Sunday, March 05, 2006
All they have to do is JUST...
How many times have you heard this said in reference to something the speaker thinks OTHER people need to do that's horrifically difficult, but because it can be described simply is made to sound like an effortless thing that anyone who doesn't do is weak, stupid, etc. You know the sorts of comments I mean:
"If people want to lose weight, all they have to do is JUST put their forks down"... said by a naturally thin person who eats all day long and has never had to withstand real, excruciating, desperate hunger in their entire life, much less struggled to combat it every moment of every day for big chunks of time.
"If a person needs to stop smoking, all they have to do is JUST not put the cigarettes in their mouth"... said by someone who's never been addicted to anything and has no clue as to how ferocious the need for whatever the addiction is to becomes, or what the agony of withdrawal feels like.
"If someone's kid is getting overweight, all they have to do is JUST give them less food"... said by someone who's never cared for a child and thus has no idea how many different places they can get food from, or how impossible it is to monitor them every moment, AND has never endured a child begging and crying for something for even a few minutes, much less the endless barrage of misery a constantly hungry child would subject the parents to all day every day for MONTHS, and has no inkling of how every cell in a parent's body rebels against not acting to end their child's suffering.
"If they're depressed, all they have to do is JUST 'cheer up'"... said by people who are inexplicably unable to grasp that depression is an ILLNESS, that NO medical condition is cured by "cheering up," and that no one is able to alter their emotional state by force of will in any case.
The word "just" doesn't always appear in these statements, but if what's said, and the way it's said, is such that the word could be put in there without altering the intended meaning, it still counts... counts as the person saying it being smug, ignorant, arrogant, compassionless, and a bunch of other unpleasant things.
Now of course there ARE statements in this format that are NOT indicative of these things, such as "If he wants to get better grades, all he has to do is just quit going out every night and do some studying instead"; this one refers to something that anyone CAN do, and withOUT having to deliberately undergo infinite and unending pain, so it's in a totally different category than the earlier examples that contemptuously dismiss the simple fact that when people seem to be consistently unable to do a thing without extreme difficulty, if at all, it means that that thing is HARD, or even impossible, NOT that those people have failed to see some quick, easy, obvious thing that they SHOULD be doing to end their problem.
If you find yourself wanting to opine on a topic with "All they have to do is JUST," stop and think for a moment; are you intending to point out what a lazy person would be better off doing... or are you about to be insensitive and mean-spirited?
And now for the news:
My mother is in the hospital; she's got pneumonia in her left lung, and because of her status as a breast cancer patient they're keeping her overnight and will decide at some point later in the day if she needs to be there any longer. It's belatedly occurred to me that some of you might have sent out good wishes to her, as many of us do when we hear about an ill or injured person, and to all that have I want to say thank you; thought creates reality, and every little bit helps.
On a positive note; if you check in my sidebar... you know what's coming, right? Yes, it's a new doodad; if you put your cursor over where it says "Want to change my title?" a box will come up that asks you to "Type in a new title"... enter anything that comes to mind, hit "OK," and whatever you chose will appear at the very top of the screen. I've been having a ball with it; my current favorite is "Every blah blah blah."
I had a nearly problem-free installation... 2 in a row, that's sorta scary. It was a little tricky figuring out which commands I really needed, though, because in the source code I got them from they were surrounded by "div" this and "id" that, and I had to think it through and sort out which bits were actually doing something from those that were... formatting and who knows what else. My intuition proved correct, which gave me thoroughly disproportionate pride, and now I have something new to play with; I hope some of you get a couple of minutes of fun out of it too.
"If people want to lose weight, all they have to do is JUST put their forks down"... said by a naturally thin person who eats all day long and has never had to withstand real, excruciating, desperate hunger in their entire life, much less struggled to combat it every moment of every day for big chunks of time.
"If a person needs to stop smoking, all they have to do is JUST not put the cigarettes in their mouth"... said by someone who's never been addicted to anything and has no clue as to how ferocious the need for whatever the addiction is to becomes, or what the agony of withdrawal feels like.
"If someone's kid is getting overweight, all they have to do is JUST give them less food"... said by someone who's never cared for a child and thus has no idea how many different places they can get food from, or how impossible it is to monitor them every moment, AND has never endured a child begging and crying for something for even a few minutes, much less the endless barrage of misery a constantly hungry child would subject the parents to all day every day for MONTHS, and has no inkling of how every cell in a parent's body rebels against not acting to end their child's suffering.
"If they're depressed, all they have to do is JUST 'cheer up'"... said by people who are inexplicably unable to grasp that depression is an ILLNESS, that NO medical condition is cured by "cheering up," and that no one is able to alter their emotional state by force of will in any case.
The word "just" doesn't always appear in these statements, but if what's said, and the way it's said, is such that the word could be put in there without altering the intended meaning, it still counts... counts as the person saying it being smug, ignorant, arrogant, compassionless, and a bunch of other unpleasant things.
Now of course there ARE statements in this format that are NOT indicative of these things, such as "If he wants to get better grades, all he has to do is just quit going out every night and do some studying instead"; this one refers to something that anyone CAN do, and withOUT having to deliberately undergo infinite and unending pain, so it's in a totally different category than the earlier examples that contemptuously dismiss the simple fact that when people seem to be consistently unable to do a thing without extreme difficulty, if at all, it means that that thing is HARD, or even impossible, NOT that those people have failed to see some quick, easy, obvious thing that they SHOULD be doing to end their problem.
If you find yourself wanting to opine on a topic with "All they have to do is JUST," stop and think for a moment; are you intending to point out what a lazy person would be better off doing... or are you about to be insensitive and mean-spirited?
And now for the news:
My mother is in the hospital; she's got pneumonia in her left lung, and because of her status as a breast cancer patient they're keeping her overnight and will decide at some point later in the day if she needs to be there any longer. It's belatedly occurred to me that some of you might have sent out good wishes to her, as many of us do when we hear about an ill or injured person, and to all that have I want to say thank you; thought creates reality, and every little bit helps.
On a positive note; if you check in my sidebar... you know what's coming, right? Yes, it's a new doodad; if you put your cursor over where it says "Want to change my title?" a box will come up that asks you to "Type in a new title"... enter anything that comes to mind, hit "OK," and whatever you chose will appear at the very top of the screen. I've been having a ball with it; my current favorite is "Every blah blah blah."
I had a nearly problem-free installation... 2 in a row, that's sorta scary. It was a little tricky figuring out which commands I really needed, though, because in the source code I got them from they were surrounded by "div" this and "id" that, and I had to think it through and sort out which bits were actually doing something from those that were... formatting and who knows what else. My intuition proved correct, which gave me thoroughly disproportionate pride, and now I have something new to play with; I hope some of you get a couple of minutes of fun out of it too.
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Email rants
I've said this before, and I'll say it again; QUIT forwarding emails!! Almost everyone dislikes getting that sort of thing, so it's an irritant for them and a counterproductive use of time for you.
If for some unfathomable reason you still feel it necessary to forward stuff, show some frigging sense about how you handle the endless list of headers with 100 email addies each that all too often accompanies these semi-spam epistles. I got one of those saccharine friendship ones recently from someone I've been tight with for nearly 20 years, and I mean a highly intelligent, educated professional woman who should know better, and there was page after page of strangers' email addies prefacing the nonsense; this woman, who's so safety-conscious that even under torture she wouldn't give you anyone's phone # unless they'd told her it was ok, hadn't hesitated to send me and a bunch of other people something with the possibility to cause far more grief for countless strangers. Although I've adopted a policy of pointedly ignoring forwarded things to try to discourage people from sending them to me, I emailed her back to point out that it's NOT ok to pass along people's addies without their permission, and that she needed to delete them all before sending such an email to others. Her reply was that... brace yourself... she didn't know HOW to delete them, with the implication being that that closed the subject!! I assume that what she meant by not knowing how to delete wasn't that she'd never noticed her delete key, but that she doesn't know how to highlight a bunch of text for deletion, but whatever the issue is it doesn't change how this needs to be handled; I told her bluntly that she has to either delete those addies or not forward anything... preferably the latter. No reply from her yet, lol.
The other thing people need to be aware of when they send out bulk emails, whether they're forwarded or just informational letters about their lives sent to everyone they know (most of whom couldn't care less), is that when you CC it means that everyone you send that email to can see the addy of everyone ELSE you sent it to; unless the people you're sending to are ALL family members or a group of friends who all know each other, this is, again, NOT ok. Use BCC instead, as that prevents people from seeing any addy but yours... or better still, write a separate email for each person that includes references to THEIR lives, as letters to loved and liked ones used to always contain.
One of the things I've been doing this year is trying to reduce the time I spend emailing as much as possible. For the 1st time since I got online in 2000, I did NOT send out a "Happy New Year, haven't heard from you, how are you?" email to a zillion people in January; instead, I went through my address book and ruthlessly deleted as many addies as possible, as a symbolic gesture of how I was giving up the lingering non-relationships with folks I used to be in online clubs or forums with and gotten hooked into corresponding with because we were all supposed to be "friends." If I told you how many HOURS I used to spend every day writing emails, you just wouldn't believe it... and mind you, none of those people really added anything worthwhile to my life, they were just babbling about the band we both liked or spewing their problems at me to get an endless stream of support for which they gave nothing in return. There are just a few of those folks who still email me occasionally, and I send replies that are pleasant but not friendly enough to invite more frequent contact; more importantly, I've dropped my previous pattern of replying promptly to people who weren't replying to ME promptly, which slows down the pace a little and gives me a great deal of satisfaction.
There was one person who was emailing me daily, even though she doesn't know me well enough to say anything to me beyond "how are you?" and "how did you sleep?", because she's seriously mentally ill and glommed onto me since she has no real-life friends and I was nice to her, sigh; she just wants someone to complain to every day, and I finally called a halt to it... I had to be VERY blunt, and tell her that she needed to save all that for the shrink that gets PAID to deal with it, that our one-way communication did NOT constitute a friendship, and gave ME nothing of value in return for all the time she was taking up. Because she IS so messed up, I couldn't bring myself to blow her off totally, though, so I still hear from her; I hope I'll be able to detach her from me eventually, but I don't see how yet.
Almost as bad is another fairly unhappy person who writes to me about twice a month; she's started mostly ignoring the contents of my emails and just sending me all new stuff each time. I finally got aggravated enough to call her on it; I replied to a recent email from her with a pointed question about whether or not she'd gotten my last letter, and if so would she please reply to my comments and questions, and I'd then reply to both emails together... and a few days later, here came an email that was an actual REPLY to the previous one I'd sent her, with no attempt to claim that she'd mis-filed it or forgotten about it. I don't know what'd possess a person to keep emailing someone they couldn't be bothered to pay attention to the replies of, but I'm gonna start nailing her every time she does this, and hopefully she'll either get squared away or find someone WILLING to write emails to her that she'll ignore.
The final pet peeve I have about emails is when people can't wait to hear back from you even when you're writing back quickly, and send a 2nd email, and then a 3rd, and all of a sudden you're writing to them all day long trying to catch up... and then, when you take a deep breath, clear a block of time, gather ALL their emails together and reply to them in one gigantic letter, they take this as their cue to never write back. grrrrrrrrrrr
I'd be curious to know if people in general spend as much time emailing, and IM-ing, these days when everyone (except me) has a cell phone and text messaging, not to mention Skype more and more commonly, as they did 5 years ago; if they ever do a long-overdue comprehensive study of online life, I hope that'll be part of it.
Just as an FYI for my regular readers; in the 2 months since I switched to blogging on alternate days, I've caught up alot on sleeping and my backlogged tasks, but it's not nearly enough, and my pile of unread books and magazines hasn't even been touched, so I've decided, regretfully, to reduce to blogging every 3rd day. This is NOT an indication that I'm burning out or losing interest; I'd still absolutely prefer to blog daily, but I need to get things done, and sleep over 5 hours, more often than every 2nd day... I still hope that once I'm caught up I can blog more often, but either way the posts will keep coming.
If for some unfathomable reason you still feel it necessary to forward stuff, show some frigging sense about how you handle the endless list of headers with 100 email addies each that all too often accompanies these semi-spam epistles. I got one of those saccharine friendship ones recently from someone I've been tight with for nearly 20 years, and I mean a highly intelligent, educated professional woman who should know better, and there was page after page of strangers' email addies prefacing the nonsense; this woman, who's so safety-conscious that even under torture she wouldn't give you anyone's phone # unless they'd told her it was ok, hadn't hesitated to send me and a bunch of other people something with the possibility to cause far more grief for countless strangers. Although I've adopted a policy of pointedly ignoring forwarded things to try to discourage people from sending them to me, I emailed her back to point out that it's NOT ok to pass along people's addies without their permission, and that she needed to delete them all before sending such an email to others. Her reply was that... brace yourself... she didn't know HOW to delete them, with the implication being that that closed the subject!! I assume that what she meant by not knowing how to delete wasn't that she'd never noticed her delete key, but that she doesn't know how to highlight a bunch of text for deletion, but whatever the issue is it doesn't change how this needs to be handled; I told her bluntly that she has to either delete those addies or not forward anything... preferably the latter. No reply from her yet, lol.
The other thing people need to be aware of when they send out bulk emails, whether they're forwarded or just informational letters about their lives sent to everyone they know (most of whom couldn't care less), is that when you CC it means that everyone you send that email to can see the addy of everyone ELSE you sent it to; unless the people you're sending to are ALL family members or a group of friends who all know each other, this is, again, NOT ok. Use BCC instead, as that prevents people from seeing any addy but yours... or better still, write a separate email for each person that includes references to THEIR lives, as letters to loved and liked ones used to always contain.
One of the things I've been doing this year is trying to reduce the time I spend emailing as much as possible. For the 1st time since I got online in 2000, I did NOT send out a "Happy New Year, haven't heard from you, how are you?" email to a zillion people in January; instead, I went through my address book and ruthlessly deleted as many addies as possible, as a symbolic gesture of how I was giving up the lingering non-relationships with folks I used to be in online clubs or forums with and gotten hooked into corresponding with because we were all supposed to be "friends." If I told you how many HOURS I used to spend every day writing emails, you just wouldn't believe it... and mind you, none of those people really added anything worthwhile to my life, they were just babbling about the band we both liked or spewing their problems at me to get an endless stream of support for which they gave nothing in return. There are just a few of those folks who still email me occasionally, and I send replies that are pleasant but not friendly enough to invite more frequent contact; more importantly, I've dropped my previous pattern of replying promptly to people who weren't replying to ME promptly, which slows down the pace a little and gives me a great deal of satisfaction.
There was one person who was emailing me daily, even though she doesn't know me well enough to say anything to me beyond "how are you?" and "how did you sleep?", because she's seriously mentally ill and glommed onto me since she has no real-life friends and I was nice to her, sigh; she just wants someone to complain to every day, and I finally called a halt to it... I had to be VERY blunt, and tell her that she needed to save all that for the shrink that gets PAID to deal with it, that our one-way communication did NOT constitute a friendship, and gave ME nothing of value in return for all the time she was taking up. Because she IS so messed up, I couldn't bring myself to blow her off totally, though, so I still hear from her; I hope I'll be able to detach her from me eventually, but I don't see how yet.
Almost as bad is another fairly unhappy person who writes to me about twice a month; she's started mostly ignoring the contents of my emails and just sending me all new stuff each time. I finally got aggravated enough to call her on it; I replied to a recent email from her with a pointed question about whether or not she'd gotten my last letter, and if so would she please reply to my comments and questions, and I'd then reply to both emails together... and a few days later, here came an email that was an actual REPLY to the previous one I'd sent her, with no attempt to claim that she'd mis-filed it or forgotten about it. I don't know what'd possess a person to keep emailing someone they couldn't be bothered to pay attention to the replies of, but I'm gonna start nailing her every time she does this, and hopefully she'll either get squared away or find someone WILLING to write emails to her that she'll ignore.
The final pet peeve I have about emails is when people can't wait to hear back from you even when you're writing back quickly, and send a 2nd email, and then a 3rd, and all of a sudden you're writing to them all day long trying to catch up... and then, when you take a deep breath, clear a block of time, gather ALL their emails together and reply to them in one gigantic letter, they take this as their cue to never write back. grrrrrrrrrrr
I'd be curious to know if people in general spend as much time emailing, and IM-ing, these days when everyone (except me) has a cell phone and text messaging, not to mention Skype more and more commonly, as they did 5 years ago; if they ever do a long-overdue comprehensive study of online life, I hope that'll be part of it.
Just as an FYI for my regular readers; in the 2 months since I switched to blogging on alternate days, I've caught up alot on sleeping and my backlogged tasks, but it's not nearly enough, and my pile of unread books and magazines hasn't even been touched, so I've decided, regretfully, to reduce to blogging every 3rd day. This is NOT an indication that I'm burning out or losing interest; I'd still absolutely prefer to blog daily, but I need to get things done, and sleep over 5 hours, more often than every 2nd day... I still hope that once I'm caught up I can blog more often, but either way the posts will keep coming.
