly, that you can become somewhat of a monster if you deal with those whose behavior is monstrous.
Although the abyss seemed to me a splendid symbol for how karma in many of its facets will "notice" you and become more overtly active in your life if you focus on it, I figured that Nietzsche probably meant it to refer to some obscure Germanic philosophical concept, but I looked him up at Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche
and found the following
"One of Nietzsche's central concepts is the will to power (Der Wille zur Macht), a process of expansion and venting of creative energy that he believed was the basic driving force of nature. He believed it to be the fundamental causal power in the world: the driving force of all natural phenomena and the dynamic to which all other causal powers can be reduced. That is, Nietzsche in part hoped will to power could be a "theory of everything," providing the ultimate foundations for explanations of everything from whole societies, to individual organisms, down to mere lumps of matter. In contrast to the "theories of everything" attempted in physics, Nietzsche's was teleological in nature."
where
"Theory of Everything in philosophy is an attempt to provide an overall explanation of everything in terms of certain fundamental or all-encompassing principles, ideas, themes or structures. This goes beyond the Theory of Everything in physics, since the philosopher is also trying to explain consciousness, morality, God, and so on."
and
"Teleology is the supposition that there is design, purpose, directive principle, or finality in the works and processes of nature, and the philosophical study of that purpose"
Sure sounds like my idea of the engine of karma, doesn't it?
Back to the main point: I read the quote, and saw that dealing too much with poisonous people would poison ME, and make me more like them, and thus that I needed to make a conscious effort to impose limits on how far I let things progress with such people, particularly online. That very night, I received a kit I'd won on eBay, and discovered to my dismay that it was missing EIGHT pieces, although it hadn't even been admitted on the auction page to be USED. I sent a sweet email to the seller asking him to send the pieces; he responded that he didn't have them, but he'd give me a refund. Sounds good, but all he did was refund the auction amount, not the ridiculous amount of shipping he'd charged, which far exceeded the amount I won the auction for; that's against Federal law (under which sending an item with missing pieces and not refunding all $ received is mail fraud), not to mention the almost as powerful PayPal policies, and was just a rotten stunt to pull when he'd made such a serious error. Still trying to be nice, I politely informed him that refunding a tiny % of the total he'd been paid in this situation wasn't acceptable, and that he needed to do a little more to compensate me for the reduced usability of the kit. He got belligerent, pointing to his "policy" of never returning any part of shipping as if that altered the law or PayPal's rules, accused me of trying to make him pay me "for receiving the kit," and asked me if I thought what was fair was for him to send me some random item for free as a bonus on top of that. I kept my cool, and sent him an email explaining what I was entitled to, that it was fair because HE should take the financial loss due to his error, not me, and asking him to come up with a fair % of the total to refund me to make up for the missing pieces (the kit is still usable, so to be karmically clean I wasn't even asking for a full refund).
Shortly after I sent it off, the quote came into my mind, and I re-read it; I saw that this was one of those times where I could easily get sucked into a protracted and ever-nastier battle online (it's happened before), and actually saw a mental image of the quote in an email... so I decided that, whatever his reply was, that would be the end of it, and screw the $ (NOT a normal way for me to think with regards to $, by the way). Not long afterwards, I started getting the urge to check the PayPal account, even though he hadn't sent any more emails and there was no reason to think he'd taken any action yet... and there it was, a FULL refund from the man who'd refused to refund more than a single-digit % of what we'd paid him.
I made the right choice, took a new path, and was instantly rewarded.
There's more, as there often is when karmic growth is involved: There's a movie that I'd missed the ending of, and then watched and missed the end of AGAIN, which really bothered me, especially since there hadn't been any more showings of it listed for the near future; I'd thought about it earlier today as one of the few "pending" things that was hovering over me (with this eBay nonsense being another, of course)... and when my husband switched the TV back to regular functioning tonight after we watched the latest arrival from Blockbuster Online, guess what was on the channel that it happened to be tuned to? You guessed it; this time, I DID see the ending. Karma was very efficient here; it combined synchronicity with giving me an added reward.
This sort of thing has happened to me over and over; next time YOU learn an important life lesson, watch out for the test, use what you've learned to pass it, and see how fast the reward comes.
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Karmic lesson from comic strip
I'm just getting around to reading the Sunday funnies from July 10, and I was impressed by the B.C. strip, which you can see here
http://www.comics.com/creators/bc/archive/bc-20050710.html
It shows 2 flowers wilting in the hot sun, just out of reach of a body of water (they call it a sea, but you'll soon realize why that's a mistake); they're distracted from their misery as a mammoth appears, and they begin to bad-mouth it... until it starts to suck up water, which miraculously gushes from its ears and waters the flowers, which turn on a dime and begin to praise it lavishly.
Ignoring for the moment that sea water is salty and not likely to be consumed by a mammoth, or to revive plants it got squirted onto, and that water drawn into a mammoth's trunk wouldn't come out of its ears, this strip is a good example of how easy it is to divert karma that's trying to work for your benefit; the flowers are dying, and are unable to do anything to help themselves, so a creature capable of slopping water around shows up to save them, and, rather than being grateful, or at the very least politely asking the mammoth for help if they don't understand that it's going to save them, they immediately start shooting their mouths off. The mammoth, which like the other living things in BC presumably can speak and understand speech, might have heard them and stalked off to a spot further along the shore to get its drink, thus squirting water elsewhere, or even stomped or eaten the flowers out of anger... and if that had happened, the flowers would either have been dead or left to continue shriveling in the heat, bemoaning their fate and never realizing that they themselves had driven away their only source of help.
The lesson here is that, if you've kept your personal karma clean, and those around you have as well (because the karma of those close to you mingles with yours and can alter what sort of energy comes to you), karma will generally try to send you some help when you need it, in response to your (often indirect) requests for it... but you still retain freedom of choice, and your choices still strongly affect your fate, and if you drive away the source of potential help, turn your back on it, spurn it, abuse it, whatever, don't expect karma to fight to help you-you're just plain out of luck.
People sent to help us, either in response to our present needs or because we're going to need them eventually, don't show up waving banners proclaiming their karmic purpose, so whenever someone tries to meet you, get to know you, enter or re-enter your life, or spend more time with you, and your inclination from your position of busy-ness and stress is to brush them off, ask yourself if maybe it'd be a good idea to be friendly instead, and see what happens... just in case.
http://www.comics.com/creators/bc/archive/bc-20050710.html
It shows 2 flowers wilting in the hot sun, just out of reach of a body of water (they call it a sea, but you'll soon realize why that's a mistake); they're distracted from their misery as a mammoth appears, and they begin to bad-mouth it... until it starts to suck up water, which miraculously gushes from its ears and waters the flowers, which turn on a dime and begin to praise it lavishly.
Ignoring for the moment that sea water is salty and not likely to be consumed by a mammoth, or to revive plants it got squirted onto, and that water drawn into a mammoth's trunk wouldn't come out of its ears, this strip is a good example of how easy it is to divert karma that's trying to work for your benefit; the flowers are dying, and are unable to do anything to help themselves, so a creature capable of slopping water around shows up to save them, and, rather than being grateful, or at the very least politely asking the mammoth for help if they don't understand that it's going to save them, they immediately start shooting their mouths off. The mammoth, which like the other living things in BC presumably can speak and understand speech, might have heard them and stalked off to a spot further along the shore to get its drink, thus squirting water elsewhere, or even stomped or eaten the flowers out of anger... and if that had happened, the flowers would either have been dead or left to continue shriveling in the heat, bemoaning their fate and never realizing that they themselves had driven away their only source of help.
The lesson here is that, if you've kept your personal karma clean, and those around you have as well (because the karma of those close to you mingles with yours and can alter what sort of energy comes to you), karma will generally try to send you some help when you need it, in response to your (often indirect) requests for it... but you still retain freedom of choice, and your choices still strongly affect your fate, and if you drive away the source of potential help, turn your back on it, spurn it, abuse it, whatever, don't expect karma to fight to help you-you're just plain out of luck.
People sent to help us, either in response to our present needs or because we're going to need them eventually, don't show up waving banners proclaiming their karmic purpose, so whenever someone tries to meet you, get to know you, enter or re-enter your life, or spend more time with you, and your inclination from your position of busy-ness and stress is to brush them off, ask yourself if maybe it'd be a good idea to be friendly instead, and see what happens... just in case.
Monday, July 18, 2005
Farewell to a few blog services
If you're exceptionally observant, you've noticed that there are some things missing from my margins today:
1) "Name That Blog": I was so excited when I got a working RSS feed again, and with it the understanding that sites that had rejected the old feed would now accept my site, and this site was 1 of the reasons why. It had such a cool premise; pull a quote from the RSS feed of a random member site, and give a choice of blog titles from which to pick the one the quote came from, with links to all the choices being given along with the answer. It seemed like a fun thing to give my readers to do, and a neat way to get some extra traffic, so I signed up, and, as the site requires, put the code on here while I awaited approval... which never came, even though I tried to get added in TWICE. I don't normally give up so easily, as most sites like this are run as sidelines by people with jobs and lives, but there wasn't even an automated reply, and there's no way to contact the owner, so I figured I needed to explore the site some more; I played a bunch of rounds of the game to get the lists of site links to come up, and discovered that the vast majority of the sites don't exist anymore, of the ones that do most are dead, and of the live ones only ONE actually had the game on it. The by-then unnecessary final straw was bringing up what was supposed to be the list of top scorers in the game for the past week, only to find it BLANK; clearly, the owner has long since stopped being involved with the site in any way, and just left it to rot, and the former participants that're still around removed the game because of the issues I've described. I was REALLY bummed, both that the game was gone and that it never occurred to me to do all this checking around before (as the site seems to be fine on the surface), and so I set myself up to be disappointed.
2) BlogSnob: I can remember when nearly every site I visited had their distinctive box on it, and it used to be a good source of new visitors; the premise was that every time your site loaded, you got a credit, and, through some formula, that translated to your blog being shown on other people's sites. It went through periodic problems, but the owner always righted it and made it worthwhile riding out the dead periods; when Pheedo bought the service, though, it took a nosedive from which it never recovered, both due to technical problems and to people abandoning the service in droves because of the addition of commercial ads being shown, and shown far too often for most people's tastes. Still, I held on, and went through a real roller coaster with them of functionality, with a marginally acceptable # of hits, and total worthlessness; in the past couple of months, though, I was being credited with significantly fewer showings of their ads than the # of hits my site was getting, and the ratio of hits in to showings was getting worse and worse, so I was starting to get fed up... remember, they were making $ from showing their ads on my site for free, so they DID owe me something in return. The final straw for this one was when they started only crediting me with a single-digit # of showings per day, I was no longer getting ANY hits from them, and emails to both their tech people and the original owner, who's still associated with the service, got no replies; I thought about it, and realized that I hadn't seen an actual BLOG show up in their ad box in AGES, which meant that either they'd decided to stop featuring non-paying sites and were hoping we'd never notice and would still provide them with free ad space, or that their code was so screwed up that no one's blog was being shown anymore... either way, totally NOT acceptable. I thought some more, and realized that I'd only rarely been seeing BlogSnob boxes on people's sites for quite a while, which told me that I was holding onto something that the blogosphere had already relegated to the trash heap... and so I've deleted their code. (A bonus to removing their script and the previous 1 is that my blog should load faster, which will really help visitors on dialup.)
3) BlogRank: This cool site was just what it sounds like, a place to see a listing of blogs based on how readers ranked them (which was done via clicking the link in my sidebar to "vote"); 1 day some weeks ago, it just went away, with an error message coming up saying "This Account Has Been Suspended, Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible." I kept my link up all this time because I like the site, and the owner, Joe, but at this point I need to stop having a link that doesn't do anything, so I've reluctantly taken it down; it'll go right back up the instant I learn that the site's back up, though, as I still hope it will be one day. Joe said once that he's a regular reader here, and, if that's still true, I'd like to say; Joe, you're sorely missed, and if, WHEN, you bring BlogRank back, be sure to send out an email to all the members to let us know if you can... or, if you've lost access to our addies, and have to start up from scratch, let our mutual friend Keeme know, and I'll find out from his site when he links you up.
I'd like to pause here to thank all the readers who've taken the time to vote for me on BlogRank; if you're still enjoying your time here, I'd really appreciate it if you'd click the link in the sidebar that says "Please vote for my site!!" and vote for me at Top100Bloggers every so often (it'll take a vote from you every week, not that I'm hinting or anything, lol). :-)
And one final blog-ranking related bit of news: Remember my post from 5-17-05, in which I said "the golden age of blogging has come and gone"? I saw more evidence of that today, when I did a search to see what other blog-ranking sites might be available, and discovered that the endless list of them that I found a year or so ago was GONE; there were some foreign-language lists, some porn "blog" lists, a couple for Christian sites, of all things, and 1 that looked promising but turned out to be mainly for forums, not blogs, and was in any case almost totally dead... and that was IT. What happened to all those other blog-ranking sites? I assume they're casualties of the decline of the blogosphere; it's not as cost-effective to run blog-service sites as it used to be.
It's sad to see sites and services decline and vanish, but as long as there's somewhere that we can put posts up, that's all that really matters, all we need to give of ourselves to our readers. And speaking of which, I've added to the "Omni FAQ," which tells you, if not everything you always wanted to know about me, at least the major stuff; to see it, click where it says "All about me (sort of)" in the sidebar.... if you've wondered what sort of a nut writes this blog, take a look. ;-)
1) "Name That Blog": I was so excited when I got a working RSS feed again, and with it the understanding that sites that had rejected the old feed would now accept my site, and this site was 1 of the reasons why. It had such a cool premise; pull a quote from the RSS feed of a random member site, and give a choice of blog titles from which to pick the one the quote came from, with links to all the choices being given along with the answer. It seemed like a fun thing to give my readers to do, and a neat way to get some extra traffic, so I signed up, and, as the site requires, put the code on here while I awaited approval... which never came, even though I tried to get added in TWICE. I don't normally give up so easily, as most sites like this are run as sidelines by people with jobs and lives, but there wasn't even an automated reply, and there's no way to contact the owner, so I figured I needed to explore the site some more; I played a bunch of rounds of the game to get the lists of site links to come up, and discovered that the vast majority of the sites don't exist anymore, of the ones that do most are dead, and of the live ones only ONE actually had the game on it. The by-then unnecessary final straw was bringing up what was supposed to be the list of top scorers in the game for the past week, only to find it BLANK; clearly, the owner has long since stopped being involved with the site in any way, and just left it to rot, and the former participants that're still around removed the game because of the issues I've described. I was REALLY bummed, both that the game was gone and that it never occurred to me to do all this checking around before (as the site seems to be fine on the surface), and so I set myself up to be disappointed.
2) BlogSnob: I can remember when nearly every site I visited had their distinctive box on it, and it used to be a good source of new visitors; the premise was that every time your site loaded, you got a credit, and, through some formula, that translated to your blog being shown on other people's sites. It went through periodic problems, but the owner always righted it and made it worthwhile riding out the dead periods; when Pheedo bought the service, though, it took a nosedive from which it never recovered, both due to technical problems and to people abandoning the service in droves because of the addition of commercial ads being shown, and shown far too often for most people's tastes. Still, I held on, and went through a real roller coaster with them of functionality, with a marginally acceptable # of hits, and total worthlessness; in the past couple of months, though, I was being credited with significantly fewer showings of their ads than the # of hits my site was getting, and the ratio of hits in to showings was getting worse and worse, so I was starting to get fed up... remember, they were making $ from showing their ads on my site for free, so they DID owe me something in return. The final straw for this one was when they started only crediting me with a single-digit # of showings per day, I was no longer getting ANY hits from them, and emails to both their tech people and the original owner, who's still associated with the service, got no replies; I thought about it, and realized that I hadn't seen an actual BLOG show up in their ad box in AGES, which meant that either they'd decided to stop featuring non-paying sites and were hoping we'd never notice and would still provide them with free ad space, or that their code was so screwed up that no one's blog was being shown anymore... either way, totally NOT acceptable. I thought some more, and realized that I'd only rarely been seeing BlogSnob boxes on people's sites for quite a while, which told me that I was holding onto something that the blogosphere had already relegated to the trash heap... and so I've deleted their code. (A bonus to removing their script and the previous 1 is that my blog should load faster, which will really help visitors on dialup.)
3) BlogRank: This cool site was just what it sounds like, a place to see a listing of blogs based on how readers ranked them (which was done via clicking the link in my sidebar to "vote"); 1 day some weeks ago, it just went away, with an error message coming up saying "This Account Has Been Suspended, Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible." I kept my link up all this time because I like the site, and the owner, Joe, but at this point I need to stop having a link that doesn't do anything, so I've reluctantly taken it down; it'll go right back up the instant I learn that the site's back up, though, as I still hope it will be one day. Joe said once that he's a regular reader here, and, if that's still true, I'd like to say; Joe, you're sorely missed, and if, WHEN, you bring BlogRank back, be sure to send out an email to all the members to let us know if you can... or, if you've lost access to our addies, and have to start up from scratch, let our mutual friend Keeme know, and I'll find out from his site when he links you up.
I'd like to pause here to thank all the readers who've taken the time to vote for me on BlogRank; if you're still enjoying your time here, I'd really appreciate it if you'd click the link in the sidebar that says "Please vote for my site!!" and vote for me at Top100Bloggers every so often (it'll take a vote from you every week, not that I'm hinting or anything, lol). :-)
And one final blog-ranking related bit of news: Remember my post from 5-17-05, in which I said "the golden age of blogging has come and gone"? I saw more evidence of that today, when I did a search to see what other blog-ranking sites might be available, and discovered that the endless list of them that I found a year or so ago was GONE; there were some foreign-language lists, some porn "blog" lists, a couple for Christian sites, of all things, and 1 that looked promising but turned out to be mainly for forums, not blogs, and was in any case almost totally dead... and that was IT. What happened to all those other blog-ranking sites? I assume they're casualties of the decline of the blogosphere; it's not as cost-effective to run blog-service sites as it used to be.
It's sad to see sites and services decline and vanish, but as long as there's somewhere that we can put posts up, that's all that really matters, all we need to give of ourselves to our readers. And speaking of which, I've added to the "Omni FAQ," which tells you, if not everything you always wanted to know about me, at least the major stuff; to see it, click where it says "All about me (sort of)" in the sidebar.... if you've wondered what sort of a nut writes this blog, take a look. ;-)
Sunday, July 17, 2005
Numbers are trickier than they look
They're not, actually, but people seem unable to understand them when, for example, they come in the form of statistics. One of the most stunning examples I've ever encountered, not to mention the most tasteless and ill-advised, was from a woman who came to give a sex-ed talk to my private school class one year, and ONLY 1 year; she gave us whatever the % was at that time of American girls that got pregnant by the end of high school, and then, applying that % to the girls in our class, smugly announced that that # of girls would get pregnant by graduation. At this point, the dean, who'd been hovering at the back of the classroom, marched up the aisle and furiously informed her that there had NEVER been a student pregnancy in the history of the school, that he was quite certain that there'd be no pre-graduation pregnancies from our class, and that in general that statistic applied to the country as a whole, NOT to every group of students. Flustered and dismayed, and no doubt seeing a phone call to her boss and the cancellation of her company's contract to provide sex ed for my school in the near future, gamely tried to finish up, but all we learned from her is what a frigging idiot looked like.
Is there anything confusing about the idea that, while if you have a homogeneous population, or near enough, you can apply %'s that describe the population as a whole to subgroups or even to individuals, when you have a HETEROgeneous population, you can NOT apply those %'s to subgroups or individuals? That'd be like hearing that 50% of American pets are cats and claiming based on that that in every household half of the pets were cats.
A common example of the lack of understanding of this idea is with divorce rates; because 52% of American marriages end in divorce, folks feel certain that they can say to any married person that THEIR marriage has a 52% chance of failure... and they get offended when their mean-spirited comment is challenged, of course. How could they think that a couple in their 80's has the same chance of their marriage ending in divorce as a pair of teenagers, that an ultra-religious couple has the same chance of their marriage ending in divorce as a Hollywood couple, that ALL of them have a 52% chance of divorce? Even if a couple's not at 1 of those extremes, the population's still very diverse; heck, every year you're married, all things being equal, increases your chance of staying married (it's like how your life expectancy goes up for every year you live), so you can't really apply the 52% to anyone.
Another common problem with statistics is that people see the results of a study and use the #'s to mean something they don't; for example, if they did a study that showed that people preferred plums to apples, some folks would take that to mean that people like purple fruit better than red fruit, and therefore go around claiming that people prefer grapes to strawberries. It's CRUCIAL that when you refer to a statistic you use the EXACT wording that applies to each # and %, because if you add or subtract detail, or extrapolate even the tiniest bit, you're no longer accurately portraying the results; since it's so easy to stray from the true path, it's important to realize that oftentimes the media misconstrues statistics because they feel confident that they can play fast and lose with their terminology.
Another problem is that statistics can NOT be added together and produce a result that replaces scientific studies, but people act as if they can; the media frenzies around the claims that the increased use of cell phones and aspartame were the causes of increases in brain tumors/cancer were based on increases in those ailments that occurred coincidentally in the same time frame... and no matter how many studies have disproved the alleged links between cell phones and aspartame and brain tumors/cancer, people are STILL claiming otherwise, and believing that statistics "prove" what they say. Now, granted, statistics CAN certainly point out things that might in fact be connected and merit study, but until those studies have been done we can NOT be sure that a connection exists... and AFTER the studies are done, people who backed the wrong horse need to drop it and move on (but many of course never will).
The final problem with statistics is that all too many people, women especially, will deny the validity of a statistic if it contradicts their personal experience; a study can show that 99% of people do, say, think, feel, like, dislike, whatever, a given thing, but if a woman knows someone in the remaining 1%, in her mind the entire study, and 99% of the population, is invalidated. Sorry, ladies, and any men who do this, but just because you happen to know someone in the minority result does NOT change the #'s, and it's NOT ok to think or argue otherwise.
The other thing people have trouble with is the seemingly simple concept of averages; for example, all parents, even those whose kids are average in scholastic ability, want their kids to only bring home A's and B's, despite the fact that these grades indicate ABOVE average performance, and thus by definition you CAN'T have all students validly bringing home those grades. An amusing example of this idea is one my husband loves, from a PBS radio show called "Prairie Home Companion," which purports to be broadcast from a fictional town called Lake Wobegon, where "all the kids are above average"... with the hopefully-obvious punchline being that it's not POSSIBLE for all, or most, or even many, children to be above average (unless you've got a wildly atypical distribution of ability within the population rather than the usual bell curve, blah blah, the fine details don't change the point).
Why the confusion about what "average" means? We seem as a nation to have gotten the idea that the average we learned to calculate in school isn't what's meant in real life by the term "average"; we act as if it actually means an arbitrarily-chosen #, or at the very least an unchanging one, that it WOULD be possible for most or all people to be above eventually, when in fact it's a # derived FROM the population it's applied to, and thus, even if the members of the population improve whatever the average is being calculated about, they can't most or all get above average because the average INCREASES as the population "improves."
The lack of understanding of that final point was driven home in a recent show I saw that talked about dogs that were helping kids with reading problems to make amazing progress; the program, and the dogs and people involved, are inarguably wonderful, but the woman who was talking about it was apparently a little dim-witted, because she explained that the reason they'd started the program was that they'd seen some statistics showing that 40% of the children were below average in their reading level.... as opposed to WHAT, don't you wonder? Depending on how wide of a range you call average, AND a reasonably even spread of scores (or whatever the input is), you could expect up to nearly 50% to be below average, and of course nearly 50% above, with just a few at dead average, and it's certainly reasonable to call the middle 20% "average," which would give you 40% above and 40% below... so what was the problem with 40% of the kids being below average? I'm not saying that the kids shouldn't have been helped to read better, because we WANT kids to read as well as possible, but by improving the performance of the lowest-ranked kids, you've raised the average, so those same kids are STILL below average; that doesn't cancel out what they've learned, but it does point out the foolishness of looking at averages as fixed points that everyone can somehow rise above.
Most #-related nonsense is easy to detect and avoid; for the rest, if it's something important, take advantage of being online and look it up... and if it's not, treat it like you would an unsubstantiated claim that didn't contain #'s. Numbers are neither sacred nor demonic; it's all in how you use 'em.
Is there anything confusing about the idea that, while if you have a homogeneous population, or near enough, you can apply %'s that describe the population as a whole to subgroups or even to individuals, when you have a HETEROgeneous population, you can NOT apply those %'s to subgroups or individuals? That'd be like hearing that 50% of American pets are cats and claiming based on that that in every household half of the pets were cats.
A common example of the lack of understanding of this idea is with divorce rates; because 52% of American marriages end in divorce, folks feel certain that they can say to any married person that THEIR marriage has a 52% chance of failure... and they get offended when their mean-spirited comment is challenged, of course. How could they think that a couple in their 80's has the same chance of their marriage ending in divorce as a pair of teenagers, that an ultra-religious couple has the same chance of their marriage ending in divorce as a Hollywood couple, that ALL of them have a 52% chance of divorce? Even if a couple's not at 1 of those extremes, the population's still very diverse; heck, every year you're married, all things being equal, increases your chance of staying married (it's like how your life expectancy goes up for every year you live), so you can't really apply the 52% to anyone.
Another common problem with statistics is that people see the results of a study and use the #'s to mean something they don't; for example, if they did a study that showed that people preferred plums to apples, some folks would take that to mean that people like purple fruit better than red fruit, and therefore go around claiming that people prefer grapes to strawberries. It's CRUCIAL that when you refer to a statistic you use the EXACT wording that applies to each # and %, because if you add or subtract detail, or extrapolate even the tiniest bit, you're no longer accurately portraying the results; since it's so easy to stray from the true path, it's important to realize that oftentimes the media misconstrues statistics because they feel confident that they can play fast and lose with their terminology.
Another problem is that statistics can NOT be added together and produce a result that replaces scientific studies, but people act as if they can; the media frenzies around the claims that the increased use of cell phones and aspartame were the causes of increases in brain tumors/cancer were based on increases in those ailments that occurred coincidentally in the same time frame... and no matter how many studies have disproved the alleged links between cell phones and aspartame and brain tumors/cancer, people are STILL claiming otherwise, and believing that statistics "prove" what they say. Now, granted, statistics CAN certainly point out things that might in fact be connected and merit study, but until those studies have been done we can NOT be sure that a connection exists... and AFTER the studies are done, people who backed the wrong horse need to drop it and move on (but many of course never will).
The final problem with statistics is that all too many people, women especially, will deny the validity of a statistic if it contradicts their personal experience; a study can show that 99% of people do, say, think, feel, like, dislike, whatever, a given thing, but if a woman knows someone in the remaining 1%, in her mind the entire study, and 99% of the population, is invalidated. Sorry, ladies, and any men who do this, but just because you happen to know someone in the minority result does NOT change the #'s, and it's NOT ok to think or argue otherwise.
The other thing people have trouble with is the seemingly simple concept of averages; for example, all parents, even those whose kids are average in scholastic ability, want their kids to only bring home A's and B's, despite the fact that these grades indicate ABOVE average performance, and thus by definition you CAN'T have all students validly bringing home those grades. An amusing example of this idea is one my husband loves, from a PBS radio show called "Prairie Home Companion," which purports to be broadcast from a fictional town called Lake Wobegon, where "all the kids are above average"... with the hopefully-obvious punchline being that it's not POSSIBLE for all, or most, or even many, children to be above average (unless you've got a wildly atypical distribution of ability within the population rather than the usual bell curve, blah blah, the fine details don't change the point).
Why the confusion about what "average" means? We seem as a nation to have gotten the idea that the average we learned to calculate in school isn't what's meant in real life by the term "average"; we act as if it actually means an arbitrarily-chosen #, or at the very least an unchanging one, that it WOULD be possible for most or all people to be above eventually, when in fact it's a # derived FROM the population it's applied to, and thus, even if the members of the population improve whatever the average is being calculated about, they can't most or all get above average because the average INCREASES as the population "improves."
The lack of understanding of that final point was driven home in a recent show I saw that talked about dogs that were helping kids with reading problems to make amazing progress; the program, and the dogs and people involved, are inarguably wonderful, but the woman who was talking about it was apparently a little dim-witted, because she explained that the reason they'd started the program was that they'd seen some statistics showing that 40% of the children were below average in their reading level.... as opposed to WHAT, don't you wonder? Depending on how wide of a range you call average, AND a reasonably even spread of scores (or whatever the input is), you could expect up to nearly 50% to be below average, and of course nearly 50% above, with just a few at dead average, and it's certainly reasonable to call the middle 20% "average," which would give you 40% above and 40% below... so what was the problem with 40% of the kids being below average? I'm not saying that the kids shouldn't have been helped to read better, because we WANT kids to read as well as possible, but by improving the performance of the lowest-ranked kids, you've raised the average, so those same kids are STILL below average; that doesn't cancel out what they've learned, but it does point out the foolishness of looking at averages as fixed points that everyone can somehow rise above.
Most #-related nonsense is easy to detect and avoid; for the rest, if it's something important, take advantage of being online and look it up... and if it's not, treat it like you would an unsubstantiated claim that didn't contain #'s. Numbers are neither sacred nor demonic; it's all in how you use 'em.
Saturday, July 16, 2005
Sweetness and synchronicity
Yesterday, I happened to catch a glimpse of myself naked in a full-length mirror, and inexplicably had the sudden urge to do the pose Venus has in Botticelli's most famous painting, "The Birth of Venus"
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/botticelli/venus/venus.jpg
in which she emerges from the sea naked on a shell... and no, I do NOT consider myself to be of goddess-like beauty, nor am I in the habit of striking poses (trust me, few women pushing middle age want to spend too much time looking at their bodies). I thought amusedly, "That's me, Venus on a half shell," and then walked away and didn't think anything else about it, until...
That evening, my husband and I were talking about how people look for mates in the modern world, and, referring to our own meeting, he said, "I decided I wanted a woman, put in about 10 minutes of effort, and there, sailing in on a shell..."
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
No, he's NEVER made that sort of reference, or any remotely related or otherwise exalted one, to me before, and no, he does NOT normally draw parallels to art, about which he knows very little, and no, he did NOT know about the pose I'd struck or the attendant thought I'd had earlier in the evening.
The synchronicity nearly knocked me senseless, but I managed to hug him and thank him for the sentiment (which is astoundingly romantic considering how long we've been together and that we're both geeks), and then to babble out what had happened earlier; he was amazed... so much so that when I said, "You know that CAN'T be a coincidence," my totally non-believing husband agreed, much to both our surprise.
Did I have the Venus thought precognitively, because he was going to say it, did he say it because I'd thought it and the energy of the thought was still hovering nearby, karmically speaking, or did it come from somewhere else entirely and we both just picked up on it? I dunno... but the connectedness of the 2 events is inescapable.
My husband is something of a clod as far as relationships go, as most male geeks are, but he did pretty darned well with this one; he manages a good line a time or 2 per year, and that's part of why I let him live when the rate of disasters caused by him becomes unusually high.
MY geekdom comes into play in this story too; when I found the pic of the painting online and looked at it, the way the legs are posed looked "backwards," and I couldn't figure out why at 1st, but eventually realized that the image in my mind was blended in with the cover of Robert Heinlein's book "To Sail Beyond the Sunset," which has artwork based on "The Birth of Venus" on it
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0441748600/ref=sib_dp_pt/104-5557992-2606304#reader-link
where the woman's left knee is turned inwards, rather than the right knee as in the painting... can you believe that I got part of the pose reversed because I've got a clearer mental picture of a scifi book cover that I haven't seen in nearly a decade (it's in storage at my mother's house) than of the famous painting I was envisioning?
Anyways, synchronicity strikes again... and brings with it the flattering realization that my husband still sees me as a goddess. Life is good.
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/botticelli/venus/venus.jpg
in which she emerges from the sea naked on a shell... and no, I do NOT consider myself to be of goddess-like beauty, nor am I in the habit of striking poses (trust me, few women pushing middle age want to spend too much time looking at their bodies). I thought amusedly, "That's me, Venus on a half shell," and then walked away and didn't think anything else about it, until...
That evening, my husband and I were talking about how people look for mates in the modern world, and, referring to our own meeting, he said, "I decided I wanted a woman, put in about 10 minutes of effort, and there, sailing in on a shell..."
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
No, he's NEVER made that sort of reference, or any remotely related or otherwise exalted one, to me before, and no, he does NOT normally draw parallels to art, about which he knows very little, and no, he did NOT know about the pose I'd struck or the attendant thought I'd had earlier in the evening.
The synchronicity nearly knocked me senseless, but I managed to hug him and thank him for the sentiment (which is astoundingly romantic considering how long we've been together and that we're both geeks), and then to babble out what had happened earlier; he was amazed... so much so that when I said, "You know that CAN'T be a coincidence," my totally non-believing husband agreed, much to both our surprise.
Did I have the Venus thought precognitively, because he was going to say it, did he say it because I'd thought it and the energy of the thought was still hovering nearby, karmically speaking, or did it come from somewhere else entirely and we both just picked up on it? I dunno... but the connectedness of the 2 events is inescapable.
My husband is something of a clod as far as relationships go, as most male geeks are, but he did pretty darned well with this one; he manages a good line a time or 2 per year, and that's part of why I let him live when the rate of disasters caused by him becomes unusually high.
MY geekdom comes into play in this story too; when I found the pic of the painting online and looked at it, the way the legs are posed looked "backwards," and I couldn't figure out why at 1st, but eventually realized that the image in my mind was blended in with the cover of Robert Heinlein's book "To Sail Beyond the Sunset," which has artwork based on "The Birth of Venus" on it
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0441748600/ref=sib_dp_pt/104-5557992-2606304#reader-link
where the woman's left knee is turned inwards, rather than the right knee as in the painting... can you believe that I got part of the pose reversed because I've got a clearer mental picture of a scifi book cover that I haven't seen in nearly a decade (it's in storage at my mother's house) than of the famous painting I was envisioning?
Anyways, synchronicity strikes again... and brings with it the flattering realization that my husband still sees me as a goddess. Life is good.
Friday, July 15, 2005
Blogging can get you into trouble
And I don't just mean because it can suck up hours of time that you should be doing other things during, I mean because what you put in your blog could usually get you into hot water with at least some of the people you know. My friend Andrew, whose excellent blog is here
http://danweasel.com/
posted a link to an interesting article on this topic
http://chronicle.com/jobs/2005/07/2005070801c.htm
and it makes many important points:
"The pertinent question for bloggers is simply, Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one's unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world?"
Sad but true; there ARE people who look askance at what we do, and look down on us for doing it... this is far from the only place I've seen this sort of thing said. I've even seen people who participate heavily in online forums and/or have conventional websites bashing bloggers, so even those that you'd think should be supportive of us can be actively hostile... and they don't wear signs around their necks to tell us who they are, so your best bet is to not tell people that you don't know VERY well that you're blogging. Then again, it's not uncommon to read about people whose family, friends and romantic partners found out about their blogs and freaked out, so it might not be safe to tell ANYONE... and that goes double if your content is even remotely questionable.
"it's best for job seekers to leave their personal lives mostly out of the interview process"
Sound advice, and part of the central theme of the article, which is to NOT tell prospective employers that you have a blog.
"Be careful what you let a close associate's blog say about you. What that associate sees as complimentary may cast you in an unflattering light in the eyes of a search committee."
In a more general sense, if people you know in "real life," or even people you've gotten chummy with online, are also blogging, keep in mind that anything they say about you, or that you say on their blogs, might be seen by people checking you out in the blogosphere... and if people know you blog, they might track you down even if you don't pass around your URL, and then everything you've posted, or that's posted about you, is fair game to be used against you.
"You may think your blog is a harmless outlet. You may use the faulty logic of the blogger, "Oh, no one will see it anyway." Don't count on it. Even if you take your blog offline while job applications are active, Google and other search engines store cached data of their prior contents. So that cranky rant might still turn up."
Excellent point... and it's not just potential employers who might be Googling you. Your friends, romantic partner, co-workers and family members might do it out of curiosity, that new hottie you just started dating will do it because everyone advises them to (and if you're a young person, their parents might be doing it too), and anyone who dislikes you or is envious of you might do it hoping to find some dirt.
"The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself. Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum."
This shows you how stupid and illogical people are; ANYONE can start a blog at any time, and say anything on it, but someone with an established history of NOT posting bad stuff about work should be seen as LESS of a threat, NOT more.
"We all have quirks. In a traditional interview process, we try our best to stifle them, or keep them below the threshold of annoyance and distraction. The search committee is composed of humans, who know that the applicants are humans, too, who have those things to hide. It's in your interest, as an applicant, for them to stay hidden, not laid out in exquisite detail for all the world to read. If you stick your foot in your mouth during an interview, no one will interrupt to prevent you from doing further damage. So why risk doing it many times over by blabbing away in a blog?"
And in general, people who don't know you well probably shouldn't be seeing your private thoughts and hearing about your personal life... and this may well include those co-workers that aren't also friends, no matter how long you've worked together.
There are some simple rules you can follow to protect yourself against negative consequences from your blog:
1) Don't use your real name; if your 1st name, or a nickname you go by, is remotely unusual or distinctive, don't even use part of your name... and if you think your blog won't be "real" if you do that, see my post of 7-8-05. Don't give the name of your school, workplace, or anything else that a search might be done on to track you down, either; why make it easy for potential troublemakers in your life to have access to your private thoughts?
2) Be aware that if you show your blog to 1 family member, friend, schoolmate, co-worker or member of any other group you're part of, it's almost certain that they'll tell others within that group, no matter how much swearing to secrecy you do with them, so if you don't want them all to know, resist the urge to tell that 1st person within the group.
3) Remember that people are rarely really secretive about their online visits, so everyone who lives with, or is ever in the home of, anyone who visits your blog might see it (if you're young, think "parents"), and if anyone at your workplace visits your blog, the boss or others in positions of power might see it; think about if it'd really be ok if those peripheral people saw what you write.
4) If there's a system available at your workplace or school for you to blog, DON'T use it unless you're required to, and then only post exactly what they want you to with no personalization... because even things that seem innocent or irrelevant to you may seem VERY bad to them.
5) Eventually, hopefully, laws will be put in place such that school officials and employers can't take any action against you for what you put on a blog that's not on their system, but until then, if people at work or school know where your blog is, show some sense about what you say about those institutions and the people associated with them... and even after then, remember that even if they can't take direct action, their disapproval of you can be expressed indirectly in a variety of ways.
6) If you're trying to keep your blog a secret from people you live with or share a computer with, be sure you haven't bookmarked it, or any blogs you link with or visit, that you don't use your URL in your profile or sig line at any forum you use, and that you're deleting your history file and the relevant cookies after you leave the blogosphere. Also, if you're storing your template and archives somewhere on your computer, as you should as a backup, make sure those files are password-protected and aren't named anything that identifies them as blog-related.
If your response to reading this post has been dismissive, if you think "It won't happen to me," unless you're relentlessly anonymous like I am, you're potentially setting yourself up; remember, every last blogger whose blog kept them from being hired, got them kicked out of school, fired, or led to misery between them and their significant other, family, friends or coworkers, thought the exact same thing. In direct interactions with people, we can tailor what we say to our audience, but with a blog every reader can see it all, and it's important to keep that in mind before passing your URL around; I don't want the next story I read about someone's life getting messed up because of their blog to be about YOU.
http://danweasel.com/
posted a link to an interesting article on this topic
http://chronicle.com/jobs/2005/07/2005070801c.htm
and it makes many important points:
"The pertinent question for bloggers is simply, Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one's unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world?"
Sad but true; there ARE people who look askance at what we do, and look down on us for doing it... this is far from the only place I've seen this sort of thing said. I've even seen people who participate heavily in online forums and/or have conventional websites bashing bloggers, so even those that you'd think should be supportive of us can be actively hostile... and they don't wear signs around their necks to tell us who they are, so your best bet is to not tell people that you don't know VERY well that you're blogging. Then again, it's not uncommon to read about people whose family, friends and romantic partners found out about their blogs and freaked out, so it might not be safe to tell ANYONE... and that goes double if your content is even remotely questionable.
"it's best for job seekers to leave their personal lives mostly out of the interview process"
Sound advice, and part of the central theme of the article, which is to NOT tell prospective employers that you have a blog.
"Be careful what you let a close associate's blog say about you. What that associate sees as complimentary may cast you in an unflattering light in the eyes of a search committee."
In a more general sense, if people you know in "real life," or even people you've gotten chummy with online, are also blogging, keep in mind that anything they say about you, or that you say on their blogs, might be seen by people checking you out in the blogosphere... and if people know you blog, they might track you down even if you don't pass around your URL, and then everything you've posted, or that's posted about you, is fair game to be used against you.
"You may think your blog is a harmless outlet. You may use the faulty logic of the blogger, "Oh, no one will see it anyway." Don't count on it. Even if you take your blog offline while job applications are active, Google and other search engines store cached data of their prior contents. So that cranky rant might still turn up."
Excellent point... and it's not just potential employers who might be Googling you. Your friends, romantic partner, co-workers and family members might do it out of curiosity, that new hottie you just started dating will do it because everyone advises them to (and if you're a young person, their parents might be doing it too), and anyone who dislikes you or is envious of you might do it hoping to find some dirt.
"The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself. Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum."
This shows you how stupid and illogical people are; ANYONE can start a blog at any time, and say anything on it, but someone with an established history of NOT posting bad stuff about work should be seen as LESS of a threat, NOT more.
"We all have quirks. In a traditional interview process, we try our best to stifle them, or keep them below the threshold of annoyance and distraction. The search committee is composed of humans, who know that the applicants are humans, too, who have those things to hide. It's in your interest, as an applicant, for them to stay hidden, not laid out in exquisite detail for all the world to read. If you stick your foot in your mouth during an interview, no one will interrupt to prevent you from doing further damage. So why risk doing it many times over by blabbing away in a blog?"
And in general, people who don't know you well probably shouldn't be seeing your private thoughts and hearing about your personal life... and this may well include those co-workers that aren't also friends, no matter how long you've worked together.
There are some simple rules you can follow to protect yourself against negative consequences from your blog:
1) Don't use your real name; if your 1st name, or a nickname you go by, is remotely unusual or distinctive, don't even use part of your name... and if you think your blog won't be "real" if you do that, see my post of 7-8-05. Don't give the name of your school, workplace, or anything else that a search might be done on to track you down, either; why make it easy for potential troublemakers in your life to have access to your private thoughts?
2) Be aware that if you show your blog to 1 family member, friend, schoolmate, co-worker or member of any other group you're part of, it's almost certain that they'll tell others within that group, no matter how much swearing to secrecy you do with them, so if you don't want them all to know, resist the urge to tell that 1st person within the group.
3) Remember that people are rarely really secretive about their online visits, so everyone who lives with, or is ever in the home of, anyone who visits your blog might see it (if you're young, think "parents"), and if anyone at your workplace visits your blog, the boss or others in positions of power might see it; think about if it'd really be ok if those peripheral people saw what you write.
4) If there's a system available at your workplace or school for you to blog, DON'T use it unless you're required to, and then only post exactly what they want you to with no personalization... because even things that seem innocent or irrelevant to you may seem VERY bad to them.
5) Eventually, hopefully, laws will be put in place such that school officials and employers can't take any action against you for what you put on a blog that's not on their system, but until then, if people at work or school know where your blog is, show some sense about what you say about those institutions and the people associated with them... and even after then, remember that even if they can't take direct action, their disapproval of you can be expressed indirectly in a variety of ways.
6) If you're trying to keep your blog a secret from people you live with or share a computer with, be sure you haven't bookmarked it, or any blogs you link with or visit, that you don't use your URL in your profile or sig line at any forum you use, and that you're deleting your history file and the relevant cookies after you leave the blogosphere. Also, if you're storing your template and archives somewhere on your computer, as you should as a backup, make sure those files are password-protected and aren't named anything that identifies them as blog-related.
If your response to reading this post has been dismissive, if you think "It won't happen to me," unless you're relentlessly anonymous like I am, you're potentially setting yourself up; remember, every last blogger whose blog kept them from being hired, got them kicked out of school, fired, or led to misery between them and their significant other, family, friends or coworkers, thought the exact same thing. In direct interactions with people, we can tailor what we say to our audience, but with a blog every reader can see it all, and it's important to keep that in mind before passing your URL around; I don't want the next story I read about someone's life getting messed up because of their blog to be about YOU.
Thursday, July 14, 2005
Speak of the angel...
When you talk about something, especially with intense emotion, karma often sends it to you, and FAST; it's with great pleasure that I announce that my little angel girl, the tiny squirrel that captured my heart a year ago, made it sing when she started taking food from me and letting me pet her, and then broke it when she suddenly stopped coming a couple of months ago, came for a visit today, and I was able to interact with her as before... she's still tame!! :-)
She'd gone from being a daily visitor for many months to not coming at all at the time our roof got replaced; I can't blame her for being freaked out, it freaked ME out having all those workmen and that insane racket. I didn't expect her to stop coming for more than a few days from roofing trauma, but her babies became old enough to leave the den right at that time, and it's possible that her instinct at that point was to stay right by them, eating only from her stored food; whatever the cause(s), it's been a LONG couple of months.
During that time, I saw her once on the fence, once running for a tree, and once sucking up a few bits of food before dashing off; during the long stretches of time with no sightings, my head spun with the countless horrible things that can happen to a little squirrel in a big world. In addition, I knew from the amount of milk she'd been producing that she had to have had at least the 8 babies that're an average litter for her species, but I only ever saw TWO, and I only saw them a few times over a period of about a week, and never again, so I've been agonizing over what happened to the bulk of her litter, and then to the precious babies that I saw all too little of.
Recently, food that we'd put out for the skunks that they hadn't eaten by daylight (they only come at night) started disappearing at some point during the day, and we knew that meant that at least 1 squirrel was coming when we weren't around; we put out more and more food, and still it was all getting eaten, which makes us hopeful that the babies are still around, just not coming when we're here... the mommy is legendary for making off with over a lb of food a day, though, so maybe it's just her-only time will tell.
Today, I spotted her, just barely, hiding back in branches that overhang the fence, and I went out with grapes for her, calling to her; as soon as she heard me, her little head popped out and she was craning to look at me, and as I approached the fence she ran down it, and was there with me when I got there. She took a grape without hesitation, but moved a little bit away to eat it. She came for another grape, and didn't move so far away to eat it. With the 3rd grape, she was sitting right by me on the fence to eat. With the 4th grape, she calmly allowed me to pet her while she ate. After a few additional grapes, she didn't want any more, but still stayed there with me for a few minutes while I continued to pet and talk to her; she doesn't react to petting in any way that I recognize, and she doesn't display affection, but since she was through eating and had a clear path back to her hiding area but didn't go right away, I can only assume that either she enjoys being petted, or cares about me in her small rodential way and allows it because she can tell *I* like it, or both... whatever the reason, my emotional bond with my little angel girl was renewed, and I was utterly thrilled.
I sometimes wonder what all this fuss about a little creature that isn't seen as a pet, or as being special to humans in any way, must seem like to people in other countries, or even to those in America who see a squirrel as a pest, or as food, people who aren't aware of how amazingly intelligent and bursting with personality squirrels are, or how utterly magical it is to make a connection with a wild animal. How can I explain how it felt when this minute animal, who because of her place on the business end of the food chain should've always looked at me with deep suspicion or outright terror, 1st came up to me, placed her tiny, tiny paw on my hand, and looked up at me with total trust? Or when I was able to stroke her pretty fur, or when she started climbing out of the tree and running to me when I called her?
Then again, of all the things I talk about on my blog, this one is probably the LEAST difficult to understand; if it isn't already clear to you, find the little wild things that live even in our cities, and spend some time with them... they'll show you.
She'd gone from being a daily visitor for many months to not coming at all at the time our roof got replaced; I can't blame her for being freaked out, it freaked ME out having all those workmen and that insane racket. I didn't expect her to stop coming for more than a few days from roofing trauma, but her babies became old enough to leave the den right at that time, and it's possible that her instinct at that point was to stay right by them, eating only from her stored food; whatever the cause(s), it's been a LONG couple of months.
During that time, I saw her once on the fence, once running for a tree, and once sucking up a few bits of food before dashing off; during the long stretches of time with no sightings, my head spun with the countless horrible things that can happen to a little squirrel in a big world. In addition, I knew from the amount of milk she'd been producing that she had to have had at least the 8 babies that're an average litter for her species, but I only ever saw TWO, and I only saw them a few times over a period of about a week, and never again, so I've been agonizing over what happened to the bulk of her litter, and then to the precious babies that I saw all too little of.
Recently, food that we'd put out for the skunks that they hadn't eaten by daylight (they only come at night) started disappearing at some point during the day, and we knew that meant that at least 1 squirrel was coming when we weren't around; we put out more and more food, and still it was all getting eaten, which makes us hopeful that the babies are still around, just not coming when we're here... the mommy is legendary for making off with over a lb of food a day, though, so maybe it's just her-only time will tell.
Today, I spotted her, just barely, hiding back in branches that overhang the fence, and I went out with grapes for her, calling to her; as soon as she heard me, her little head popped out and she was craning to look at me, and as I approached the fence she ran down it, and was there with me when I got there. She took a grape without hesitation, but moved a little bit away to eat it. She came for another grape, and didn't move so far away to eat it. With the 3rd grape, she was sitting right by me on the fence to eat. With the 4th grape, she calmly allowed me to pet her while she ate. After a few additional grapes, she didn't want any more, but still stayed there with me for a few minutes while I continued to pet and talk to her; she doesn't react to petting in any way that I recognize, and she doesn't display affection, but since she was through eating and had a clear path back to her hiding area but didn't go right away, I can only assume that either she enjoys being petted, or cares about me in her small rodential way and allows it because she can tell *I* like it, or both... whatever the reason, my emotional bond with my little angel girl was renewed, and I was utterly thrilled.
I sometimes wonder what all this fuss about a little creature that isn't seen as a pet, or as being special to humans in any way, must seem like to people in other countries, or even to those in America who see a squirrel as a pest, or as food, people who aren't aware of how amazingly intelligent and bursting with personality squirrels are, or how utterly magical it is to make a connection with a wild animal. How can I explain how it felt when this minute animal, who because of her place on the business end of the food chain should've always looked at me with deep suspicion or outright terror, 1st came up to me, placed her tiny, tiny paw on my hand, and looked up at me with total trust? Or when I was able to stroke her pretty fur, or when she started climbing out of the tree and running to me when I called her?
Then again, of all the things I talk about on my blog, this one is probably the LEAST difficult to understand; if it isn't already clear to you, find the little wild things that live even in our cities, and spend some time with them... they'll show you.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
A truly foolish dilemma
Recently, we've been visited every night by skunks; there are at least 5, 3 smallish ones and 2 big ones, and they mostly were coming separately, except that 2 of the littler ones often came together... and between them all, we had quite a parade going on.
Then, we didn't see any of them for several days, and since that time only 1 has been coming, a little female (we've been fooled as to wild animal gender before, but skunks often have their tails held up, and she clearly has, er, 2 "innies" and no "outie")... we assume they did another round of trapping and relocating, as for 4 skunks to be killed all at once, or to simultaneously decide to give up a good food source, seems unlikely.
The skunks in general showed no fear of us; they could see us through the kitchen window and the screen door, they could hear and smell us, but even if we were talking and moving around they didn't seen disturbed, and would come right up to the screen door and sniff loudly and look in at me, sitting on the floor with my laptop about 5 feet away. Anyone who's been reading here long enough to know about my little angel girl (a tiny squirrel who's been visiting me for a year) has probably already figured out what's been on my mind since it became clear that the skunks had no fear of us; I've been eager to try to hand-feed and possibly even pet them.
Not being totally deluded, I AM aware that objectively it's just plain stupid to attempt that close of contact with a wild skunk, since, no matter how calmly and unthreateningly one interacts with it, something could always happen to scare it, and, although like most creatures its 1st instinct is to flee, there's always the risk of it spraying, especially if what scares it is, say, a cat leaping over the fence, and then *I* could be sprayed, and the carpet and furniture behind me... even if the patio got sprayed, it'd be a nightmare.
Stupid... but it's still spinning around in my mind all the time, because my passion for animals, and my extraordinary ability to get even shy or wild ones to trust me, makes me reasonably sure that I could easily get the remaining skunk to approach closely enough to take food and maybe be petted, and the risk of cats showing up, or other disasters, is low, so...
It's STILL stupid, but it's getting harder and harder to hold back from trying... with ANY other animal, I'd have long since gotten it to at least stay nearby while I rolled food to it from the doorway, and a fearless and intelligent creature like a skunk would probably have been willing to interact directly with me by now if I'd made any effort. When they've come to the screen door, and I've talked to them while they sniffed and checked me out, it's taken all I've got to not edge closer, to not bring the laptop closer to the door for the night so they got used to being nearer to me... what if I sneezed, or had a coughing fit?
Today, I came striding into the family room, and there was a noise by the door that turned out to be our remaining skunk stumbling back in surprise, and then waddling rapidly around the corner of the house on her short little legs; her tail was mostly up, but there was no evidence that spraying was on her mind. Dismayed at having scared her away from her food, I called out to her, "Come back, it's only me, I'm sorry, don't be afraid, come back and eat"... and a few seconds later, she reappeared around the corner, came all the way back to the screen door, looking up at me and sniffing, and when I continued to talk she tilted her head as if listening, and seemed perfectly calm despite how I'd just scared her.
A frightened wild animal came back into range, came as close to me as she could get, and showed great curiosity about me, mere moments after I myself frightened her, just because she heard my voice and understood that it was safe to come back... you could even make a case that she came to me when I called her, since she came to the door rather than going directly to the food.
It'd be so easy to get her to take food from me, and, with that accomplished, there's a good chance that I could pet her.
It's stupid... STUPID... a skunk is like a loaded weapon with the safety off, even though it doesn't mean to be.
She's such a beautiful little creature, and her fur is so long and silky, it must be so soft...
STUPID.
She's done everything short of ASK me to come closer.
STUPID.
Imagine, getting to pet a wild skunk!!
STUPID.
I'll keep you posted.
Then, we didn't see any of them for several days, and since that time only 1 has been coming, a little female (we've been fooled as to wild animal gender before, but skunks often have their tails held up, and she clearly has, er, 2 "innies" and no "outie")... we assume they did another round of trapping and relocating, as for 4 skunks to be killed all at once, or to simultaneously decide to give up a good food source, seems unlikely.
The skunks in general showed no fear of us; they could see us through the kitchen window and the screen door, they could hear and smell us, but even if we were talking and moving around they didn't seen disturbed, and would come right up to the screen door and sniff loudly and look in at me, sitting on the floor with my laptop about 5 feet away. Anyone who's been reading here long enough to know about my little angel girl (a tiny squirrel who's been visiting me for a year) has probably already figured out what's been on my mind since it became clear that the skunks had no fear of us; I've been eager to try to hand-feed and possibly even pet them.
Not being totally deluded, I AM aware that objectively it's just plain stupid to attempt that close of contact with a wild skunk, since, no matter how calmly and unthreateningly one interacts with it, something could always happen to scare it, and, although like most creatures its 1st instinct is to flee, there's always the risk of it spraying, especially if what scares it is, say, a cat leaping over the fence, and then *I* could be sprayed, and the carpet and furniture behind me... even if the patio got sprayed, it'd be a nightmare.
Stupid... but it's still spinning around in my mind all the time, because my passion for animals, and my extraordinary ability to get even shy or wild ones to trust me, makes me reasonably sure that I could easily get the remaining skunk to approach closely enough to take food and maybe be petted, and the risk of cats showing up, or other disasters, is low, so...
It's STILL stupid, but it's getting harder and harder to hold back from trying... with ANY other animal, I'd have long since gotten it to at least stay nearby while I rolled food to it from the doorway, and a fearless and intelligent creature like a skunk would probably have been willing to interact directly with me by now if I'd made any effort. When they've come to the screen door, and I've talked to them while they sniffed and checked me out, it's taken all I've got to not edge closer, to not bring the laptop closer to the door for the night so they got used to being nearer to me... what if I sneezed, or had a coughing fit?
Today, I came striding into the family room, and there was a noise by the door that turned out to be our remaining skunk stumbling back in surprise, and then waddling rapidly around the corner of the house on her short little legs; her tail was mostly up, but there was no evidence that spraying was on her mind. Dismayed at having scared her away from her food, I called out to her, "Come back, it's only me, I'm sorry, don't be afraid, come back and eat"... and a few seconds later, she reappeared around the corner, came all the way back to the screen door, looking up at me and sniffing, and when I continued to talk she tilted her head as if listening, and seemed perfectly calm despite how I'd just scared her.
A frightened wild animal came back into range, came as close to me as she could get, and showed great curiosity about me, mere moments after I myself frightened her, just because she heard my voice and understood that it was safe to come back... you could even make a case that she came to me when I called her, since she came to the door rather than going directly to the food.
It'd be so easy to get her to take food from me, and, with that accomplished, there's a good chance that I could pet her.
It's stupid... STUPID... a skunk is like a loaded weapon with the safety off, even though it doesn't mean to be.
She's such a beautiful little creature, and her fur is so long and silky, it must be so soft...
STUPID.
She's done everything short of ASK me to come closer.
STUPID.
Imagine, getting to pet a wild skunk!!
STUPID.
I'll keep you posted.
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
The feed and blog problems continue
I posted on 7-1-05 about my dismaying discovery that Bloglines hadn't updated what they showed for my blog for a year, which I figured out was because my RSS feed from Feedster seemed to have died, and vanished from their system, and how, after a bit of a struggle, I got a new feed with FeedBurner, and was finally able to get Yahoo to put me in their system, after which I put in a button for people to add my feed to their My Yahoo. I was hoping to be able to make an "all is well" post about my feed-related issues by now, but this is the online world, not a sitcom, and things never work as quickly or run as smoothly as you hope... and there's so much upheaval and dysfunctionality in my sidebar that I figured it was time to say something.
No one at Feedster has replied to my emails as of yet, but they've been busy; when I click their subscribe button now, more info appears than was there before (although NOT any post info). I don't know if that means that the feed is usable now or not, but I haven't given up on them, because if they get this straightened out I don't have to re-submit a feed to every directory and search engine in the blogosphere; I didn't remove their button, but I put it at the bottom of the list, so that no one else uses it to... do whatever it is people do with feed URL's.
I did a search at Feedster for my blog, and DID get a result... sort of. The name of my blog came up, and an XML button for my FeedBurner feed (NOT their own feed), but no other info, and the link to my cached posts gave a system error message. I then tried to add my feed to "My Feedster," and it did so with no problems, but when I clicked on the link to see my posts, I got my URL and title but nothing else.
I've written to them again, giving them this info and begging to be told if my feed still exists; cross your fingers for me.
The Bloglines folks have been hard at work, responding to my emails much faster than the 2 business days they say to expect it to take... and there've been LOTS of emails, because their system has taken a wild dislike to my blog. By the time they replied to my 1st email, I'd used the Bloglines subscription button provided by my FeedBurner screen to get my new feed into Bloglines and verify that it WAS showing recent posts (not all of them, but more on that later), and was all ready to ask them to switch my subscribers from the old feed to the new 1 if, as seemed likely, the former was dead; when they told me that they'd fixed the problem, I checked and saw that they'd done that, but the subscription list was still attached to the old feed, which had been deleted from my account. They fixed that, but then clicking on the button was suddenly giving a choice of both feeds... and someone had already subscribed to the dead feed, which was listed 1st. They switched the subscriber to the new feed, and deactivated the old feed... but then, and now, clicking on the Bloglines button is bringing up a screen with no way to subscribe to or see my feed, at least not with the browsers I normally use. They say that they get a subscribe screen when they test it, but of course they want it to work with all the browsers, so all they can do is send it on to their tech people; throughout all of this, the posts that come up in Bloglines have never gone back past June 24th, which is a significant problem, and that's been passed along too.
I have no idea how long it'll take for this stuff to get fixed, but I'll keep on it; in the meantime, if you're subscribed to me with Bloglines, you can at least see my newer posts, and, depending on what browser you use, you may be able to subscribe to me, if not via the button, then by clicking on the XML button and using their Bloglines button... maybe.
The FeedBurner system developed a bug a couple of days after I signed on, and now the subscription buttons on their screen aren't working with some browsers, and the posts aren't showing up with every browser either; I corresponded with them about that, and they're working on it.
Then, there's NewsGator; I added my blog to their system, but it wasn't showing up in searches. I was marking spam emails for deletion a few days later, and the instant before I hit the button I heard the inner voice telling me to not delete one of them, even though it was shown as being from someone with the sort of unusual name that's standard with spammers, and the subject line only had what looked like a nonsense word, which is also typical of spam; I listened to the voice (thank goodness for psychic flashes), opened the email, and saw that it was from NewsGator... who apparently haven't grasped the concept of how to send an "official" email, or the reasons for making clear to people that an email's from them. The subject line was "Folksonomy," which I researched and discovered to be an actual term, which refers to the organization of information in a way convenient to its users; the subject of the email of itself was that this guy had glanced at the 1st 2 posts on my blog and decided from that that it's got nothing to do with the religion/spirituality and personal growth category that I'd tried to get added into... despite the fact that if he'd scrolled down a little, he'd have found posts that WERE clearly in that category. I pointed that out, adding that, sadly, spiritual insights don't present themselves every day, and he wrote back and took another dig at my topics, but added my blog in, which is all that really mattered.
The button to subscribe to my blog via NewsGator is now in my sidebar; I've tested it, and it works... I know, it's shocking that something WORKS, isn't it? I've also tested the My Yahoo one, and it also works. I put in the My MSN button as well, but I don't want to sign up for anything to do with them to test it, so if you use MSN give it a shot, but don't be too surprised if there's a problem... and I hope that if there is, 1 of the other subscription options will be useful to you.
Believe it or not, that's STILL not all of it; depending on what browser you use, you may have noticed that, starting last weekend, my sidebar has been a disaster area. Blogger made an alteration in their templates to allow something to do with image posting to work, which for some reason included a command that counteracts div commands... and BOOM, my right-justify stopped working, and now things in my sidebar are right, left or center depending on what their code dictates (note to programmers-PLEASE don't set your stuff up to be placed a particular way, because your users may have different formatting preferences than you do) every time I bring my blog up in my primary browser. The supposed "fix" that Blogger has inserted as an option in the settings area doesn't work, and all of my attempts to contact tech support are being met with form letters; you'd better believe that I'm going to keep after them until they fix it... I didn't do all that work setting up my sidebar to have it look like a wreck to even a small % of my visitors.
That's where things stand now; it'd be sure nice if I COULD put up an "all is well" post soon...
No one at Feedster has replied to my emails as of yet, but they've been busy; when I click their subscribe button now, more info appears than was there before (although NOT any post info). I don't know if that means that the feed is usable now or not, but I haven't given up on them, because if they get this straightened out I don't have to re-submit a feed to every directory and search engine in the blogosphere; I didn't remove their button, but I put it at the bottom of the list, so that no one else uses it to... do whatever it is people do with feed URL's.
I did a search at Feedster for my blog, and DID get a result... sort of. The name of my blog came up, and an XML button for my FeedBurner feed (NOT their own feed), but no other info, and the link to my cached posts gave a system error message. I then tried to add my feed to "My Feedster," and it did so with no problems, but when I clicked on the link to see my posts, I got my URL and title but nothing else.
I've written to them again, giving them this info and begging to be told if my feed still exists; cross your fingers for me.
The Bloglines folks have been hard at work, responding to my emails much faster than the 2 business days they say to expect it to take... and there've been LOTS of emails, because their system has taken a wild dislike to my blog. By the time they replied to my 1st email, I'd used the Bloglines subscription button provided by my FeedBurner screen to get my new feed into Bloglines and verify that it WAS showing recent posts (not all of them, but more on that later), and was all ready to ask them to switch my subscribers from the old feed to the new 1 if, as seemed likely, the former was dead; when they told me that they'd fixed the problem, I checked and saw that they'd done that, but the subscription list was still attached to the old feed, which had been deleted from my account. They fixed that, but then clicking on the button was suddenly giving a choice of both feeds... and someone had already subscribed to the dead feed, which was listed 1st. They switched the subscriber to the new feed, and deactivated the old feed... but then, and now, clicking on the Bloglines button is bringing up a screen with no way to subscribe to or see my feed, at least not with the browsers I normally use. They say that they get a subscribe screen when they test it, but of course they want it to work with all the browsers, so all they can do is send it on to their tech people; throughout all of this, the posts that come up in Bloglines have never gone back past June 24th, which is a significant problem, and that's been passed along too.
I have no idea how long it'll take for this stuff to get fixed, but I'll keep on it; in the meantime, if you're subscribed to me with Bloglines, you can at least see my newer posts, and, depending on what browser you use, you may be able to subscribe to me, if not via the button, then by clicking on the XML button and using their Bloglines button... maybe.
The FeedBurner system developed a bug a couple of days after I signed on, and now the subscription buttons on their screen aren't working with some browsers, and the posts aren't showing up with every browser either; I corresponded with them about that, and they're working on it.
Then, there's NewsGator; I added my blog to their system, but it wasn't showing up in searches. I was marking spam emails for deletion a few days later, and the instant before I hit the button I heard the inner voice telling me to not delete one of them, even though it was shown as being from someone with the sort of unusual name that's standard with spammers, and the subject line only had what looked like a nonsense word, which is also typical of spam; I listened to the voice (thank goodness for psychic flashes), opened the email, and saw that it was from NewsGator... who apparently haven't grasped the concept of how to send an "official" email, or the reasons for making clear to people that an email's from them. The subject line was "Folksonomy," which I researched and discovered to be an actual term, which refers to the organization of information in a way convenient to its users; the subject of the email of itself was that this guy had glanced at the 1st 2 posts on my blog and decided from that that it's got nothing to do with the religion/spirituality and personal growth category that I'd tried to get added into... despite the fact that if he'd scrolled down a little, he'd have found posts that WERE clearly in that category. I pointed that out, adding that, sadly, spiritual insights don't present themselves every day, and he wrote back and took another dig at my topics, but added my blog in, which is all that really mattered.
The button to subscribe to my blog via NewsGator is now in my sidebar; I've tested it, and it works... I know, it's shocking that something WORKS, isn't it? I've also tested the My Yahoo one, and it also works. I put in the My MSN button as well, but I don't want to sign up for anything to do with them to test it, so if you use MSN give it a shot, but don't be too surprised if there's a problem... and I hope that if there is, 1 of the other subscription options will be useful to you.
Believe it or not, that's STILL not all of it; depending on what browser you use, you may have noticed that, starting last weekend, my sidebar has been a disaster area. Blogger made an alteration in their templates to allow something to do with image posting to work, which for some reason included a command that counteracts div commands... and BOOM, my right-justify stopped working, and now things in my sidebar are right, left or center depending on what their code dictates (note to programmers-PLEASE don't set your stuff up to be placed a particular way, because your users may have different formatting preferences than you do) every time I bring my blog up in my primary browser. The supposed "fix" that Blogger has inserted as an option in the settings area doesn't work, and all of my attempts to contact tech support are being met with form letters; you'd better believe that I'm going to keep after them until they fix it... I didn't do all that work setting up my sidebar to have it look like a wreck to even a small % of my visitors.
That's where things stand now; it'd be sure nice if I COULD put up an "all is well" post soon...
Monday, July 11, 2005
Further insights on the value of intelligence
I've posted several times on this topic; the central theme is that, although intellect is objectively a good thing, and everyone would agree with that if asked, by our behavior we show that as a culture we do NOT value braininess, that we dislike and distrust intellectuals, and see them as "not one of us," that due to our own irrational insecurities we see anyone more intelligent than ourselves as looking down on us, as a threat, as someone who's not a candidate for a friend or a lover... and all of that goes x10 for an intelligent woman. Since all aspects of our lives depend on the opinion of others, the smart person who can't convincingly pretend to be average, not just brains-wise but in all of their perceived likes and preferences and such so that they fit in with the people they know, had better be self-sufficient enough that they can earn a living and get social and romantic satisfaction on the fringes with others like themselves.
It doesn't matter how many times I write that, how many times I talk or even think about it, it galls me right down to my soul; that the very thing that allows me to see and understand forms a wall between me and the bulk of humanity, and forces me to modulate myself when dealing with all but those who know me well so that I don't make people feel foolish or condescended to... and even then, I still sometimes get blank stares because I let a big word or esoteric concept slip into conversation with the wrong people, followed by their withdrawal and/or petulance.
sigh
This concept came back into my mind after my friend Buddy Don, whose terrific blog is here
http://buddydon.blogspot.com/
posted a Twain quote on Friday, reminding me of how much I love Twain's words of wisdom and that it'd been too long since I'd read any of them. I found a site just bursting with his quotes
http://twainquotes.com/quotesatoz.html
one of which is
"The gods offer no rewards for intellect. There was never one yet that showed any interest in it..."
- Mark Twain's Notebook
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That quote probably makes no sense to the average person, who, not being aware of their own subconscious attitudes towards smart people and what that means on a broad scale to smart people's lives, can't imagine that intellect brings no rewards, but *I* read it and realized that Twain, a brilliant man who remains justly famous for his piercing insights into human nature, had seen exactly what I've been saying, and had described it in a wonderfully pungent and nearly poetic way. It gave me CHILLS, as it always does when I discover that an acknowledged great thinker has seen what I do... and thus that I'm not just nuts to be perceiving things that no one else notices or talks about.
Things are a little better for the brilliant in the modern era than when Twain was alive, because these days people with certain kinds of intellectual abilities, particularly in computers and engineering, can make an excellent living even if they can't function socially, can generally be friends with others of their ilk that get gathered around them at work, and even lure in romantic companions with the promise of a big bank account; still, the concept remains the same now as then... the "rewards" mostly go to those who can most effectively garner peer-group approval, who have great skill in dealing with people but rarely exceptional levels of intelligence, NOT to the people whose skull sweat keeps the human race making progress.
Twain has another, chilling, quote about this topic:
"The thug is aware that loudness convinces sixty persons where reasoning convinces but one."
- Mark Twain's "Is Shakespeare Dead?"
If you've ever wondered how sociopaths and other unpleasant types are so often able to get people to follow them, even when there are folks crying out with the voice of reason, that's it in a nutshell; that's a perfect depiction of how little people truly care for anything with the taint of intellectualism.
There isn't a single country on this planet that's being run by a bunch of geniuses, whether the leaders are elected, born, or take power by force; did you ever wonder WHY? Those qualities that make people willing to follow someone's orders, and even in a dictatorship there MUST be enough willing followers to make it possible to control everyone, have nothing to do with brains, are difficult or impossible to learn and master via intellect, and would be counteracted in people's judgment by the intelligence of anyone who gave it a try.
There's also commentary on this subject by someone unfamiliar to most Americans, the German philosopher, poet, historian, dramatist, and playwright Friedrich Schiller, whose best known quote (of which there are several translations) is:
"Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain."
10 points if you can name the Isaac Asimov book whose title comes from that quote.
What a staggering concept, that STUPIDITY could be such a powerful force. If you doubt that Schiller means to point out the fruitlessness of intelligence with that comment, here's where that quote comes from (keep in mind that this is a translation if you notice any awkwardness)
"Folly, thou conquerest, and I must yield!
Against stupidity the very gods
Themselves contend in vain. Exalted reason,
Resplendent daughter of the head divine,
Wise foundress of the system of the world,
Guide of the stars, who art thou then if thou,
Bound to the tail of folly's uncurbed steed,
Must, vainly shrieking with the drunken crowd,
Eyes open, plunge down headlong in the abyss.
Accursed, who striveth after noble ends,
And with deliberate wisdom forms his plans!
To the fool-king belongs the world."
-The Maid of Orleans (1801) Act iii scene 6
How mindboggling, this idea that someone possessing and using wisdom would be CURSED rather than successful, that reason would be unable to sway "the crowd" and end up destroyed, that folly and fools would be victorious... and mind you, Schiller's been dead for 200 years, so it's not as if he were commenting on modern life-this is a pure analysis of human society, human nature.
Ouch.
It doesn't matter how many times I write that, how many times I talk or even think about it, it galls me right down to my soul; that the very thing that allows me to see and understand forms a wall between me and the bulk of humanity, and forces me to modulate myself when dealing with all but those who know me well so that I don't make people feel foolish or condescended to... and even then, I still sometimes get blank stares because I let a big word or esoteric concept slip into conversation with the wrong people, followed by their withdrawal and/or petulance.
sigh
This concept came back into my mind after my friend Buddy Don, whose terrific blog is here
http://buddydon.blogspot.com/
posted a Twain quote on Friday, reminding me of how much I love Twain's words of wisdom and that it'd been too long since I'd read any of them. I found a site just bursting with his quotes
http://twainquotes.com/quotesatoz.html
one of which is
"The gods offer no rewards for intellect. There was never one yet that showed any interest in it..."
- Mark Twain's Notebook
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That quote probably makes no sense to the average person, who, not being aware of their own subconscious attitudes towards smart people and what that means on a broad scale to smart people's lives, can't imagine that intellect brings no rewards, but *I* read it and realized that Twain, a brilliant man who remains justly famous for his piercing insights into human nature, had seen exactly what I've been saying, and had described it in a wonderfully pungent and nearly poetic way. It gave me CHILLS, as it always does when I discover that an acknowledged great thinker has seen what I do... and thus that I'm not just nuts to be perceiving things that no one else notices or talks about.
Things are a little better for the brilliant in the modern era than when Twain was alive, because these days people with certain kinds of intellectual abilities, particularly in computers and engineering, can make an excellent living even if they can't function socially, can generally be friends with others of their ilk that get gathered around them at work, and even lure in romantic companions with the promise of a big bank account; still, the concept remains the same now as then... the "rewards" mostly go to those who can most effectively garner peer-group approval, who have great skill in dealing with people but rarely exceptional levels of intelligence, NOT to the people whose skull sweat keeps the human race making progress.
Twain has another, chilling, quote about this topic:
"The thug is aware that loudness convinces sixty persons where reasoning convinces but one."
- Mark Twain's "Is Shakespeare Dead?"
If you've ever wondered how sociopaths and other unpleasant types are so often able to get people to follow them, even when there are folks crying out with the voice of reason, that's it in a nutshell; that's a perfect depiction of how little people truly care for anything with the taint of intellectualism.
There isn't a single country on this planet that's being run by a bunch of geniuses, whether the leaders are elected, born, or take power by force; did you ever wonder WHY? Those qualities that make people willing to follow someone's orders, and even in a dictatorship there MUST be enough willing followers to make it possible to control everyone, have nothing to do with brains, are difficult or impossible to learn and master via intellect, and would be counteracted in people's judgment by the intelligence of anyone who gave it a try.
There's also commentary on this subject by someone unfamiliar to most Americans, the German philosopher, poet, historian, dramatist, and playwright Friedrich Schiller, whose best known quote (of which there are several translations) is:
"Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain."
10 points if you can name the Isaac Asimov book whose title comes from that quote.
What a staggering concept, that STUPIDITY could be such a powerful force. If you doubt that Schiller means to point out the fruitlessness of intelligence with that comment, here's where that quote comes from (keep in mind that this is a translation if you notice any awkwardness)
"Folly, thou conquerest, and I must yield!
Against stupidity the very gods
Themselves contend in vain. Exalted reason,
Resplendent daughter of the head divine,
Wise foundress of the system of the world,
Guide of the stars, who art thou then if thou,
Bound to the tail of folly's uncurbed steed,
Must, vainly shrieking with the drunken crowd,
Eyes open, plunge down headlong in the abyss.
Accursed, who striveth after noble ends,
And with deliberate wisdom forms his plans!
To the fool-king belongs the world."
-The Maid of Orleans (1801) Act iii scene 6
How mindboggling, this idea that someone possessing and using wisdom would be CURSED rather than successful, that reason would be unable to sway "the crowd" and end up destroyed, that folly and fools would be victorious... and mind you, Schiller's been dead for 200 years, so it's not as if he were commenting on modern life-this is a pure analysis of human society, human nature.
Ouch.
Sunday, July 10, 2005
Infrasound
My friend Melanie, whose excellent blog is here
http://converttheatheist.blogspot.com/
introduced me today to the connection between infrasound (sounds below 20Hz, and thus below the human hearing range), which I'd previously known about only as it applies to the communication of certain animals (most notably elephants), and the perceptions that some people have believed to be indicative of the presence of ghosts.
Infrasound can cause feelings such as anxiety, uneasiness, chills, shivers down the spine and even fear in humans. Studies have shown that big pipe organs can produce these sounds, and I've seen speculation that this is the cause of some of the feelings that people get during church services; one such mention is here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3087674.stm
You don't suppose that church officials have kept buying organs that make these sounds that can't be heard without being aware of the effects, do you? :-)
There have been no actual studies done that I've been able to find (and I LOOKED) that make, or tried to make, any connection between infrasound and hauntings, ghost sightings, the eerie feelings people get at some places, or any similar phenomena; if there HAD been, it'd have been front-page news around the world. All I could find is that a handful of scientific types think there MIGHT be a connection, that it MIGHT be an explanation for these things; this would seem to be easy enough to test, but scientists are so fearful of being involved in anything to do with the supernatural, even when the purpose is to DISprove something, that it's no surprise that no one has tried... and where would they get the funding for such a thing in any case?
So, let's see what sort of analysis a layperson can come up with; infrasound, which can be created by any # of natural and manmade sources and is far from uncommon, creates sensations that some folks believe indicate something supernatural, so it's entirely likely that it HAS been the actual cause of these feelings at least part of the time... how could it NOT be to blame sometimes, after all, with infrasound being produced by everything from waterfalls to wind to the vibration of manmade structures?
http://www.borderlands.com/newstuff/research/infra.htm
Is it responsible for ALL feelings of that nature that occur? To suggest that every time every human feels a certain sort of thing there's only one cause is too silly to contemplate; even if studies ever DO prove that it's been responsible some of the time, I'd bet $ they won't try to insist it's ALWAYS responsible... that'd be a complete abandonment of the scientific mindset, as such an extrapolation can never be properly made.
But wait, am I just splitting hairs to excuse my personal experiences with ghosts from being explained away? Nope... because I've NEVER had those sorts of feelings as part of any interaction with spirits, nor, at the times in my life when I've felt uneasy, chills, whatever, have I EVER seen it as an indication of ghosts being around; I'm a hard-headed type, and a spirit has to be right in my face before I proclaim its existence. Do I think that only people like myself who don't feel the chills and such have had valid sightings or perceptions? Of course not; although it certainly might be true (I don't think it very likely, but let's be open-minded), without proof I have no intention of trying to decide from a distance whose experiences with ghosts are true and which are infrasound.
It gets better, though; there are at least 2 locations where people have SEEN some sort of apparition under circumstances where a specific frequency of infrasound, 18.9 Hz, was present
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4038891,00.html
The same man, Vic Tandy, "experimental officer and part-time lecturer in the school of international studies and law" at Coventry University, is behind both reports, and is to be commended for finding a scientific explanation for the scary feelings at both locations (one of which he personally had experienced)... but what about the apparitions, how does he explain THEM? At the original URL Melanie sent me to
http://www.skepdic.com/infrasound.html
it says
"When he measured the infrasound in the laboratory, the showing was 18.98 hertz--the exact frequency at which a human eyeball starts resonating. The sound waves made his eyeballs resonate and produced an optical illusion: He saw a figure that didn't exist."
WOW... but wait a minute, let's use the link (the * at the end of the paragraph) that leads to where they got that quote; it takes us here
http://istina.rin.ru/eng/ufo/text/359.html
Surprise surprise, this site that SkepDic.com is quoting as if it were giving facts is NOT a science site at all, but a Russian site devoted to describing (NOT debunking) all types of unusual phenomena. Furthermore, that quote isn't even claimed on that site to come from Tandy himself, and, if you need more proof of the UNscientific nature of this site, on that same page they claim that the mystery of the brigantine Mary Celeste, which was found abandoned by her crew (none of whom were ever seen again) in 1872
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Celeste
has been solved by infrasound:
"The mystery was unsolved for decades, until it became clear that infrasound was the explanation of the phenomenon. As it turned out, infrasound of seven hertz emitted by ocean waves under some definite conditions was the reason of it. But infrasound of seven hertz is terrible for people: they may go mad and throw themselves overboard to save their lives."
I checked every resource I could think of, and NONE of them point to infrasound as even a possible solution to the mystery... and the site gives no reference to check to back up their claim.
Hold on a minute, though; SkepDic.com gives the specifics about Tandy's article
"Tandy V. & Lawrence, T,. (1998). The ghost in the machine. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 62, 360-364"
at the bottom of the page... doesn't that mean that this is where they got their info from, and that they're quoting the article? Couldn't they have linked to the Russian site by mistake, when they actually meant to link to a site that has Tandy's article on it? Accidents do happen, but this ain't one of 'em; Tandy's article can be found here
http://users.iafrica.com/s/sa/salbu/apollo/HumA2.html
and I've read it and verified that the offending passage is NOT from this article... so SkepDic.com DID take it from a paranormal site.
As an aside, THIS is why you need to take sites like SkepDic.com with a BIG grain of salt; they're more than willing to use the sort of site that they'd normally point to as an example of nonsense to try to "prove" a point when it suits them... those sites magically become the bearers of valid info when it'll give them a good quote, and I suppose they count on people never going to those sites to see what they actually consist of, and what provably-wrong BS might be posted there, much less doing research to check any of it out. They want you to believe that they've done a thorough objective analysis, but what they're actually doing is making the best case they can provide or invent for certain things NOT being real... and that's a totally different sort of thing than an objective analysis.
Tandy does NOT claim that the effects of infrasound on human eyes cause us to see things, despite what he himself saw, because there've been no scientific studies demonstrating this; if there HAD been, again, it'd have been front-page news worldwide, AND he would've pointed to those studies as part of his explanation. However, it's clear that he DOES see cause and effect, reasonably enough; in the Guardian article, he's quoted as saying
"'Evidence from Nasa and other sources suggests that it can cause you to hyperventilate and your eyeballs to vibrate,' says Tandy."
and in his own article, it says
"a NASA technical report mentions a resonant frequency for the eye as 18 Hz (NASA Technical Report 19770013810). If this were the case then the eyeball would be vibrating which would cause a serious 'smearing' of vision. It would not seem unreasonable to see dark shadowy forms caused by something as innocent as the corner of V.T.'s spectacles. V.T. would not normally be aware of this but its size would be much greater if the image was spread over a larger part of his retina."
I think it's a bit much to suggest that only ONE spot in a person's field of vision would undergo this "serious smearing," leading to what Tandy experienced, but obviously I can't make even an educated guess about how eyes process infrasound, as I lack the background; similarly, I can't do more than speculate that infrasound's proven effects on the brain might be partly, or even fully, to blame for making people see odd things while "under the influence."
What if, though, instead of causing "smearing," resonating the eyeballs causes a sensitizing of vision, in the same way that a variety of things can increase our sensitivity to light, such that an apparition normally too faint to be detected became much more noticeable?
In any case, the "explanation" for what Tandy saw that's given on the Russian site (and SkepDic.com) is clearly an extrapolation from the given facts, and NOT indicative of what he himself is portraying as the "proven truth."
There's a disclaimer at the end of the article on the Russian site:
"However, other scientists call the idea into question. Physicists studying effect of infrasound upon the human body say that volunteers participating in their experiments complain of weariness, high pressure in the eyes and in the ears, but never mention hallucinations or ghosts. At that, physicists say that drivers also have no optical illusions when cars overcome the air drag at a really high speed and the level of infrasound waves is very high."
And Tandy's position despite his experiences is:
"'When it comes to supernatural phenomena, I'm sitting on the fence. That's where scientists should be until we've proved that there isn't anything,' says Tandy."
Despite all that, I'll say that infrasound MIGHT cause distortions of vision as suggested in Tandy's article, and thus could very well be behind the things some people have seen and believed to be ghosts; it'd be silly to deny that people seeing unexplained things in areas where infrasound was detected was caused by infrasound, after all... unless...
... unless infrasound attracts spirits and/or causes them to become visible and/or activates the part of our brains that allows us to perceive them.
But what if, despite the lack of visual anomalies supposedly claimed by physicists (for which I could find no verification), infrasound IS eventually proven to cause them? I'm guessing that it'll show some people that what they thought they saw weren't ghosts. And what about what I'VE seen that I refer to as ghosts? The distinctive feelings caused by infrasound were absent in each case, and of course when a witness sees the exact same thing, the vibrating of my eyeballs being the explanation becomes less likely; also, it's important to remember that the most that's been suggested as a result of infrasound is a "smearing" of what's being seen, NOT the hallucination of detailed human figures, which is a VERY different thing, and what I've personally experienced. Even more importantly, I've heard ghosts, interacted with them, had them touch me and act on objects around me... NONE of which can be explained away by infrasound reactions.
In the area of the perception of the unknown, there are people who are confused or mistaken, liars, tricksters, crazy people, and people under all sorts of influences... but no matter how many exceptions they point to, we're still left with plenty of people who've had clear-cut experiences that go beyond what science has seen so far.
A big thank-you to Melanie for bringing infrasound to my attention!! :-)
http://converttheatheist.blogspot.com/
introduced me today to the connection between infrasound (sounds below 20Hz, and thus below the human hearing range), which I'd previously known about only as it applies to the communication of certain animals (most notably elephants), and the perceptions that some people have believed to be indicative of the presence of ghosts.
Infrasound can cause feelings such as anxiety, uneasiness, chills, shivers down the spine and even fear in humans. Studies have shown that big pipe organs can produce these sounds, and I've seen speculation that this is the cause of some of the feelings that people get during church services; one such mention is here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3087674.stm
You don't suppose that church officials have kept buying organs that make these sounds that can't be heard without being aware of the effects, do you? :-)
There have been no actual studies done that I've been able to find (and I LOOKED) that make, or tried to make, any connection between infrasound and hauntings, ghost sightings, the eerie feelings people get at some places, or any similar phenomena; if there HAD been, it'd have been front-page news around the world. All I could find is that a handful of scientific types think there MIGHT be a connection, that it MIGHT be an explanation for these things; this would seem to be easy enough to test, but scientists are so fearful of being involved in anything to do with the supernatural, even when the purpose is to DISprove something, that it's no surprise that no one has tried... and where would they get the funding for such a thing in any case?
So, let's see what sort of analysis a layperson can come up with; infrasound, which can be created by any # of natural and manmade sources and is far from uncommon, creates sensations that some folks believe indicate something supernatural, so it's entirely likely that it HAS been the actual cause of these feelings at least part of the time... how could it NOT be to blame sometimes, after all, with infrasound being produced by everything from waterfalls to wind to the vibration of manmade structures?
http://www.borderlands.com/newstuff/research/infra.htm
Is it responsible for ALL feelings of that nature that occur? To suggest that every time every human feels a certain sort of thing there's only one cause is too silly to contemplate; even if studies ever DO prove that it's been responsible some of the time, I'd bet $ they won't try to insist it's ALWAYS responsible... that'd be a complete abandonment of the scientific mindset, as such an extrapolation can never be properly made.
But wait, am I just splitting hairs to excuse my personal experiences with ghosts from being explained away? Nope... because I've NEVER had those sorts of feelings as part of any interaction with spirits, nor, at the times in my life when I've felt uneasy, chills, whatever, have I EVER seen it as an indication of ghosts being around; I'm a hard-headed type, and a spirit has to be right in my face before I proclaim its existence. Do I think that only people like myself who don't feel the chills and such have had valid sightings or perceptions? Of course not; although it certainly might be true (I don't think it very likely, but let's be open-minded), without proof I have no intention of trying to decide from a distance whose experiences with ghosts are true and which are infrasound.
It gets better, though; there are at least 2 locations where people have SEEN some sort of apparition under circumstances where a specific frequency of infrasound, 18.9 Hz, was present
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4038891,00.html
The same man, Vic Tandy, "experimental officer and part-time lecturer in the school of international studies and law" at Coventry University, is behind both reports, and is to be commended for finding a scientific explanation for the scary feelings at both locations (one of which he personally had experienced)... but what about the apparitions, how does he explain THEM? At the original URL Melanie sent me to
http://www.skepdic.com/infrasound.html
it says
"When he measured the infrasound in the laboratory, the showing was 18.98 hertz--the exact frequency at which a human eyeball starts resonating. The sound waves made his eyeballs resonate and produced an optical illusion: He saw a figure that didn't exist."
WOW... but wait a minute, let's use the link (the * at the end of the paragraph) that leads to where they got that quote; it takes us here
http://istina.rin.ru/eng/ufo/text/359.html
Surprise surprise, this site that SkepDic.com is quoting as if it were giving facts is NOT a science site at all, but a Russian site devoted to describing (NOT debunking) all types of unusual phenomena. Furthermore, that quote isn't even claimed on that site to come from Tandy himself, and, if you need more proof of the UNscientific nature of this site, on that same page they claim that the mystery of the brigantine Mary Celeste, which was found abandoned by her crew (none of whom were ever seen again) in 1872
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Celeste
has been solved by infrasound:
"The mystery was unsolved for decades, until it became clear that infrasound was the explanation of the phenomenon. As it turned out, infrasound of seven hertz emitted by ocean waves under some definite conditions was the reason of it. But infrasound of seven hertz is terrible for people: they may go mad and throw themselves overboard to save their lives."
I checked every resource I could think of, and NONE of them point to infrasound as even a possible solution to the mystery... and the site gives no reference to check to back up their claim.
Hold on a minute, though; SkepDic.com gives the specifics about Tandy's article
"Tandy V. & Lawrence, T,. (1998). The ghost in the machine. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 62, 360-364"
at the bottom of the page... doesn't that mean that this is where they got their info from, and that they're quoting the article? Couldn't they have linked to the Russian site by mistake, when they actually meant to link to a site that has Tandy's article on it? Accidents do happen, but this ain't one of 'em; Tandy's article can be found here
http://users.iafrica.com/s/sa/salbu/apollo/HumA2.html
and I've read it and verified that the offending passage is NOT from this article... so SkepDic.com DID take it from a paranormal site.
As an aside, THIS is why you need to take sites like SkepDic.com with a BIG grain of salt; they're more than willing to use the sort of site that they'd normally point to as an example of nonsense to try to "prove" a point when it suits them... those sites magically become the bearers of valid info when it'll give them a good quote, and I suppose they count on people never going to those sites to see what they actually consist of, and what provably-wrong BS might be posted there, much less doing research to check any of it out. They want you to believe that they've done a thorough objective analysis, but what they're actually doing is making the best case they can provide or invent for certain things NOT being real... and that's a totally different sort of thing than an objective analysis.
Tandy does NOT claim that the effects of infrasound on human eyes cause us to see things, despite what he himself saw, because there've been no scientific studies demonstrating this; if there HAD been, again, it'd have been front-page news worldwide, AND he would've pointed to those studies as part of his explanation. However, it's clear that he DOES see cause and effect, reasonably enough; in the Guardian article, he's quoted as saying
"'Evidence from Nasa and other sources suggests that it can cause you to hyperventilate and your eyeballs to vibrate,' says Tandy."
and in his own article, it says
"a NASA technical report mentions a resonant frequency for the eye as 18 Hz (NASA Technical Report 19770013810). If this were the case then the eyeball would be vibrating which would cause a serious 'smearing' of vision. It would not seem unreasonable to see dark shadowy forms caused by something as innocent as the corner of V.T.'s spectacles. V.T. would not normally be aware of this but its size would be much greater if the image was spread over a larger part of his retina."
I think it's a bit much to suggest that only ONE spot in a person's field of vision would undergo this "serious smearing," leading to what Tandy experienced, but obviously I can't make even an educated guess about how eyes process infrasound, as I lack the background; similarly, I can't do more than speculate that infrasound's proven effects on the brain might be partly, or even fully, to blame for making people see odd things while "under the influence."
What if, though, instead of causing "smearing," resonating the eyeballs causes a sensitizing of vision, in the same way that a variety of things can increase our sensitivity to light, such that an apparition normally too faint to be detected became much more noticeable?
In any case, the "explanation" for what Tandy saw that's given on the Russian site (and SkepDic.com) is clearly an extrapolation from the given facts, and NOT indicative of what he himself is portraying as the "proven truth."
There's a disclaimer at the end of the article on the Russian site:
"However, other scientists call the idea into question. Physicists studying effect of infrasound upon the human body say that volunteers participating in their experiments complain of weariness, high pressure in the eyes and in the ears, but never mention hallucinations or ghosts. At that, physicists say that drivers also have no optical illusions when cars overcome the air drag at a really high speed and the level of infrasound waves is very high."
And Tandy's position despite his experiences is:
"'When it comes to supernatural phenomena, I'm sitting on the fence. That's where scientists should be until we've proved that there isn't anything,' says Tandy."
Despite all that, I'll say that infrasound MIGHT cause distortions of vision as suggested in Tandy's article, and thus could very well be behind the things some people have seen and believed to be ghosts; it'd be silly to deny that people seeing unexplained things in areas where infrasound was detected was caused by infrasound, after all... unless...
... unless infrasound attracts spirits and/or causes them to become visible and/or activates the part of our brains that allows us to perceive them.
But what if, despite the lack of visual anomalies supposedly claimed by physicists (for which I could find no verification), infrasound IS eventually proven to cause them? I'm guessing that it'll show some people that what they thought they saw weren't ghosts. And what about what I'VE seen that I refer to as ghosts? The distinctive feelings caused by infrasound were absent in each case, and of course when a witness sees the exact same thing, the vibrating of my eyeballs being the explanation becomes less likely; also, it's important to remember that the most that's been suggested as a result of infrasound is a "smearing" of what's being seen, NOT the hallucination of detailed human figures, which is a VERY different thing, and what I've personally experienced. Even more importantly, I've heard ghosts, interacted with them, had them touch me and act on objects around me... NONE of which can be explained away by infrasound reactions.
In the area of the perception of the unknown, there are people who are confused or mistaken, liars, tricksters, crazy people, and people under all sorts of influences... but no matter how many exceptions they point to, we're still left with plenty of people who've had clear-cut experiences that go beyond what science has seen so far.
A big thank-you to Melanie for bringing infrasound to my attention!! :-)
Saturday, July 09, 2005
Relationship weirdness
I saw an episode of "Babylon 5" a couple of days ago, in which the beautiful telepath got onto the elevator with the guy who's hot for her; we can see that he's thinking lewd thoughts, and that she's picking up on them... and then she elbows him hard in the middle, doubling him over. The elevator reaches her floor, and she sweeps out the door without glancing at him; he, still doubled over with his eyes bugging out, clutches the edge of the door, watching her go, and croaks out, "I think I'm in LOVE!!"
You probably guessed before you read the punchline that his interest in her escalated after she injured him... but WHY did you guess that, WHY would we assume that a man's interest in a woman would INcrease after she assaulted him, when logically he SHOULD have lost all interest and branded her a psycho?
A friend of mine has been eager to date a woman he's worked with for several years; during all that time, she's been with the same boyfriend, who she constantly weeps and wails is mistreating her... clinging onto my friend for support, of course, even though he's made it clear that he wants to be with her and not just be her shoulder to cry on. Did you even BLINK when you read that that woman stayed year after year with a man who mistreated her? Very unlikely. But, shouldn't it be a SHOCK that any human being would stay with an unpleasant partner, especially when they have someone nice they could switch right over to?
The common point between these 2 stories is adrenaline, the chemical responsible for excitement; someone who acts in unexpected and extreme ways fills us with it (especially when it's a woman taking intense physical action, as that suggests sexual passion to a man), as does someone who's not treating us the way we think they should, and is thus beyond our control and understanding (uncertainty is one of the most powerful forces in inducing, guess what, passion). This is why we're so often uninterested in the sweet and decent people that we and our future offspring would be best served by our hooking up with; the adrenaline effect is one of the many twisted and counterintuitive aspects of human nature that favors the uncaring, rotten and worthless people in the world over those who are kind, dependable, and strive for virtue.
Sucks, doesn't it?
You probably guessed before you read the punchline that his interest in her escalated after she injured him... but WHY did you guess that, WHY would we assume that a man's interest in a woman would INcrease after she assaulted him, when logically he SHOULD have lost all interest and branded her a psycho?
A friend of mine has been eager to date a woman he's worked with for several years; during all that time, she's been with the same boyfriend, who she constantly weeps and wails is mistreating her... clinging onto my friend for support, of course, even though he's made it clear that he wants to be with her and not just be her shoulder to cry on. Did you even BLINK when you read that that woman stayed year after year with a man who mistreated her? Very unlikely. But, shouldn't it be a SHOCK that any human being would stay with an unpleasant partner, especially when they have someone nice they could switch right over to?
The common point between these 2 stories is adrenaline, the chemical responsible for excitement; someone who acts in unexpected and extreme ways fills us with it (especially when it's a woman taking intense physical action, as that suggests sexual passion to a man), as does someone who's not treating us the way we think they should, and is thus beyond our control and understanding (uncertainty is one of the most powerful forces in inducing, guess what, passion). This is why we're so often uninterested in the sweet and decent people that we and our future offspring would be best served by our hooking up with; the adrenaline effect is one of the many twisted and counterintuitive aspects of human nature that favors the uncaring, rotten and worthless people in the world over those who are kind, dependable, and strive for virtue.
Sucks, doesn't it?
Friday, July 08, 2005
What makes a "real blog"?
I used quotes because, really, it's pretty arrogant for anyone to suggest that THEY have the final word as to what's a "real" blog and what isn't... especially since their parameters are always, noncoincidentally, whatever they themselves are using on their own blogs.
Things that people have posted are necessary for a blog to be a "real blog" include:
1) Commenting
2) Trackbacks
3) Email addy for the blogger(s)
4) The real name(s) of the blogger(s)
5) Photo(s) of the blogger(s)
6) A PHONE # for the blogger(s) (in caps because the idea of giving random, and often hostile, strangers one's home phone # online makes my head spin)
Some people think that only one of the above is necessary (which one the magic one is varies), some insist that multiple items are necessary, and some think that most or ALL of those things are necessary... despite the fact that only a VERY tiny % of blogs could qualify, since, even if we ignore the extreme of the phone #, very few blogs contain a full name (and of course it's reasonable to assume that many of the ones that do are fakes, since we know how rare genuine personal info is online), and plenty of people who do allow for interactivity of some degree don't have all 3 kinds.
I looked through some online dictionaries, and the consensus is that a blog is just a site with dated entries, with NO other requirements; I'm sure that some dictionary I didn't get to says differently, and in general we could validly ask "but what do THEY know about it anyways?", but the point is that those bloggers who try to make it sound like "everyone" agrees that a "real blog" has anything OTHER than dated entries are demonstrably wrong, regardless of what they think the real-blog requirements are.
Commenting is the thing most often trumpeted as a requirement, and it puzzles me no end; if a blogger's stuff was put in a magazine article or book instead of online, people wouldn't be claiming that they should be allowed to include their input, or even that they'd like to be able to, so what is it about something being posted online that makes people wild to add their 2¢, and certain of their right to do so? If reading a blog entry gives you ideas that you'd like to share, why not just post them on your own blog; why is it so important to you that the total stranger who posted the original entry, and their readers (who are also strangers), see what you have to say on the topic? I'm not saying that you shouldn't leave comments if there's a way to, and in fact I think it's a good idea to leave a comment at any blog you enjoy if you can, just to give the blogger a well-deserved boost, but if a blogger has no way to get your input... SO WHAT? Why does anyone give this 1 second of thought, much less see it as so important that it HAS to be available?
This must be one of those human nature things that doesn't apply to me, because no one has been able to make me see it; in any case, my position is that a blog with comments, and/or any of the other things on the list, does NOT cease to be a "real blog" if those things are removed, and something that's NOT a blog doesn't suddenly become a blog if those things are added on. If, IF, there's anything other than dated entries that I'd say makes something a "real blog," it's...
Do you know what I'm about to say, or has the blogosphere gotten so bogged down with self-proclaimed experts dictating how a blog has to be set up that it's not obvious what a site actually needs OTHER than a string of dates with some non-zero amount of stuff below each one?
Oh please, let it be unnecessary for me to say; content.
As I posted on 4-24-05, there's an alarming # of companies using blogs to post lists of links to sites where products or services can be purchased, and an increasing # of blogs being used for students and teachers to exchange info (a virtuous use, of course), and also as the latest way to display porn (somewhat less virtuous, and sometimes disgustingly NON-virtuous); I'd say that this sort of thing does NOT constitute "real blog content," and thus that a case can be made that these aren't "real blogs."
Few people would argue with that, except maybe those who REALLY prefer form over substance (as those sorts of "blogs" often DO have things like commenting, email addies and real names used), so does it really need to be said? How about this, then: I'll go out on a limb and add that sites that are a substitute for, or an adjunct to, corporate or political-candidate websites shouldn't necessarily be called "real blogs" just because their content has been broken up into dated entries.
I'll go even farther out on a limb and say that most of the gigantic political blogs are actually political discussion forums, not "real blogs," for all that they're using dated entries rather than an actual forum layout... and they'd be FAR easier to use if they WERE laid out as forums rather than as an endless list of posts, which I think is meaningful.
So, now we have a 2-part "requirement" for a "real blog"; a site with dated entries containing "real content" that's suited to the dated-entry format, and not just shoehorned or spread out into it. I think it's reasonable, realistic and fair... but I don't see it as other than my OPINION, and I'm not going to insist that this is the ultimate, only or definitive definition, or go around posting to people that their blogs aren't "real blogs" because they don't happen to be handling their sites the way I handle mine or to suit my preferences.
And neither should anyone else.
Things that people have posted are necessary for a blog to be a "real blog" include:
1) Commenting
2) Trackbacks
3) Email addy for the blogger(s)
4) The real name(s) of the blogger(s)
5) Photo(s) of the blogger(s)
6) A PHONE # for the blogger(s) (in caps because the idea of giving random, and often hostile, strangers one's home phone # online makes my head spin)
Some people think that only one of the above is necessary (which one the magic one is varies), some insist that multiple items are necessary, and some think that most or ALL of those things are necessary... despite the fact that only a VERY tiny % of blogs could qualify, since, even if we ignore the extreme of the phone #, very few blogs contain a full name (and of course it's reasonable to assume that many of the ones that do are fakes, since we know how rare genuine personal info is online), and plenty of people who do allow for interactivity of some degree don't have all 3 kinds.
I looked through some online dictionaries, and the consensus is that a blog is just a site with dated entries, with NO other requirements; I'm sure that some dictionary I didn't get to says differently, and in general we could validly ask "but what do THEY know about it anyways?", but the point is that those bloggers who try to make it sound like "everyone" agrees that a "real blog" has anything OTHER than dated entries are demonstrably wrong, regardless of what they think the real-blog requirements are.
Commenting is the thing most often trumpeted as a requirement, and it puzzles me no end; if a blogger's stuff was put in a magazine article or book instead of online, people wouldn't be claiming that they should be allowed to include their input, or even that they'd like to be able to, so what is it about something being posted online that makes people wild to add their 2¢, and certain of their right to do so? If reading a blog entry gives you ideas that you'd like to share, why not just post them on your own blog; why is it so important to you that the total stranger who posted the original entry, and their readers (who are also strangers), see what you have to say on the topic? I'm not saying that you shouldn't leave comments if there's a way to, and in fact I think it's a good idea to leave a comment at any blog you enjoy if you can, just to give the blogger a well-deserved boost, but if a blogger has no way to get your input... SO WHAT? Why does anyone give this 1 second of thought, much less see it as so important that it HAS to be available?
This must be one of those human nature things that doesn't apply to me, because no one has been able to make me see it; in any case, my position is that a blog with comments, and/or any of the other things on the list, does NOT cease to be a "real blog" if those things are removed, and something that's NOT a blog doesn't suddenly become a blog if those things are added on. If, IF, there's anything other than dated entries that I'd say makes something a "real blog," it's...
Do you know what I'm about to say, or has the blogosphere gotten so bogged down with self-proclaimed experts dictating how a blog has to be set up that it's not obvious what a site actually needs OTHER than a string of dates with some non-zero amount of stuff below each one?
Oh please, let it be unnecessary for me to say; content.
As I posted on 4-24-05, there's an alarming # of companies using blogs to post lists of links to sites where products or services can be purchased, and an increasing # of blogs being used for students and teachers to exchange info (a virtuous use, of course), and also as the latest way to display porn (somewhat less virtuous, and sometimes disgustingly NON-virtuous); I'd say that this sort of thing does NOT constitute "real blog content," and thus that a case can be made that these aren't "real blogs."
Few people would argue with that, except maybe those who REALLY prefer form over substance (as those sorts of "blogs" often DO have things like commenting, email addies and real names used), so does it really need to be said? How about this, then: I'll go out on a limb and add that sites that are a substitute for, or an adjunct to, corporate or political-candidate websites shouldn't necessarily be called "real blogs" just because their content has been broken up into dated entries.
I'll go even farther out on a limb and say that most of the gigantic political blogs are actually political discussion forums, not "real blogs," for all that they're using dated entries rather than an actual forum layout... and they'd be FAR easier to use if they WERE laid out as forums rather than as an endless list of posts, which I think is meaningful.
So, now we have a 2-part "requirement" for a "real blog"; a site with dated entries containing "real content" that's suited to the dated-entry format, and not just shoehorned or spread out into it. I think it's reasonable, realistic and fair... but I don't see it as other than my OPINION, and I'm not going to insist that this is the ultimate, only or definitive definition, or go around posting to people that their blogs aren't "real blogs" because they don't happen to be handling their sites the way I handle mine or to suit my preferences.
And neither should anyone else.
Thursday, July 07, 2005
Color-full insights
I've had an interest in color, and its effects on humans, for a long time now; I wrote a little bit about it on 3-23-04. Today, I stumbled across a page called "The Karma of Colour," the bulk of which is attributed to Shelly Wu, PhD; much of what's said isn't anything new or surprising, but there are some fascinating revelations:
Yellow:
"speeds metabolism"
That sounds intriguing... unless it just lasts a few moments, in which case it wouldn't be helpful for weight loss/control.
"Paint a room yellow, you will make babies cry and grown-ups lose their tempers in it."
My parents were too cheap to ever paint the walls in any home we lived in, but my mother, ignoring my color preferences, had everything in my room yellow throughout my entire childhood, and it was certainly a room full of negative emotions much of the time... would I have been less unhappy if she'd been less of a psycho, and didn't feel the need to do my room in my least favorite color?
Blue:
"be careful when using blue in association with food - it is a natural appetite suppressant and can be repulsive in some instances. Blue is one of the least appetizing [colors]. Blue food is rare in nature. Blue-colored food is repulsive to humans because when our ancestors searched for food, they learned to avoid toxic or spoiled objects, which were often blue, black, or purple. During experiments, when participants were served with food dyed blue, they lost appetite."
If blue surroundings can cause any shred of this effect, I see a blue dining room in my future; to someone who's hungry all the time, loss of appetite is a blessing. If not, I'd be willing to experiment with blue dye and see if, say, a blue rice appetizer would make me want less dinner.
"Blue relaxes our nervous system. It has a sobering effect on the mind and can cause people to be more contemplative. Blue surroundings, if not too dark, increase productivity. Studies show that students score higher, weightlifters lift heavier weights in blue rooms."
Sounds like blue would be a good color for a computer room, not to mention weight rooms.
"Peaceful, tranquil blue, which is a good color for bedrooms, causes the body to produce calming chemicals."
That makes me remember my idea for a bedspread of blue changeable taffeta or shot silk that'd give the effect of a pool of water with a pebble dropped into it...
"Darker shades of blue, however, can feel cold and depressing."
I'm thinking of bedroom walls of that purplish twilight blue, that I think might be the color of karma... with touches of cobalt, maybe, but I agree about too much dark blue being unpleasant.
"People retain more when reading information written in blue text."
Ad execs please take note... but bloggers who want people to remember what they say, keep in mind that more than a little blue text is hard to read.
Green:
"Green is the easiest color on the eye and can improve vision."
VERY interesting; could this be related to our need in the caveman days to see clearly into dense masses of foliage to find food or avoid predators?
"It is a calming color and has a neutral effect on the human nervous system."
I don't like green enough to make it part of my decor, but I plan to have a bunch of indoor plants eventually, which should help create a tranquil atmosphere in my home.
"The 'green rooms' are designed for people who are waiting to appear on TV to sit and relax. Green is also a popular color in hospitals because it relaxes patients."
I'd honestly never made those connections before; sure, I know that all the "nature colors" are soothing, for the obvious reason, but the "green rooms" I've seen were NOT green, so I assumed there was a "historical" reason for calling them that, and I'd never thought that the hideous green used in hospitals was supposed to calm anyone... heck, any time I see "hospital green" anywhere, it makes me TENSE, because of the association with hospitals.
Orange:
"Orange is the color most associated with appetite."
I've read several times that this is why fast food restaurants have shades in the orange to red spectrum in their decor; they make you eat faster.
"Orange has a declassifying, broad appeal. It can be used to indicate that a product is suitable for everyone, and can make an expensive product seem more affordable."
Again, ad execs take note.
Pink:
"Pink is the most romantic and tender color."
That's a new one on me... perhaps because of the connection to sexual flush?
"It is also tranquilizing. Research suggested that pink makes people calm and soft-hearted. Dr. Alexander Schauss, Ph.D., director of the American Institute for Biosocial Research in Tacoma Washington, reported that when prison cells were painted pink, it reduced aggressive behavior among prisoners. 'Even if a person tries to be angry or aggressive in the presence of pink, he can't. The heart muscles can't race fast enough. It's a tranquilizing color that saps your energy. Even the color-blind are tranquilized by pink rooms,' according to Dr. Schauss."
This I HAD heard before, and I've certainly always found pastel pinks to be very soothing; since color-blind people are affected, it makes you wonder if even with the colors where the effect on us "makes sense" it doesn't actually have anything to do with psychological associations, and is instead biological in nature.
"Such a[n] effect, unfortunately however, was short-lived as later studies would show. It appears that once the body returns to a state of equilibrium, a prisoner may regress to an even more agitated state."
Maybe the optimum strategy if you need to get calmed down would be to start in a pink room and switch to a blue room right before that happens?
"Other people tried to apply the above research finding. When Hayden Fry, who had a degree in psychology, was the football coach at the University of Iowa, he had the visiting team's lock[er] room painted pink hoping to make the visiting team lose their energy and the aggressive drive for winning."
I'd like to know if this did any good; either way, you've gotta hand it to him for trying.
Red:
"It [c]an elevate blood pressure and respiratory rate. It has the effect of stimulating people to make quick decisions and increase expectations."
Lingerie and short dresses are often red for a reason.
"Red is an attention grabber. Words and objects in red get people's attention immediately."
Even the gov't knew this one; that's why stop signs are red.
"When it comes to cars, there is a positive correlation between the color red and theft rate."
No one ever said that thieves were logical.
"Red rooms make people anxious"
Something to keep in mind when decorating a doctor's or dentist's waiting room... or choosing a wall color for an interrogation room.
"but rooms with a red accent can cause people to lose track of time, thus are favored by bars and casinos."
That might be useful in a meditation room, or in a large garden where you'd like to wander and lose yourself in nature.
"Restaurants often use red as a decorating scheme because of its appetite stimulant function."
See, told ya.
You can read the rest of the article here
http://www.enorc.com/colour.htm
The big question here is; WHY do the various colors affect our physical, mental and emotional states in these ways, or in ANY ways? Why does a color like pink, that our primitive ancestors would only have seen briefly sometimes at sunrise/sunset, and maybe if they stumbled across a field of pink flowers in the spring, have such a powerful effect on us? Why does yellow affect the speed of our metabolism, especially when it seems as if you'd need a higher metabolism in the winter, to keep you warmer, and there's not much yellow sunshine, or yellow anything, then? Why does blue help with reading retention when reading is NOT something we're biologically programmed to do? You can make biological cases for bits and pieces of how color affects us, but the rest of it seems... accidental.
Color as we perceive it is just energy, wavelengths of light, not something magical, but it DOES do something to us once our perception of it reaches our brains... and given that, and that everything is at its base just energy, is it possible that the people of various belief systems that assign spiritual powers to colors are onto something?
Yellow:
"speeds metabolism"
That sounds intriguing... unless it just lasts a few moments, in which case it wouldn't be helpful for weight loss/control.
"Paint a room yellow, you will make babies cry and grown-ups lose their tempers in it."
My parents were too cheap to ever paint the walls in any home we lived in, but my mother, ignoring my color preferences, had everything in my room yellow throughout my entire childhood, and it was certainly a room full of negative emotions much of the time... would I have been less unhappy if she'd been less of a psycho, and didn't feel the need to do my room in my least favorite color?
Blue:
"be careful when using blue in association with food - it is a natural appetite suppressant and can be repulsive in some instances. Blue is one of the least appetizing [colors]. Blue food is rare in nature. Blue-colored food is repulsive to humans because when our ancestors searched for food, they learned to avoid toxic or spoiled objects, which were often blue, black, or purple. During experiments, when participants were served with food dyed blue, they lost appetite."
If blue surroundings can cause any shred of this effect, I see a blue dining room in my future; to someone who's hungry all the time, loss of appetite is a blessing. If not, I'd be willing to experiment with blue dye and see if, say, a blue rice appetizer would make me want less dinner.
"Blue relaxes our nervous system. It has a sobering effect on the mind and can cause people to be more contemplative. Blue surroundings, if not too dark, increase productivity. Studies show that students score higher, weightlifters lift heavier weights in blue rooms."
Sounds like blue would be a good color for a computer room, not to mention weight rooms.
"Peaceful, tranquil blue, which is a good color for bedrooms, causes the body to produce calming chemicals."
That makes me remember my idea for a bedspread of blue changeable taffeta or shot silk that'd give the effect of a pool of water with a pebble dropped into it...
"Darker shades of blue, however, can feel cold and depressing."
I'm thinking of bedroom walls of that purplish twilight blue, that I think might be the color of karma... with touches of cobalt, maybe, but I agree about too much dark blue being unpleasant.
"People retain more when reading information written in blue text."
Ad execs please take note... but bloggers who want people to remember what they say, keep in mind that more than a little blue text is hard to read.
Green:
"Green is the easiest color on the eye and can improve vision."
VERY interesting; could this be related to our need in the caveman days to see clearly into dense masses of foliage to find food or avoid predators?
"It is a calming color and has a neutral effect on the human nervous system."
I don't like green enough to make it part of my decor, but I plan to have a bunch of indoor plants eventually, which should help create a tranquil atmosphere in my home.
"The 'green rooms' are designed for people who are waiting to appear on TV to sit and relax. Green is also a popular color in hospitals because it relaxes patients."
I'd honestly never made those connections before; sure, I know that all the "nature colors" are soothing, for the obvious reason, but the "green rooms" I've seen were NOT green, so I assumed there was a "historical" reason for calling them that, and I'd never thought that the hideous green used in hospitals was supposed to calm anyone... heck, any time I see "hospital green" anywhere, it makes me TENSE, because of the association with hospitals.
Orange:
"Orange is the color most associated with appetite."
I've read several times that this is why fast food restaurants have shades in the orange to red spectrum in their decor; they make you eat faster.
"Orange has a declassifying, broad appeal. It can be used to indicate that a product is suitable for everyone, and can make an expensive product seem more affordable."
Again, ad execs take note.
Pink:
"Pink is the most romantic and tender color."
That's a new one on me... perhaps because of the connection to sexual flush?
"It is also tranquilizing. Research suggested that pink makes people calm and soft-hearted. Dr. Alexander Schauss, Ph.D., director of the American Institute for Biosocial Research in Tacoma Washington, reported that when prison cells were painted pink, it reduced aggressive behavior among prisoners. 'Even if a person tries to be angry or aggressive in the presence of pink, he can't. The heart muscles can't race fast enough. It's a tranquilizing color that saps your energy. Even the color-blind are tranquilized by pink rooms,' according to Dr. Schauss."
This I HAD heard before, and I've certainly always found pastel pinks to be very soothing; since color-blind people are affected, it makes you wonder if even with the colors where the effect on us "makes sense" it doesn't actually have anything to do with psychological associations, and is instead biological in nature.
"Such a[n] effect, unfortunately however, was short-lived as later studies would show. It appears that once the body returns to a state of equilibrium, a prisoner may regress to an even more agitated state."
Maybe the optimum strategy if you need to get calmed down would be to start in a pink room and switch to a blue room right before that happens?
"Other people tried to apply the above research finding. When Hayden Fry, who had a degree in psychology, was the football coach at the University of Iowa, he had the visiting team's lock[er] room painted pink hoping to make the visiting team lose their energy and the aggressive drive for winning."
I'd like to know if this did any good; either way, you've gotta hand it to him for trying.
Red:
"It [c]an elevate blood pressure and respiratory rate. It has the effect of stimulating people to make quick decisions and increase expectations."
Lingerie and short dresses are often red for a reason.
"Red is an attention grabber. Words and objects in red get people's attention immediately."
Even the gov't knew this one; that's why stop signs are red.
"When it comes to cars, there is a positive correlation between the color red and theft rate."
No one ever said that thieves were logical.
"Red rooms make people anxious"
Something to keep in mind when decorating a doctor's or dentist's waiting room... or choosing a wall color for an interrogation room.
"but rooms with a red accent can cause people to lose track of time, thus are favored by bars and casinos."
That might be useful in a meditation room, or in a large garden where you'd like to wander and lose yourself in nature.
"Restaurants often use red as a decorating scheme because of its appetite stimulant function."
See, told ya.
You can read the rest of the article here
http://www.enorc.com/colour.htm
The big question here is; WHY do the various colors affect our physical, mental and emotional states in these ways, or in ANY ways? Why does a color like pink, that our primitive ancestors would only have seen briefly sometimes at sunrise/sunset, and maybe if they stumbled across a field of pink flowers in the spring, have such a powerful effect on us? Why does yellow affect the speed of our metabolism, especially when it seems as if you'd need a higher metabolism in the winter, to keep you warmer, and there's not much yellow sunshine, or yellow anything, then? Why does blue help with reading retention when reading is NOT something we're biologically programmed to do? You can make biological cases for bits and pieces of how color affects us, but the rest of it seems... accidental.
Color as we perceive it is just energy, wavelengths of light, not something magical, but it DOES do something to us once our perception of it reaches our brains... and given that, and that everything is at its base just energy, is it possible that the people of various belief systems that assign spiritual powers to colors are onto something?
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Selling on eBay is NOT rocket science
Or so you'd think... but it's amazing how much trouble some people have figuring out how to get paid for their auctions:
There's a seller that I won a vintage poster from a month and a half ago that I just got the shipping amount for TODAY, not because he'd been sick, or out of town, or without internet access, but because he's an IDIOT... and of course because eBay was falling down on the job as usual.
I was sending messages to the seller every few days, using every message system on eBay, but he wasn't getting them, firstly because eBay, despite being a multi-BILLION dollar corporation, is too clueless to figure out how to send notification emails that don't get screened out as spam, and secondly because, as I later learned, the seller had decided not to bother going into his bulk mail folder looking for emails from eBay, and that it was somehow ok to ignore them entirely (!!!)... they should offer this guy a job, because he'd fit right in with them.
After the 1st couple of weeks passed with no shipping info, I started trying to get the seller's contact info; after a bunch of failed attempts, someone told me that the American eBay site's request-info system doesn't work, and to log onto the Canadian eBay and use their system... which I did, to no avail.
Next, I started trying to get help from eBay; live chat help, customer service and "Trust and Safety" all blithered and stonewalled, tossing out lies like "we only provide a place for buyers and sellers to meet, nothing more" and "we CAN'T contact the seller on your behalf," and even refusing to manually generate the contact info that by their own rules I had a right to have.
I continued hammering them on all fronts, and finally, a MONTH after the end of the auction, the contact info appeared in eBay's latest innovation, the "My Messages" inbox accessible from each person's account, and I was able to call the seller; I gave him my email addy, and he said he'd send me the shipping info that day. Several days later, with no info received, I sent him an email at the addy he'd given me. Several more days later, I sent another one. Several days after that, I phoned him again, and left him a message. Today, he called me back and left a message... withOUT the shipping info!! I called him again, and discovered that he'd never gotten my emails, and that he'd sent the shipping info to my husband's email addy, NOT mine as agreed, despite my making it clear that he was being screened out there (I use free webmail accounts that don't screen much of anything, which comes in handy sometimes). The moron then tried to tell me that I should email him again to get the shipping amount... and I nearly bit my tongue out of my head trying to make myself speak pleasantly as I pointed out that at this juncture he really needed to go look the amount up and just TELL me while we were on the phone, which he grudgingly did.
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
If YOU sell on eBay, it'd improve the experience for everyone if you'd keep a few things in mind:
1) This is NOT a game, it's a legal contract you've entered into to sell something and deliver it in a timely manner; treat your auctions accordingly.
2) Thanks to the spammers, almost every buyer's inbox is screening out lots of emails, including those from eBay, so do NOT count on being able to send info to a buyer via "eBay emails"; instead, you should:
A) Choose the account option that makes your email addy visible to your buyers, giving them another way to contact you whether or not emails from you are reaching them; people who give you $ SHOULD have a direct way to reach you in any case.
B) If you use PayPal or other online payment system, put a shipping amount or a shipping calculator on your auction page, AND put the shipping total into the payment form associated with the auction, so that the buyer can get their total due and pay you without hearing from you.
C) If time is passing and you haven't heard from the buyer, instead of forgetting about the auction (as my seller amazingly had, according to him), or tossing out - feedback which will get you one in return, request contact info, and harass eBay until you get it... and then use it with common sense-if you leave a message on someone's answering machine, leave the info they need from you as part of the message, AND your phone # as well.
3) YOUR inbox may be screening out emails too, and you can NOT just ignore emails from buyers (it's against eBay rules to not be contactable via email by your buyers, plus it's just plain stupid), so you MUST:
A) Alter your settings, if you have them, such that eBay emails are getting to you... and NOT in your bulk/junk folder, either. If you honestly can't get the eBay emails into your main folder without being flooded with spam, you're going to have to sift through your bulk emails every day looking for eBay stuff.
B) Check your "My Messages" inbox (it's in the left-hand margin in your "My eBay" area) every single day if you have uncompleted transactions, as copies of messages buyers are trying to send you will supposedly all end up there.
C) Make sure that your official eBay contact info contains your current phone #, and return any calls you receive with professional promptness... again, be sure any messages you leave contain all necessary info.
4) Keep in mind that not 1 buyer in a million will make the sort of protracted effort *I* did, and will instead give you - feedback which can NOT be retracted and/or report you to eBay for fraud or non-performance, which can cost you your eBay account... so don't expect to be spoon-fed your $, take action to make SURE your buyer can get it to you.
This last one has nothing to do with my specific eBay topic, but it makes me so nuts that I'm going to tack it on:
5) If you're selling something with a "face," such as a doll, stuffie or figurine, the most important photo to take is one that shows the face straight on; if you only have 1 pic on your auction page, that's the 1 to have. No, it doesn't show the side(s), which in the case of a "long" stuffie can mean a large % of the item isn't being seen, but when people display these things they usually display them facing forward, so that's the part of the item that they most want to see.
Until such time as eBay gets some long-overdue regulations applied to it, they're set up so that they can really stick it to you, and so can every trading partner; a little common sense will insure that you don't risk losing access to this increasingly valuable marketplace.
There's a seller that I won a vintage poster from a month and a half ago that I just got the shipping amount for TODAY, not because he'd been sick, or out of town, or without internet access, but because he's an IDIOT... and of course because eBay was falling down on the job as usual.
I was sending messages to the seller every few days, using every message system on eBay, but he wasn't getting them, firstly because eBay, despite being a multi-BILLION dollar corporation, is too clueless to figure out how to send notification emails that don't get screened out as spam, and secondly because, as I later learned, the seller had decided not to bother going into his bulk mail folder looking for emails from eBay, and that it was somehow ok to ignore them entirely (!!!)... they should offer this guy a job, because he'd fit right in with them.
After the 1st couple of weeks passed with no shipping info, I started trying to get the seller's contact info; after a bunch of failed attempts, someone told me that the American eBay site's request-info system doesn't work, and to log onto the Canadian eBay and use their system... which I did, to no avail.
Next, I started trying to get help from eBay; live chat help, customer service and "Trust and Safety" all blithered and stonewalled, tossing out lies like "we only provide a place for buyers and sellers to meet, nothing more" and "we CAN'T contact the seller on your behalf," and even refusing to manually generate the contact info that by their own rules I had a right to have.
I continued hammering them on all fronts, and finally, a MONTH after the end of the auction, the contact info appeared in eBay's latest innovation, the "My Messages" inbox accessible from each person's account, and I was able to call the seller; I gave him my email addy, and he said he'd send me the shipping info that day. Several days later, with no info received, I sent him an email at the addy he'd given me. Several more days later, I sent another one. Several days after that, I phoned him again, and left him a message. Today, he called me back and left a message... withOUT the shipping info!! I called him again, and discovered that he'd never gotten my emails, and that he'd sent the shipping info to my husband's email addy, NOT mine as agreed, despite my making it clear that he was being screened out there (I use free webmail accounts that don't screen much of anything, which comes in handy sometimes). The moron then tried to tell me that I should email him again to get the shipping amount... and I nearly bit my tongue out of my head trying to make myself speak pleasantly as I pointed out that at this juncture he really needed to go look the amount up and just TELL me while we were on the phone, which he grudgingly did.
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
If YOU sell on eBay, it'd improve the experience for everyone if you'd keep a few things in mind:
1) This is NOT a game, it's a legal contract you've entered into to sell something and deliver it in a timely manner; treat your auctions accordingly.
2) Thanks to the spammers, almost every buyer's inbox is screening out lots of emails, including those from eBay, so do NOT count on being able to send info to a buyer via "eBay emails"; instead, you should:
A) Choose the account option that makes your email addy visible to your buyers, giving them another way to contact you whether or not emails from you are reaching them; people who give you $ SHOULD have a direct way to reach you in any case.
B) If you use PayPal or other online payment system, put a shipping amount or a shipping calculator on your auction page, AND put the shipping total into the payment form associated with the auction, so that the buyer can get their total due and pay you without hearing from you.
C) If time is passing and you haven't heard from the buyer, instead of forgetting about the auction (as my seller amazingly had, according to him), or tossing out - feedback which will get you one in return, request contact info, and harass eBay until you get it... and then use it with common sense-if you leave a message on someone's answering machine, leave the info they need from you as part of the message, AND your phone # as well.
3) YOUR inbox may be screening out emails too, and you can NOT just ignore emails from buyers (it's against eBay rules to not be contactable via email by your buyers, plus it's just plain stupid), so you MUST:
A) Alter your settings, if you have them, such that eBay emails are getting to you... and NOT in your bulk/junk folder, either. If you honestly can't get the eBay emails into your main folder without being flooded with spam, you're going to have to sift through your bulk emails every day looking for eBay stuff.
B) Check your "My Messages" inbox (it's in the left-hand margin in your "My eBay" area) every single day if you have uncompleted transactions, as copies of messages buyers are trying to send you will supposedly all end up there.
C) Make sure that your official eBay contact info contains your current phone #, and return any calls you receive with professional promptness... again, be sure any messages you leave contain all necessary info.
4) Keep in mind that not 1 buyer in a million will make the sort of protracted effort *I* did, and will instead give you - feedback which can NOT be retracted and/or report you to eBay for fraud or non-performance, which can cost you your eBay account... so don't expect to be spoon-fed your $, take action to make SURE your buyer can get it to you.
This last one has nothing to do with my specific eBay topic, but it makes me so nuts that I'm going to tack it on:
5) If you're selling something with a "face," such as a doll, stuffie or figurine, the most important photo to take is one that shows the face straight on; if you only have 1 pic on your auction page, that's the 1 to have. No, it doesn't show the side(s), which in the case of a "long" stuffie can mean a large % of the item isn't being seen, but when people display these things they usually display them facing forward, so that's the part of the item that they most want to see.
Until such time as eBay gets some long-overdue regulations applied to it, they're set up so that they can really stick it to you, and so can every trading partner; a little common sense will insure that you don't risk losing access to this increasingly valuable marketplace.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Separation of church and state
I caught a program about Ben Franklin on the History Channel tonight, and learned something new; when he was reviewing the Declaration of Independence with the other committee members, preparatory to showing it to congress, he requested that "We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal" be changed to the familiar phrase "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"... because he thought that the word "sacred" would prevent the new nation from having the separation of church and state that they wanted it to have.
Religious wrong, I mean "right," please take note; THAT is what the founding fathers wanted for this country.
You can see a pic of an actual rough draft, with a transcription of the alterations below it, here
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/rough.htm
It never ceases to amaze me how people who'd scream bloody murder if they had to be exposed to the images, symbols, rituals and words of any other religion truly believe that everyone in this country should be subjected to THEIR religion without complaint. My reply to their "but what harm would it do?" argument is:
"None... so let's rotate through ALL the religions and spiritual beliefs held by people in this country in our public displays; that'd be fair, and, after all, there's no harm in seeing other people's beliefs represented, right? We'll put your stuff up right after, say, the devil worshippers have had their opportunity to shove their beliefs in your face... how does that grab you?"
Do you suppose any of them would go for it, lol?
Then, there are those who say that because the original colonists were all Christian, that makes this a de facto Christian country; my reply to that is that Jews had long since settled here when we became a nation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_history_in_Colonial_America
and that the slaves, who weren't seen as citizens but were nevertheless residents of the colonies, had brought a variety of belief systems with them from Africa. If they try to push it back further, and point to the uniform Protestantism of the Puritans as "proof" that we're based in Christianity, my reply is that the actual endpoint of looking back in history to find our "national religion" would in fact be Native Americans and their spiritual beliefs... but I don't see anyone championing THEM, although frankly it'd probably do us alot of good to be submerged in their wise, planet-friendly worldview.
I respect all religions, and understand people's desire to be surrounded by references to their beliefs, but when it shades over into trying to force everyone else to be surrounded, that's where I become intolerant... and it doesn't matter how big of a majority Christians are in this country, the concept remains the same. Heck, not all Christians can even agree on what they like; the Catholic vs the Protestant thing is pretty major, but there are other disagreements too... I remember one I saw on TV, where a little boy from, I think, a Lutheran family, was in a school in a primarily Baptist district that featured prayers read over the intercom each day; the parents objected to how Jesus was being prayed to, so their boy had to sit in the classroom with big headphones on his head to block out the prayers, which of course resulted in him becoming a friendless laughing stock.
Even if you remove all the specifics from something with religious intent, making it apply to everyone is STILL not ok; the much-touted "moment of silence" is a perfect example, as forcing people to freeze in place and be silent for no reason is arbitrary and stupid, blocks their pursuit of happiness, and has no similarity to what the laws normally require people to do.
The government is supposed to serve ALL Americans equally, and the only way for it to do that is to have total separation of church and state; that we don't actually HAVE that degree of separation leads to all sorts of inequities, such as only Christian holidays leading to time off of work and school, swearing on a Bible in court, and gays not being allowed to marry.
Even our MONEY has a reference to God on it, which, given our focus on finances, is about as UNseparate as it gets... and how must that make people who pray to Allah, Buddha or other deities feel? I know that as an agnostic cum metaphysicist, it even bothers ME to not be able to be free of the influence of Christianity; I'm not picking on that faith, mind you, I don't want ANY religion pushed at me, but in America no other religion is an issue in this area.
The founding fathers meant for us to have REAL freedom; to get that, we had to have no royalty to automatically have power over us, and no state religion, which would constitute another category of people having automatic power over us... they wanted us to have a government elected by the people as the ONLY source of authority, and that's one of their greatest gifts to us, even if it hasn't been implemented perfectly.
Unless and until we have another group of leaders of the same caliber as the founding fathers, we should NOT presume to change their plan for this nation... and I hope you're not holding your breath for THAT to ever happen.
Religious wrong, I mean "right," please take note; THAT is what the founding fathers wanted for this country.
You can see a pic of an actual rough draft, with a transcription of the alterations below it, here
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/rough.htm
It never ceases to amaze me how people who'd scream bloody murder if they had to be exposed to the images, symbols, rituals and words of any other religion truly believe that everyone in this country should be subjected to THEIR religion without complaint. My reply to their "but what harm would it do?" argument is:
"None... so let's rotate through ALL the religions and spiritual beliefs held by people in this country in our public displays; that'd be fair, and, after all, there's no harm in seeing other people's beliefs represented, right? We'll put your stuff up right after, say, the devil worshippers have had their opportunity to shove their beliefs in your face... how does that grab you?"
Do you suppose any of them would go for it, lol?
Then, there are those who say that because the original colonists were all Christian, that makes this a de facto Christian country; my reply to that is that Jews had long since settled here when we became a nation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_history_in_Colonial_America
and that the slaves, who weren't seen as citizens but were nevertheless residents of the colonies, had brought a variety of belief systems with them from Africa. If they try to push it back further, and point to the uniform Protestantism of the Puritans as "proof" that we're based in Christianity, my reply is that the actual endpoint of looking back in history to find our "national religion" would in fact be Native Americans and their spiritual beliefs... but I don't see anyone championing THEM, although frankly it'd probably do us alot of good to be submerged in their wise, planet-friendly worldview.
I respect all religions, and understand people's desire to be surrounded by references to their beliefs, but when it shades over into trying to force everyone else to be surrounded, that's where I become intolerant... and it doesn't matter how big of a majority Christians are in this country, the concept remains the same. Heck, not all Christians can even agree on what they like; the Catholic vs the Protestant thing is pretty major, but there are other disagreements too... I remember one I saw on TV, where a little boy from, I think, a Lutheran family, was in a school in a primarily Baptist district that featured prayers read over the intercom each day; the parents objected to how Jesus was being prayed to, so their boy had to sit in the classroom with big headphones on his head to block out the prayers, which of course resulted in him becoming a friendless laughing stock.
Even if you remove all the specifics from something with religious intent, making it apply to everyone is STILL not ok; the much-touted "moment of silence" is a perfect example, as forcing people to freeze in place and be silent for no reason is arbitrary and stupid, blocks their pursuit of happiness, and has no similarity to what the laws normally require people to do.
The government is supposed to serve ALL Americans equally, and the only way for it to do that is to have total separation of church and state; that we don't actually HAVE that degree of separation leads to all sorts of inequities, such as only Christian holidays leading to time off of work and school, swearing on a Bible in court, and gays not being allowed to marry.
Even our MONEY has a reference to God on it, which, given our focus on finances, is about as UNseparate as it gets... and how must that make people who pray to Allah, Buddha or other deities feel? I know that as an agnostic cum metaphysicist, it even bothers ME to not be able to be free of the influence of Christianity; I'm not picking on that faith, mind you, I don't want ANY religion pushed at me, but in America no other religion is an issue in this area.
The founding fathers meant for us to have REAL freedom; to get that, we had to have no royalty to automatically have power over us, and no state religion, which would constitute another category of people having automatic power over us... they wanted us to have a government elected by the people as the ONLY source of authority, and that's one of their greatest gifts to us, even if it hasn't been implemented perfectly.
Unless and until we have another group of leaders of the same caliber as the founding fathers, we should NOT presume to change their plan for this nation... and I hope you're not holding your breath for THAT to ever happen.
Monday, July 04, 2005
Happy 4th of July
If you're interested in learning a few facts about our founding fathers, whose efforts and sacrifices gave us a nation where we can be free, check out my July 4th and 5th posts from last year... and watch the wonderful movie "1776," which will tell you more about them, and the events of that fateful year, than 99% of Americans know.
Have you ever actually read the Declaration of Independence? If not, you should:
http://federalistpatriot.us/histdocs/declaration.htm
In my post a year ago, I said, "the Declaration as originally written would have ended slavery"; this year, I've found an online copy of the 1st draft of the Declaration:
http://www.constitution.org/tj/doi_rough.txt
The anti-slavery clause, the one that almost sank the Declaration because some of the southern states would have voted it down (the vote to pass it had to be unanimous), the one that, contrary to what modern media pundits would have us believe, many of the founding fathers passionately supported, begins with:
"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce..."
At what other time in history when people had slaves were any of them determined to END slavery... including people who, like Jefferson, were born into slave-owning families, and depended on the slaves for all their wealth? (Remember, Jefferson freed his slaves, knowing that the ruination of his finances would result.)
Every year that I've been online, I've been asked by people from other countries what the 4th of July is all about; after all, from the outside, it just looks like the standard excess consumption of food associated with all American holidays (in this case, primarily in picnic and BBQ form) enhanced by fireworks. For all we complain about how meaningless Christmas has become, the 4th means far less to most people, even though it SHOULD be overwhelmingly important to all of us; nearly every American beyond earliest childhood can tell the story of Jesus, regardless of their religious beliefs, but it's a VERY rare one of us who has any idea about the events that led up to the signing of the Declaration, even though that was arguably one of the most important incidents in the history of the human race... the moment of conception for the nation that would eventually become the most powerful in the world.
If you'd like to know more about what drove the then-colonies to revolution and the Declaration, here are a couple of sites to get you started:
http://www.americanrevolution.com/EventsLeadingTo.htm
http://americanhistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa070401a.htm
Some info on all of the 56 signers of the Declaration can be found here:
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/signers/index.htm
And last, but FAR from least, an image of the Declaration itself can be found here:
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/image.htm
Doesn't look like much, does it? A chunk of text, bold titles, and a cramped bunch of signatures of men who, had things gone the other way, would have been seen as lunatics and traitors, and been hanged... but who history has proven to be visionaries, innovators, and heroes.
When they say that the pen is mightier than the sword, THIS is what they're talking about. This is why we celebrate the 4th of July. Be sure to take some time today from your hotdogs and potato salad and think about it.
Have you ever actually read the Declaration of Independence? If not, you should:
http://federalistpatriot.us/histdocs/declaration.htm
In my post a year ago, I said, "the Declaration as originally written would have ended slavery"; this year, I've found an online copy of the 1st draft of the Declaration:
http://www.constitution.org/tj/doi_rough.txt
The anti-slavery clause, the one that almost sank the Declaration because some of the southern states would have voted it down (the vote to pass it had to be unanimous), the one that, contrary to what modern media pundits would have us believe, many of the founding fathers passionately supported, begins with:
"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce..."
At what other time in history when people had slaves were any of them determined to END slavery... including people who, like Jefferson, were born into slave-owning families, and depended on the slaves for all their wealth? (Remember, Jefferson freed his slaves, knowing that the ruination of his finances would result.)
Every year that I've been online, I've been asked by people from other countries what the 4th of July is all about; after all, from the outside, it just looks like the standard excess consumption of food associated with all American holidays (in this case, primarily in picnic and BBQ form) enhanced by fireworks. For all we complain about how meaningless Christmas has become, the 4th means far less to most people, even though it SHOULD be overwhelmingly important to all of us; nearly every American beyond earliest childhood can tell the story of Jesus, regardless of their religious beliefs, but it's a VERY rare one of us who has any idea about the events that led up to the signing of the Declaration, even though that was arguably one of the most important incidents in the history of the human race... the moment of conception for the nation that would eventually become the most powerful in the world.
If you'd like to know more about what drove the then-colonies to revolution and the Declaration, here are a couple of sites to get you started:
http://www.americanrevolution.com/EventsLeadingTo.htm
http://americanhistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa070401a.htm
Some info on all of the 56 signers of the Declaration can be found here:
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/signers/index.htm
And last, but FAR from least, an image of the Declaration itself can be found here:
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/image.htm
Doesn't look like much, does it? A chunk of text, bold titles, and a cramped bunch of signatures of men who, had things gone the other way, would have been seen as lunatics and traitors, and been hanged... but who history has proven to be visionaries, innovators, and heroes.
When they say that the pen is mightier than the sword, THIS is what they're talking about. This is why we celebrate the 4th of July. Be sure to take some time today from your hotdogs and potato salad and think about it.
Sunday, July 03, 2005
Love and sex with aliens
Countless scifi books, movies and TV shows have portrayed humans falling in love with members of alien species (which are almost always very human in appearance, naturally)... but, could that every actually happen? Could such a wildly different being have enough of a meeting of the minds with one of us for love to bloom? Would they WANT to? Could love beyond the infatuation stage exist with someone whose mind worked in a way beyond our comprehension, whose psychology was utterly different than we were used to dealing with?
And what about sex? It's easy to be hot for aliens as portrayed on TV and in movies, who after all are just attractive actors with makeup and prosthetics, but would even the most humanoid-looking aliens send off the right physical signals for us to feel attracted to them, or, of course, for them to be attracted to any of US? Old school scifi always showed reptilian or insectile aliens eager to copulate with busty Earth women, but is there any chance whatsoever of species with no physical similarity being able to feel attraction to each other?
As to the sex itself; assuming the genitals were compatible, would any but the most adventurous of us really be able to go through with it? What if their skin was blue, or had an odd texture, or their body temperature was significantly different, or their nerves, if they had them, were much more or less sensitive, than ours? How would they smell, and, er, taste? Could a human really skip along the path to orgasm faced with this sort of thing? Even if they had no perceptible differences from humans, do you think YOU could go through with it, knowing that you'd be touching, and touched by, something not of this world?
And what if the alien was non-humanoid; if you somehow developed affection for it, like if it were really smart and funny and kind, could anything ever induce you to try physical contact, or form a romantic attachment to it?
If they as a species were able to be attracted to us, sexually and/or romantically, but we didn't reciprocate, would they think us racist... or rather species-ist? If the situation were reversed, would we think that of THEM?
If aliens wanted to come and live here, would you think that was ok? Would you be willing to have them living in your neighborhood, working at your office, sending their kids to school with your kids? Would you ever be able to trust one of them like you would a human? Could you be friends with one? If one of your loved ones started dating one, would you be happy or alarmed? What about when the 1st pregnancy between species occurred, assuming we were capable of interbreeding?
We're so used to the idea of humans and sentient non-humans interacting as if being different species didn't matter, because of the scifi films and shows we've been seeing all our lives, that this seems like the natural way for it to work... but if aliens DID show up one day, is there really any chance of human beings, who can't even tolerate it when another human's too short, fat, or old, or a different race or religion, or has non-standard genitals or sexual preferences, offering the aliens the opportunity to live among us as if they were like us?
And what about sex? It's easy to be hot for aliens as portrayed on TV and in movies, who after all are just attractive actors with makeup and prosthetics, but would even the most humanoid-looking aliens send off the right physical signals for us to feel attracted to them, or, of course, for them to be attracted to any of US? Old school scifi always showed reptilian or insectile aliens eager to copulate with busty Earth women, but is there any chance whatsoever of species with no physical similarity being able to feel attraction to each other?
As to the sex itself; assuming the genitals were compatible, would any but the most adventurous of us really be able to go through with it? What if their skin was blue, or had an odd texture, or their body temperature was significantly different, or their nerves, if they had them, were much more or less sensitive, than ours? How would they smell, and, er, taste? Could a human really skip along the path to orgasm faced with this sort of thing? Even if they had no perceptible differences from humans, do you think YOU could go through with it, knowing that you'd be touching, and touched by, something not of this world?
And what if the alien was non-humanoid; if you somehow developed affection for it, like if it were really smart and funny and kind, could anything ever induce you to try physical contact, or form a romantic attachment to it?
If they as a species were able to be attracted to us, sexually and/or romantically, but we didn't reciprocate, would they think us racist... or rather species-ist? If the situation were reversed, would we think that of THEM?
If aliens wanted to come and live here, would you think that was ok? Would you be willing to have them living in your neighborhood, working at your office, sending their kids to school with your kids? Would you ever be able to trust one of them like you would a human? Could you be friends with one? If one of your loved ones started dating one, would you be happy or alarmed? What about when the 1st pregnancy between species occurred, assuming we were capable of interbreeding?
We're so used to the idea of humans and sentient non-humans interacting as if being different species didn't matter, because of the scifi films and shows we've been seeing all our lives, that this seems like the natural way for it to work... but if aliens DID show up one day, is there really any chance of human beings, who can't even tolerate it when another human's too short, fat, or old, or a different race or religion, or has non-standard genitals or sexual preferences, offering the aliens the opportunity to live among us as if they were like us?
Saturday, July 02, 2005
$ matters
The air conditioning in my husband's car broke down, so we only had mine for a few days while the mechanic version of the Keystone Cops got it fixed. On the day his car went in, MINE naturally didn't want to start, and then didn't want to stay running; it ran fine after a while, and my husband insisted it was just a blip and not indicative of a problem, but then it happened again, so when we got his car back we had to leave mine there to be worked on. We got it back today, and on the way home my husband was sideswiped on the freeway by a teenager driving a new Mercedes; he wasn't hurt, but the car will need body work along the entire passenger side... that's right, it had to go right back into the shop. The girl's insurance company has already admitted that she was 100% to blame, so they have to cover the cost of the body work, but the repairs we DID have to pay for, plus some unavoidable taxi rides when we had only 1 car between us, added up to a tidy sum... and it's times like this that I'm particularly grateful for being financially solvent, because to many Americans this sort of unplanned expense would be a major problem.
My husband and I have no debt other than the mortgage; ZERO. How many people do you know who can say that? We also have enough $ to never worry about failing to pay for bills, eBay purchases, dinners out, or, and here's the biggie, unexpected disasters... and how many people in America can say THAT these days? The scary thing is that this did NOT used to be the way things were; I'm old enough to remember when credit cards were a new thing, crushing mountains of credit card debt had never been heard of, and people lived within their means AND saved at least a little $ pretty consistently... what happened to us?
That was of course a rhetorical question; it doesn't take an economics PhD to see that the combination of the availability of easy credit, the sharp increase in the sheer # of things to buy, and the sense of entitlement that's become part of our national character made it inevitable that most Americans are living from paycheck to paycheck, with their credit cards stretched to the max, such that something like 2 cars needing repairs at the same time, or even ONE car needing them, can cause a desperate scramble to stay afloat.
I know couples who make 6 figures a year who're always fretting about how they're going to cover their bills, whether they're going to have to sell their house, or can afford to furnish a room for their new baby, or will be able to take a trip to see their family this year... people who should be living comfortable lives free of $-related stress, rather that having to agonize over whether canceling cable TV and brown-bagging it to work will allow them to make their minimum payments on everything.
I cringe to contemplate what folks from other countries think of people with that sort of $ being unable to budget it so that they can pay for essentials as well as frivolous things.
If you're worried about the economy now, ask yourself this; what happens when that 1st wave of savings-free, debt-swamped people reaches retirement age and has to file for bankruptcy en masse because their only $ is from Social Security, and that won't even cover basic living expenses much less credit card bills? What happens when they go from spendspendspend to ceasing to take part in the rampant consumerism that fuels the economy because they no longer have any extraneous income? What happens when our refusal as a nation to live within our means and handle $ responsibly comes home to roost?
My husband and I have no debt other than the mortgage; ZERO. How many people do you know who can say that? We also have enough $ to never worry about failing to pay for bills, eBay purchases, dinners out, or, and here's the biggie, unexpected disasters... and how many people in America can say THAT these days? The scary thing is that this did NOT used to be the way things were; I'm old enough to remember when credit cards were a new thing, crushing mountains of credit card debt had never been heard of, and people lived within their means AND saved at least a little $ pretty consistently... what happened to us?
That was of course a rhetorical question; it doesn't take an economics PhD to see that the combination of the availability of easy credit, the sharp increase in the sheer # of things to buy, and the sense of entitlement that's become part of our national character made it inevitable that most Americans are living from paycheck to paycheck, with their credit cards stretched to the max, such that something like 2 cars needing repairs at the same time, or even ONE car needing them, can cause a desperate scramble to stay afloat.
I know couples who make 6 figures a year who're always fretting about how they're going to cover their bills, whether they're going to have to sell their house, or can afford to furnish a room for their new baby, or will be able to take a trip to see their family this year... people who should be living comfortable lives free of $-related stress, rather that having to agonize over whether canceling cable TV and brown-bagging it to work will allow them to make their minimum payments on everything.
I cringe to contemplate what folks from other countries think of people with that sort of $ being unable to budget it so that they can pay for essentials as well as frivolous things.
If you're worried about the economy now, ask yourself this; what happens when that 1st wave of savings-free, debt-swamped people reaches retirement age and has to file for bankruptcy en masse because their only $ is from Social Security, and that won't even cover basic living expenses much less credit card bills? What happens when they go from spendspendspend to ceasing to take part in the rampant consumerism that fuels the economy because they no longer have any extraneous income? What happens when our refusal as a nation to live within our means and handle $ responsibly comes home to roost?
Friday, July 01, 2005
I got them site-feed blues
I got too excited about the joys of blogging, so of course the blogosphere has thrown me a curve, lol:
Today, my new friend Daniel, whose terrific blog is here
http://ds.blogzy.com/
told me that he'd been subscribed to me via Bloglines for some time, and that it never updated; the last post he was seeing was from July 15, 2004, almost a YEAR ago!! :-O
I hadn't visited my Bloglines account since shortly after I set it up early last year, as I don't use it to track or read blogs, so I went over there to take a look; after a great deal of floundering around, clicking every link, I finally was able to see my posts, and verify that what Daniel had seen wasn't something buggy with his account... and that meant that something was terribly wrong with my site feed.
Any sort of blog-related problem is a bummer, but I still don't know the 1st thing about this part of blogging, so I'm out of my depth here; all I could do was give it my best shot. I clicked on the RSS/Feedster thing in my sidebar, and saw that the code and text that used to come up had been replaced by "en-us Fri, 01 Jul 2005 01:55:51 PDT"; my RSS feed info was GONE. I went to the Feedster site and did searches for both my feed and blog URL's; the system returned no results. I looked around for the link that used to exist for their service that'd give you an RSS feed URL for your site; it was also GONE.
The only conclusion I can come to is that Feedster went out of the RSS-feed-URL-providing business... about a year ago, judging by Bloglines, which was using that feed. It sounds crazy to think that they deactivated everyone's RSS feed URL, when so many people had entered those URL's in so many blog search engines and such, but what else could explain what's happened? I've written to them asking about this; who knows, maybe I missed something on their site, and my old feed still is recoverable... that'd be nice, because then I could get Bloglines working again.
I've written to Bloglines, because it seems likely that my old feed will NOT be coming back, and I can't find a way to change the RSS feed they use for my site to one that works; I've got subscribers who signed up in good faith and have a right to expect me to fix this, and if you're one of them, rest assured that I'll keep on top of it... they warn to not expect a reply for a couple of business days, though, so don't expect anything to be fixed until next week. In the meantime, please accept my apologies for having no idea this was going on.
My next step was to get a new RSS feed URL, so I went to the only place I could think of; FeedBurner. I registered, entered my site info, and... the XML thing (which should have shown my recent posts) was BLANK. I started methodically clicking through every page in my account area, and eventually found the reason; their system had picked up on the Feedster URL and was trying to use it. I would've been at a loss at that point, but luckily Daniel had mentioned my Atom feed (which Blogger automatically generates), so I got that URL and tried to substitute it into FeedBurner; it gave me an Error 404. I tried to access the URL directly, and got a Blogger "page not found" error... and yes, I DID have it set up to publish my site feed. I then implemented a strategy from my old programming days, "when it's failing for no reason, change something, anything, and try again"; I changed the "Descriptions" control from "Short" to "Full," republished, and tried the Atom feed URL again... and there it was!! I tried to enter that URL at FeedBurner again, and the system accepted it; I checked the XML, and there it was!! (If you don't know what any of this means, click on the orange XML button in my sidebar.)
Then, a new thought occurred to me; this must be why I couldn't get Yahoo to accept my RSS feed and generate a "+ My Yahoo" button for my site... too bad their tech people couldn't ever be bothered to reply to my messages asking what the problem was, grrrrrrrrrr. I'd bookmarked the page to add RSS feeds to Yahoo, so I went there, added in the new URL provided by FeedBurner, and... it claimed it couldn't find that URL. Ok, I thought, there might be a lag in the system; I tried again a few minutes later... success!! The result can be see in the sidebar.
THEN, there's that NewsGator thing, not to mention "+ My MSN"; I'm going to pass out from sheer exhaustion if I don't get to bed now, so I can't do anything more at this point, but I'll try to check it out sometime soon.
AND, I'm almost certainly going to have to go around and re-enter my RSS feed in every directory and blog search engine that asks for it... whimper...
Anyways, this was an important thing, and it's most of the way fixed now; thanks, Daniel!! :-)
Today, my new friend Daniel, whose terrific blog is here
http://ds.blogzy.com/
told me that he'd been subscribed to me via Bloglines for some time, and that it never updated; the last post he was seeing was from July 15, 2004, almost a YEAR ago!! :-O
I hadn't visited my Bloglines account since shortly after I set it up early last year, as I don't use it to track or read blogs, so I went over there to take a look; after a great deal of floundering around, clicking every link, I finally was able to see my posts, and verify that what Daniel had seen wasn't something buggy with his account... and that meant that something was terribly wrong with my site feed.
Any sort of blog-related problem is a bummer, but I still don't know the 1st thing about this part of blogging, so I'm out of my depth here; all I could do was give it my best shot. I clicked on the RSS/Feedster thing in my sidebar, and saw that the code and text that used to come up had been replaced by "en-us Fri, 01 Jul 2005 01:55:51 PDT"; my RSS feed info was GONE. I went to the Feedster site and did searches for both my feed and blog URL's; the system returned no results. I looked around for the link that used to exist for their service that'd give you an RSS feed URL for your site; it was also GONE.
The only conclusion I can come to is that Feedster went out of the RSS-feed-URL-providing business... about a year ago, judging by Bloglines, which was using that feed. It sounds crazy to think that they deactivated everyone's RSS feed URL, when so many people had entered those URL's in so many blog search engines and such, but what else could explain what's happened? I've written to them asking about this; who knows, maybe I missed something on their site, and my old feed still is recoverable... that'd be nice, because then I could get Bloglines working again.
I've written to Bloglines, because it seems likely that my old feed will NOT be coming back, and I can't find a way to change the RSS feed they use for my site to one that works; I've got subscribers who signed up in good faith and have a right to expect me to fix this, and if you're one of them, rest assured that I'll keep on top of it... they warn to not expect a reply for a couple of business days, though, so don't expect anything to be fixed until next week. In the meantime, please accept my apologies for having no idea this was going on.
My next step was to get a new RSS feed URL, so I went to the only place I could think of; FeedBurner. I registered, entered my site info, and... the XML thing (which should have shown my recent posts) was BLANK. I started methodically clicking through every page in my account area, and eventually found the reason; their system had picked up on the Feedster URL and was trying to use it. I would've been at a loss at that point, but luckily Daniel had mentioned my Atom feed (which Blogger automatically generates), so I got that URL and tried to substitute it into FeedBurner; it gave me an Error 404. I tried to access the URL directly, and got a Blogger "page not found" error... and yes, I DID have it set up to publish my site feed. I then implemented a strategy from my old programming days, "when it's failing for no reason, change something, anything, and try again"; I changed the "Descriptions" control from "Short" to "Full," republished, and tried the Atom feed URL again... and there it was!! I tried to enter that URL at FeedBurner again, and the system accepted it; I checked the XML, and there it was!! (If you don't know what any of this means, click on the orange XML button in my sidebar.)
Then, a new thought occurred to me; this must be why I couldn't get Yahoo to accept my RSS feed and generate a "+ My Yahoo" button for my site... too bad their tech people couldn't ever be bothered to reply to my messages asking what the problem was, grrrrrrrrrr. I'd bookmarked the page to add RSS feeds to Yahoo, so I went there, added in the new URL provided by FeedBurner, and... it claimed it couldn't find that URL. Ok, I thought, there might be a lag in the system; I tried again a few minutes later... success!! The result can be see in the sidebar.
THEN, there's that NewsGator thing, not to mention "+ My MSN"; I'm going to pass out from sheer exhaustion if I don't get to bed now, so I can't do anything more at this point, but I'll try to check it out sometime soon.
AND, I'm almost certainly going to have to go around and re-enter my RSS feed in every directory and blog search engine that asks for it... whimper...
Anyways, this was an important thing, and it's most of the way fixed now; thanks, Daniel!! :-)
Thursday, June 30, 2005
50,000 hits!! :-)
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!! :-)
First and foremost; to all my readers, and especially my link-buddies; THANK YOU!! :-)
For both old readers and new, here's the "Omni FAQ," presented here because I couldn't think of anything more profound to commemorate this milestone:
Q: Why did you use "omniverse" in your URL?
A: It's all-encompassing, like my topics.
Q: Why do you post on other blogs under the name "Omni"?
A: It's short for "omniverse," and so connects my "posting name" to my blog URL... and it seemed simpler than making up a whole new name.
Q: Why do you use such a plain, low-tech template?
A: My blog isn't one you can really scan or skip around, it's one you have to settle in and read, and a simple layout with black text on a white background, and withOUT distracting colors and graphics, is what best lends itself to reading long posts.
Q: Why don't you get your own domain name?
A: Because they don't give them away for free, and because I don't want the confusion of multiple URL's for my blog.
Q: Tell me about you.
A: I'm a late-30's, happily-married (most of the time) American woman with no kids (unless you count my husband, lol) who doesn't get enough sleep, but nevertheless spends a great deal of time thinking about a variety of topics, and is on a protracted, if sporadic, spiritual journey.
Q: That's it? Why don't you give details, post a pic, etc?
A: I've gotta remain anonymous.
Q: Why?
A: If you posted the sort of stuff on this blog, wouldn't YOU want to be? Seriously, though, I've posted things about my friends that I want to be able to maintain deniability about... and I don't want any psychos tracking me down.
Q: You say you're a geek-does that mean you're chubby, with thick glasses and stringy hair?
A: No, I don't resemble the physical stereotype of female geeks in any way (other than my preference for geekish t-shirts).
Q: Why's there no way to comment here?
A: Again, the psychos; they come on here, read my posts obsessively, and then attack me on other people's blogs. Also: Just yesterday, I came across a blog that purported to be owned by a sexually-open 19 year old Asian girl (which means it's probably owned by a sexually-repressed mid-50's Caucasian man), with a 7-digit # of hits, that had apparently just added commenting; there were troll attacks that were PAGES long in every thread, and in several spots people had posted that, although they'd wanted to be able to respond to her posts, they thought she should REMOVE the commenting, because the troll posts were so unpleasant and distracting. If you think it'd be nice to have commenting here, believe me, we'd have exactly the same situation if I enabled it.
Q: Why can't I email you?
A: Because they haven't invented a filter that would block troll emails, and nothing could induce me to give trolls ANY way to contact me; I refuse to subject myself to abuse from belligerent strangers.
Q: Why do you use so many capitalized words (and parts of words) and ellipses ("...")?
A: That's my attempt to mimic my speech pattern as closely as possible; if you use the stresses and pauses as I've written them in your mind when you read my posts, you'll get a feeling for how I speak.
Q: Is that why you use words like "gotta" even when discussing a serious topic?
A: Yup; that's part of how I learned to talk to people, so as to not come across as quite so intense.
Q: You don't use curse words or vulgar language, though; are you a prude?
A: Gee, I hope not, lol; I want this blog to be readable by people of all ages and degrees of "social casualness," and in general I don't curse around people until I'm sure they don't find it offensive (eg they've done it themselves)... after which I curse as much as anyone else.
Q: Why do you typically use "1st, # and $" for "first, number and money"?
A: I'm a slow and horrible typist, and I've gotten used to using those sorts of shortcuts to speed things up.
Q: Do you realize that some of the contractions and compound words you use aren't accepted as actual words, and neither is "alot"?
A: Uh-huh; I use 'em because they're the fastest and simplest way to get things said... and just watch, they'll become accepted as words eventually, and then I'll be seen as a pioneer.
Q: You know that some people find short posts more enjoyable to read than the looooooooong ones you write, right?
A: There are a zillion blogs for those people to read, so they won't suffer from my posts not being the type they prefer. I don't go into every facet of a topic to be different, though, but because that's how I think... and that's what this blog is about, what *I* think.
I may add to the above as time goes on, but for now it should provide a decent bunch of answers for inquiring minds.
The other thing I wanted to mention is the downside of becoming a more established blog, with more "link buddies"; my link list of cool blogs keeps growing (and if you haven't checked them all out, including the ones I just added, you really should do so ASAP), but my available free time does NOT, with the unfortunate consequence that I've gone from visiting my favorite blogs every day, to every few days, to once a week, to closer to every other week as often as not, and, although I try to always leave a comment, I can rarely leave the sort of in-depth responses that I used to... my apologies, folks, I really am doing the best I can with my current schedule.
Time issues and trolls aside, my blogging experience continues to be overwhelmingly enjoyable, and it continues to be a source of daily joy that people from all over the world (130 countries and counting) choose to take time out of their busy days to come and see what I've ranted (or rambled) about; again, thanks!! :-)
First and foremost; to all my readers, and especially my link-buddies; THANK YOU!! :-)
For both old readers and new, here's the "Omni FAQ," presented here because I couldn't think of anything more profound to commemorate this milestone:
Q: Why did you use "omniverse" in your URL?
A: It's all-encompassing, like my topics.
Q: Why do you post on other blogs under the name "Omni"?
A: It's short for "omniverse," and so connects my "posting name" to my blog URL... and it seemed simpler than making up a whole new name.
Q: Why do you use such a plain, low-tech template?
A: My blog isn't one you can really scan or skip around, it's one you have to settle in and read, and a simple layout with black text on a white background, and withOUT distracting colors and graphics, is what best lends itself to reading long posts.
Q: Why don't you get your own domain name?
A: Because they don't give them away for free, and because I don't want the confusion of multiple URL's for my blog.
Q: Tell me about you.
A: I'm a late-30's, happily-married (most of the time) American woman with no kids (unless you count my husband, lol) who doesn't get enough sleep, but nevertheless spends a great deal of time thinking about a variety of topics, and is on a protracted, if sporadic, spiritual journey.
Q: That's it? Why don't you give details, post a pic, etc?
A: I've gotta remain anonymous.
Q: Why?
A: If you posted the sort of stuff on this blog, wouldn't YOU want to be? Seriously, though, I've posted things about my friends that I want to be able to maintain deniability about... and I don't want any psychos tracking me down.
Q: You say you're a geek-does that mean you're chubby, with thick glasses and stringy hair?
A: No, I don't resemble the physical stereotype of female geeks in any way (other than my preference for geekish t-shirts).
Q: Why's there no way to comment here?
A: Again, the psychos; they come on here, read my posts obsessively, and then attack me on other people's blogs. Also: Just yesterday, I came across a blog that purported to be owned by a sexually-open 19 year old Asian girl (which means it's probably owned by a sexually-repressed mid-50's Caucasian man), with a 7-digit # of hits, that had apparently just added commenting; there were troll attacks that were PAGES long in every thread, and in several spots people had posted that, although they'd wanted to be able to respond to her posts, they thought she should REMOVE the commenting, because the troll posts were so unpleasant and distracting. If you think it'd be nice to have commenting here, believe me, we'd have exactly the same situation if I enabled it.
Q: Why can't I email you?
A: Because they haven't invented a filter that would block troll emails, and nothing could induce me to give trolls ANY way to contact me; I refuse to subject myself to abuse from belligerent strangers.
Q: Why do you use so many capitalized words (and parts of words) and ellipses ("...")?
A: That's my attempt to mimic my speech pattern as closely as possible; if you use the stresses and pauses as I've written them in your mind when you read my posts, you'll get a feeling for how I speak.
Q: Is that why you use words like "gotta" even when discussing a serious topic?
A: Yup; that's part of how I learned to talk to people, so as to not come across as quite so intense.
Q: You don't use curse words or vulgar language, though; are you a prude?
A: Gee, I hope not, lol; I want this blog to be readable by people of all ages and degrees of "social casualness," and in general I don't curse around people until I'm sure they don't find it offensive (eg they've done it themselves)... after which I curse as much as anyone else.
Q: Why do you typically use "1st, # and $" for "first, number and money"?
A: I'm a slow and horrible typist, and I've gotten used to using those sorts of shortcuts to speed things up.
Q: Do you realize that some of the contractions and compound words you use aren't accepted as actual words, and neither is "alot"?
A: Uh-huh; I use 'em because they're the fastest and simplest way to get things said... and just watch, they'll become accepted as words eventually, and then I'll be seen as a pioneer.
Q: You know that some people find short posts more enjoyable to read than the looooooooong ones you write, right?
A: There are a zillion blogs for those people to read, so they won't suffer from my posts not being the type they prefer. I don't go into every facet of a topic to be different, though, but because that's how I think... and that's what this blog is about, what *I* think.
I may add to the above as time goes on, but for now it should provide a decent bunch of answers for inquiring minds.
The other thing I wanted to mention is the downside of becoming a more established blog, with more "link buddies"; my link list of cool blogs keeps growing (and if you haven't checked them all out, including the ones I just added, you really should do so ASAP), but my available free time does NOT, with the unfortunate consequence that I've gone from visiting my favorite blogs every day, to every few days, to once a week, to closer to every other week as often as not, and, although I try to always leave a comment, I can rarely leave the sort of in-depth responses that I used to... my apologies, folks, I really am doing the best I can with my current schedule.
Time issues and trolls aside, my blogging experience continues to be overwhelmingly enjoyable, and it continues to be a source of daily joy that people from all over the world (130 countries and counting) choose to take time out of their busy days to come and see what I've ranted (or rambled) about; again, thanks!! :-)
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Puzzled about parenting probs
For this post, "parenting" will refer to the care of "fur babies" as well as the human kind; the confusion I have applies equally to both cases.
How many times have you heard "pet parents" complain about not being able to sleep in, or even sleep past dawn, because their pets are leaping around and clamoring for food? These folks all have something in common; they feed their pets right after they get up in the morning. Can someone please tell me why none of them see where the problem lies in that situation? Granted that I haven't questioned them all, but this one is so easy to solve that it wouldn't make sense for them to keep on suffering if they saw the solution... which is of course to STOP feeding the pet 1st thing in the morning, so that the animal stops associating morning, and especially early morning, with being fed, and loses its desire to stomp on mommy and daddy's faces at 5AM. To make REALLY sure the animal has stopped making the daylight=food connection, don't feed them until after dark, and maybe even wait until near your bedtime to fill their dishes, so that they'll most likely lay down to sleep when you do, and STAY asleep because they're not starving. (It should go without saying that giving in to begging and giving them food other than when you intend to do so will NOT help them to learn to eat only at night and not to pester their "parents" all day.)
When you suggest this solution to pet parents, they'll be stunned and speechless at 1st, and then will start making excuses like, "I'm used to feeding them then," "They're used to eating then," "My parents always fed our animals in the morning" and so forth; the only 1 of these with any shred of validity is that it's less than ideal to have a pet not be fed until a dozen or more hours later than they're expecting, but that's easily overcome by feeding them half their day's food in the morning to start, and the other half at night, and then gradually increasing the % they get at night until that's when they get it all... not totally effortless, but hardly a big deal.
The related situation where small kids are concerned is when you hear the parents complaining that their little ones are up and around at the crack of dawn. This one's even easier to see the solution for; however much earlier the kids are waking up before you'd prefer them to, put them down for the night that much later. Is that so hard to figure out? If the kids are already nodding off at their current bedtime, you can make it a few minutes later each night until you reach the desired time, and if sunlight is waking them up early, put blackout shades on their windows.
Again, the parents are astounded to hear this simple solution; the main rebuttal is that they "can't" put the kids to sleep at whatever time they'd need to to have them waking up at the ideal time... and if you ask them why they "can't," there's never a valid reason, just a repetition of how you "can't" put a kid down that late, that it's somehow "wrong" in a way they can't describe. If you pursue the matter, you'll eventually discover that someone told them that a child of age X should be going to bed at time Y, and they took it as gospel, totally ignoring the wide range of sleep needs that kids can have, and that the length of nap a child takes, if any, alters how much sleep they need at night, and thus when they should be put to bed. A healthy child will wake up and want to get up when they've had enough sleep; with that as a guide, you can ignore the "shoulds," figure out how much sleep your child needs and plan their bedtime accordingly (consult your doctor if that amount seems way out of line for their age group, of course).
And do please show some sense, not to mention sensitivity, about what bedtime you enforce after a child reaches school age; don't be like MY parents, who, despite the fact that I woke up over an HOUR earlier than I needed to to get ready for school every single day, refused to budge on my bedtime... even though the other kids my age were going to bed an hour later than I was, so they didn't even have the excuse of following the crowd. When you force a child to adhere to an unreasonably early bedtime, they feel punished, and that makes them tense as their assigned sleep time approaches, which can lead to insomnia... believe me, I know all about that one. As long as your child is awake, or easily rousable, when you need them to be up, that's all that matters; you don't get bonus points if you make the kid go to bed earlier and they then wake up at sunrise.
We're a desperately sleep-deprived nation; did you know that, before the invention of the lightbulb, the average adult slept TEN hours per night? Preventing our babies, of both human and fur varieties, from stealing even an hour or 2 of sleep a day from us is far from trivial, so it's well worth the effort to correct those things; as to how to get yourself to bed earlier, with so many movies to watch and emails to type (not to mention blog entries)... you're on your own, lol.
How many times have you heard "pet parents" complain about not being able to sleep in, or even sleep past dawn, because their pets are leaping around and clamoring for food? These folks all have something in common; they feed their pets right after they get up in the morning. Can someone please tell me why none of them see where the problem lies in that situation? Granted that I haven't questioned them all, but this one is so easy to solve that it wouldn't make sense for them to keep on suffering if they saw the solution... which is of course to STOP feeding the pet 1st thing in the morning, so that the animal stops associating morning, and especially early morning, with being fed, and loses its desire to stomp on mommy and daddy's faces at 5AM. To make REALLY sure the animal has stopped making the daylight=food connection, don't feed them until after dark, and maybe even wait until near your bedtime to fill their dishes, so that they'll most likely lay down to sleep when you do, and STAY asleep because they're not starving. (It should go without saying that giving in to begging and giving them food other than when you intend to do so will NOT help them to learn to eat only at night and not to pester their "parents" all day.)
When you suggest this solution to pet parents, they'll be stunned and speechless at 1st, and then will start making excuses like, "I'm used to feeding them then," "They're used to eating then," "My parents always fed our animals in the morning" and so forth; the only 1 of these with any shred of validity is that it's less than ideal to have a pet not be fed until a dozen or more hours later than they're expecting, but that's easily overcome by feeding them half their day's food in the morning to start, and the other half at night, and then gradually increasing the % they get at night until that's when they get it all... not totally effortless, but hardly a big deal.
The related situation where small kids are concerned is when you hear the parents complaining that their little ones are up and around at the crack of dawn. This one's even easier to see the solution for; however much earlier the kids are waking up before you'd prefer them to, put them down for the night that much later. Is that so hard to figure out? If the kids are already nodding off at their current bedtime, you can make it a few minutes later each night until you reach the desired time, and if sunlight is waking them up early, put blackout shades on their windows.
Again, the parents are astounded to hear this simple solution; the main rebuttal is that they "can't" put the kids to sleep at whatever time they'd need to to have them waking up at the ideal time... and if you ask them why they "can't," there's never a valid reason, just a repetition of how you "can't" put a kid down that late, that it's somehow "wrong" in a way they can't describe. If you pursue the matter, you'll eventually discover that someone told them that a child of age X should be going to bed at time Y, and they took it as gospel, totally ignoring the wide range of sleep needs that kids can have, and that the length of nap a child takes, if any, alters how much sleep they need at night, and thus when they should be put to bed. A healthy child will wake up and want to get up when they've had enough sleep; with that as a guide, you can ignore the "shoulds," figure out how much sleep your child needs and plan their bedtime accordingly (consult your doctor if that amount seems way out of line for their age group, of course).
And do please show some sense, not to mention sensitivity, about what bedtime you enforce after a child reaches school age; don't be like MY parents, who, despite the fact that I woke up over an HOUR earlier than I needed to to get ready for school every single day, refused to budge on my bedtime... even though the other kids my age were going to bed an hour later than I was, so they didn't even have the excuse of following the crowd. When you force a child to adhere to an unreasonably early bedtime, they feel punished, and that makes them tense as their assigned sleep time approaches, which can lead to insomnia... believe me, I know all about that one. As long as your child is awake, or easily rousable, when you need them to be up, that's all that matters; you don't get bonus points if you make the kid go to bed earlier and they then wake up at sunrise.
We're a desperately sleep-deprived nation; did you know that, before the invention of the lightbulb, the average adult slept TEN hours per night? Preventing our babies, of both human and fur varieties, from stealing even an hour or 2 of sleep a day from us is far from trivial, so it's well worth the effort to correct those things; as to how to get yourself to bed earlier, with so many movies to watch and emails to type (not to mention blog entries)... you're on your own, lol.
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
Bank of America = STUPID
My husband has a long and illustrious history of losing things, including bank cards (he typically misplaces several of them per year); this causes the expected problems and stresses each time, compounded by his foot-dragging, first in doing a real search for them, and then in getting them replaced the majority of times that they're never found. For this most recent episode, however, the incompetence and stupidity shown by Bank of America actually eclipsed his.
It started out typically enough; he came home without his debit/ATM card, but denied that he'd lost it... until I played him the message on the answering machine from a B of A branch informing him that his card had been turned in there, at which point he admitted that he must have left it at the store. {sigh}
Stupidity #1 from B of A: They claimed that if my husband didn't get to the branch the next morning, they'd "have to" destroy the card... which is utterly ridiculous, as they'd NEVER "have to" destroy a bank card unless they got hold of one after a new one had been issued (as they don't want people to have more than 1 card at a time). Unreasonableness and a threat; how's that for customer service?
Stupidity #2 from B of A: By the time my husband got to the branch the next morning, they'd LOST the card. You read right; their system recorded the card coming in, but there's no record whatsoever of where it went to after the call was made to us... and they NEVER found it.
Stupidity #3 from B of A: We were told that the replacement card that they were then required to send, which after all was just a little embossing and magnetic coding put on a card blank, was going to take up to TEN business days to reach us, when in fact they should have been able to print it up right away and get it to us in a couple of days... especially since their own astounding screwup was behind the need for it.
Stupidity #4 from B of A: When I tried to pay some bills via their online banking setup, I discovered that I couldn't log in, and there was a weird error message saying that our login name didn't exist... silly me, I thought the site was down, when it in fact was just the failure of their programmers to make an error message that actually explained what the problem was. What the error message was indicating turned out to be...
Stupidity #5 from B of A: Although the card was NOT stolen, and even if it had been it contained no info that'd allow anyone to access the online banking setup, when their system processed the request for a new card it shut down our ability to pay our bills online... and remember, this is in addition to being unable to use the ATM's or make purchases with the card-talk about adding insult to injury, not to mention having no clue as to how the online world is connected (or not, in this case) to the real world.
Stupidity #6 from B of A: Because the online banking setup had been signed up for using my husband's info, even though there was a joint account involved they tried to convince me that there was no way that *I* could get the account unsealed... I eventually talked them into it, and paid the bills I'd intended to, but I shouldn't have HAD to fight for access to my own @#$%^&* checking account.
Stupidity #7 from B of A: When the card finally got here, my husband followed the instructions to activate it over the phone, and they didn't work, and the system told him to use the ATM... and of course, when he went to the ATM, IT didn't work, and told him to activate it by phone.
Stupidity #8 from B of A: I went to pay some bills online, and... you guessed it.
Stupidity #9 from B of A: They tried to convince me that there was no way they could have any sort of interchange with me that would allow the account to be unsealed, despite the fact that they'd had that ability just last week, and yes, I told them that; my husband came home at that point, and to save time I just handed the phone over to him.
Stupidity #10 from B of A: My husband told them that he wanted me to be able to have access to the online banking regardless of what was going on with him, as I had every right to expect to be able to do, but they said they "couldn't" add me on as an equal user to the account; all they could do was add me on as another user with different login info... and there's no guarantee that I won't still get locked out the next time he loses a card, as all the accounts still have his name on them (would YOU trust anything they said?).
Stupidity #11 from B of A: They informed him that the payee info that I'd laboriously entered for every company we get billed from could NOT be copied into this new user account!! This one is the worst of all, really, because there's no possible security issue even in the mind of the most clueless person with all account holders being able to pay their bills without having to re-enter all the info, it'd be trivially simple to program, and it's a GROSS lapse in customer service and common sense to not be able to do it... so, even if I CAN still get access to online bill paying next time my husband loses his card, I'm going to have to use so much effort to pay anything that I'd be better off just writing out a check.
Stupidity #12 from B of A: When I logged into the new account area (with gritted teeth), I discovered something amazing; the account info for our savings account was on there... but it does NOT show up in the original user account's listing. An email has been dispatched to inquire as to WHY we're not seeing the savings account under the original login name, since now it's clear that the info IS available online. Their system claims that a reply will be sent within 12 hours, which tells me that either they're lying through their teeth, or they've outsourced some or all of their customer service stuff to other countries... neither of which option endears me to them. (Update: they NEVER replied to me, but the savings account info has appeared on the original user account.)
When I announced my intention to start up with online banking in my post of 3-25-05 (because my bill payments were vanishing into the nether regions of the postal system), I said, "I'm nervous about what disasters could befall me if I try to deal with $ online"; I wish my instincts had been off just this once...
It started out typically enough; he came home without his debit/ATM card, but denied that he'd lost it... until I played him the message on the answering machine from a B of A branch informing him that his card had been turned in there, at which point he admitted that he must have left it at the store. {sigh}
Stupidity #1 from B of A: They claimed that if my husband didn't get to the branch the next morning, they'd "have to" destroy the card... which is utterly ridiculous, as they'd NEVER "have to" destroy a bank card unless they got hold of one after a new one had been issued (as they don't want people to have more than 1 card at a time). Unreasonableness and a threat; how's that for customer service?
Stupidity #2 from B of A: By the time my husband got to the branch the next morning, they'd LOST the card. You read right; their system recorded the card coming in, but there's no record whatsoever of where it went to after the call was made to us... and they NEVER found it.
Stupidity #3 from B of A: We were told that the replacement card that they were then required to send, which after all was just a little embossing and magnetic coding put on a card blank, was going to take up to TEN business days to reach us, when in fact they should have been able to print it up right away and get it to us in a couple of days... especially since their own astounding screwup was behind the need for it.
Stupidity #4 from B of A: When I tried to pay some bills via their online banking setup, I discovered that I couldn't log in, and there was a weird error message saying that our login name didn't exist... silly me, I thought the site was down, when it in fact was just the failure of their programmers to make an error message that actually explained what the problem was. What the error message was indicating turned out to be...
Stupidity #5 from B of A: Although the card was NOT stolen, and even if it had been it contained no info that'd allow anyone to access the online banking setup, when their system processed the request for a new card it shut down our ability to pay our bills online... and remember, this is in addition to being unable to use the ATM's or make purchases with the card-talk about adding insult to injury, not to mention having no clue as to how the online world is connected (or not, in this case) to the real world.
Stupidity #6 from B of A: Because the online banking setup had been signed up for using my husband's info, even though there was a joint account involved they tried to convince me that there was no way that *I* could get the account unsealed... I eventually talked them into it, and paid the bills I'd intended to, but I shouldn't have HAD to fight for access to my own @#$%^&* checking account.
Stupidity #7 from B of A: When the card finally got here, my husband followed the instructions to activate it over the phone, and they didn't work, and the system told him to use the ATM... and of course, when he went to the ATM, IT didn't work, and told him to activate it by phone.
Stupidity #8 from B of A: I went to pay some bills online, and... you guessed it.
Stupidity #9 from B of A: They tried to convince me that there was no way they could have any sort of interchange with me that would allow the account to be unsealed, despite the fact that they'd had that ability just last week, and yes, I told them that; my husband came home at that point, and to save time I just handed the phone over to him.
Stupidity #10 from B of A: My husband told them that he wanted me to be able to have access to the online banking regardless of what was going on with him, as I had every right to expect to be able to do, but they said they "couldn't" add me on as an equal user to the account; all they could do was add me on as another user with different login info... and there's no guarantee that I won't still get locked out the next time he loses a card, as all the accounts still have his name on them (would YOU trust anything they said?).
Stupidity #11 from B of A: They informed him that the payee info that I'd laboriously entered for every company we get billed from could NOT be copied into this new user account!! This one is the worst of all, really, because there's no possible security issue even in the mind of the most clueless person with all account holders being able to pay their bills without having to re-enter all the info, it'd be trivially simple to program, and it's a GROSS lapse in customer service and common sense to not be able to do it... so, even if I CAN still get access to online bill paying next time my husband loses his card, I'm going to have to use so much effort to pay anything that I'd be better off just writing out a check.
Stupidity #12 from B of A: When I logged into the new account area (with gritted teeth), I discovered something amazing; the account info for our savings account was on there... but it does NOT show up in the original user account's listing. An email has been dispatched to inquire as to WHY we're not seeing the savings account under the original login name, since now it's clear that the info IS available online. Their system claims that a reply will be sent within 12 hours, which tells me that either they're lying through their teeth, or they've outsourced some or all of their customer service stuff to other countries... neither of which option endears me to them. (Update: they NEVER replied to me, but the savings account info has appeared on the original user account.)
When I announced my intention to start up with online banking in my post of 3-25-05 (because my bill payments were vanishing into the nether regions of the postal system), I said, "I'm nervous about what disasters could befall me if I try to deal with $ online"; I wish my instincts had been off just this once...
Monday, June 27, 2005
Summer sun sense
With the July 4th weekend fast approaching, it's time to give a little thought to not getting fried by the sun at beaches and BBQ's; not only is the pain something we can do without, sun damage is aging, and, worst of all, greatly increases the possibility of getting skin cancer. Most of us are bright enough to glop on sunscreen before spending a day in the rays, but it turns out that this might be doing more harm than good, according to a blurb in the June 2005 issue of Cosmo:
"Many sunscreens only protect against UVB (or burning) rays because it was thought that those were the only beams that caused cancer. However, there's new evidence that UVA rays, which age the skin but don't burn you, are carcinogenic too, says dermatologist Nick Lowe... 'A sunscreen that doesn't protect against UVA rays can be worse than none at all, because it allows you to stay in the sun all day without burning, but you're still damaging your DNA,' says Sheldon Pinnell, MD, professor emeritus of dermatology at Duke University Medical Center."
WHAAAAAAAAAAT?!! After all those years of telling us we'd be safe as long as we used sunscreen and prevented burns, now it turns out that people who've used sunscreen to be able to enjoy being out in the sun all the time have been putting themselves at INCREASED cancer risk, not to mention enduring photoaging (aging by sunlight)? Why do we EVER believe it when doctors tell us that XYZ will make us safe, when we know perfectly well that they don't know all the facts about ANYTHING?
The updated advice for selecting sunscreen is:
"Your best defense is a sunscreen (minimum SPF 15) with zinc oxide, titanium dioxide, or avobenzone (also called Parsol 1789); it will likely be labeled as full- or broad-spectrum or indicate UVA and UVB protection. It's also good to choose a block laced with antioxidants like vitamins C or E or green tea. They help your sunscreen do its job by fighting off free radicals generated by UV light."
Other articles I've read have claimed Parsol 1789 to be the best sun protection ingredient available in this country (there's a supposedly better one available in most of the world outside of the US called mexoryl, but without FDA approval no accurate comparison can be made), so that's the one to go for if you can afford it (the others are cheaper). They tell us to use enough sunscreen to fill a shot glass to cover our bodies, or an amount the size of a golf ball, but most of us only use 1/4 that much, which, according to Dr. Pinnell, "turns SPF 30 into about SPF 4" (I guess SPF doesn't work according to basic math), so it's best to use the highest SPF you can find and NOT to trust that you're getting the level of protection the # suggests, by a wide margin.
They say you should wear sunscreen every day, which would be honestly unbearable for ME, as, perhaps because I have sensitive skin, I can feel the nasty stuff sitting there on me, and it feels AWFUL; also, despite what they say, you can NOT put it under makeup... even the concealer that comes in a hard stick can't hold on very well to those greasy chemicals. The closest thing there is to an exception is the one I'm going to recommend:
Neutrogena Ultra Sheer Dry-Touch Sunblock, UVA/UVB Protection with Parsol 1789... in SPF 45. It's non-oily, contains antioxidants (A, C and E), and is waterproof, sweatproof, rub-proof and non-comedogenic (won't clog pores and cause acne); it's one of the more expensive options, but, as much as I love to pinch a penny and get a bargain, this is one of the areas where I'd say it's crucial to go for the best. You may notice a few moments of "sunscreen ick" before it's absorbed, but after that you won't have that gross feeling of wearing sunscreen, and you can put some makeup on over it (I haven't tried liquid or cream makeups, but powder and stick are ok), so you can protect your face from the sun without having to show your undereye circles and blotches. It's available most places where sunscreen is sold, or you can order it online
http://store.yahoo.com/seabreezewholesale/ulshsp11.html
If you forget the sunscreen and end up burned, take a cool shower as soon as you can (like regular burns, sunburns develop slowly, and cooling the skin can stop the process), take ibuprofen and vitamin E, slather your skin with moisturizer and hydrocortisone (and a first aid or waxing-prep cream with lidocaine or pramoxine if you need extra pain killing); you can also puncture an E oil capsule and apply it directly to your skin, which works well but stains, so you can't use it under or near your clothing, or on skin that's about to be in contact with bedding.
My final tips:
Men, your greatest skin cancer risks are the tops of your ears and, if you're bald(ing), the top of your head, so be sure and protect those areas... a hat would be a good idea if you're comfortable wearing one (NOT a cap, as that doesn't protect your ears).
Ladies, I've read that as much as 95% of facial aging is photoaging, so for extra protection you might want to consider a wide-brimmed hat if it fits in with your style, or, if not, carry an umbrella or parasol to shade your face... with the big bonus of the latter being that you can twirl it coquettishly and attract admiring male glances.
And the most important tip of all; make sure your KIDS are covered in sunscreen every time they're going to be out in the sun... their future skin cancer risk will be determined in large part by how many burns they get in their first couple of decades.
"Many sunscreens only protect against UVB (or burning) rays because it was thought that those were the only beams that caused cancer. However, there's new evidence that UVA rays, which age the skin but don't burn you, are carcinogenic too, says dermatologist Nick Lowe... 'A sunscreen that doesn't protect against UVA rays can be worse than none at all, because it allows you to stay in the sun all day without burning, but you're still damaging your DNA,' says Sheldon Pinnell, MD, professor emeritus of dermatology at Duke University Medical Center."
WHAAAAAAAAAAT?!! After all those years of telling us we'd be safe as long as we used sunscreen and prevented burns, now it turns out that people who've used sunscreen to be able to enjoy being out in the sun all the time have been putting themselves at INCREASED cancer risk, not to mention enduring photoaging (aging by sunlight)? Why do we EVER believe it when doctors tell us that XYZ will make us safe, when we know perfectly well that they don't know all the facts about ANYTHING?
The updated advice for selecting sunscreen is:
"Your best defense is a sunscreen (minimum SPF 15) with zinc oxide, titanium dioxide, or avobenzone (also called Parsol 1789); it will likely be labeled as full- or broad-spectrum or indicate UVA and UVB protection. It's also good to choose a block laced with antioxidants like vitamins C or E or green tea. They help your sunscreen do its job by fighting off free radicals generated by UV light."
Other articles I've read have claimed Parsol 1789 to be the best sun protection ingredient available in this country (there's a supposedly better one available in most of the world outside of the US called mexoryl, but without FDA approval no accurate comparison can be made), so that's the one to go for if you can afford it (the others are cheaper). They tell us to use enough sunscreen to fill a shot glass to cover our bodies, or an amount the size of a golf ball, but most of us only use 1/4 that much, which, according to Dr. Pinnell, "turns SPF 30 into about SPF 4" (I guess SPF doesn't work according to basic math), so it's best to use the highest SPF you can find and NOT to trust that you're getting the level of protection the # suggests, by a wide margin.
They say you should wear sunscreen every day, which would be honestly unbearable for ME, as, perhaps because I have sensitive skin, I can feel the nasty stuff sitting there on me, and it feels AWFUL; also, despite what they say, you can NOT put it under makeup... even the concealer that comes in a hard stick can't hold on very well to those greasy chemicals. The closest thing there is to an exception is the one I'm going to recommend:
Neutrogena Ultra Sheer Dry-Touch Sunblock, UVA/UVB Protection with Parsol 1789... in SPF 45. It's non-oily, contains antioxidants (A, C and E), and is waterproof, sweatproof, rub-proof and non-comedogenic (won't clog pores and cause acne); it's one of the more expensive options, but, as much as I love to pinch a penny and get a bargain, this is one of the areas where I'd say it's crucial to go for the best. You may notice a few moments of "sunscreen ick" before it's absorbed, but after that you won't have that gross feeling of wearing sunscreen, and you can put some makeup on over it (I haven't tried liquid or cream makeups, but powder and stick are ok), so you can protect your face from the sun without having to show your undereye circles and blotches. It's available most places where sunscreen is sold, or you can order it online
http://store.yahoo.com/seabreezewholesale/ulshsp11.html
If you forget the sunscreen and end up burned, take a cool shower as soon as you can (like regular burns, sunburns develop slowly, and cooling the skin can stop the process), take ibuprofen and vitamin E, slather your skin with moisturizer and hydrocortisone (and a first aid or waxing-prep cream with lidocaine or pramoxine if you need extra pain killing); you can also puncture an E oil capsule and apply it directly to your skin, which works well but stains, so you can't use it under or near your clothing, or on skin that's about to be in contact with bedding.
My final tips:
Men, your greatest skin cancer risks are the tops of your ears and, if you're bald(ing), the top of your head, so be sure and protect those areas... a hat would be a good idea if you're comfortable wearing one (NOT a cap, as that doesn't protect your ears).
Ladies, I've read that as much as 95% of facial aging is photoaging, so for extra protection you might want to consider a wide-brimmed hat if it fits in with your style, or, if not, carry an umbrella or parasol to shade your face... with the big bonus of the latter being that you can twirl it coquettishly and attract admiring male glances.
And the most important tip of all; make sure your KIDS are covered in sunscreen every time they're going to be out in the sun... their future skin cancer risk will be determined in large part by how many burns they get in their first couple of decades.
Sunday, June 26, 2005
The development of the soul
My contemplation of what sort of soul, if any, an evil person might have in yesterday's post got me thinking:
The soul is formed from the energy of thought and feeling; does the KIND of thoughts and feelings you have affect the size and quality of your soul? If you're not much of a thinker and/or are unemotional, do you have a stunted soul? If your soul is of the wrong kind or not sufficiently powerful, does it fail to form a spirit when you die?
That's a BIG question; is there any reason to think that EVERYONE has a soul, much less that everyone has a spirit after their death? Does every soul eventually become a spirit? Can negative energy, can evil, make something wonderful like a soul, much less an eternal spirit? If not, how much of that can you have before your soul can no longer reach "critical mass" to form a spirit, or falls apart entirely?
Negative energy isn't just evil, violence, hatred and other "bad" emotions, but things like fear and sadness as well; if you've had an unhappy or anxious life, does that affect your soul? I sure hope not, but from a cold-blooded viewpoint of analyzing energies it seems as if it MUST have an effect. If you go through life thinking unpleasant thoughts, no matter how justified, no matter how appropriate for what life has done to you, what sort of soul are you creating?
If you produce positive energy and thoughts, does that counteract the negative stuff, as if opposing charges were literally canceling each other out, or do they mix together like white and black paint to make ever-changing shades of gray whose darkness or lightness depends on how your life is going?
If you die when your life is at a low point, can you be cheated out of having a spirit, even if most of your life was good? If you get your life in good shape before you die, can you overcome years of strife and stress and be assured of having a spirit? Or, does it all average out, and that average is what counts when you die?
Does this sound crazy? It does, yes, even to ME, but when I consider that humans can be born lacking, fail to develop, or lose literally EVERY other piece and part (sometimes leading to death, of course), I have to accept that it's only realistic to see the soul as being variable, and destructible, as well.
I've always said that, for the sake of your karma, it's important to try to avoid negative thoughts and emotions, and to cultivate positive ones, because you draw to yourself what you put out; now, I'm facing the realization that our souls, and our ability to continue to exist after the death of our bodies, may depend on this as well.
No horror movie could ever be as terrifying.
The soul is formed from the energy of thought and feeling; does the KIND of thoughts and feelings you have affect the size and quality of your soul? If you're not much of a thinker and/or are unemotional, do you have a stunted soul? If your soul is of the wrong kind or not sufficiently powerful, does it fail to form a spirit when you die?
That's a BIG question; is there any reason to think that EVERYONE has a soul, much less that everyone has a spirit after their death? Does every soul eventually become a spirit? Can negative energy, can evil, make something wonderful like a soul, much less an eternal spirit? If not, how much of that can you have before your soul can no longer reach "critical mass" to form a spirit, or falls apart entirely?
Negative energy isn't just evil, violence, hatred and other "bad" emotions, but things like fear and sadness as well; if you've had an unhappy or anxious life, does that affect your soul? I sure hope not, but from a cold-blooded viewpoint of analyzing energies it seems as if it MUST have an effect. If you go through life thinking unpleasant thoughts, no matter how justified, no matter how appropriate for what life has done to you, what sort of soul are you creating?
If you produce positive energy and thoughts, does that counteract the negative stuff, as if opposing charges were literally canceling each other out, or do they mix together like white and black paint to make ever-changing shades of gray whose darkness or lightness depends on how your life is going?
If you die when your life is at a low point, can you be cheated out of having a spirit, even if most of your life was good? If you get your life in good shape before you die, can you overcome years of strife and stress and be assured of having a spirit? Or, does it all average out, and that average is what counts when you die?
Does this sound crazy? It does, yes, even to ME, but when I consider that humans can be born lacking, fail to develop, or lose literally EVERY other piece and part (sometimes leading to death, of course), I have to accept that it's only realistic to see the soul as being variable, and destructible, as well.
I've always said that, for the sake of your karma, it's important to try to avoid negative thoughts and emotions, and to cultivate positive ones, because you draw to yourself what you put out; now, I'm facing the realization that our souls, and our ability to continue to exist after the death of our bodies, may depend on this as well.
No horror movie could ever be as terrifying.
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