There is a saying that men and women can't be real friends without
getting over the sexual tension that inevitably occurs at some point
in the relationship. A man and a woman may start out as friends but if
they spend enough time together one will fall for the other of maybe
they'll both fall fir each other at the same time and it will all work
out.

Anyway, this saying is one I do agree with. But is it better for
the tension to come at the very beginning or somewhere in the middle,
once you've each developed a good but of trust in each other? On one
hand, it's good to get the whole dating idea out of the system right
away and a romantic attraction surely implies some sort of friendly
attraction but you may be afraid to even try being friends. On the
other hand, if it gets ugly, you're more likely to be friends
afterward if you were friends for a long time before. But, you could
be afraid to try to go back to being friends because that led to the
sexual tension that turned out yo not be good and a repeat of that
surely wouldn't be good.

Why is this even on my mind today? There's no woman in my life, not
even any potential, and I am totally happy with that. Temporarily.
Sent from my iPhone

Google Searches

I have done 15336 google searches since January 2007. At least that’s how many searches I’ve performed while logged into to google, which is almost all the time. That roughly equates to 13 searches per day. Does that sound about right to you? I would have guessed it to be higher than that. I found these statistics that google has kept of me to be rather interesting.

Breaking it down by day, I have googled more on Monday than any other day, at just over 3000. There is a steady decline in my google searches until it hits bottom on Saturday, which nets only about 1100 google searches, which I am glad is the lowest. Saturday I should be out doing cool things that don’t involve google. Sunday it goes back up to about 1700.

Breaking it down by hour, I google most in the 8 and 9am and between noon and 1pm, each with 7.8% of my totalsearches. I guess those are the times shortly after I get to work and during lunch. 1am to 8am is really low – none of those hours include more than 1% of my searches. The rest of the day is relatively flat around 5% to 6% except the 6pm and 7pm hours, when it dips down to 3% per hour.

The sites I click to the most are: Wikipedia, Google Maps, and A-Z Lyrics. Hmm.

Accept/Submit

Every other Wednesday when I log in to view my pay stub, I get annoyed by the little button that you click when you enter your password. It says Accept/Submit. First of all, they make you type in your password by clicking on a virtual keyboard, but it's not just any keyboard. The keys are in a different place on the keyboard each time you open the page so you can't get in any kind of routine about typing in your password. Anyway, have any of you ever seen the words accept and submit used as synonyms.

Accept: to receive with approval or favor; to undertake the duty/resonsibility of; to answer affirmatively; to understand as having a specific meaning; to acknowledge; to regard as normal, suitable, or usual.

Submit: to give over or yield to the power of authority of another; to present for the approval, consideration or decision of others; to offer as proposition or contention.

I suppose I can kind of see how some definitions of accept might fit in with entering a password into a computer, mainly the definition "toacknowledge." But, really, aren't accept and submit kind of opposites? Accept is more of a receiving thing. Someone else does or says something and you pass judgment on whether it is true or valid - the acceptor is the one giving the approval. Submit is a giving thing. Someone else is the judge of whether something is valid or true. The submitter is the one giving someone else something to approve.

Step one in accomplishing anything is having a goal

We recently had a meeting regarding our individual career progression. The discussion started out trying to determine if we are getting adequate feedback on our performance and progress and whether our mentors and supervisors are helping us make progress.

Apparently we all have different ideas of what progress means. By and large, people associated progress with more money and promotions. I suppose that is the idea most people have when you talk about making progress career-wise, but the fact is, many if not most engineers will not be promoted beyond a journeyman engineer (where I currently am) because basically the only promotions available are to management positions.

So we had to take another step back and define what progress is. In the scope of the work we do in our current office, it is clearly becoming more knowledgeable of the system and getting the technical work done more efficiently. But in the broader scope of things, progress could mean many different things. For some, that is all the progress that they desire – being content with the current situation and just becoming more proficient. For others, progress might be gaining a management position or a project lead or becoming the technical lead on something. For others, progress might be getting a graduate degree, and for others progress might be finding a new engineering job, and still for others it may be finding a new career that is more interesting.

So we had to take another step back to define what our goals are because we can’t measure progress unless we have a goal in mind. At this point we realized that many of us don’t have clear goals and therefore cannot accurately measure progress.

So we had to take one more step back and see if we can help each other, along with our first level supervisor, determine our goals. Do you know what your goals are? Are you actively working toward them? Or are you mindlessly going through the motions without much idea for what you want out of your career? This all in terms of careers but the same thing can be said for personal/life goals. Hopefully there is some but not too much overlap between career and personal goals.

Gatlinburg

Last week was the annual bridge tournament in Gatlinburg, probably the most dense gathering of bridge players in the world. It's not a world championship or even a national championship - just a regional - but 4000 bridge players in that small tourist town is a lot. I never really understood why people like going there for the bridge tournament. It's hard to get to. If you drive, there are all those mountain roads you have to take, at least if you're coming from the south, and if you fly, there's no major airport within an hour and no major public transportation to get there. Gatlinburg is, however, one of the southerner's favorite places to go for a mountain vacation - to hide away in a quaint village lined with junk stores, to enjoy the smoky mountain national park, even ski or hike a little bit. It's nothing like a ski village in the Rockies or the Alps but I suppose for people living in the south, it's good.

But why does it attract twice as many bridge players as any other regional bridge tournament in the US. It's not like bridge players get out and enjoy the scenery much. As a whole, they are a very sedentary bunch. At about 40% the size of the Gatlinburg tournament are the next largest regional tournaments in Atlanta, Hilton Head, and Las Vegas. I can understand Vegas - it's a card player's and gambler's heaven, two categories bridge players fit right in with. Atlanta - well, they have a very strong bridge community and the tournament is one of the cheapest and easiest to get to even sans car.

The decision to go to back to school and possibly return to the days of room-sharing and eating ramen noodles or continue a job that may no longer be as exciting and thrilling as it once was is a dilemma lots of smart people face. How do we decide? Why can't there be some sort of guarantee that we'll be more satisfied with life if we change our lifestyle?

How can we tell if we really want a long term change or just a sabattical to allow us to explore some other interests for a few months? I think I'm not ready to completely give up my WR life but I am so  ready to try a radically different lifestyle for more than just a week or two vacation. i'd want it to be something along the lines of a  professional internship or contract job for 4 or 5 months in montreal or some other place but opportunities like that are hard to find, if possible at all. Then I could comeback here for awhile and then later maybe make a permanent change if I liked the temporary job. Eh. Or maybe a 1 year leave without pay while I get a graduate diploma in journalism from Concordia sounds fun... Or alternate semesters working here and studying for a master's in EE at concordia or mcgill. I wonder if that situation would be acceptable to my boss. Hmm.

Hurt Feelings Report

Have your feelings been hurt lately? Fill this out and submit it to your first level supervisor or best friend or colleague or even the person responsible for your hurt feelings, and maybe it'll make you feel better. Or maybe just fill it out and put it in your filing cabinet so you can laugh about it a few years from now. I don't know if this is an actual army form or not - I guess it's not but I wouldn't put it past the Army to have something like this. Anyway, I stumbled across this the other day and found it quite amusing. Here's an example of how to fill it out and a blank one in case you want to fill one out too!

Next New Adventure

So, for the past 2 or 3 months I've been really high on moving because I had sort of gotten stuck in a rut on nothingness. Actually, this had been going on for over a year but I kept finding things/people that kept me amused for awhile but they've been coming and going way too quickly, save for my regular bridge partners and somewhat regular visits to friends in Atlanta. By January, the upcoming departure of more of my ATL friends became known and I was looking at options for moving again, this time more serious because in June I hit the 3 year mark here, which means more freedom to leave and probably more job options available. The influx of new young bridge friends across the country, largely thanks to Sean and BBO, made the idea of moving even more attractive.

Things certainly haven't gone as I had hoped (but surely I'm better off now than at the start of January or in October or pretty much anytime before?) and several ideas that I thought were independent of each other seemed to merge and confuse me and irritate me and stress me out and lead to my being slightly crazy. I am still very interested moving in Montreal and slightly interested in Boston and am not seriously considering anywhere else but not sure enough that it's what I really want.

Anyway, my next adventure is being in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, an unusual musical with multiple endings depending on how the audience votes on who Drood's murderer is. I don't really understand it yet, but I really love the music in the play despite having to use sort of a British accent. So, that and online bridge and working on partnerships and teammates for the summer nationals will occupy me and keep my happy for the next 6 weeks, and then I'll re-evaluate the relocation possibilities with (hopefully) a much clearer head.

Are You Under the Impression that We're Gonna Have Sex Tonight?

On a Grey's Anatomy episode from a couple of weeks ago which just got around to watching, there's a nice dialogue between Dr. Bailey and Dr. Warrren on their third date. Bailey starts the date with sort of a lecture about how she's uncomfortable but excited and nervous about starting a relationship. The man, Dr. Warren, insists that they have a conversation rather than a series of lectures. So, Dr. Bailey starts the conversation with the blunt title question, which I think is great. She continues to be really nervous about everything as they exchange their ideas of what they want and expect and it turns out to be a great date. What a great example to set for people!

Preempting Life

In bridge, preempting is an attempt to prevent the opponents from bidding effectively – essentially, it is taking a chance that partner doesn’t have a good hand either and that by bidding higher right away, you’ll put yourself in a better position to score well. Life, however, isn’t a competition so you’re not trying to prevent anyone else from having anything but just trying to be prepared for the future changes that might or might not occur. Occasionally in bridge, it backfires and you go for -800 or so, occasionally you keep them out of game or slam or they get to the wrong strain, and sometimes it really doesn’t have much effect. In life, it can work the same way. Preempting life can sabotage the current state, make the future changes not so glorious, or it can help you move on to bigger and better things, or it can have no effect at all.

According to Merriam-Webster's dictionary, preempt has these definitions:

1) to acquire (as land) by preemption

2) to seize upon the exclusion of others

3) to replace with something considered to be of greater value or priority

4) to gain a commanding or preeminent place in

5) to prevent from happening or taking place

6) to make a preemptive bid in bridge

So, what does it mean to preempt life? I define it as planning ahead to have activities to fill certain voids in life in the near future that inevitably will be there when some current activity ends. This can include preparing for a new job before you quit the old one, making new friends in anticipation of a falling out with a current friend or a current friend’s move, planning a weekend visit somewhere to preclude being home and alone and bored, trying to get involved in another social activity after it gets to be too cold to play tennis, or trying to develop a new partnership with the anticipation that a current partnership is going to end.

We all do this to some extent, but I maybe take it to the extreme. To a point it is good to have new activities to take the place of old activities. They say the best way to get over something is to stay busy with other things. However, the best way to get over a girl is NOT to find another girl. That’s not fair to her and you’re unlikely to be genuine with her until well after the heartache is gone, which for me has been known to take 3 or 4 months but usually is less. So, while I do try to keep a steady flow of friends and bridge partners and different social and intellectual activities, that doesn’t apply to potential mates.

Recently, my good friend Ramesh moved from Atlanta to Hong Kong about 3 weeks ago. He is someone I could always count on to go out to a bar or to team trivia or to play a fun canapé-style of bridge. In anticipation of his departure, I had been and still am kind of seeking out new bridge partners, especially ones that are interested in canapé and who could also become a good drinking buddy, even if only online most of the time. Locally, that’s not happening as I’m “stuck” with Emory and Joel and Bob, who are actually quite clearly my three best partnerships – just not quite in my age bracket.

Also recently, I’ve been trying to preempt an anticipated dislike of living in Warner Robins by seeking out other things to get involved with (more online bridge and online socializing, writing, singing, acting, working more, traveling more) and also seeking out potential places to move. Having almost decided on Montréal as my next place to live, I started trying to preempt my potential loneliness there by trying to go ahead and make friends there.

In bridge, they say you shouldn’t preempt with a good hand because it inhibits your side from bidding effectively, something that is more important when you have the good cards. Much the same with life – you shouldn’t preempt when it is going well. Or should you? Should you always have a “backup plan ready to be put into action” or does that jeopardize the current state of goodness?

Schism

"There was a time that the pieces fit, but I watched them fall away.
Mildewed and smoldering, strangled by our coveting,
I've done the math enough to know the dangers of our second guessing,
Doomed to crumble unless we grow, and strengthen our communication."

If there’s one quality in a person I have the most difficulty accepting and dealing with, it is phoniness.
It’s the person who puts on a front for everyone, always appearing to like everyone and be friendly with everyone while secretly wishing he were somewhere else.
It’s the person that agrees to something but then when it comes down to actually doing it, has some lame excuse.
It’s the person who acts all interested in talking with you at a party, you exchange contact info and never hear from the person again.
It’s the person who never really was interested in hanging out with you, but since you were interested, he went along with it for awhile until one day he just quits associating with you.
It’s the person who is super nice to you at the office lunches but goes home and complains about what a bore or a jerk you are.
It’s the person you ask to go out to lunch with who says he love to but then gives a lame excuse for why he can’t today.

Do you know people like this? We probably are all like some of these people some of the time. These are just a few generic examples of how communication in our society sometimes suffers, and most of the time it's not because we are trying to be rude but just have difficulty finding the balance between clarity and frankness.

We are all taught at a young age to be nice to everyone and not talk bad about anyone, and in general those are both good things to follow. However, it can and frequently does get overdone. For people working in customer service, yes, you have to be nice and friendly to people you don’t care for but in such a setting, usually the other person knows it and isn’t taking it as any personal niceness. In a professional environment, we are supposed to be cordial but not particularly friendly with anyone. There are clear ways that we are supposed to behave in these instances. It’s in the social world where it gets muddy, where you can choose who you associate with and be nice to. And in such a setting, being friendly to someone should be genuine. Being particularly formal with someone should indicate ambivalence. And of course, we can avoid people to express displeasure.

So, what is there to gain from pretending to be nice to someone you have no interest in being friends with? You’re not getting satisfaction and all it would do for the other person is potentially cause them to be disappointed when you inevitably quit pretending to be nice. Occasionally, the pretending to be nice does turn into genuinely being nice, but that is rare.

And what’s the point of agreeing to do something, even in a very casual conversation, without having any actual intentions of following through with it? If you know the other person is also not taking it seriously, it’s fine. With a female friend here, we regularly talk about hooking up or her leaving her boyfriend for me, but we both know it’s not going to happen so it’s all fun and games. If the other person takes your agreeability seriously and then winds up expecting something later, all you’ve done is postpone and magnify the disappointment.

And how about talking behind someone’s back? That bugs me more than almost anything else. Don’t say something about someone behind their back that you haven’t told to their face. Yes, it’s definitely easier to tell a 3rd party but you do have an obligation to tell the person you’re irritated with before anyone else. By the same token, once you've been friends with someone and you decide you don't want to anymore, you are obligated to give them an explanation and fix any issues that may be fixable.

Ephesians 4:26

"Each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully for we are all members of one body. In your anger, do not sin: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry..."

Whether you are a Christian or not, this is good advice for you. There are few worse feelings in the world than ending the day in a fight with someone. There are very few if any fights or arguments or things that cause us to be angry that should not be resolved by the end of the day. It's hard to rest when there's a lingering question of whether he/she is even upset with me and if so will he/she forgive me. This goes not only for family but friends and colleagues as well.

Many a time I have irritated a friend during the day and tried to make amends shortly thereafter only to find that the other person wants to let this little problem linger on and on. When the opposite occurs, I an typically very quick to forgive and forget as long as I see the other person wasn't deliberately trying to hurt me.

Basically, just keep communications open and honest with everyone with whom you have a personal relationship, and resolve all conflict before going to sleep and we will all be happier, well-rested people.

Inverse Relationship Between Happiness and How Much I Post

I have decided that the number of times someone posts a status update to facebook or updates his/her blog is inversely proportional to his/her contentment with life.  I have gone back and looked at my data since November and made a chart of this. I probably should categorize the posts as some of them actually probably have a positive correlation to happiness, but in general, more posts means less happiness. I apparently rated 3 weeks as a 10 in happiness - 2 during the production of Traditions and one in January when I was uber-excited about my new friend Dana. And the 2 weeks rated a 2 were the first week of January which is always gloomy and during the Reno tournament.

My thinking is that writing is a relatively harmless way to release anger and resentment. So, when one writes more, it is likely because he has some anger he wants to let out. When one is happy, he is probably busy and probably gets enough time sharing the joys with actual friends, so there's less of a desire to broadcast it to the world (or at least the part of the world that sees one's posts). Of course, if this starts getting to be a money-making thing, I don't think this theory would apply.

Pro-Con List for My Career Options

What do I want? A big part of me wants a nice simple life in a small city not unlike Warner Robins. However, a perquisite for that is having a wife or fiancée. I think ultimately that is what I want. But in order to get to that, I may need to move to a place where there is more of a chance of finding a person to live that simple life with. I mean, practically all my friends here are married. And in the mean time, I want a very different kind of life: either a job that requires me to be sociable so that after work I will be content at home most of the time, or a more active social life after work, a neighborhood bar downstairs with a bartender I can go chill with and talk to and meet more people any time, a city I can live in without have a burning desire to travel every couple of weeks.

Boston and Montréal are the cities in North America with the highest concentration of post-secondary students, with 4.37 and 4.38 students per 100 residents. And that was before I was even considering going back to school. Just living in such an environment would be good for me instead of Warner Robins where practically everyone I know is married and the single people don’t tend to stay here very long, probably for the same reasons I am wanting to leave.

Many more opportunities to travel are coming up as well. How many of these trips I actually take should depend on what I’m going to do in the future as far as work and school is concerned. If I do stay here or get one of the 20 jobs I have now applied for, I can afford almost any trip I want and have the vacation time to allow for it this year. But if I wind up in grad school, I probably should try to save more money, because I have no idea how much I will be able to get in scholarships.

I’ve made a weighted list to compare things. There are 12 criteria, scaled according to importance, including the bridge scene, the quantity/quality of young people there, money, the weather, the potential interest I will have in the work, the friends I currently have in the various places, and what my friends/family think. Montréal scores the lowest in Friends I currently have there and Weather but wins in a landslide among places the people who know me best think I would like to live, and the vast majority of people think I should get a Master’s degree somewhere. The current results (out of 220 possible points):

165 Grad school at Concordia or McGill
152 Engineering/CS job in Montréal
136 EE job at Hanscom AFB in Boston
131 Stay at Robins AFB and grad school at Mercer
128 Stay at Robins
126 Job in Washington DC
123 Job in NYC

Déjà Vu

Do you ever feel like you're doing something you've already done, or that you're doing something you've done before with slightly different parameters, or that you're doing something you've already done with a different audience, or that you're doing something that you've already done?

As an engineer doing mostly testing of radar systems, I have found myself doing that a lot lately. Maybe it's rerunning a test after a slight code change or rerunning a test with one parameter different, or rerunning a test just to see if the system will do the same over and over, or rerunning a test on a different computer. After awhile you start to forget what you've tried and haven't tried or what techniques worked and what didn't work.

But it's not just in engineering where this kind of thing occurs. It's apparently in all facets of life.

In the world of bridge, you open that ragged 10 point hand and go down in 3NT time and time again. Eventually, maybe you'll realize that you shouldn't open hands like that. Or maybe, you open that 10 point hand against an expert pair who knows how to defend so you get a bad board. A few days or weeks later, you get a similar hand against a very weak pair and get to your 22 point 3NT and it rolls because they slip a trick or two. Or maybe next time you open that 10 point hand, it helps keep the opponents out of game.

In the world of the pick-up artist, the pick-up artist may try to same techniques or moves or line or whatever you want to call them on numerous women and get a vastly different result each time. Just because it doesn't work one time with one girl at one place doesn't mean it won't work with a different girl at the same place or even the same girl in a different time and/or place. I have relatively no experience in this area - I'm just going by what my friends tell me and what I may have read in The Game by Neil Strauss.

In the world of social life, One day a friend may not want to go out. Maybe next time, a different day, a different mood, he may just want to read a book alone. Next time, maybe a different place, he still may say he just wants to wallow in front of the tv. Next time, maybe a different group of people and a different place, he may have other plans. How many times should one put up with this "i'd like to but i have something else to do today" before deciding that the other person just will never not have something else to do?

In engineering, it may take hundreds or thousands of little tweaks to get something to do what you want but never quite get to the point of saying for sure that a desired outcome will not be achieved. For people and brdige hands, does that principle apply as well? For people, I am inclined to think that at some point the probability approaches 1 that a desired outcome will not be achieved. I have no idea how many trials it takes to reach that. Is it 3 or 5 or 10 or 50? And I am inclined to think that in bridge, except in the most obvious situations, the probability of the desired outcome will never approach 0 or 1.

 

Are you sure that's such a good idea? No, but the thought of never seeing you again sounds like a much much worse idea.

Thinking about a 6 hour journey to see a friend of the opposite sex?

While I admittedly think like a girl when it comes to most relationship issues, there are a few things I know about how guys think, and in the situation I’m writing about today, I’m a typical guy. Sort of. Most guys would probably substitute “sleep with” in place of “date” in the next sentence but for me, date is more accurate. A guy does not spend a long weekend to visit a girl who lives several hours away with the sole intent of visiting her unless: 1) she is family, 2) they have a long history of being BFFs, or 3) he wants to date her. I think the same think would apply to girls going to visit guys as well, but I think girls might actually be more open to such a visit with a friend, especially if the guy is already attached. And girls, be clear with the guys about what you want/don’t want before a guy schedules a trip specifically to see you or vice versa. If you go way out of your way to visit a guy, he is likely to think you want to be more than just friends.


Of course, if seeing said female on a trip just happens to coincide with some other reason the guy is traveling (like to play bridge or work or visit family in the neighborhood), then hanging out and even staying at each other’s place can definitely be a totally platonic thing. I don’t really feel like expanding more on this today, but I wanted to get this basic idea out there.