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.