Thursday, August 03, 2006
Your brain... and the Brain
From the May 2006 issue of Discover magazine (yes, I'm still WAY behind in my reading) comes an article called "Blinded By Science: What Were We Thinking?" which gives us the following fascinating info:
"Countless baseball pitchers have had their careers cut short not by a pulverized rotator cuff or a line drive to the eye socket but simply by thinking about what they were doing. Once a pitcher starts 'aiming his pitches,' as the commentators call it, their voices heavy with foreboding, it usually isn't very long before he's back riding a tractor near the house he was born in"
"The great British snooker champion Jimmy White (snooker, for the uninitiated, is a version of pool played on a table the size of a football field with pockets the size of pinpricks) was known for his habit of rhythmically tapping the table surface with his ring finger as he lined up his shot. A presumptuous interviewer once proposed to him that it was a timing device, like a drummer's four-beat count-in, a technique to help him marshal his powers of concentration. Not at all, said White. He actually found it incredibly distracting to have some idiot--albeit himself--tapping on the table as he lined up a shot. And that was the whole point. If he weren't distracted, he'd be calculating angles, and every time he had tried doing that, the cue ball had ended up in the audience."
This is surprising stuff, but it shouldn't be; we know that the subconscious takes in masses of raw data, which it selects bits and pieces of and strings them together with whatever alterations are necessary for it to flow smoothly for us (including distortions of our perception of time-see my post of 6-4-06), and does it all instantaneously... how could it do that unless it was able to perform analyses and calculations far beyond what we can do consciously, in #, speed and accuracy? Compared to what the unconscious mind does to turn crude sensory input into a usable version of the world around us, and to allow us to do difficult things like rock climbing and snowboarding without having to plan every muscle movement, aiming a ball is a snap.
Here's the part that IS validly surprising:
"researchers assembled a crowd of typical Dutch shoppers--sending home, one would imagine, the ones whose shoulder-slung panpipes and Caucasian dreadlocks marked them as liable to freak out in a laboratory setting--and put them through a series of tests to see how they make buying decisions. In one test, the volunteers were split into two groups and asked to choose among four cars. One group was given much more elaborate descriptions of the cars than the other group. Then half of the members of each group spent four minutes in a quiet room, carefully considering their choices. The rest were forced to spend four minutes doing anagram puzzles, in Dutch--which can't be much of a picnic even if you speak Dutch--to distract their conscious minds.
After the test subjects were dismissed and the research team crunched all the numbers, a startling truth emerged: 'Conscious thinkers were better able to make the best choice among simple products, whereas unconscious thinkers were better able to make the best choice among complex products.'"
Interacting with the physical world with precision is a skill with obvious survival value, and is reasonable to expect a successful species of animal like humans to be able to do, but why would our unconscious minds need to be able to analyze "non-sensory" information (like gas mileage and crash test results) such as was required in the above experiment, much less be able to do it better than our conscious minds? What kinds of complex intellectual decisions did primitive humans have to make, that they needed this ability? "Here's a bunch of facts about antelope species X, and a bunch of facts about antelope species Y; which one should we try to hunt today?"... and then, what, they'd focus on sharpening their spears for 4 minutes and then announce their decisions? Or; did they use those minutes to pray for "the god of the hunt" to tell them the right thing to do, attribute whatever their subconscious minds came up with to divine intervention, and act accordingly, because those types of decisions had been better in the past than the ones they came up with themselves? Is THAT the survival connection, that those who instinctively DIDN'T consciously think things through, and whose unconscious minds were able to handle increasingly complex theoretical scenarios, did better than their compatriots who tried to figure things out directly?
Is this part of why we do NOT (as a rule) want "heavy thinkers" to be our leaders, or even our friends or lovers... because people who try too hard to consciously sort things out tend to be less "successful" than those who go with whatever percolates up from the depths of their subconscious minds?
And; how much impetus was given to the success of religion in every human tribe by the realization that praying over difficult problems generally produced better solutions than thinking about them?
AND; how many times have you heard a religious person say that they prayed about a problem, or gave up on it and asked their deity of choice to handle it, and the answer "just came to them," which they believe means that the deity helped them? I'm unwilling to totally discount the idea of there being a deity, as I can't prove there isn't one (or several), but isn't it reasonable to assume that at least SOME of these cases are intervention by the subconscious rather than by the divine?
As I was mulling all this over, I realized that *I* use the power of the unconscious, er, unconsciously; if I'm going to toss a piece of trash and want to have it land in the can, rather than 3 feet away, I just toss it without "planning" the throw, and when I'm not quite sure how I want to word a portion of something I'm writing, I'll do eBay searches for a couple of minutes with no attention being given to the topic, and when I come back to it the words will just flow on out.
If we're capable of grasping the mysteries of the omniverse, it'll probably be our subconscious minds that figure them out; hopefully, we'll be paying attention when the answers bubble up into our conscious minds.
There are a couple of entertainment-type tidbits that I wanted to pass on, so here they are before I forget them in the continuing frenzy with my mother and visiting relatives (everyone's doing fine, just FYI):
The original Warner Brothers cartoons (with Bugs Bunny et al) and the non-verbal Pink Panther cartoons are by far the most brilliant creations of their genre; it's always amazed me that this decades-old stuff has never been equalled. There are only 2 cartoons that I'd call even remotely close, and I do NOT mean "The Simpsons" and "South Park," which pander to the lowest common denominator too much for my taste; I mean the "Dilbert" animated series, which is obviously based on the ultra-funny comic strip of the same name, and "Pinky and the Brain," which is the continuing saga of 2 genetically-altered lab mice who try each night to take over the world. The good news is that the latter has finally started coming out on DVD; only 22 of the 65 episodes are out so far (including the Christmas special!!), but the others will presumably be coming soon. If you already love this series, now you can own some of it, and if you're unfamiliar with it, by all means rent it... you're in for a treat.
I saw a movie during one of those times when nothing much was on called "The Emerald Forest," in which an American man who's helping to build a dam in Brazil brings his family to the site, which abuts the rain forest, and his little boy is abducted by a secretive, primitive tribe... and isn't seen again for 10 years, despite his father's endless attempts to locate him. When he IS found, he's fully integrated into the tribe that snatched him, and doesn't really remember his original family... and doesn't want to rejoin them. It's a cool concept, but what makes it riveting is that it's based on a TRUE STORY; I'm sure that endless dramatic license was taken, as it always is, but the basics of the story have to be real for there to BE a story, and the depiction of the Amazonian tribes and the struggles they face is thought-provoking and disturbing... it's well worth watching.
"Countless baseball pitchers have had their careers cut short not by a pulverized rotator cuff or a line drive to the eye socket but simply by thinking about what they were doing. Once a pitcher starts 'aiming his pitches,' as the commentators call it, their voices heavy with foreboding, it usually isn't very long before he's back riding a tractor near the house he was born in"
"The great British snooker champion Jimmy White (snooker, for the uninitiated, is a version of pool played on a table the size of a football field with pockets the size of pinpricks) was known for his habit of rhythmically tapping the table surface with his ring finger as he lined up his shot. A presumptuous interviewer once proposed to him that it was a timing device, like a drummer's four-beat count-in, a technique to help him marshal his powers of concentration. Not at all, said White. He actually found it incredibly distracting to have some idiot--albeit himself--tapping on the table as he lined up a shot. And that was the whole point. If he weren't distracted, he'd be calculating angles, and every time he had tried doing that, the cue ball had ended up in the audience."
This is surprising stuff, but it shouldn't be; we know that the subconscious takes in masses of raw data, which it selects bits and pieces of and strings them together with whatever alterations are necessary for it to flow smoothly for us (including distortions of our perception of time-see my post of 6-4-06), and does it all instantaneously... how could it do that unless it was able to perform analyses and calculations far beyond what we can do consciously, in #, speed and accuracy? Compared to what the unconscious mind does to turn crude sensory input into a usable version of the world around us, and to allow us to do difficult things like rock climbing and snowboarding without having to plan every muscle movement, aiming a ball is a snap.
Here's the part that IS validly surprising:
"researchers assembled a crowd of typical Dutch shoppers--sending home, one would imagine, the ones whose shoulder-slung panpipes and Caucasian dreadlocks marked them as liable to freak out in a laboratory setting--and put them through a series of tests to see how they make buying decisions. In one test, the volunteers were split into two groups and asked to choose among four cars. One group was given much more elaborate descriptions of the cars than the other group. Then half of the members of each group spent four minutes in a quiet room, carefully considering their choices. The rest were forced to spend four minutes doing anagram puzzles, in Dutch--which can't be much of a picnic even if you speak Dutch--to distract their conscious minds.
After the test subjects were dismissed and the research team crunched all the numbers, a startling truth emerged: 'Conscious thinkers were better able to make the best choice among simple products, whereas unconscious thinkers were better able to make the best choice among complex products.'"
Interacting with the physical world with precision is a skill with obvious survival value, and is reasonable to expect a successful species of animal like humans to be able to do, but why would our unconscious minds need to be able to analyze "non-sensory" information (like gas mileage and crash test results) such as was required in the above experiment, much less be able to do it better than our conscious minds? What kinds of complex intellectual decisions did primitive humans have to make, that they needed this ability? "Here's a bunch of facts about antelope species X, and a bunch of facts about antelope species Y; which one should we try to hunt today?"... and then, what, they'd focus on sharpening their spears for 4 minutes and then announce their decisions? Or; did they use those minutes to pray for "the god of the hunt" to tell them the right thing to do, attribute whatever their subconscious minds came up with to divine intervention, and act accordingly, because those types of decisions had been better in the past than the ones they came up with themselves? Is THAT the survival connection, that those who instinctively DIDN'T consciously think things through, and whose unconscious minds were able to handle increasingly complex theoretical scenarios, did better than their compatriots who tried to figure things out directly?
Is this part of why we do NOT (as a rule) want "heavy thinkers" to be our leaders, or even our friends or lovers... because people who try too hard to consciously sort things out tend to be less "successful" than those who go with whatever percolates up from the depths of their subconscious minds?
And; how much impetus was given to the success of religion in every human tribe by the realization that praying over difficult problems generally produced better solutions than thinking about them?
AND; how many times have you heard a religious person say that they prayed about a problem, or gave up on it and asked their deity of choice to handle it, and the answer "just came to them," which they believe means that the deity helped them? I'm unwilling to totally discount the idea of there being a deity, as I can't prove there isn't one (or several), but isn't it reasonable to assume that at least SOME of these cases are intervention by the subconscious rather than by the divine?
As I was mulling all this over, I realized that *I* use the power of the unconscious, er, unconsciously; if I'm going to toss a piece of trash and want to have it land in the can, rather than 3 feet away, I just toss it without "planning" the throw, and when I'm not quite sure how I want to word a portion of something I'm writing, I'll do eBay searches for a couple of minutes with no attention being given to the topic, and when I come back to it the words will just flow on out.
If we're capable of grasping the mysteries of the omniverse, it'll probably be our subconscious minds that figure them out; hopefully, we'll be paying attention when the answers bubble up into our conscious minds.
There are a couple of entertainment-type tidbits that I wanted to pass on, so here they are before I forget them in the continuing frenzy with my mother and visiting relatives (everyone's doing fine, just FYI):
The original Warner Brothers cartoons (with Bugs Bunny et al) and the non-verbal Pink Panther cartoons are by far the most brilliant creations of their genre; it's always amazed me that this decades-old stuff has never been equalled. There are only 2 cartoons that I'd call even remotely close, and I do NOT mean "The Simpsons" and "South Park," which pander to the lowest common denominator too much for my taste; I mean the "Dilbert" animated series, which is obviously based on the ultra-funny comic strip of the same name, and "Pinky and the Brain," which is the continuing saga of 2 genetically-altered lab mice who try each night to take over the world. The good news is that the latter has finally started coming out on DVD; only 22 of the 65 episodes are out so far (including the Christmas special!!), but the others will presumably be coming soon. If you already love this series, now you can own some of it, and if you're unfamiliar with it, by all means rent it... you're in for a treat.
I saw a movie during one of those times when nothing much was on called "The Emerald Forest," in which an American man who's helping to build a dam in Brazil brings his family to the site, which abuts the rain forest, and his little boy is abducted by a secretive, primitive tribe... and isn't seen again for 10 years, despite his father's endless attempts to locate him. When he IS found, he's fully integrated into the tribe that snatched him, and doesn't really remember his original family... and doesn't want to rejoin them. It's a cool concept, but what makes it riveting is that it's based on a TRUE STORY; I'm sure that endless dramatic license was taken, as it always is, but the basics of the story have to be real for there to BE a story, and the depiction of the Amazonian tribes and the struggles they face is thought-provoking and disturbing... it's well worth watching.
Sunday, July 30, 2006
Bloggers, eBay sellers... mother
First and foremost, I want to thank 2 extraordinary blog buddies, Deborah
http://www.sugarfused.net/
and Todd ("Pterodactyl")
http://misterpterodactyl.blogspot.com/
for taking the time to put messages on their blogs about me and the situation with my mother; she sends her thanks also, along with her amazement that total strangers would be interested in her illness, much less post about it. These kind folks exemplify what's best about the blogosphere.
Sadly, there are other people busily exemplifying what's WORST about the blogosphere:
The psycho whose disgusting comments on the blog of someone who (GASP) has a different political view than hers (see my post of 7-10-06) have been the source of much discussion in the blogoshere has continued to aim filthy posts at her victim, both on his blog and those of other people; it's gotten so bad that he's actually been forced to pursue legal action. I hope that those who spoke in her defense, and asked people to stop criticizing her even though SHE hadn't stopped her evildoing, realize what morons they look like at this point, and have learned an important lesson about how to judge this sort of thing; evil behavior indicates an evil person, NOT a good person having an off day (week/month), and evil people NEVER stop behaving badly... once you see that 1st evil act, the only smart thing to do is to condemn that person utterly.
The other ugly behavior I've recently seen is also in the political section of the blogosphere; some no-life twit who obviously isn't filling out his inseam very well launched an endless personal attack against someone who's clearly his intellectual superior... what is it about stupid people, that they think they can substitute belligerence for brain cells, and somehow magically become a smarter person's equal if they attack them long enough? I stumbled across the hooraw after it had already been going on for a while on multiple blogs, but 3 things made it perfectly clear who was at fault:
1) One person was spewing lengthy, elaborate posts of a personal nature, the replies to which were brief and to the point; do I really need to specify who's the attacker and who's the victim within that pattern?
2) Mr. Empty Inseam was protesting that some of his attack posts had been deleted from the blog on which the victim is part of the team; only evil people even THINK to make out like deleting their garbage is somehow WRONG.
3) As part of his protracted rants, he portrayed the deletion of improper posts from himself and other trolls by the victim as "bullying"; only an evil person sees the removal of their attacks as evidence of THEM being mistreated, or uses terms like "bullying" ("control freak," "power mad," etc) to describe actions that any sane person would deem not only ok but necessary for the good of the forum... there's no possible non-evil argument for why someone has to allow nasty posts, whether attacks on them or otherwise, to remain on their site.
The grim thing is that, again, the wrongdoer has forced extreme action upon the victim; he's announced that he's quitting the blog that he's added so much of value to for so long, because this sort of childish taunting has made blogging no longer fun for him.
No, strike that; the REALLY grim thing is that several people posted that the 2 combatants were equally to blame for the whole mess. No, no, NO!! It doesn't matter how long a battle goes on, the attacker, which is the person who 1st crossed the line from mature adult discussion into personal remarks, bears 100% of the blame. I'll never understand how, although we all know that the law says that if you're attacked you can defend yourself as much as you need to, and it's only the attacker who's broken the law, in our personal lives we say stupid things like "it takes 2 to argue, so they're equally to blame" and "they're both fighting, so they're both behaving badly" and equivalent nonsense; rebutting attacks, whether physical or verbal, NEVER stops being self-defense, and NEVER becomes indicative of wrongdoing. Remember, if you don't give the participants their proper labels, if you don't apportion blame and censure correctly, you're supporting the attacker's bad behavior and adding to the victim's suffering... care to guess what the karmic backlash would be for that?
I've got some new stupid eBay seller stories:
I got a package in the mail a couple of days ago from a seller that I'd won a pair of pants from; imagine my surprise when the pants in the box were NOT the ones I'd won. They're the same color, but of totally different material and style, and a different brand as well (which was abundantly clear, as they were new with all still tags attached); since pants are pants, I guess it's not THAT odd that the seller confused one for the other, but this person sells LOTS of clothes, and you think she'd CHECK to be sure that a garment was the exact one a buyer had won before wrapping it up, wouldn't you?
I checked her listings, and found the auction for the pants she'd sent me; when I saw that there were no bidders yet, I crossed my fingers as I sent her a message explaining the mix-up. In her reply, she did what embarrassed sellers typically do when they send someone an item in error that's not already been bought by someone else; she said that she'd send my pants right away, and to keep the pants I already had for free.
Did I mention that they're ** $60 ** pants? :-)
More important than the price is that they fit perfectly, look great, and are of a type that I didn't already have but am willing to wear; it's nice to BENEFIT from the stupidity of a seller for once.
The other stupid seller is someone I won a Swarovski crystal item from; he has spectacular feedback and sells other Swarovski stuff, which I assumed was insurance against my item being fake, having undisclosed flaws, or being poorly packed for shipping... you see where this is going, right? The item was shipped FAST, packed well, arrived with no flaws, and was certainly identical in design to one of the Swarovski creations... but where it should have the Swarovski swan etched into it, it has another design instead.
Can you imagine being STUPID enough to sell pricey stuff like Swarovski crystal and not verify that EVERY item is genuine?
I AM benefitting from the seller's high, perfect feedback however, in that he's agreed to give a full refund, including round-trip shipping... and I'm betting he won't risk going back on that, not just because he's already left + feedback for me, and I can wreck his spotless record without consequences if he tries to play games, but because I've caught him in what's technically fraud (and have warned him of my intention to get photos documenting the lack of swan), which would totally screw him with eBay and PayPal if I reported it.
My mother, it turns out, is taking an interest in my eBay adventures, because she asked me last night to regale my aunt and uncle with descriptions of some of the better deals I've gotten; the story of the $60 pants, which she hadn't heard yet, produced gratifying yelps of amazement from all 3 of them.
The really unexpected moment came when she prompted me to talk about my blog: how many hits I've had, my PageRank, what countries my visitors and my blog buddies are from... and she kept chiming in with stuff I can't believe she remembers, like how I've had to scale back from posting every day and how I'm the #1 result on Google for a bunch of different searches.... which made me remember that the only thing she's ever said she was proud of me for my entire life is my PageRank, sigh.
If you think these signs of interest from her mean that she's turning over a new leaf, don't get excited; she never thanked me for all I did for her when she was in the hospital, which was so extreme even from a woman with a history of never saying "thank you" to family members that I thought maybe she didn't really remember that day... but she DID, she was able to clearly recount the events, she just didn't feel the need to express gratitude. She also didn't let me know when they'd released her from the hospital, or even that they'd agreed to do so, or when she got home, and expressed surprise at the idea that she should have mentioned something about these matters to her only child, who had just dedicated an entire day to caring for her. She ALSO resisted having my husband and I go over to her house, where my aunt and uncle that we hadn't seen in YEARS are staying, although she felt fine and was having other visitors; not until I made clear to my aunt WHY we hadn't already come over, and that we could NOT just show up there because we do NOT have a standing invitation to do so, and she confronted my mother about it, did the latter suddenly give grudging permission for us to come over.
Then, when we were leaving Friday night, she asked eagerly, out of the blue, when we were going to be there over the weekend.
Then, today, she was indifferent as to which day we came over, or if we did at all.
Have I mentioned that she's NUTS? Being sick hasn't made her a saint, or even a nice person; frankly, I'd rather she stick to her usual level of unpleasantness rather than finding new heights of it, then acting friendly, then bouncing back to "normal"... I LOATHE inconsistency, and do NOT get sucked in by intermittent reinforcement.
Is it possible that she's all over the map because she's TRYING to improve our relationship while she can, just in case, and doesn't really know how? Or, is she making an effort to not look so awful in front of my aunt and uncle? Or, is she so involved in being sick that she doesn't have the energy to devote to being nasty that she usually expends? Only time will tell; we'll be seeing alot of each other in the next month while the relatives are here, which we haven't done in many years, and it'll be interesting to see how it pans out.
http://www.sugarfused.net/
and Todd ("Pterodactyl")
http://misterpterodactyl.blogspot.com/
for taking the time to put messages on their blogs about me and the situation with my mother; she sends her thanks also, along with her amazement that total strangers would be interested in her illness, much less post about it. These kind folks exemplify what's best about the blogosphere.
Sadly, there are other people busily exemplifying what's WORST about the blogosphere:
The psycho whose disgusting comments on the blog of someone who (GASP) has a different political view than hers (see my post of 7-10-06) have been the source of much discussion in the blogoshere has continued to aim filthy posts at her victim, both on his blog and those of other people; it's gotten so bad that he's actually been forced to pursue legal action. I hope that those who spoke in her defense, and asked people to stop criticizing her even though SHE hadn't stopped her evildoing, realize what morons they look like at this point, and have learned an important lesson about how to judge this sort of thing; evil behavior indicates an evil person, NOT a good person having an off day (week/month), and evil people NEVER stop behaving badly... once you see that 1st evil act, the only smart thing to do is to condemn that person utterly.
The other ugly behavior I've recently seen is also in the political section of the blogosphere; some no-life twit who obviously isn't filling out his inseam very well launched an endless personal attack against someone who's clearly his intellectual superior... what is it about stupid people, that they think they can substitute belligerence for brain cells, and somehow magically become a smarter person's equal if they attack them long enough? I stumbled across the hooraw after it had already been going on for a while on multiple blogs, but 3 things made it perfectly clear who was at fault:
1) One person was spewing lengthy, elaborate posts of a personal nature, the replies to which were brief and to the point; do I really need to specify who's the attacker and who's the victim within that pattern?
2) Mr. Empty Inseam was protesting that some of his attack posts had been deleted from the blog on which the victim is part of the team; only evil people even THINK to make out like deleting their garbage is somehow WRONG.
3) As part of his protracted rants, he portrayed the deletion of improper posts from himself and other trolls by the victim as "bullying"; only an evil person sees the removal of their attacks as evidence of THEM being mistreated, or uses terms like "bullying" ("control freak," "power mad," etc) to describe actions that any sane person would deem not only ok but necessary for the good of the forum... there's no possible non-evil argument for why someone has to allow nasty posts, whether attacks on them or otherwise, to remain on their site.
The grim thing is that, again, the wrongdoer has forced extreme action upon the victim; he's announced that he's quitting the blog that he's added so much of value to for so long, because this sort of childish taunting has made blogging no longer fun for him.
No, strike that; the REALLY grim thing is that several people posted that the 2 combatants were equally to blame for the whole mess. No, no, NO!! It doesn't matter how long a battle goes on, the attacker, which is the person who 1st crossed the line from mature adult discussion into personal remarks, bears 100% of the blame. I'll never understand how, although we all know that the law says that if you're attacked you can defend yourself as much as you need to, and it's only the attacker who's broken the law, in our personal lives we say stupid things like "it takes 2 to argue, so they're equally to blame" and "they're both fighting, so they're both behaving badly" and equivalent nonsense; rebutting attacks, whether physical or verbal, NEVER stops being self-defense, and NEVER becomes indicative of wrongdoing. Remember, if you don't give the participants their proper labels, if you don't apportion blame and censure correctly, you're supporting the attacker's bad behavior and adding to the victim's suffering... care to guess what the karmic backlash would be for that?
I've got some new stupid eBay seller stories:
I got a package in the mail a couple of days ago from a seller that I'd won a pair of pants from; imagine my surprise when the pants in the box were NOT the ones I'd won. They're the same color, but of totally different material and style, and a different brand as well (which was abundantly clear, as they were new with all still tags attached); since pants are pants, I guess it's not THAT odd that the seller confused one for the other, but this person sells LOTS of clothes, and you think she'd CHECK to be sure that a garment was the exact one a buyer had won before wrapping it up, wouldn't you?
I checked her listings, and found the auction for the pants she'd sent me; when I saw that there were no bidders yet, I crossed my fingers as I sent her a message explaining the mix-up. In her reply, she did what embarrassed sellers typically do when they send someone an item in error that's not already been bought by someone else; she said that she'd send my pants right away, and to keep the pants I already had for free.
Did I mention that they're ** $60 ** pants? :-)
More important than the price is that they fit perfectly, look great, and are of a type that I didn't already have but am willing to wear; it's nice to BENEFIT from the stupidity of a seller for once.
The other stupid seller is someone I won a Swarovski crystal item from; he has spectacular feedback and sells other Swarovski stuff, which I assumed was insurance against my item being fake, having undisclosed flaws, or being poorly packed for shipping... you see where this is going, right? The item was shipped FAST, packed well, arrived with no flaws, and was certainly identical in design to one of the Swarovski creations... but where it should have the Swarovski swan etched into it, it has another design instead.
Can you imagine being STUPID enough to sell pricey stuff like Swarovski crystal and not verify that EVERY item is genuine?
I AM benefitting from the seller's high, perfect feedback however, in that he's agreed to give a full refund, including round-trip shipping... and I'm betting he won't risk going back on that, not just because he's already left + feedback for me, and I can wreck his spotless record without consequences if he tries to play games, but because I've caught him in what's technically fraud (and have warned him of my intention to get photos documenting the lack of swan), which would totally screw him with eBay and PayPal if I reported it.
My mother, it turns out, is taking an interest in my eBay adventures, because she asked me last night to regale my aunt and uncle with descriptions of some of the better deals I've gotten; the story of the $60 pants, which she hadn't heard yet, produced gratifying yelps of amazement from all 3 of them.
The really unexpected moment came when she prompted me to talk about my blog: how many hits I've had, my PageRank, what countries my visitors and my blog buddies are from... and she kept chiming in with stuff I can't believe she remembers, like how I've had to scale back from posting every day and how I'm the #1 result on Google for a bunch of different searches.... which made me remember that the only thing she's ever said she was proud of me for my entire life is my PageRank, sigh.
If you think these signs of interest from her mean that she's turning over a new leaf, don't get excited; she never thanked me for all I did for her when she was in the hospital, which was so extreme even from a woman with a history of never saying "thank you" to family members that I thought maybe she didn't really remember that day... but she DID, she was able to clearly recount the events, she just didn't feel the need to express gratitude. She also didn't let me know when they'd released her from the hospital, or even that they'd agreed to do so, or when she got home, and expressed surprise at the idea that she should have mentioned something about these matters to her only child, who had just dedicated an entire day to caring for her. She ALSO resisted having my husband and I go over to her house, where my aunt and uncle that we hadn't seen in YEARS are staying, although she felt fine and was having other visitors; not until I made clear to my aunt WHY we hadn't already come over, and that we could NOT just show up there because we do NOT have a standing invitation to do so, and she confronted my mother about it, did the latter suddenly give grudging permission for us to come over.
Then, when we were leaving Friday night, she asked eagerly, out of the blue, when we were going to be there over the weekend.
Then, today, she was indifferent as to which day we came over, or if we did at all.
Have I mentioned that she's NUTS? Being sick hasn't made her a saint, or even a nice person; frankly, I'd rather she stick to her usual level of unpleasantness rather than finding new heights of it, then acting friendly, then bouncing back to "normal"... I LOATHE inconsistency, and do NOT get sucked in by intermittent reinforcement.
Is it possible that she's all over the map because she's TRYING to improve our relationship while she can, just in case, and doesn't really know how? Or, is she making an effort to not look so awful in front of my aunt and uncle? Or, is she so involved in being sick that she doesn't have the energy to devote to being nasty that she usually expends? Only time will tell; we'll be seeing alot of each other in the next month while the relatives are here, which we haven't done in many years, and it'll be interesting to see how it pans out.
