Less here lately
As we used to say around our dorm room, it's "not entirely clear" why my blog entries have tapered off lately. A predictable twist is that it's not entirely clear I'm inclined to share—or even come up with—an introspective, coherent account of why. So how about some bullet points instead, each in the nature of a possible partial explanation?
- The "great events of the day" are heavily covered elsewhere, complicated to write about with originality, clarity and verve, or are predictably disgusting (like whenever someone on the GOP ticket opens his or her mouth).
- Don't Trust Snakes is not my public diary. An oldie but goodie.
- I've gradually concluded almost no one reads this.
- The emergence of new little diversions, like composing clever Facebook status lines. Seriously. Vague but cognizable pique at people who refuse my Facebook friend requests. Yes, Facebook, that exquisite form of slavery. You are indeed wise to shun it.
- Aggregate changes in my situation since inception of the MWR blog persona that either diminish my desire to express myself through the MWR blog persona, or provide alternative real-world outlets for some impulses that often animate the MWR blog persona.
- I'm not sure what to call this one. Psychic editing, perhaps. I'm in a mood lately where I'm tired of giving myself away for free. Further experiments may follow.
Labels: what passes for introspection
MWR on unrequited love
From an email today to an old friend:
The handy thing is that I am extremely good at not being interested in people who are not interested in me. It's like if you need a cow and you realize you've been bidding on a goat. Who the fuck wants a goat? (Other than half the women I've dated in the last few years).
Labels: MWR: weaver of metaphor, scenes from my outbox, Things I might blog about if this were my public diary, what passes for introspection
The new me
I have quite a lot of old email buried in my computer, much of it undeleted Outlook mail burned to CD for me as the venerable Seattle law firm bled out. I dip into the trove sometimes. Lately, and on the heels of asserting here and there that I haven't changed much since my 20s, I keep seeing signs that I am wrong. Even allowing for how new email was to me back then, and for the oddness of reading things one doesn't remember writing, there is quite a bit there that the current me just wouldn't write. It's not so much of a surprise, really, knowing all that's happened in the intervening years, but I rarely focus on how I've changed. There was more of an edge then, a more self-conscious way of crafting messages (part of the imperfect, alienating but mostly effective pulling the wool over the world's eyes I practiced in that long period of hanging unhappiness). I'm so much more comfortable now, so much more mellow. I wonder if it's something others perceive more than I do, less, or not at all.
Yes, more mellow. This blog notwithstanding. Scary to think what this would have been like a decade ago.
Labels: what passes for introspection
Ah, other people, bless 'em . . . where do they get such fanciful, wrong ideas?
I was thinking about writing some long thoughtful (myopic) what-passes-for-introspection piece about the odd, counterfactual notions even close friends can come up with about our characters . . . but I'm not sure I'm up for it. I'm not sure why I care much, except that I can't get past the notion that I should be able to control what people think of me, generally, and when it should matter what they think of me. I'm not sure I'm ready to put the misapprehensions of other people into Niebuhr's category of things I cannot change, but that would make for an interesting paradigm shift. As it is, if someone's perception of me differs very much from mine, I typically view it as a correctable misunderstanding
Anyway, anyone who really thinks I'm impatient, opinionated and arrogant should really consult a good dictionary . . . or should have known me in the eighth grade.
Labels: composition fatigue, INTP, what passes for introspection
The strange case of the self-identified "geek"
I've never understood why anyone would self-identify as a geek or a nerd, as seems common in places like Seattle. Doing so involves an unexplainable willingness to denigrate one's own interests. I have never had a single interest that I felt I had to justify, account for or gloss over as "my geeky interest." I realize that, most of the time, people who brand themselves as geeks or nerds are using a shorthand and self-deprecatingly acknowledging how they expect people perceive them, but I could never do that. It would never even cross my mind. I make no apologies or accounts for my interests, ever.
Before someone leaves a comment that includes the phrase "badge of honor", let me note that only only fools and despots confer badges of honor on themselves. Who am I kidding? Comments on this blog are rarer than a three-legged snake.
Labels: ego integrity, things that seem stupid to MWR (abridged version), what passes for introspection
The tasty improvised salad roll
I finally started the Omega Diet a week ago, failing to blog about it because Don't Trust Snakes is not my diary. I'd forgotten how it's pretty easy to stay with a sensible diet once it is underway, and that the hardest thing is starting and getting into the right frame of mind (these are things I should know from other segments of my life, but never mind). Anyway, I've been on this diet once and been told I looked like a movie star once, and the two events were related, so, reasonably enough, I'd been meaning to get back to it these past few years for the greater glory of my inner movie star.
This started out to be a food blog interlude, and it's going to veer in that direction very, very soon. But if you're in the market for a very sound book on diet and nutrition, or a diet, I highly recommend
The Omega Diet by Artemis P. Simopoulos, M.D., and Jo Robinson. This is very much not the latest fad approach, and the book provides a very understandable, educational discussion of the physiology involved. Of course, the more you understand why you should be doing something, the easier it is to convince yourself to do it. One example may suffice. You know how they always say how the best way to lose weight is a combination of diet and exercise? There is a whole dimension to that I'd never understood, despite being an amazing genius in most other areas. Logically, of course, it makes sense that if you both dieted and exercised you would lose weight faster than if you just did one or the other. But you could just diet more, right, consume some still smaller number of calories, and achieve the same result? But . . .
When you diet without exercising, you can lose one pound of muscle for every three pounds of fat. It's important to hold on to every muscle fiber you have because your resting metabolic rate (the rate you burn calories while resting) is largely determined by your amount of lean muscle. If you have sixty pounds of muscle, for example, you burn about 1,600 calories to fuel your body while at rest. If you lose five pounds of muscle, you will be burning 150 fewer calories a day. Over a years time, this could amount to 54,000 extra calories, which could cause you to regain eighteen of those twenty pounds! If you maintain your body mass, however, those twenty pounds are far less likely to come back.
That's a very interesting insight, isn't it? Did you know that? Maybe you did. I, however—a key member of the team that stormed to the Health Occupations Students of America 1985 Oregon "Brain Bowl" Championship with less effort that I'm taking to craft this sentence—did not.
Let's shift gears as promised so I can tell you about the healthy snack I whipped up earlier. Since this is neither my diary nor a food blog, and it's late, I'm not going to give much detail at all here about the provenance of the idea or the ingredients, or the technique (not that there is much).
I improvised a quick Vietnamese-style salad roll with the following in it:
- Fuji apple
- cucumber
- pea vines
- mint
- purple basil
- sriracha (hot sauce)
The wrapper requires a 30-second dip in warm water. For guidance beyond that, consult your favorite Vietnamese cookbook or elsewhere on the web. The whole process was very pretty.
For a dipping sauce,
nuoc cham or peanut sauce would be traditional. I just mixed some fish sauce, mirin and sugar, which wasn't bad. Elapsed time for the whole endeavor was about five minutes. Well, maybe ten. But it seemed like only five!
Labels: food blog interlude, what passes for introspection
Collecting vs. accumulating
Thanks to a dear friend and her free-spending ways in silent auctions, I got a chance this afternoon to tour Dale Chihuly's "boathouse" on Lake Union. I took some potentially good photos that I'll likely post sometime next week (that bothersome film thing again, I'm afraid). If I'm not mistaken, most of the really serious glassblowing takes place elsewhere; much of the tour was about seeing the over-the-top amount of
cool stuff that Chihuly has collected, such as
Pendleton Indian blankets, of which I think our guide said he had more than the Pendleton company itself. Sadly, there was no opportunity for me to steal Fizzy Lifting Drinks.
I've been meaning recently to do a little entry here about the difference between collecting things and the kind of accumulation I am capable of, and since that very topic came up in an email with the always provocative CLD this afternoon, I figure I'll just present a lightly-edited version of that rather than reinvent the wheel (a workmanlike planing job is probably in order for this wheel, but I only do entries like this when I'm feeling lazy, so that's not going to happen right now).
———MWR: The Chihuly tour was very cool. I shot a couple of rolls of slides. It's not really about seeing them make the glass. It's about seeing some of the quarters they have over there, the swimming pool with glass on the bottom, the aquarium, the huge long room with the giant slab table made from a single slab of old-growth trunk, all his collections (800 vintage Pendleton Indian blankets, etc., etc. It's almost excessive. There is something very alien to me about the impulse of collecting. My impulse is much more one of having things I like around, which sometimes entails accumulation and accretion, but I never have a collection or "completist" mentality. On the other hand, more money equals more cool stuff to some point, and how can any of us say where it would end with unlimited resources?
CLD: I think you have the collector's impulse... think about your cookbooks (and your expensive NYC ties!) I don't see much difference between someone who likes to read/collect cookbooks and someone who has more money and chooses instead to collect vintage blankets. Am I missing something here?
MWR: I think I'm going to have to do a blog entry about my distinctions between accumulation and collecting. I think they are real and meaningful. Most basically, I think, there is a real difference between the collector—who places some psychic value on the collection, its value, its completeness, its rarity, the search for the next things in it, etc., etc.—and someone who just tends to accumulate things he enjoys. If you look at the things I have in excess—neckties, cookbooks, fragrances, fountain pens, cameras, etc.—I acquired them following a purchase psychology that is not much different than what I, and most others, apply when deciding on what day-to-day purchases to make. I value things idiosyncratically, and see important distinctions in kind where others just see two blue ties, two vetiver fragrances, two old cameras, etc., but my ideas about utility are pretty normal. I don't buy things I don't expect to use and I have pretty normal ideas of diminishing marginal utility. I would be glad to have a black Nikon F2AS or a silver Leica M5, but because I have each camera in the other color, getting a second cosmetically different one is WAY down on my list. It would be high on a true collector's list.
My cameras, even though I have about [
WOULDN'T YOU LIKE TO KNOW?], really DO all do different things, and the differences are significant in my use. With neckties, accumulation comes at first from building a wardrobe, later from changing taste and from having buying a tie as a form of retail therapy at times over the years. My tastes never would change enough to suggest I get rid of what I already had (and it is an INTP trait to think that if something has interested you, it will always interest you and should be kept around—again, accumulation is the result). I almost never buy cookbooks anymore. Much of the cookbook buying was really about building a library, which I think is very distinct from collecting. If six cookbooks come out every year that I think should be in my library, well, when I start out there are quite a few years to catch up on. I always chose my cookbooks with a lot of care and I saw each of them as an individual object/item rather than "another cookbook". Someone with no interest in cooking—or French cooking, or New York City—might not understand why I needed a book by Andre Soltner if I already had one by Jacques Pepin or whomever, but to me they are not the same at all. And, by the same token, I had exactly zero interest in well over 90% of the cookbooks out there. A cookbook really needed to be "in my wheelhouse" to get my attention even in my heyday.
Accumulation is also somewhat self-limiting if you have normal ideas of diminishing marginal utility. Sometimes it's necessary to learn what your utility curve is for some genus of interest, but it does become clear. I tend to get more and more selective and eventually stop accumulating things when it is obvious that new additions just aren't going to see any use. A collector would continue acquiring items even if they would see no use. In most cases, the experience gained from using the accumulated items gives me a lot more wisdom about utility than I had at the start of my interest in whatever. I could probably deaccession half of every accumulated type of stuff with almost no practical hardship to how I use this stuff ("obviously," you say ;)). There's no way to do that
ex ante. I wouldn't be happy to get rid of half my camera equipment, but I could tell you almost to the item what 50% I would keep in order to be able to do 90% of what I can do with all of it. A collector, though, would be traumatized.
Collectors often display or showcase their collections, which I don't do (except as necessitated by limited storage space, or if they are good decor items). Many collectors are "completists" who would like to have a complete set of whatever, or multiple complete sets, or a complete set in mint condition, or a complete set mint in box, or shrink-wrapped, or with the original receipts intact, etc., etc. This kind of behavior really shows that fundamentally different notions of utility are at work. It's more like the satisfaction an OCD person gets from his or her little rituals. Mine is more like the satisfaction of having a valued book at my fingertips, or the right knife for the job, or whatever.
Your point about money is well taken. If I had a ton of money, my indifference curve would be such that, sure, why not pick up a black F2AS and a chrome M5. But it would take quite an interest in blankets for me to assemble 800 of them. I think if you had tons of resources, you might start to see things in a different way, because if you had some idiosyncratic interest or appreciation for something not in, or yet in, the mainstream, you really could envision building a collection that would have real, objective value later on, more than the sum of its parts. Maybe I would want to develop the most complete chronological collection of spiders preserved in amber, which future generations of students at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology would revere as the "MWR Collection of Spiders in Amber". But it's hard to project something like that with any certainty. And then I think the impulse would be more curatorship than collection, and I think there is a difference there too.
Labels: composition fatigue, INTP, scenes from my outbox, what passes for introspection
All modesty aside . . .
I don't wear suits very often these days, but I used to, and have flipped back and forth between casual and formal office settings several times. Last night I pulled out all of my neckties to plan a certain outfit and was reminded that . . . I have a shockingly large number of just lovely neckties. For years, the selection of neckties was my main aesthetic outlet, so the state of affairs is not surprising since I am an aesthetic savant. Still, I'd half forgotten that before most of the other aesthetic outlets—photography, lapidary blog entries, taxidermy, overpass vandalism and whatever else you'd give me credit for—there were the neckties. The pretty, pretty neckties.
MWR's favorite make of necktie: Tino Cosma.
Labels: "And then even Benno Schmidt had to admit that there vas something to my . . . modesty.", what passes for introspection
Things to do while you're alive [Change to less pandering title]
I have decided that
one of the things to do while I am alive something I would like to do is stop using my blog to gratuitously attract traffic from prominent ad agencies monitoring what random tastemakers and MWR might be writing about their slogans. This has not been an easy decision for me, because I do enjoy my periodic visits from the blog search page for
a certain the catchphrase
"Things to do while you're alive". But it just doesn't seem fair for me to waste everyone's time, including my own, by trying to work
that the catchphrase
"Things to do while you're alive" into the blog for no good reason.
Sure, I could go on and on about how buying a film camera is
one of the a thing
s I think you should do sometime to do while you're alive. Or say that
I have always aspired while I am alive I would love to write a legal opinion noting that it's not a partial birth abortion if you just kill the fetus before its little head exits the mother's body, but such comments would be tedious and tasteless, respectively, and certainly not worth wasting the time of the good people at
Chiat\Day that prominent creative shop,which I've heard of for years and years (with the irony being that for all they have surely taught me about the fine products of others, I still have no clue how to pronounce
"Chiat" the first part of the agency's name). Hey! There is still time
while I am alive before I go to bed to figure out how to pronounce
"Chiat" that gentleman's surname. I think in order to keep things positive, though, I'm going to look at learning the pronunciation as one of my many diverse accomplishments
for the day, rather than as part of some grim countdown to
death bed.
Don't even get me started about my list of things to do while
you're alive. Quite a few of them have something or other to do with you, but not all. So don't get a big head, Live-o!
Labels: film cameras, irony, Only in Don't Trust Snakes, what passes for introspection
Today's reflection
Every now and then I'm reminded that I think about the world in so many ways that are very different from how everyone else looks at the world. I try not to dwell too much on these matters because, in all honesty, doing so makes me feel alienated from my fellow human beings. One of the biggest fundamental differences in outlook is that I have almost no respect for tradition or authority as such. I process and filter pretty much everything presented from these sources, and never base my respect or compliance, if they are indeed given, on the status of the source alone. Of course, I'm simplifying and distilling this notion down to its "ideal typical" essence, as I see it.
I would write more but for the fact that my computer crashed yesterday and I'm having to write this on my mobile device. I'm hoping Fujitsu will manage to correct the disabling hardware problem in less than the two months it took them to replace my malfunctioning LCD screen. Actually, I'm secretly hoping that this issue will be so grave that they will need to replace my laptop. But I'm not holding out too much hope for that.
It's all extra annoying for me because another one of my defining characteristics is wanting my tools to always work correctly as specified.
Labels: INTP, what passes for introspection
"It would not be logical to make such a statement."
I just wrote this in an email to someone:
I have several levels of "my brain doesn't work that way" going on here. First, it almost never occurs to me to give a compliment, sincere or otherwise, because I want something. Second, I seldom compliment people on things they have no control over, like their facial features, also because that doesn't occur to me. It's not that I don't give compliments, just not these kinds.
Labels: INTP, scenes from my outbox, what passes for introspection
Scenes from my outbox
I just wrote this (well, 99.5% of this) in an email to someone:
I have a thing about people who form conclusions about me based on things unrelated people did . . . . I suppose that could be one of those things that will hurt me from time to time, but to me it's an illegitimate way to think, kind of like stereotyping about what all in group X are like or whatever. I ordinarily don't make accommodations for that sort of thing, and certainly not on spec. So if someone ends up having some idiosyncratic issue I feel like that's not really within my control. If I'm negotiating a treaty with the Russians, and they say "Oh, well, the Germans double-crossed us so we don't trust you either", my response is to give that no credence because I'M NOT THE GERMANS AND IF YOU THINK I'M GOING TO BE LIKE THE GERMANS YOU'RE PRETTY FUCKING STUPID TO BE NEGOTIATING WITH ME IN THE FIRST PLACE--AND, BY THE WAY, I'M A LITTLE INSULTED THAT YOU THINK I'M GOING TO BE LIKE THE GERMANS.
Labels: MWR: master of the WWII metaphor, scenes from my outbox, what passes for introspection
Finally, I lay bare my essence
I rarely (formerly never) clutter my blog with these meme things that require me to reveal information about myself, but a dear old friend wanted to see what I would put down for this one. Welcome to my world.
Three screen names that you’ve had: quanon, Lance White, Tuner Watson
Three things you like about yourself: my wit and charm, my even temperament, that I can keep confidences
Three things you don’t like about yourself: inertia, my too-high threshold/tolerance for non-physical pain, my tendency to key in on the negative and why things won't work
Three parts of your heritage: German, Swiss, Alsatian (see a pattern?)
Three things that scare you: (a) the prospect of personal annihilation, (b) the prospect of not remaining almost continually distracted from (a), (c) actually, not much else
Three of your everyday essentials: coffee, allergy medicine, web browsing
Three things you are wearing right now: wine-colored pinwale corduroy shirt, dark grey suede Chelsea boots, 1950s Omega "pie pan" wristwatch
Three of your favorite songs: Beyond Belief (Elvis Costello), Bold As Love (Jimi Hendrix), Careless Ethiopians (Toots & The Maytals)
Three things you want in a relationship: play, humor, understanding
Two truths and a lie: I can't remember the last time I read a non-genre novel. I own several hundred cookbooks. I stole fizzy lifting drinks.
Three things you can’t live without: friends, information, cameras
Three places you want to go on vacation: India, Turkey, Paris
Three things you just can’t do: juggle, tie my shoes without using the "rabbit ears" method, let my brother finish all his sentences
Three kids names: Ilan, Lina, Diamelen
Three things you want to do before you die: live for a significant time in one of a few European capitals, live for a significant time somewhere in India or thereabouts, learn French, Italian or Russian.
Three celeb crushes: Ingrid Bergman, Amanda Pays (Oxford Blues / Max Headroom era), Iman (Star Trek IV era)
Three of your favorite musicians: Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Walter Becker
Three physical things about the opposite sex that appeal to you: shoulders, neck, lips
Three of your favorite hobbies: photography, cooking, blogging (I suppose)
Three things you really want to do badly right now: curl up with an undiscovered Sherlock Holmes story (of which there are none), find brilliant subject matter for night photography within a ten block radius, cleverly segue to the next item
Three careers you’re considering/you’ve considered: immunology (in high school), professor of philosophy (in high school), sixth-grade teacher
Three ways that you are stereotypically a boy: I have a high tolerance for my own mess. I like bottle rockets. I reenact that scene from Taxi Driver as part of my bedtime ritual.
Three ways that you are stereotypically a girl: I enjoy shopping and shop to keep abreast of what's out there in the marketplace. I love to gossip. I enjoy fragrances and own and wear a variety of uncommon ones.
Three people that I would like to see post this meme: My parents. My sister.
Labels: memes, what passes for introspection
A little more
Chapter X - What Worries Me
What worries me is the number of hippies in [MWR's hometown]. Every time I go to [local park] I see long haired, drug addicted, beer drinking hippies. They're all over. I know from past experiences that they are seldom friendly. It realy scares me when I walk or ride in the park to go near them.
Another thing that worries me is pollution. Plants and companys like Trojan and Wah Chang putting out air pollution and radioactive waste. It worries me to think what will happen.
Remember, I was pulling this all together in one night. Some of the concepts were not developed as well as they might have been.
Labels: Only in Don't Trust Snakes, what passes for introspection
All about MWR, circa 1977
Home for the holidays, I did something this evening I have threatened to do for years: I went through the little half-door into the attic in my bedroom and dug through most of the boxes there. I realize this doesn't sound like such an undertaking, but there are some kind of rodents living in my mother's attic spaces (a/k/a "the creatures that live in the walls," as she casually called them the first time I heard them years ago) and the last time I opened that door (several years ago) to undertake this same project, one of them was sitting right there. I only caught a glimpse as it fled, but it didn't look fuzzy enough for a squirrel. This time, the attic was deserted though a bit of a mess. The contents of all the boxes were in remarkably good shape.
Anyway, I thought I'd favor you with a couple of selections from my fifth grade language arts project, "Project Me". This was supposed to be a long-term project we worked on for a good part of the semester, but I did nothing on it before it was due, claimed that I had lost it and then stayed up late the night of the day it was due to throw the whole thing together. I wish I could say I learned my lesson.
Anyway, see if you can see a little bit of today's MWR in these entries. And, if you happen to have known me since fifth grade, see how much or how little has changed.
Chapter I - Myself in General
In this chapter I will tell my best and worst qualities. This paragraph will tell about my best qualities and the next will tell my worst. The best thing about me is that I am realy smart. I have always been in the 99th percentile in all subjects according to the ITBS [Iowa Tests of Basic Skills] scores. Another good point is that I can get along with people I want to get along with. My third high point is that I know a lot of different things, odd facts, etc.
My first fault is that I'm too picky, I don't like school hot lunches, hotdogs and most of all I hate tacky items, birdbaths, people anything. My second setback is that I put down people a lot, mostly stupid ones. My third problem is that I talk to much but that can't be helped much.
Chapter IV - A Secret
Once myself and several others buried certain items in a certain part of [local park]. At a certain date we will dig them up.
A secret is some information that is known only to a small amount of poeple. They do not tell for various reasons.
Chapter VI - My Name and Initials
. . . . My intials are soso. Most of the population of the school thinks it is immensely funny and humorus to say some stupid thing like this "His initials stand for mentaly retarded! Ho Ho Huh Huh." I dispise this low form of humor, it makes me sick. I realize that the idiots who say these things are making total fools out of themselves, which comforts me a bit, but it still makes me sick. Other than this major setback however my initials are great.
Chapter VIII - My Pet Peeves
I have an almost endless number of pet peeves. I have some about people. I dislike hippies, vandals, drug addicts, people who run paper mills etc. and people who strip mine for coal.
There are food products that make me sick. Most of all I hate candy-coated breakfast cereal, Cheese-Its and potato chips.
Some things on T.V. are boring and repulseive. Commercials and soap operas are great examples of this. Among the worst commercials are those for Pepto-Bismol, Whisk and Dristan.
There are many other pet peeves on my list. These are only the major ones.
Chapter IX - Things I Like
I like a lot of things. Some of the things I like will be listed below. They are: Going to interesting places, playing board games, sleeping in, flying in airplanes, talking to people and reading. These are not the only things I like, they're just the main ones.
I'd say I've matured quite a bit since then. Imagine not liking Cheez-Its. That's crazy.
Labels: Only in Don't Trust Snakes, what passes for introspection
Blogger upgrade
Google finally got around to inviting me to upgrade to the new Blogger beta. I had been feeling slightly neglected. So far the main benefit has been that I no longer need to republish when altering posts or the template. I am now able to use "labels" to categorize my posts, which I might feel a little silly doing just because users of LiveJournal have had this functionality since what seems like the early 1970s and, as an INTP on the Myers-Briggs type indicator (the apotheosis of self-reporting), I tend to either embrace such things early or dismiss them as unimportant. Similarly, I tend to dismiss things I'm not immediately good at as unimportant skills. For example, juggling—pointless.
Maybe I'll give the labels a try. If nothing else, I should be able to get a good poll out of some of the more fanciful label ideas.
I will see what other benefits there are to the Blogger upgrade. When they announced it, my impression was that it would make it much easier for people who don't want to learn any HTML to create individualized templates. I'd like to see a feature that automatically creates parodies of MySpace pages. Now that would be something.
By the way, I'm sorry that I don't have a music player here at the blog that would blast some MWR-essence-capturing song at you on every visit. Maybe I'll have to look into that. Ah, but what would it be? Another poll!
Labels: blogs, INTP, irony, mocking others, what passes for introspection
Now with more mirror-universeness
. . . and you modeled yourself on a combination of Adolf Hitler and Mr. Spock. - My college roommate, circa 1987, countering my relentlessly logical assertions that it was just as easy for him to put his coffee cup in the garbage as to drop it on our floor
I've been thinking a lot this week about why I was the way I was in high school and for a time afterward. Though he was very drunk at the time, my roommate did have it half right.
Spock, of course, prided himself on being relentlessly logical in all things, and was very good at suppressing his human side. But the one thing that agonized him more than having a human side was the thought that others might see the human emotions he so studiously hid behind the mask of pure logic (think of "Amok Time", for example). That's the way I was in high school. Partly, I was a precocious little adult, of whom my AP English teacher could remark in class "I can't picture M as a freshman" (as an aside to his explanation of why he wouldn't teach freshmen, that you don't become a fully rational human being until at least age 16—I took it as a compliment, and think it was intended that way). Yet another part of me was this weirdly Spock-like character. I was shy, like many, and so wary of asking someone on a date that I never did, but if only shyness had been involved I think I would have found a way to overcome it. However, my real mortal fear was of having other people, generally, see that I had human emotions, of which going on a date would be conclusive evidence. It didn't matter who the other people were, or how close I was to them. I remember being mortified one All Saints' Day when my dad found a witch's hat in his car that I had borrowed the night before—damning evidence, to my way of thinking, that I had gone to a Halloween dance with someone. I'm totally serious. This incident concerned me. I didn't want it known—even by my own father, who might have been relieved, that I'd been chauffeuring around a witch or sorceress.
I actually would attribute a bit of this character to watching way too much
Star Trek as a kid and identifying way too much with Spock. (There are probably kids from a younger generation who got far more screwed up emulating Mr. Data, and I pity them.) Of course, I'm mostly joking about the Spock thing, but I'm still not sure of the real reasons I was that way. In those years most of my ego-definition was based on being really, really smart. And in those years my ego-definition seemed inseparable from my "presentation of self." I've come to see how silly it is to base such things on any slender reed, but I certainly wasn't reflecting on that at the time. Being smart was the source back then of much of the external reinforcement that in later years I came to take from multiple sources, like having the best neckties. I really think I believed that the reason people liked me was because I was smart, and I remember being shocked when my first serious girlfriend told me that my being nice was much more important to her than my intelligence (this from someone who was positively brilliant).
I'd taken so much of my reinforcement from being "the smart kid" that I didn't really grasp that no one whose opinion mattered to me would change their opinion of me if I did something stupid, or if I revealed some illogical affection for someone. During high school, it seemed to me that showing normal human feelings ran counter to being smart and logical, that it would make people think less of me (wanting them to see me as an intellectual demigod, of course) or even give them a power over me (an idea I have not completely abandoned because it is on some level correct).
When someone recently asked me what advice I would give to my 18-year-old self, I decided it would be "People care both more and less about you than you think." Pity I wasn't around to actually deliver that advice. I might have had much more fun in high school.
Although this blog could be an object lesson in not revealing too much of oneself to the world—this is an unprecedented level of personal reflection for an entry, I believe, and you're unlikely to ever see an unmasked adult likeness of me here—I do think I'm not so much like that anymore. Sort of, but not really. And I've had the goateed "Anti-Spock" look going for me for more than five years. Now perhaps we see the real reason I've never shaved off the goatee.
Anti-Spock did have one thing that's still beyond my reach: a device for remotely disintegrating enemies.
Labels: what passes for introspection
"This is the silliest compatibility profile I've ever read"
A confluence of factors in the my local Zeitgeist microclimate recently led me to "[t]ake the eHarmony Personality Profile and get instant, objective feedback on [my]self and how [I] relate to others. Then read [my] FREE Compatibility Profile and find out who is right for [me]." I hasten to add that none of the factors was a particular desire to meet my "soulmate" or whatever they are calling them over at eHarmony these days.
Being "not impressed by much," to paraphrase my good friend and missed-calling criminal defense attorney
syp ("He clocked that homeowner—that's not carjacking!"), I was prepared to be not impressed by what lay behind eHarmony's boasts about its "Scientifically Proven Compatibility Matching System" based on "[e]xhaustive research with thousands of couples found that there are 29 Key Dimensions of Compatibility necessary for success in a long term relationship. eHarmony is the only relationship site that uses a scientifically proven method to match based on these 29 crucial dimensions."
Conclusion: syp knows me very well. Not impressed. Amazingly, according to a TV commercial I saw last night featuring that very annoying eHarmony founder, they used to charge $50 for the pablum-packed profiles their "proven" protocol produces. (Sorry.) I sent my narrative results to another good friend who knows me well, CLD, who pronounced: "This is the silliest compatibility profile I've ever read . . . it contradicts itself in numerous places, and is written like it is straight out of the 1950s."
Truly, I was expecting a little better effort from these charlatans. However, it's important to remember one thing about all these so-called "personality profiles" based on self-completed Myers-Briggs-style surveys:
They ask you what you are like and then they tell you what you are like. Duh! It's not that much different from how the "psychic" figures out that you want to hear from Uncle Joe, and there's not even trickery involved. Puffery, yes. So, for example, if I say that a sense of humor is very important to me in a partner, I get back something like this: "She tends to be lighthearted and shares your humorous view of the world."
Quel shock! (For the record, however, my view of the world is not "humorous." Some of my observations about the world are humorous. In addition to its other conspicuous flaws, the eHarmony profile is poorly written. Another example: "You may demonstrate positive possessiveness by developing strong attachments; however, you will not be overly involved as some others tend to do." Huh? But I digress.)
Let's just string together a few of the qualities of my "ideal mate" and see what kind of consistent picture the "Scientifically Proven Compatibility Matching System" paints for me
from my own statements about what I am like and what I prefer:
"Conflict Resolution: You'll be happiest with a woman who tries to avoid conflict altogether. When she does have a disagreement, she tries to keep the peace instead of adding fuel to the fire. Resolving the argument is generally more important to her than being right, but she will stand up for herself."
Now, you may wonder whether the two parts of that last sentence are entirely consistent, but let's skip down a bit in the profile and continue reading . . .
"Dominance: You are best suited to someone who respects your competitive nature and shares some of the same thirst for victory. [What am I, a Roman general?] She generally goes out of her way to make sure she wins, whether it's finding the bargain shopping or excelling in the business world. Her friends describe her as someone who doesn't back down easily."
O.K., you're saying, just because she's a "woman who tries to avoid conflict altogether" doesn't mean she will "back down easily." I learned that as a kid from
Marlin Perkins. She might be kind of like a wolverine or a jackal. Lucky me. But it still seems a little contradictory. Let's read on . . .
"Obstreperousness: Your ideal mate is someone who isn't afraid to voice her opinion and appreciates the fact that you do the same. She won't be surprised if you disagree with her or argue your position. Her friends would probably describe her as the type of person who's more concerned with being right than just having everyone like her. Like you, she may get irritated when others disagree with her."
Putting aside the fact that I don't typically get irritated when others disagree with me (
don't start!), we now have someone who tries to avoid conflict but isn't afraid to voice her opinion and likes to be right and hates to back down. I'm not sure it's all inconsistent, but the effort to impose consistency highlights what general terms in which most everything in these profiles is couched.
Anyway, it's been a long entry so I'll wrap this up by noting that there can be insights to be had from this kind of personality profile, even though I didn't find any of them in my eHarmony reports. Here is the best example I can come up with, from a
detailed profile of the Myers-Briggs INTP type (which I am--weak I, strong P, as best I recall): "He always chooses to listen to music which suits his current emotional state, be it aggression, warmth, excitement, relaxation or whatever. Hence, the emotional state is assumed to be an unchangeable, mysterious property of himself. It is easier to choose appropriate music than to attempt to influence this. People with introverted Feeling . . . will deliberately choose to listen to music which helps them change and improve their mood. INTPs could never do that." Now that's at once interesting, true and non-obvious, three features I found lacking in the eHarmony output.
And, yes, I appreciate the significance of some INTP person having put together an entire intp.org website.
Labels: INTP, Only in Don't Trust Snakes, what passes for introspection
Reflections on the blog, its audience and tenor
Just finished doing a little blog housekeeping to make it slightly harder to figure out who I am from looking at the blog. It still wouldn't be that hard, I'm sure, but I just closed a few of the obvious gaping holes in my anonymity. No, I'm not going to say what they were.
This got me thinking about what my target audience is for this blog, if any. Sometimes it almost seems like the real audience is people entering queries like "big snakes new orleans flood penis" in MSN Search. O.K., I think I may have made up the penis part, but that gives you the flavor of what comes across the transom from our friends the search engines. Mostly, though, the audience is a fairly small group of people who already know me. It's handy that they already know me because you could read "Don't Trust Snakes" for a very long time without getting any sense of my inner mental and emotional life. Believe me, this is intentional. Why would I want to tell a bunch of random strangers--interested principally in snakes' private parts--about my intimate inner mental and emotional life? Nor am I going to tell that kind of stuff to the small group of people who already know me--how embarrassing. There is
plenty of that sort of thing available elsewhere, from the looks of it way more interesting than anything I've got going on.
Curiously, almost no one in my family reads the blog with any regularity--by which I mean that monthly would be a departure for all but one of them. One non-reader, my mother, has for years dropped little hints and suggestions that I was wasting my God-given writing talents (all without reading those masterly client advice memos on Section 3(a)(10) of the Securities Act of 1933, I might add). I can only conclude that these little
feuilletons were not what she had in mind. No matter. I remind myself that many people do a less-than-normal amount of web browsing. My mother withstood years of browsing on a 1998-vintage machine slightly more powerful than a good slide rule, so she's obviously not a very active surfer.
Besides the vaguely Olympian and Spock-like narrative voice, another noteworthy feature of this blog is its eclecticism. I have no commitment to write about anything in particular or in any depth whatsoever. I'm usually very happy to put up something pithy without connecting many of the dots. I don't think you really
want me connecting all the dots, because I can connect dots all day and almost everyone eventually tires of it.
Sadly, the theme of eclecticism has always seemed to rule out one of those delightful blog subtitles, such as:
Just your average pagan massage therapist who knits crochets, makes jewelry and is just really crafty!
The Bramton Minor Atom Spitfires have had a great start to the season. Attached are some images of the boys in action.
It was my sweet wifes idea to set up a blog site where our family and friends can feel free to talk or ask questions. We sent everyone a chronilogical Bible in a year. A great opportuniy voice insights, experiences etc. We wish everyone Gods best and lets have some fun!
A Collection of thoughts, observations, ideas and memories, designed for women who want to be full time homemakers and do it beautifully.
See anything from my point of view seems so hard to understand by others, and to let it unspoken will make me feel like stranger. To shout it out at blog is the best way I can do, never mean to hurt other's feeling.. Sorry if I do...
Now, I ask you, do you want to be accepting theological guidance from someone who writes "We sent everyone a chronilogical [
sic] Bible in a year"? Did/will they really? How sure are/were/will they be that it's really "chronilogical"? I guess you could read the sentence as history and have it make sense. But where's the fun in that?
Labels: what passes for introspection
