I think I was 12 or 13 before I ever heard my father complain to someone other than us or about anything other than how we children didn't do our chores or obey our mother well enough the first time. Which is not to say that he complained about those things often, I just never heard him complain at all except in those instances. I also can't remember him ever getting in an argument with anyone outside of our family.
So it is not that I never gained experience being combative or argumentative if the need arose, indeed, within the family we could stage a row that would make the British Parliament seem as serene as sleeping monks. But I never observed my parents fight or argue with people outside the family, so my mind seemed to understand this as a thing that simply didn't occur.
Thus, when I started to meet argumentative people in my later years of high school and early years in college, I wasn't really sure how to deal with them. My first thoughts were along the lines that I should take them aside and explain to them that I was not a member of their family so they were just embarrassing themselves by trying to start an argument with me. The absurdity of these people, being rude to somebody besides your siblings who are required by all known laws to love you. What made them think they would ever get away with it?
Of course I had seen people on TV and in movies arguing with others not of their kin, but I had also seen aliens and magic and elves in those mediums, and the former seemed just as contrived as the latter. And even today when I am approached at work either in person or through email or phone, by someone with an impatient or combative attitude, my first response is one of marked disbelief and confusion. I maintain this noticeably confused and unhelpful state and invariably they realize they need to readjust their tact or gain nothing from the interchange.
This was a long walk around the park to get to my main point, that I have a great deal of trouble dealing with contractors who have come to work on my home and property. I have had only one experience with a contractor who did everything as he said he would and there were no mistakes on his part or dissatisfaction on mine. The rest have all made some mistake or another and when confronted about it they have adopted my own strategy against me of acting confused and martyred, until I give it all up. So, with this particular subset of the population I have taken a new approach: shock and awe. With these creatures I now come down on them with the fury of gods' own thunder and this seems to be the best way to drive results.
I came across this method on accident when I was at work one day and received a call from a contractor who began to speak about a problem he had encountered while working on a job he and I had not previously discussed, but he had started anyway with the thinking that we had, and I had approved. The price of this was $5K, and I my usually calm voice began to betray my frustration, when he continued to calmly claim that this is something I had approved and he already had his crew doing the job and could not stop I reached my breaking point and unleashed upon him the most abrasive string of words I had every audibly formed in my entire life.
All was quiet on both ends of the line for several moments until he said sheepishly, "I'll call my manager." I beat him to it, and this time opened with my rage and the matter was quickly settled on the terms I outlined.
I am not at all proud of this methodology (though I now understand why so many come to me using this from the outset) and have never resorted to that most nasty kind of phrasing I used on that first day, but for some reason in these relationships it seems to be the way to get things done.
I understand if you don't agree with me on my thoughts and actions as described above, and I'm happy to discuss the subject with you, but I don't understand why you are taking that tone with me on the outset.
Friday, October 26, 2012
Monday, October 22, 2012
What was to be law a-biting
Over the last two decades there has been a dramatic decrease in violent crime in the United States. It has fallen by around 38% since 1992. Our crime rates have increased during every recession in our history for which we have those statistics, until this recent one, when they continued to fall. A variety of theories have been posited.
One notes that cars have become more difficult to steal, citing that instances of grand theft auto have decreased dramatically over the years and historically car theft has been the first major crime of career criminals. With cars being harder to steal fewer individuals get wrapped up into lives of crime.
A study from a few years ago noted that rates of play and time spent per week with video games had risen dramatically during the recession among the demographic that historically accounted for the rise in crime. They hypothesized that the video games kept the would-be-hooligans in doors and away from other people's bodies and property.
Many politicians and police officials cite the adoption of Compstat meetings, where "Every seven weeks bureau commanders are grilled by a senior panel, often including the police chief himself, on the whys and wherefores of crime in their jurisdictions. They are expected to have an on-the-spot grasp of the statistics: if there has been a spike in burglaries from vehicles, the captain’s interrogators will want to know what is being done about it. There is no hiding from the numbers: data-laden documents are distributed before the meeting, and overhead map projections pinpoint the sites of individual incidents in pitiless detail."
I posit my own theory: we have all seen the coverage on the rise in obesity cited as a growing epidemic and a grievous challenge to our current state and costs of health care. But what if our collective growing guts are actually making us safer?
If our potential criminals are overweight how far do we really think they are going to be able to run once they've committed their crimes? How long can you lay low in that abandoned factory if you just have to get to Taco Bell every night? How are you going to follow that wealthy looking couple into the alley if you can't even fit in the alley?
I'm just saying, when I see a group of teenagers whose guts are sagging rather than their jeans, I feel safer. When I'm walking down the street at night and I hear fat footsteps behind me, I feel the warm sense of security that comes with knowing that whether he's the attacker or the attacker is behind him, when the time comes, I'm the one who is getting away.
One notes that cars have become more difficult to steal, citing that instances of grand theft auto have decreased dramatically over the years and historically car theft has been the first major crime of career criminals. With cars being harder to steal fewer individuals get wrapped up into lives of crime.
A study from a few years ago noted that rates of play and time spent per week with video games had risen dramatically during the recession among the demographic that historically accounted for the rise in crime. They hypothesized that the video games kept the would-be-hooligans in doors and away from other people's bodies and property.
Many politicians and police officials cite the adoption of Compstat meetings, where "Every seven weeks bureau commanders are grilled by a senior panel, often including the police chief himself, on the whys and wherefores of crime in their jurisdictions. They are expected to have an on-the-spot grasp of the statistics: if there has been a spike in burglaries from vehicles, the captain’s interrogators will want to know what is being done about it. There is no hiding from the numbers: data-laden documents are distributed before the meeting, and overhead map projections pinpoint the sites of individual incidents in pitiless detail."
I posit my own theory: we have all seen the coverage on the rise in obesity cited as a growing epidemic and a grievous challenge to our current state and costs of health care. But what if our collective growing guts are actually making us safer?
If our potential criminals are overweight how far do we really think they are going to be able to run once they've committed their crimes? How long can you lay low in that abandoned factory if you just have to get to Taco Bell every night? How are you going to follow that wealthy looking couple into the alley if you can't even fit in the alley?
I'm just saying, when I see a group of teenagers whose guts are sagging rather than their jeans, I feel safer. When I'm walking down the street at night and I hear fat footsteps behind me, I feel the warm sense of security that comes with knowing that whether he's the attacker or the attacker is behind him, when the time comes, I'm the one who is getting away.
Friday, October 19, 2012
What was to be absolute
I want to say something inside of us rebels against an absolute statement, but I don't speak for us. Just for me. So I will say, something inside of me rebels against absolute statements.
"There can be no freedom without education."
"There can be no triumph without loss"
"There can be no light without darkness"
"There can be no peace without war"
"There can be no peace without justice"
"There can be no courage without fear"
"There can be no progress without struggle"
"There can be no etc. without etc..."
These statements are usually followed by the speaker or writer proceeding to make some point, but I can rarely pay attention to what that point is because I have been distracted by my mind which is freaking out because it is simultaneously trying to decide if we are being manipulated and positing scenarios where the statement may not hold up.
They sound good, they make sense, but I am uncomfortable with absolute statements. The universe seems so big to me, and time so infinite. Humans and other life so varied and our experiences so distinct, it just seems impossible for you to have found the two things with a relationship that never vary across all possible parameters. And you see that in most of those examples I gave, when you say those things you are really just working on defining the first word based on the second.
So I like qualifying statements before my bold assertions. They make me feel more comfortable. They narrow the field in which I have to test the assertion from all space and all time to some more manageable scope.
I panic when asked, "What is your favorite color?" How can you possibly answer that question without more information? My favorite color of shirts is different than my favorite color of jeans. even more narrowly, my favorite color of cotton button-up shirts is different than my favorite color of polo shirts. And there are also conditional dependencies: my favorite color of cotton button-up shirts is different depending on whether I am wearing black slacks or blue jeans.
'How many brothers and sisters do you have?'
'Well, you will have to be a lot more specific about what you mean by brothers and sisters as there are somewhere over 6 billion people on this earth and I subscribe to the notion that we can see ourselves as a single family, and I also see that family as including our progenitors as well as future generations. Nor do I limit the possibility that the basis of our shared intelligence is limited to this pinpoint of the universe or even to this single universe and that I may share an organizer of my current physical makeup with those intelligences in their current form. So in the broadest sense, given my current grasp of calculations, I would have to say that I have an infinite number of brothers and sisters.
...
I also have a dog"
She hasn't returned my last text.
"There can be no freedom without education."
"There can be no triumph without loss"
"There can be no light without darkness"
"There can be no peace without war"
"There can be no peace without justice"
"There can be no courage without fear"
"There can be no progress without struggle"
"There can be no etc. without etc..."
These statements are usually followed by the speaker or writer proceeding to make some point, but I can rarely pay attention to what that point is because I have been distracted by my mind which is freaking out because it is simultaneously trying to decide if we are being manipulated and positing scenarios where the statement may not hold up.
They sound good, they make sense, but I am uncomfortable with absolute statements. The universe seems so big to me, and time so infinite. Humans and other life so varied and our experiences so distinct, it just seems impossible for you to have found the two things with a relationship that never vary across all possible parameters. And you see that in most of those examples I gave, when you say those things you are really just working on defining the first word based on the second.
So I like qualifying statements before my bold assertions. They make me feel more comfortable. They narrow the field in which I have to test the assertion from all space and all time to some more manageable scope.
I panic when asked, "What is your favorite color?" How can you possibly answer that question without more information? My favorite color of shirts is different than my favorite color of jeans. even more narrowly, my favorite color of cotton button-up shirts is different than my favorite color of polo shirts. And there are also conditional dependencies: my favorite color of cotton button-up shirts is different depending on whether I am wearing black slacks or blue jeans.
'How many brothers and sisters do you have?'
'Well, you will have to be a lot more specific about what you mean by brothers and sisters as there are somewhere over 6 billion people on this earth and I subscribe to the notion that we can see ourselves as a single family, and I also see that family as including our progenitors as well as future generations. Nor do I limit the possibility that the basis of our shared intelligence is limited to this pinpoint of the universe or even to this single universe and that I may share an organizer of my current physical makeup with those intelligences in their current form. So in the broadest sense, given my current grasp of calculations, I would have to say that I have an infinite number of brothers and sisters.
...
I also have a dog"
She hasn't returned my last text.
Sunday, October 14, 2012
What was to be inevitable
Why the European Union for the Nobel Peace Prize? A puzzle in two pieces:
Piece the first
Until a few years ago, when the Indiana Jones series was a trilogy, my least favorite of the three installments was The Temple of Doom. My least favorite scene was when the priest reached into a mans chest and pulled out the man's heart. The chest closes up and the unattached heart continues to beat and the man continues to live; for a few more moments anyway, before he disappears into a fiery chasm. At first I did not enjoy it because it terrified me, but to deflect that terror I eventually convinced myself that I was merely frustrated by how unrealistic it all was.
It wasn't until my college after spending a great deal of time in the company of a young lady named *****, that I learned that in fact a man's beating heart could be torn from his chest and set on fire in front of him while he watched. What's more, throwing that man into a fiery chasm would be a mercy compared to making him stumble through his life and Econ finals while simultaneously dead inside but painfully aware of his burning heart lost out somewhere in the nether (though actually being dead inside makes you a superior economist).
So I began to better understand this concept of an organism or organization being able to exist and operate as usual, while being effectively gutted of its inner impetus or fuel so doomed to eventually collapse and die though the death stroke was delivered long before the fall. And while I don't believe I understand enough to identify whether we have reached 'peak oil', 'national debt point of impossible payback' or the 'global warming point of no return' I entertain the possibility that in any of these cases we may have already incurred dire and unavoidable consequences to be visited on us in the future.
Piece the Second
Though nominated several times during his lifetime, Gandhi never won a Nobel Peace Prize. If the prize could be awarded posthumously, he almost certainly would have been awarded one by now, but, like most beauty pageants, you cannot be nominated after your death.
All Together Now
I suspect that the five Vikings who make up the Norwegian Nobel Committee actually see the current EU as a scuttled boat that is only above the water for a matter of time, but will eventually be filled with and sunk by the water that once buoyed it up. So in standard Viking fashion they are endeavoring to fill it with grave goods (items and treasures to ease and join the departed in the afterlife). If they wait too much longer there will be no union to award, so it had to be this year or never. Long story short: short the Euro, man the longboats.
Piece the first
Until a few years ago, when the Indiana Jones series was a trilogy, my least favorite of the three installments was The Temple of Doom. My least favorite scene was when the priest reached into a mans chest and pulled out the man's heart. The chest closes up and the unattached heart continues to beat and the man continues to live; for a few more moments anyway, before he disappears into a fiery chasm. At first I did not enjoy it because it terrified me, but to deflect that terror I eventually convinced myself that I was merely frustrated by how unrealistic it all was.
It wasn't until my college after spending a great deal of time in the company of a young lady named *****, that I learned that in fact a man's beating heart could be torn from his chest and set on fire in front of him while he watched. What's more, throwing that man into a fiery chasm would be a mercy compared to making him stumble through his life and Econ finals while simultaneously dead inside but painfully aware of his burning heart lost out somewhere in the nether (though actually being dead inside makes you a superior economist).
So I began to better understand this concept of an organism or organization being able to exist and operate as usual, while being effectively gutted of its inner impetus or fuel so doomed to eventually collapse and die though the death stroke was delivered long before the fall. And while I don't believe I understand enough to identify whether we have reached 'peak oil', 'national debt point of impossible payback' or the 'global warming point of no return' I entertain the possibility that in any of these cases we may have already incurred dire and unavoidable consequences to be visited on us in the future.
Piece the Second
Though nominated several times during his lifetime, Gandhi never won a Nobel Peace Prize. If the prize could be awarded posthumously, he almost certainly would have been awarded one by now, but, like most beauty pageants, you cannot be nominated after your death.
All Together Now
I suspect that the five Vikings who make up the Norwegian Nobel Committee actually see the current EU as a scuttled boat that is only above the water for a matter of time, but will eventually be filled with and sunk by the water that once buoyed it up. So in standard Viking fashion they are endeavoring to fill it with grave goods (items and treasures to ease and join the departed in the afterlife). If they wait too much longer there will be no union to award, so it had to be this year or never. Long story short: short the Euro, man the longboats.
Friday, October 12, 2012
What was to be observed?
After the first Obama-Romney (in alphabetical order so as not to indicate this writer's preference) debate last week I commented that "I enjoyed this debate format, but as usual, i think it suffers from too short a time frame and too structured. As this had a PBS theme, I think I would have liked to see them in Bert and Ernie's beds, just talking about domestic policy between themselves until they fall asleep."
The principle purpose of this comment was to generate 'likes' on facebook so that I could feel clever and validated by people I don't talk to anymore. But I also have this voyeuristic desire to see how people speak and behave when they feel they are neither being observed nor evaluated. I love peering around a corner to see my niece playing with her dolls, providing both viewpoints of a conversation between the cuddly squid and the dump truck as each party makes their argument for a place on top of the dog.
I know when I walk in the room I will be given a big smile and both the cuddly squid and the dump truck will begin to enthusiastically strike the dog because my niece enjoys the reaction of the dog yelping and me scrambling over to her to impart a rapid lesson on humane animal treatment. However, if I stay in my furtive vantage point I get to learn that she has a growing grasp of the term 'important' and that she feels when two individuals debate they must begin each sentence with the template, "No (name here) that's not what I said..."
So I know that tonight when I watched the vice-presidential debate I was watching two men striking the dog to elicit a reaction from me. And what I really want to see is how these guys talk about solving the nations problems when the nation is not around.
Honestly, I think that if you were to leave the two of them at the table long enough you would hit a sweet spot of honesty sometime before the delirium that would come from exhaustion (though that would be helpful to observe in the presidential debate given the hours they must keep at times).
The principle purpose of this comment was to generate 'likes' on facebook so that I could feel clever and validated by people I don't talk to anymore. But I also have this voyeuristic desire to see how people speak and behave when they feel they are neither being observed nor evaluated. I love peering around a corner to see my niece playing with her dolls, providing both viewpoints of a conversation between the cuddly squid and the dump truck as each party makes their argument for a place on top of the dog.
I know when I walk in the room I will be given a big smile and both the cuddly squid and the dump truck will begin to enthusiastically strike the dog because my niece enjoys the reaction of the dog yelping and me scrambling over to her to impart a rapid lesson on humane animal treatment. However, if I stay in my furtive vantage point I get to learn that she has a growing grasp of the term 'important' and that she feels when two individuals debate they must begin each sentence with the template, "No (name here) that's not what I said..."
So I know that tonight when I watched the vice-presidential debate I was watching two men striking the dog to elicit a reaction from me. And what I really want to see is how these guys talk about solving the nations problems when the nation is not around.
Honestly, I think that if you were to leave the two of them at the table long enough you would hit a sweet spot of honesty sometime before the delirium that would come from exhaustion (though that would be helpful to observe in the presidential debate given the hours they must keep at times).
What you may expect to read here
Throughout my life, I have seldom been the most vocal individual in a group as I have always felt that you should have something worth saying before you said it. You should have something enlightening, entertaining, or enthralling to merit the time and attention you are asking to be paid to you when you make a comment. So my reputation is frequently one of being quiet and shy but smart and funny whereas I think of my self as simply courteous.
That said, over the years the concept has sunk in that people do not require that the conversation or media they consume have any particular merit other than it comes from a source they have previously categorized as likable. I have observed a young lady listening to the most insipid drivel that has ever oozed from a conscious being moved as if she was watching McKellen's Lear carry Cordelia. I have seen serious men nod in grave agreement as a nubile flirt shared thoughts on politics that would have made Stalin and Hoover bond over the shared trauma of being exposed to such ignorant idealism.
Evidence that I am not that smart, merely courteous, is that it took me years to understand why I did not forge the same relationships as quickly as others did. I have been incredilby lucky to have very strong friendships with a few exceptional people, but unfortunatley the combination of my bafflement with the world and my small cadre of confidants led to some elitism hardly commensurate with my accomplishments in life. However, this elitsm developed later in life with the primary defense mechanism of my youth being humor, specifically a self-effacing brand of humor which I hope tempers the more outragious aspects of my arrogance.
So, that background provided and those confessions made, what I expect to see in the future posts of this blog are some of the topics and themes of the day refracted through my own lenses of humor, arrogrance, economics, and poetry which I hope makes for some entertaining and informative though likely strained and at times agonizing reading.
That said, over the years the concept has sunk in that people do not require that the conversation or media they consume have any particular merit other than it comes from a source they have previously categorized as likable. I have observed a young lady listening to the most insipid drivel that has ever oozed from a conscious being moved as if she was watching McKellen's Lear carry Cordelia. I have seen serious men nod in grave agreement as a nubile flirt shared thoughts on politics that would have made Stalin and Hoover bond over the shared trauma of being exposed to such ignorant idealism.
Evidence that I am not that smart, merely courteous, is that it took me years to understand why I did not forge the same relationships as quickly as others did. I have been incredilby lucky to have very strong friendships with a few exceptional people, but unfortunatley the combination of my bafflement with the world and my small cadre of confidants led to some elitism hardly commensurate with my accomplishments in life. However, this elitsm developed later in life with the primary defense mechanism of my youth being humor, specifically a self-effacing brand of humor which I hope tempers the more outragious aspects of my arrogance.
So, that background provided and those confessions made, what I expect to see in the future posts of this blog are some of the topics and themes of the day refracted through my own lenses of humor, arrogrance, economics, and poetry which I hope makes for some entertaining and informative though likely strained and at times agonizing reading.
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