Shift! Trailer

Get Off The Fence.

There is no place for emotions in a civilized society.  Even keeled, good tempered and the ability to outwardly project minimal fluctuations in emotions is a trait that at least makes it look like you have it together.  Civilized?  Maybe, maybe not.

Have you ever just seen someone totally lose control of their emotional disposition?  Wether it is anger, or depression, or sobbing, or whatever, the lack of emotional grip makes the person look out of control.  Mostly because they are.  The line between conviction in something and emotional control is blurred, but it's there.  Can one be passionate about something and have complete control over their emotional state?  I think so.  This week, I've decided to write about the dynamic relationship among emotions, how they influence public opinion, and what it means to be civilized.

Vanilla.  People have used this expression to describe a state of being of just sort of going with the flow. There is no conviction on either side of the fence.  There is no strong opinion about anything, really, at all.  The terminology is a metaphor.  Chocolate being an extreme on one side, and strawberry being the opposite extreme.  Those that choose vanilla, really don't lean one way or the other.  Vanilla is that center option, it is the "I can't get off the fence and choose a stronger option," option.  What might people think of me if I go strongly in the chocolate direction?  It will certainly alienate the strawberry people. And the converse is also true.  If I go in the strawberry direction, it will most certainly offend the chocolate people.  So this person is vanilla, ever so careful not to offend, ever so careful to try to identify with all groups, everywhere.  

So, then, I wonder, if being vanilla means not having your own opinions, or if it simply means you choose not to express those opinions since much of society can't seem to get a grip on their emotional state.  If I expressed a strong opinion one way, the unstable nature of society's emotional state could have consequences I simply don't want to deal with.  In fact, it could incite consequences that I feel that I'm above dealing with.  This whole freedom of speech stuff, while protection of it legally seems great, peer pressure is another matter all together.  The question then becomes how fast my government can save me from an angry mob of the general public?  Not fast enough.  Vanilla it is!  

Tolerance of opinion differences is a civilized idea, and can only occur with education.  That may be wrong.  Maybe it can only occur with intelligence.  And since intelligence can not be taught, we are evolutionary steps away from tolerance.  No amount of teaching can make a person tolerant of opinion differences.  It can only happen with a logical mind.  Emotions cripple the ability of the average person to achieve this.  And we are all emotional beings.  But we are also on the precipice.  Some people are intelligent enough to handle chocolate or strawberry.  Some people can look at things from different angles, get their pride out of the way and say, "When you explain it like that, I can see your position."  Some people can do it, but most cannot get outside of themselves to have this ability.

Our emotional depth is what makes us humans.  A robot can see things logically, but conviction, anger, sadness and art, all come from the heart and not from the brain.  When we lose our ability to stay vanilla despite how we feel, when we don't care about public reactions because there won't BE a public reaction, when logic rules and emotion doesn't exist, will there be anything worthy of conviction?  Without opponents to arguments, there is no argument.  Stay vanilla, but be against something.  Or stand for a strongly held belief.  Fight the fight if it is something you believe in, but listen to alternative opinions.  Be emotional, but be rational.  Be loud, then be quiet.  Be heard, but listen.  We enter debates too often with a closed mind, a mind that will not be swayed.  

We are changing, though.  A world without controversy--world peace--has always been an abstract idea.  And a highly-touted goal of Miss America contestants and politicians for lifetimes.  Evolution is the answer, and it is coming.  Make no mistake, we are emotional beings and we need that.  But we also need that one switch, that switch that we can turn on to allow us to consider alternative opinions.  We can never know all angles, and we need to realize that it might be possible that someone can explain an angle we haven't thought of.  So be chocolate, be strawberry, and be vanilla.  But don't select your position based on your emotional state.  It's possible to be neopolitan...

Check out my satirical fiction:

"Delightfully offensive!"  Slighted by humanity, God must put down the bottle long enough to save the world...

Buy "Shift!" on amazon

Prioritize Your Reliability

 Reliability is an important attribute to have, from every vantage point.  Of course employers want a reliable employee, but also from a personal standpoint, friends want reliable friends.  That's why, in this week's blog, I'm going to unravel the root reasons that people want other people to have that quality.

1.  Trust.  If you never do what you say you're going to do, you lose people's trust.  When no one trusts you, they know they can't count on you.  I almost called this point 'predictability.'  But if you never do what you say you'll do, well, then you do become predictable insofar as people will be able to predict what you're not going to do.  But ultimately, it boils down to how much trust you can garner from people.  People will only trust you when you have a proven track record of doing what you say you'll do.  In many cases, we humans often allow ourselves to trust people before they have given us a reason to trust them.  This is most likely due to the misplaced belief that other people have the same moral code that we ourselves hold.  Call me an optimist, but I honestly do still believe that people want to do the right thing in most situations, but ultimately it will come down to their ability to prioritize in a way that matches your priorities.  Let's be realistic here, though, everyone' priorities are skewed to lean toward what's important to them, individually.  When they make your priorities their priorities, they will build your trust.

2.  Good intentions.  "I planned on coming to work when I was scheduled, but I had a flat tire."  Unfortunately, the world doesn't function on good intentions.  Not when it comes to reliability.  Obviously, the example is a situation that couldn't be predicted.  But consider this:  you leave in enough time for work that any unexpected detour would still get you there on time.  Often, as a manager of staff, I have had people call out because their car wouldn't start, or their ride didn't show up, or some other excuse that rode soley on the back of a lack of transportation.  A reliable person would find a way.  Call a taxi.  Take the bus.  Ride a bike.  Their priority was not a match with mine.  My priority was to have employees that can help my customers.  Their priorities were not in line with mine.  They didn't find a way to make it work.  Unreliable.

3.  Do what you say you're going to do.  If you don't plan on doing it, don't promise it.  Politicians could take a lesson in this.  How frustrating is it when someone promises they'll do something and then they don't do it?  Pretty annoying.  Often, they fully plan on doing whatever it was they said they'd do.  Again--good intentions.  But their priority level of the task is not in line with yours and they forget, or something comes up, and point one is blown.  Trust is out the window.

4.  Be the person you would want someone else to be.  Blah blah blah....treat others as you would want to be treated...yada yada yada....gimme a break!  How much more cliche can it be, really?  It's true though.  Wouldn't you want someone else's priorities to match your own?  Would you want the things that are important to you to be important to everyone else?  Of course you would!  I often think about how everyone has their own agenda, their own self important mental view of the way things need to be.  It's a selfish view.  It has to be.  But at least in most of what we do, we are driving towards that self important agenda.  Can we, some of the time, not all, focus on what's important to others?  If we can do that, we will find that most people will pay it back by matching their priorities just a little closer to ours.  And that is where the magic happens.

5.  You have to pay it forward before it will get paid back.  A good deed, a nice gesture, the simple act of consistent reliability will get a return on investment.  People will trust you.  Good intentions will materialize into good actions.  People will do what they say they will do, and treat you as you would want them to treat you.  When you are a reliable person, people will reciprocate that back to you.

It's interesting to me that a good employee can be viewed that way based simply on reliability.  A good friend can be a good friend based simply on reliability.  A good parent, the same.  All positive interactions build on the foundation of reliability, because reliability is the root of trust.  People want to trust other people.  We want to trust others so desperately that we trust without proof that we should trust.  Why not be that breath of fresh air?  Make people confident that they can trust you because you are reliable.  Simple reliability will give you meaningful friendships.  It will get you promoted at work.  In a day and age where everyone is so focused on trying to selfishly gain the advantage, it is easy to let the selfish nature of others propel you by being reliable.  In other words, when people can count on you, in a world where that quality is rare, they will want you on their team.

Check out my satirical fiction:

"Delightfully offensive!"  Slighted by humanity, God must put down the bottle long enough to save the world...

Buy "Shift!" on amazon

Comfort Zone Expansion

     Routine is the definition of comfort.  When we know what to expect, how to react, and there are no surprises, we feel comfortable.  I think most of us do, anyways.  When we know how to handle ourselves in any given situation, there is a calm that comes over us.  The routine might be work.  It might be your Sunday foray to church, or your Wednesday tee time.  We fill our lives with routine.  We have a desire to be comfortably tucked inside our shell of protection.

     I've been increasingly interested in others' motivation to leave that comfort zone and try something new and unknown.  Or, alternatively, I'm curious about how routines begin in the first place and then how they stick.  Nothing starts out as a routine.  It builds to that, but at some point, the newness of it wears off and the comfort zone expands.

     I have often been of the opinion that I hate anything new.  New people, new ideas, doing new things, all of it makes me uncomfortable.  And while I openly admit that I hate anything new, that is not necessarily the case.  Hate may be too much.  It's more of a lack of comfort.  Sort of like someone stabbing me with a knife in an area that is not life threatening.  I don't like it, it is not comfortable, but then once the knife is removed, I will heal and have a small scar from it.  Then I will call the police since I just got stabbed.  What is this world coming to, anyway?  You can't just stab someone and it's okay.  It's not.  It's not okay.

     But anyway, I really don't have a problem meeting new people.  I have a problem with unimportant surface conversations.  I guess when you first meet someone, you don't know them enough to have deeper conversations.  To me, that first bit is uncomfortable.  That digging in and trying to get to know someone is cumbersome and flawed.  I take a true comfort in routine.

     I like knowing the scope of most likely possibilities, and I like knowing that my knee-jerk reaction to an on-the-fly situation will have already been tried and true.  There is no fumbling around for some insight on the correct way to proceed.  I've been through a situation very similar before and already know how to handle it. Purposefully putting yourself in uncomfortable situations is a foreign concept to me.  I don't get why anyone would purposefully do that.

     Obviously I'm an inward thinker.  Perhaps those social butterflies are not inward thinkers, or maybe their confidence level is way higher than mine.  I certainly can't pretend to know the answer.  So, as per my usual philosophical, inward thinking brain slowly ticks...I try to imagine any and all reasons that someone would not hold the same beliefs about comfort zone expansion as I.

     Maybe people that purposefully seek a change in routine(I call it comfort) is because they are adrenaline junkies.  They must like that rush of uncertainty.  They must revel in that crazy chaos of change!  Okay.  So that's one reason.  Maybe another reason is despite the fact that it's not comfortable, they force themselves to do it because they know, consciously or subconsciously, that after the initial discomfort, they will now have a broadened idea of comfort.  

     I like the simple routine of things and I very much dislike monotony.  These things work in counterpoint to one another.  I guess when the scale of monotony gets heavier than the scale of routine and comfort, I stick a big toe just outside my routine; never too far, though, because I may need to pull in back in quickly.  So it really is, for me, that nefarious quote of my former mentor; "Change occurs when the pain of staying the same is more than the pain caused by making a change."

     The pain of monontony, for me and as of late, has increased to a level that requires me to make a change.  My routine has been broadening, little by little.  It will continue to broaden, too, until a time when I look back on my former routine and find that I am so far off the reservation, the view is scary, and looks to be too far outside of my comfort zone to ever make that journey back.  A broadened comfort zone is biased, then, based on how good our memory serves us, and mine's not so great.

   
     Check out my satirical fiction:

"Delightfully offensive!"  Slighted by humanity, God must put down the bottle long enough to save the world...

Buy "Shift!" on amazon

There Is No Mad Dash To Publishing

     When I finished my book, I thought, "Okay!  The hard part is over!"  I spent a lot of time writing, refining, editing, rewriting, adding, subtracting, organizing plot structure, characterizing, throwing bits of exposition and dialogue around...the list goes on and on.  Believe it or not, and maybe it's akin to self-inflicted pain, a little masochism, but that's not the hard part.  That's actually the fun part.  Really!  That sounds fun right?  People that write books NEED to find that fun.  If they don't, they won't continue to write.

     The point is, I thought I had reached the Mother Land!  Everything is downhill now, right?  The book has been written, now it's off to the printing press and the amazing word of mouth the book will receive will create sales from the ether!  My part in this is done.  Let the publishers market it and manage the rest while I get back to the fun part, the creation phase.  I guess, subconsciously, I knew there was at least a little more 'post production' work I would have to do, but I did consider, in my wide eyed and child-like innocence, that most of the work was done.  Wrong!  So here's my experience of the post work that comes after the super fun creation work.

     The novel is finished.  Well, as much as it can be, because let's face it, we, as novelists, could carry on forever revising and editing, making it just a little better.  But we have committed to letting it go, to letting our need for perpetual revising to just end.  I submitted my work to many different publishing companies.  What a short sentence that was to describe the angst involved it that!  It wasn't dealing with rejections that authors seemed to be plagued with.  I kept the attitude that submitting my work was half the battle.  I even planned on framing my first rejection letter as proof of the effort.    The hard part about submitting my work to different publishing houses was the formatting requirements.  Each publishing house wants specific guidelines followed for your submitted work and it is vastly varied.

     From margins to headers, to page numbers to title pages, here's what I ran into:  publishing company "A" wants a header with your last name and email address at the top of each page of your manuscript.  Publishing company "B" wants no page numbers and only wants the title of your manuscript at the top of each page.  You phone number and email address must be on the title page.  Publishing company "C" only accepts manuscripts with one inch margins and your last name should appear on the top of the page, left justified, but only at the beginning of each chapter, etc...the specification went on and on.  Because of it, I found myself spending massive amounts of time before each submission reading though the requirements of each house and formatting my manuscript to their specs.  After all, I didn't want my book slush piled(can I use those words as verbs?) just because I didn't follow the requisite formatting guidelines for that particular publishing house, right?  So I trudged through it, reading the guidelines, formatting, submitting, reading the guidelines, formatting, submitting...oh! And not to mention the time spent before all that finding a publishing house that accepts the genre I write in.  No sense in sending a publisher of romance novels a sci-fi, right?  The process was grueling, and not fun, especially when all I wanted to do was to get back to that fun creation stage.

     Eventually, two publishers wanted to publish my work.  I guess they saw my magnificently formatted content and thought, "Hey, if nothing else, this guy can follow formatting guidelines!"  Never mind about content!  No, I'm sure(telling this to myself, now...) that the content was the driving factor for acceptance.  So I was emailed a contract to peruse.

     Upon reading the contract, I was simply not impressed.  I would make less than a dollar a book sale.  I would be required to purchase a minimum of forty books, and I would have to market it on my own.  Is this what publishing houses are doing nowadays?  So I took a step back for a moment.  Here it was, the coveted book contract, the pinnacle of what I was after, and now the feeling was simply flat.  It took the air out of my sails, that's for sure!  I weighed the options and decided that I would explore the idea of self publishing.  

     The main thing I was after when I decided to sell my book wasn't money or fame or really any of that.  It was a simple thing really.  It was simply the confirmation that I was a good enough writer to have my book published one day, at some point, to call myself an author.  So after the mad formatting and submittal dash, after I received the contract to simply sign and send back, I realized that the contract itself was confirmation enough.  A publisher saw my work and decided that I was good enough to publish.  I understand and acknowledge that publishers are taking a huge risk on a new author and spend little of their budget on marketing for first time novelists.  I wasn't offended at all, just surprised that that's how it worked.

     I decided, after some research, that if I were going to self publish, I would still be responsible for marketing and trying to sell my book.  No advantage to having a publisher there.  I would make more money on each sale.  No advantage to having a publisher there.  The only advantage I saw was the professional name behind my book, and the professional formatting service they would provide to make my book look as professional as possible.  Unfortunately for them, the process of submitting my work made me an expert at book formatting!  I decided to self publish and see how it went.

     So four months after I finished my book, I had still not published, and decided to self publish.  I mistakenly thought the majority of time to publish a book was the writing!  Not true at all!  That's the fun part.  The next part in the process is what everyone in the self publishing world calls 'discoverability.'  The journey was just beginning.  I will expound on this process and what I experienced in my next blog.  Hopefully, this blog will serve to demystify the publishing and querying process.  I hope it will help anyone on a publishing mission to understand the process as I have come to understand it.  Subscribe to the blog so you don't miss the process of discoverability.  In many blogs of this type, people never tell you the hard sales numbers.  As I work through the process, I will be transparent with this.

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Inspiration: Create. It.

     There is a stark contrast between letting things happen to you and making things happen for you.  I think most of us, most of the time, just idly let things happen to us.  We are more reactive than proactive.  This is not an insult, just an observation of human nature.  None of us are always firing on all cylinders.  It's just not possible.

     This week, I decided to write an inspirational blog.  Well, semi-inspirational, since I plan on throwing in a little shot of reality too.  I often find that inspirational allegories are so outside of reality, they often work in contradiction to what they're trying to achieve.  Nothing can ever be absolute, and one could look at these snippets of inspiration in two ways:  

     1.  Take it for what it is.  You know you'll never quite achieve the perfection of whatever inspirational quote you're reading or trying to achieve, but you know in trying to get there, you will at least be a little better off than you were before.

     2.  The inspirational words aspire to a too perfect view and you are defeated before you even start.

     I think most of us try the former, but lately, I've been on the latter.  And that's not to say I'm in a deep state of depression or have a defeated worldview.  I'm just being realistic.  Inspirational quotes or memes or sonnets or blogs--whatever(you get the idea here)--so often serve to remind me what I'm not doing that I should be doing.  Granted, that's probably not what the writer had in mind.  

     Here's an example: "Don't let outside influences halt your personal motivation.  You can do anything you desire."  Not a great one, but nonetheless, it's meant to inspire and motivate.  And let me know if I'm reading too deeply into it, which, nevermind, I know I do that sort of thing on a regular basis already--BUT most people read something like that and gloss over it, never giving it another thought.  Most people will read it and go, "Hmmmmm.  Well, yes, that's right, I shouldn't let outside influences control me or get me down."  But then not another thought is spared about it.  

     I, on the other hand, consider it, weigh it, analyze it, and quite probably I am thinking way too deeply into it than intended.  How can an inspirational quote start with the word Don't?  Seems to start off negatively there...

     Also, I have a real problem with the idea that some stranger is trying to tell me what to do.  But by the suggestion of the quote, I shouldnt let this quote(which is an outside influence) halt my personal motivation.  So I guess if I'm trying to follow and enact this in my daily life, and if this quote is serving to demotivate me, should I not allow it?  But I think I'm getting off point here.

     No one can be constantly productive.  That's where I was going.  I see so many people yearning for that big break, that one knock of opportunity.  They are dying to get out of dead end jobs and poor relationships.  They want so desperately to live the life they imagine it should be.  We all have had that attitude at some point I suppose.  But the real problem I see is that many people that feel that way, sit there, immobile, hoping that the change will come without any sort of action on their part.  They want that change so badly, but they don't take steps to create that change.  In a perfect world, everyone would be handed their own personal key to happiness without ever having to work for it.  It's what we all want, right?  Well, sorry, it's most likely not going to happen until you take some action.

     I would love to win the lottery. Oh man!  Would I self-gluttonize!  I sit in my recliner with my tablet in hand checking the numbers week after week to no avail.  Success doesn't seem to come.  But I'm sitting there, just waiting to win it!  Oh, by the way, I never bought a ticket.  That's essentially what we are doing: hoping to win a lottery we never bought a ticket for.  You must take some sort of action for something to occur.  It will not come if you stay actionless.  That's the point.  You must create your opportunities.  But, how then, does one obtain the inspiration?

     This, I believe is where almost everyone fails.  No one seems to be doing anything.  Like zombies they simply trudge on, hope driving them but oblivious of the requirement to take action.  Hope, but no action.  If you choose to do something, you are already at the top of the class.  You exponentially have a better chance at achieving your dream, whatever it may be.  To me, that is inspiration enough.

     Inspiration cannot come from an external source.  You must be inwardly moved.  A simple quote can be a catalyst for that inner inspiration, but ultimately, it is your willingness to take action.  THAT is what inspiration is.  If we can learn to create that desire to take action within ourselves, maybe the dream can become a reality.  Until then, like most of society, we dumbly accept our lot in life and take no action to achieve our dreams.  Since we--and by 'we' I mean most of the rest of society--since we are squared firmly inside the mediocre bucket, any movement toward the dream will distinguish you away from that mediocrity.  That is an encouraging thought.  More encouraging than that, though, is realizing that the dream can be within reach, if only you make the move to extend your arm and reach out your hand.  Then at least for you, the dream will be closer to your outstretched fingers than the guy standing next to you, with both arms planted firmly at his sides.


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The Hope Of Perpetuation

     Everything, everywhere, builds on a foundation.  I've always considered this to be true, but I've never articulated it in writing, verbally or otherwise.  I'm think, at one time or another, everyone has at least thought about it.  Look around you, and think about everything you have, everything you've learned, and everything you are, currently, as a person.  Everything occurs in a series of steps that builds on the foundation you have laid down.

     I once thought of the world as a mess, as a hodgepodge of incomplete works, things people began but never finished.  Everywhere I looked, I saw unfinished projects: roads in the middle of construction, flip phones, tube TVs, gardens, elementary school children, the NFL draft.  All of these things, indeed everything else in this world too, were not finished and would never be finished.  They were simply building to a crescendo that would never occur.  They were all projects that would continue to be reinvented, redefined and improved upon.  But my view of the world, as I get older, is beginning to change.

     I dare suspect(as if I know the minds and hearts of others) that I am metamorphisizing backwards in this.  I would think that most people initially view the world through the prism of hopeful optimism and evolve away from that into a negative cynicism.  As I live on, I think I'm moving away from the idea of an incomplete world and into the idea that there is no technological ceiling.  There will never be an end to the incomplete projects of the world, but now I feel a comfort in that, not a brooding sense of failure.  It is like a classical masteiece ending on a suspended seventh, and I'm waiting, screaming for that resolution chord to finish the concert but it never comes and we, the audience, sit in our red velvet seats, stuck in suspense for all eternity.  But after being stuck on that chord for so long, maybe, just maybe, I begin to recognize the hope in it.  It is the idea that we are never finished--not as a negative, but instead as a positive.  Things will always improve.  And with that idea, comes hope.  It is the focal point that changed, I guess.  I am no longer focussing on the incomplete, but instead focussing on the future possibilities, and imagining the evolution.

     The same is true with everything in this world.  End points are an illusion, like the concept of time.  Ends are a means constructed by the human mind to force some sort of order on the world in which we live.  The idea helps us feel fulfilled.  Admittedly, it's hard not to be seduced by it.  For example, I mow my lawn.  I am finished.  Broaden the time frame and I am not finished.  If you broaden it enough, I will end up cutting it next week too.  Broadened to infinity, I will never fully complete the task.  Again, and simply for the fact that it bears repeating, everything is this way.  

     We define what constitutes the end of something.  We make an imaginary stopping point, a point where we say, it will be done when....fill in the blank.  But it's never done.  We percieve something to be completed when we arrive at this imaginary end point.  Everything stretches to infinity, and our minds cannot grasp it.  Because of this inability to fully grasp the concept of infinity, we must create absolutes.  

     

     Instead of negatively viewing a project as never finished, I submit the challenge to view it positively.  It is a chance to improve on it, a chance for continuation, a hopeful progression of perpetuation.  There are no real end points, no fulfilling victories.  The fulfillment comes in improving, in always having that last chance to do it better.  It is what has given us what we have today.  Everything builds on a foundation and goes on ad infinitum...

http://www.amazon.com/Shift-Bill-C-Castengera/dp/150088703X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1410747499&sr=1-1&keywords=castengera

Interact, MAN! Be A Part Of Something!

     I've always thought of interacting with people as a hassle.  I'm not sure why I feel like this, so that's why I've decided to dig in this week and do a little self evaluation.  Hopefully, if this works out right, by the end of this narrative foray, I'll at least be a little closer to the answer--and maybe a little closer to understanding myself as an individual.  I think we all suppress personality traits.  We all hide behind a socially acceptable mask of vanilla opinions and predictable responses.  Perhaps we don't want to offend, perhaps we all, deep down, just want people to like and accept us.  I have been at this game for a long time, and it's becoming obvious to me now, that I have lost my identity in the process.  Maybe there never was a time when I just let it loose, full steam ahead, destroying every preconceived notion of me in its wake.  Maybe I never even had an accurate identity to begin with.  After all, we are our outward appearance.  We are perceived by others how we elect to outwardly appear.

     I wonder how many of us really know ourselves.  How do we really feel about things?  Why do we do things we don't enjoy?  I would imagine that the benefit received by doing the joyless act outweighs the misery of doing it.  That's the only reason that I can think of.  But, and at the same time, I don't really ever recall sitting down and deeply considering the nuances of cause and effect.  I have a healthy respect for the human mind and it's ability to subconsciously make many decisions all at once, and maybe we're on auto pilot.  I always fear that we flick that auto pilot switch on a little too often.  We've become complacent with everything, detached, and we're not quite as self aware as we once were.  I'm often haunted by the question:  Am I living life, or is life living me?  How much control do I take in the results of my own life?  Not enough.  I am drifting down the lazy river of life on an inner tube, casually taking in the scenery, but most of the time I'm napping.  Those of you that know me, know that my naps are not only a metaphor for not stopping to smell the roses, but also a reality that I take extremely seriously.  

     Who am I?  Ah, an age-old question, possibly too complex for a simple, multi-million neuron equipped network of synaptic impulses to determine.  Who am I, really?  Maybe that's a better question.  Who I am is relative to the observer.  Who I am really pulls out the relativistic factor and implies that the answer will be a fact, regardless of observer.  Strangely, no one could ever know the answer but me, and even that is questionable.  Does everyone engage in a societal desire to be accepted?  I've heard people say they don't care what others think of them, but I wonder if that's truly the case.  Part of being human is to desire interaction, to feel like you belong to something, to be able to relate to someone about anything.  There are countless groups and organizations you can elect to be a part of.  Most of us belong to more than one.  Republican, PTA, car club, book club, Sam's Club, magazine subscriber, movie goer, dancer, writer, blogger, Facebooker, Twitter--ah...tweeter, Christian, drinker, student...the list could go on forever.  People want to be a part of something, it seems.  But not me.  I don't desire interaction.  People who know me might find that surprising.  People who really know me, know this about me.  I loathe the mere potential for interaction. 

     I find interacting cumbersome.  I find meeting new people awkward.  I have groomed myself into a passably believable(maybe I'm fooling myself here) extrovert.  People often seem surprised when I tell them I could easily be a recluse.  People think I'm joking when I call myself an introvert.  I have fooled them too well, it seems.  I enjoy solitude.  I like quiet time.  I like to have time alone with my own thoughts.  This way, I can get to know myself better.  I don't always have to be doing something.  I can bask in the silence of solitude indefinitely.  But despite that almost depressing fact, I am also pretty charismatic and ridiculously narcissistic.  Can these things really go together or define who I really am?  Only I can be the judge of it and I'm thinking that this evaluation is spot on.

     I think I'm too concerned with how others perceive me.  I'm too concerned with the fact that I might accidentally offend someone.  Please don't misunderstand me.  I have no problem in offending people.  I have a problem with accidentally offending someone.  If I have a goal in mind, i.e. Offending someone and I succeed--total win!  On the other hand if my goal was not to offend, and I still offend--total loss!  If I gave up my concerns about how others percieve me, though, would it be an improvement?  If I just lived my life, and truly didn't care what other people thought of me, and lived an "I am what I am" existence(wasn't that a Popeye quote??), would I feel like less of a fraud?  Because when I'm pandering to people, in the hopes that I can sway a positive opinion from them about me, that's exactly how I feel: Fraudulent.  And perhaps that's the main problem with this whole situation.  It's the fact that I feel like I am selling a fraudulent personality.  And that makes me feel dishonest.

     The tough part to swallow then is the idea that there will never be a truly honest portrayal of my personality.  One reason is because I honestly don't know who I truly am since I've been faking it for so long.  Another reason is because no one would appreciate it to begin with because it would be sinfully self-centered.  And yet another reason is because everyone's in the same boat.  No one truly knows themselves.  People pander to be accepted.  People bend their morals to be accepted and people act out of character so that they can manipulate another person's perception of them.  It's textbook sociopathy.  We are all on that track, I suppose.  And despite my advanced ability to think freely, this is a case where I've decided to follow the rest of the cows to slaughter.  And I'm okay with it.  At least I'm part of something.

Small Talk Is Vampiric

      I think I'm personable.  I think I get along well with others.  I outwardly accept most situations, even though sometimes someone throws a serious curveball and I'm ill prepared to mask my surprise.  Most of this may seem intangible so I'm prepared to back it up with examples.  But before the example backup, ask yourself how well you roll with the punches.  I guess it's not necessarily even punches I'm talking about, because that implies a hardship, and even though that's a portion of what I'm talking about, it's more frequent.  Ask yourself how well you can make someone feel that you relate to them.  How well do you put people at ease, allowing them to feel safe enough to give you a glimpse into their twisted lives?  I feel that I have, in some scope, refined an ability to do this.  It sounds sociopathic.  It sounds like social engineering or psy ops.  I suppose it is on its most basic level.  It's social guerrilla warfare, a manipulation of perception swayed in your favor to gain an insight not just anyone can gain.

     As a general rule, I'm not a "small talk" kind of person.  It's awkward and irrelevant.  Small talk is, at best, a disengenuous act of feigning compassion about someone else's concerns.  I'm more of a "say what you need and then let's shut the hell up" kind of person.  This may sound a bit harsh, and maybe I don't mean it quite as harsh as it seems to sound.  Basically, I want my conversations to stay relevant.  I have been known to tell people that I think their story is too long.  I can fake interest in brief sections of time.  But when someone's story drags on and on, I get antsy.  Gotta keep moving.  I liken it to someone telling me what they dreamed.  This is so irrelevant, it makes me want to cry vomit.  Yes, cry vomit, since it's so sad and nauseating at the same time.  What happened in your dream is pointless and holds no bearing on real life(I'll not get into a debate about psychic phenomena or future predictions from dreams, here).  Often, when someone is explaining their dream, it is an ill-constructed, plotless, weird recount of events that have no structure or climactic payoff.  They all end with "then I woke up."  There is no character development, and no plot line resolution.  Its a waste of time.  The only format in which dream recitation is acceptable to me is in two to three sentence explanations.  "I dreamt that you had a goats head, then we hunted you and ate you for dinner.  Pretty weird, huh?"  Quick, to the point, and a breath of fresh air.  So, I'm getting off the dream stump now, and back to what I'm trying to convey.

     Since I get bored with small talk and everyone seems to want to do it, I have no choice but to engage in it so I can fit under the societal umbrella of normal.  So I often play a game.  I roll with what people tell me.  I feign interest.  I ask follow up questions and I listen way more than I talk.  If you ever get a chance to watch two people engage in small talk, I recommend that you look at it through this prism:  Every intention that the two people have during the interaction is to twist the conversation into something meaningful and relevant to them.  It's a struggle for floor time, a struggle for each of them to keep the conversation about themselves, to gain control of the spotlight.  If I get stuck in a small talk situation(which is not that often, since I'm easily put off by it), I allow it to be about the other person.  I don't grapple for the focus.  It's interesting to me because it makes people really feel that I care.  But it's also exhausting because I am loading up on someone else's emotional baggage.  If I could come up with a way best to explain it, I would call it "emotional energy transference."  I am letting someone use me to unload their emotional energy and so I absorb it, making them feel better and me feel like I now have their emotional weight.  These people are energy vampires, off-loading their negative energy and corrupting my positive energy.  That's why I don't like to engage in it.  It's exhausting. 

     You'll find that when you don't wrestle for the focus in conversations, people will tell you way more than you expect to hear.  And also, your reaction will alert them as to wether they feel safe to continue or if they feel that they've said too much and back off.  I always try to handle whatever people tell me as normal and not too far off the beaten path, even when it is way outside the grid.  "Oh, you killed your girlfriend last night?  Hmmm.  Sounds reasonable.  How'd you do it?"  This makes them feel safe and they will continue, knowing now, that you are not judging and are sympathetic to their point of view.  

     So, I'm obviously and constantly thinking inwardly.  Outwardly, I accept what people tell me.  Inwardly, I'm thinking crazy thoughts about this killer I'm talking to and how I hope they don't kill me, and how can I get out of this conversation without getting kilt.  (Decided to use the vernacular of "killed."  I don't know, maybe now I'm getting bored with my own story)...

     So anyway, I guess this post is about holding a reaction to get more insight because it makes people feel more comfortable.  And I guess it's about how if I can avoid it, I will, but also, if I can't avoid it, I try to seem genuinely interested to build that trust to see how much I can get out of them.  Mostly it's about how bat-shit crazy my mind is, and how long conversations suck the life out of me.

5 Life Lessons In 36 Years

Here's a list of lessons that took 36 years for me to learn.  While I understand that just reading this list is no substitute for actual experience, hopefully it can allow one to arrive to the conclusions a little more expediently than it took me.   

1.  People are selfish.  Big deal, you knew that already, right?  People want to feel important.  People's worlds revolve around themselves.  Obvious lesson, right?  I think I knew that early on, but maybe not quite to the extent that it realistically is.  There are subconscious subtleties to this lesson that I never considered or even fathomed.  It starts at one's desire to hear their own name to wanting money, fame, etc.  We, even me, want it all.  Everything.  It's a deeply rooted, base feeling inside us all.  It's the human condition and can lead to pretty substantial problems.  A surface word for it is greed.  But it's more than that.  It's a subconscious fear of inferiority.  None of us are confident.  We hide it through arrogance and vanity.  But it's there.  

     The lesson, I guess, wasn't that people are selfish.  As I said, I knew that early on.  The real lesson was how to deal with this fact.  It was the 36 year long struggle with how to interact with people in a world of selfishness that was the eye opener.  So here's the secret,if you haven't figured it out yet in your own journey through this tangled world:  Play into it.  Very simple.  Use people's names.  Ask questions from the perspective of what's important to them.  Remember details.  Stop talking and listen.  Do this, and your desire to feel important will be fulfilled, because you'll find that people suddenly want to be around you.  You'll become likable.  Funny how that works.  

     As a manager, I've hired many people.  More applicants than you might realize speak in terms of what they want.  Instant interview killer.  Without being too insensitive, here, I just don't care what they want.  I'm interviewing people to find qualities in someone that I want.  

   

   "So, Mr. So-and-so, why do you want to work for our company?"  

    "Well, I'm ready for a change of pace.  I need to make a higher salary.  I wanted better hours than my previous job and I just had a baby so I need the benefits...."  Blah blah blah.  How about speaking in terms of what the employer might want?

     "I feel that I might be a good fit for your company because I have experience doing x,y,z.  Also I'm really impressed with the operation of your company.  (A little ego stroke). I feel that I can add value to your organization because blah blah blah."  Speak in terms of what other people want.  You will instantaneously become a desirable person to be around and a breath of fresh air to the selfish monotony of other people.  Not just in interviews--that was just an example--but in life.  Talk less, listen more.  And when you do talk, speak in terms of the other person's desires instead of your own.

2.  Nothing is free.  There is a cost to all things.  If a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is, and if there is a truer cliche, I don't know it.  We all wish for free things, but there is no substitute for working hard to get it.  Working hard for things adds value to the thing you got and builds confidence when you succeed.  It's not our fault that we feel like sometimes we should catch a break on something.  We are indoctrinated.  As kids, most of us lived with parents who provided for us and for a long time, things truly did seem "free."  It wasn't.  Our parents worked for the "freebies" we enjoyed.  We know that now, as adults, but we still don't fully consider it.  I see it with my kids, too.  We want to provide the very best for them and we do, but there will come a time when we unleash the real world on them and the realization that nothing is free will come to them.  Despite this realization, we desperately want the free ride.  We want a taste of that innocence again, the worry-free attitude of the hand out.  It's a natural feeling but understand that it's gone and it will not come back.  

     There has been a lot of debate recently about government filling that cavity of emptiness we all have.  And it is a tempting notion.  But remember, nothing is free.  Whatever it is, must be paid for by someone, somewhere.

3.  Everyone has skeletons in their closet.  We have all done some things we are not proud of.  We have all made mistakes and have had to live either with the guilt of not getting caught or the consequences of what we did.  We all have embarrassing moments.  We all have memories of something that happened to us that still makes us cringe with regret.  We have all lied about something at some point, and we all have all of that hanging over our heads at all times and the stress of it has made us into who we are presenting to the public today.  Baggage.  Emotional baggage.  I have a theory about this.  In life, we start out with no property, no emotional baggage.  As we age, we accumulate a bag, a small one.  Eventually that bag turns into a suitcase and later still, that suitcase turns into a forty piece luggage set that you carry with you everywhere.  We cannot let go of our past mistakes.  We will carry that baggage with us everywhere until our death.  That's not my theory, though.  My theory is this:  If you get married young, the other person will have less emotional baggage for you to have to deal with.  The older you get, the more emotional baggage and the less likely you'll be to get past it all.  Like going on vacation, it's a lot easier to travel with two bags than it is with three. You see where I'm going here.  The theory is only a theory so unbunch those panties!  It's simply an idea I've had about people and relationships for a while and there's no way to prove its accuracy.  There's WAY too many variables for a controlled experiment to occur.  But know this simple lesson.  Everyone is dealing with a personal past and it shapes who we are today.  It is the reason that someone has trust issues.  It is the reason someone adjusts the rear view mirror every time they get behind the wheel and it's the reason someone is doesn't take no for an answer.  It is trivial, and it is gigantic.  It doesn't matter how small or big, it is the reason we are who we are.

4.  Do things you don't want to do.  Obviously, I'm not talking about killing someone or anything even remotely harmful or illegal.  All I'm saying is to get out of your comfort zone from time to time.  I don't know many people that like doing things that they're not already comfortable with.  It is awkward, uncomfortable, humiliating, maybe.  You cannot do something confidently until you've had practice at it, or at least have done it a couple of times.   We don't like feeling unsure.  I get it.  We don't like that we might look foolish.  But really, who cares all that much if you look foolish?  Just you, that's who.  I made a decision a while back to just charge in and try it.  If there's something I haven't done before, I refuse to go in meekly or timidly.  I will either surprise myself and do whatever it is well, or I will fail miserably and look like the biggest fool ever.  And I have decided to be okay with the latter.  I'm already dragging a few tons of emotional baggage around anyway, load me up.  I have found, and I guess here's the real lesson behind the scene, is that when I charge into things head on like that, and even when I aggressively fail, my emotional baggage stays the same size.  It's a mental preemptive choice, to accept that I might fail, and that if I do, to take it in stride.  

5.  Be honest, and give bad news.  No one I know enjoys having to give bad news.  In fact, most people try to dodge it at all costs.  It's difficult to do and emotionally painful, but do it anyways.  Most people will be surprised by your honesty.  Don't mistake what I'm trying to say though.  Don't seek out bad news just so you can inflict an emotional breakdown on someone.  That is ethically defunct, and mean for no good reason.  But if you must give someone bad news, don't avoid it.  On top of that, it has been my experience that the sooner the bad news is delivered, the easier it is.  In counterpoint, the longer you avoid it, the harder it becomes.  Get it out of the way so it's not sitting heavily on your shoulders for any length of time and so that whoever is going to receive the bad news can begin to accept whatever it is and move on from it.  

     I have witnessed a lot of people pass the buck when it comes to bad news.  The buck stops here!  People appreciate the honesty in most cases.  And even when they aren't gracious enough to not take it out on the messenger, well at least you're not carrying that burden around any longer.  In all cases, it is necessary to deliver the news with a certain level of tact.  I fear a misinterpretation on this one.

     Five steps to major life lessons in 36 years of life.  I'm not perfect by any stretch, and often it is a struggle to remember even simple lessons I've learned in life.  For some, I'm doomed to repeat for a long time to come.  For others, I have them mastered.  We make mistakes to learn, but when the mistakes get made, we also have to be in the right frame of mind to receive it as a lesson, and that may be the most difficult lesson of all.

     

Are You A Winner Or A Loser?

     Are you a winner or a loser?  As I was driving home from the gym this morning, something on the radio got me thinking about this.  I really only listen to talk radio, since most of the music stations seem to only get the rights to play the same four songs in a cycle of repetitive monontony (I honestly can't even begin to substantiate this claim, but I've spent a lot of time imagining a back story for how this occurs so in the interest of making myself feel like it was time well spent, I'm going to blindly believe that I somehow correctly guessed how the industry works).  Bottom line:  I choose to listen to talk radio as an alternative to music radio.  It is entertaining, keeps my mind engaged and its different everyday.  The reporter was relaying a story about a school somewhere (who cares where, am I right?) that has made the decision to not keep score during their soccer games.  We've all probably heard of this scenario at some time or another.  They decide not to keep score so that the kids don't get their feelings hurt, they all get trophies, yada, yada.  But as I was still coming to terms with the fact that I've become desensitized to this whole line of thought, the story took an additional twist, one for which I was not prepared.  Apparently, some of the children couldn't dribble the ball(aha!  Are you impressed with my knowledge of soccer terms??  Dribbling in soccer, unlike basketball, simply means handling the ball with your feet to work your way across the field).  Well, they couldn't dribble the ball quite as well as some other kids, so they elected to leave the ball out of the game.  Are you freaking kidding me?  Imagine watching this game of pretend soccer where the kids are running back and forth on the field, no score, no ball, and wait, why am I watching this?  This sort of sounds like running around a track, now.  Just tell the kids to do some sprints.

    Okay, now we're going to play tennis, but sometimes the ball hits the net and that could disappoint someone, so let's remove the net.  The tennis racket can get heavy after a while, so let's just pretend we are holding a racket and you don't have to worry your delicate little mind about missing the ball, because guess what?, we are going to just imagine that the ball is there.  No need for those pesky out of bounds lines, they can be such a nuisance!  I know that some people can get tired of running back and forth faster than other people and that's just not fair, so no running allowed.  Alright!  Good game! You guys played your hearts out, out there!  Good job.  Tomorrow, you get a trophy for sitting on the couch and watching TV.  Keep up the great work!

    This doesn't adequately prepare children for life.  In life, producers are rewarded.  Laziness is punished.  At work, promotions occur because someone is better at something than someone else.  People that can produce results get paid more than non-producers, and this makes sense. 

     "You tried but your results were the opposite of what we were going for, but dammit, you tried.  Here's a pay increase for trying."  Nope, it would never happen.  Can you imagine the shock these kids experience when they grow up, get out into the real world, and never get a trophy for just participating?  Everything they learned in school taught them that all they need to do is participate.  They've never been subjected to performance pressure and now they are not conditioned to handle it.  Freak out.  Depression.  Confusion.

     Here's the truth...Tell as many kids as you can, so they can be prepared for life:

     Are you a winner or a loser?  Everyone is both.  We don't always win.  But, on the positive side, we don't always lose.  Learn to accept a loss.  It teaches you what not to do next time so that maybe, when you are presented with the same situation, you'll make the necessary adjustments to win.  We lose to learn.  Use it as a learning experience.  Everyone's goal in life is to win more than they lose.  Produce.  Producers are rewarded.  Hard work is rewarded with wins.  Mediocrity is rewarded with losses.  Welcome the loss objectively, even positively, and change the thing that made you lose.  We are all trying to beat the other team.  Life keeps score.  Bosses keep score.  Life puts the ball in play and life gives trophies only to the winners.  A loss means you need to work hard and practice more. A win means you need to work hard and practice more.  Get it?  It's the same.  There will always be a competitor that worked harder than you, practiced more than you.  Acknowledge this fact, it's the natural order of the universe.  The goal here is to get good enough to capture a few wins, and then more.  Everyone is after the title and no one can stay on top forever.  Try to give yourself a few moments up there, because its always brief.

     Life makes you play with the soccer ball.  Skill level in sports, in everything--in life, is like fingerprints.  There is no one that is an identical match.  If I were on that scoreless, ball less soccer field, I would still try to be the best damn imaginary soccer player out there, because I want the biggest imaginary trophy ever not given out for not being the team's irrelevant MVP.

     Now get out there and produce!

Breaking Up With Yellow

     I'm not much for sentimentality.  I don't have a problem letting go of inanimate objects just because they're attached to a particular memory or feeling.  I'm a pack rat in reverse.  I throw things away I might desperately need at a later date.  Thinking that I might need something two years from now is simply not enough reason for me to retain it.

     I like clean lines, clutter-free, knick knack free countertops and tables.  My home is not a retail oddity shop.  You cannot come to my house and peruse an eclectic mix of bizarre items from around the country.  Functional items often cross the boundary into decorative, and this might be okay to some people, but I'm not trying to inflict my own personality onto the items I own.  I don't buy things because they're "cute."  I buy things that I need.

     Maybe it's a function of testosterone, maybe it's a function of a fear of personal attachment, but for the most part, I can throw almost anything away.  I think people, as a general rule, don't consider themselves enough.  People don't often sit down, have some quiet time, and consider who they really are.  We're on the go.  We have things to do.  We lose our sense of self awareness in our daily grind.  Our personalities are there, buried in us.  The fight to get out, though, has been lost.  We stand by original convictions as if we still feel the same way.  Case in point:  when I was very young, I decided that yellow was my favorite color.  Many years have passed, now, and when someone asks me what my favorite color is, I blankly, and without much thought, tell them it's yellow.  I have never revisited this stance and I am comfortable with the color choice of my six year old self.  I'm so comfortable with it, that I have a hard time revisiting my original conviction and I'm not really open to change it.  It's been yellow for so long, I feel that I might lose a little piece of who I am if I just up and abandon poor yellow.  And then where would yellow be?  Out on the streets, tossed aside like a used diaper in the trash!  We've been through a lot together, me and yellow.  How could I ever abandon you?  This may be an extreme explanation, but it illustrates the attachments we feel towards things.  And that's not even a physical thing, it's a concept.  Sorry, yellow, it's time for you to get evaluated.  People change.  It's not you, it's me.  

     I'm not saying that I hold absolutely zero sentimentality.  I like to look at old pictures, I feel connections to things I've had for long periods of time, and I have certain books that I just can't simply give away or throw out.  What I'm saying is in those rare times when we make a decision to like something, when we evaluate how we feel about something and respond according to that decision, we very rarely look back and reevaluate.  Once the decision is made, we take for granted that we will always feel the same.  We take comfort in never having to analyze that feeling again and years pass as we blindly assume that once we like something, we'll always like it.

     Sometimes, I make a snap judgement to throw something away that I don't think I want to throw away.  And it's hard.  But once it's in the trash, I move on and rarely ever think of it again.  Just recently, I was cleaning out my garage.  In there, I found an old beat up lamp, with no shade, in the shap of a koala.  The koala on the base of the lamp was a stuffed animal sort of thing, fluffy, hair matted down.  The lamp was not mine, it was my wife's and she had had it for as long as I can remember, probably before we had even known each other.  But I was cleaning out the garage.  I couldn't remember the last time we even attempted to plug it in.  Into the trash!  I continued cleaning out the garage, but luckily (and as an act of sheer self preservation), I got into that rare mindset of reevaluating my initial feelings.  Who am I, I thought, to inflict my personal feelings about keeping sentimental things onto my wife?  I thought about it for a while before I pulled it back out of the trash can.  Who knows what kind of memories this item holds for her?  Who knows what memories she would forever lose because this lamp was not here to remind her of them?  It was not my place, and I overstepped the boundary of respect for her belongings, assuming that she could have the same sense of disconnect that I have.  

     All of this begs the question:  Are we the sum of our belongings?  In a way, the answer is yes.  We acquire things and we project memories onto them.  We see an item and are reminded of a certain time and place, a situation, a smell, a feeling.  If not for the item, the memory inspired by the item, while not completely lost, will dull with the inactivity of thought.  These items bring it back, remind us of the memory, and repetition always equals retention.  

     So what, exactly, am I advocating here?  It seems as though I'm contradicting myself.  Throw it away, keep it for the memory it reminds you of...

     I'm saying that we are human beings, with thoughts and feelings and personalities.  We are unique and diverse.  I'm saying use the power of thought.  Don't blindly accept something just because it always was.  Reevaluate.  Hold yourself to a higher standard of thought and self awareness.  Try to understand how and why you feel a certain way.  It's easy to forget it in the mundane course of everyday life, but one day you'll wake up, and years will have passed.  It is the difference between letting things happen to you and making things happen for you.

     And come back yellow, I miss you already!

     

   Check out by book here!

     

Airport Shenanigans (part one)

People are amazing.  Recently, I flew to Atlanta on a work related expedition for product training.  

JIA is a humble airport, with a spattering of terminals, resting serenely, almost with an air of nonchalance, as a nearly insignificant blip on an otherwise uneventful swath of land inside the rim of Jacksonville's northern extremity.  I suppose what I'm trying to convey here, is that Jacksonville has a wishful airport, big boy pants for a waist that's just too small...it's trying, though, and one day, maybe soon, the waistline will fit the pants.

With ticket in hand and bags checked, I confidently made my way toward my designated terminal.  I wouldn't, by any remote stretch of the imagination, call myself a frequent flyer, but over the last four or five years, I've flown to Atlanta twice, Oklahoma City, Indianapolis, and Richmond, Virginia.  While I I'm not a Lord of the Rings level traveler, I would at least consider myself comfortable with and accustomed to the act of flying--in a plane, in case you thought I had acquired the next level of human evolution or come up with an aviatory solution not otherwise already considered.  Because of my past experiences with this sort of thing, I elected to bring a Tom Robbins novel with me in an attempt to quell the boredom of the inevitable wait.  I already knew that waiting in a security checkpoint line, on the plane before takeoff and after landing, and then on the tram to the hotel, was imminent.  Plus, the book is wildly entertaining.

Everything was textbook as I boarded the plane; everything was standard airport monotony.  I can find entertainment almost anywhere and people-watching at an airport could be the Super Bowl of a lifetime of people-watching training.  There's much to digest, if observing people is your bag.  

A little off-topic, and as a simple example (I like supporting evidence), I hadn't been inside of JIA for ten minutes before I witnessed the first of many soon to come novelties a simple airport has to offer.  I was standing on an escalator, heading down.  The escalator to my left was on the upward rotation, creating a technological letter "X" in the form of metal steps.  I mind my own business for the most part, I don't seek out strangers to talk to, don't give them a reason to talk to me.  In fact, in public places, where there is an abundance of people, my goal is to be invisible.  I slither through the crowd, not making eye contact, not making a scene in any sense of anything.  I'm not sure if my ninja skills were honed just so precisely on this occasion, or if the woman on the up escalator just didn't care that I was there, because she suddenly turned to two men about twenty feet back on the escalator behind her and asked loudly, affronted, if they were talking about her, and that she could hear everything they had said.  I, as previously stated, was on the opposite escalator, moving in the opposite direction and so was not privy what the two men had said.  One of them looked at her square in the eyes and told her, yes, they were talking about her.  Then she released the Kracken on them and began to unleash some words in the English language that I had only heard tales about.  

The voice trailed off the deeper I rode the escalator down, as my thoughts moved from how homeland security could possibly have executed her right then and there for causing such a stir in the airport.  They would have been within the limits of proportionate reactions because the woman had lost a grip on her sanity and quite literally had become a threat.  I never got to hear the end of that argument, but it would end up being just a simple skirmish in the war of my day.  

So, my thoughts moved back to finding my terminal, which I did, and fast forwarding, I ended up on an aisle seat, sitting there, invisibility cloak wrapped tightly around me, Tom Robbins book in hand.  The book had been a gift, and I had just started reading it after I had situated myself in my seat.  I was on page one.

The seats were five across, with an aisle in the middle.  I was on the two seat side, close to the aisle.  I only describe this arrangement to facilitate the understanding that the window seat was currently open, the plane not fully boarded, but really it illustrates that when my aisle-mate would arrive, we'd be in intimate quarters, just the two of us with no third wheel buffer.  A third wheel buffer always keeps the invisibility cloak in tact.  Head down in a book keeps it in tact too, mostly, because most people just don't feel comfortable interrupting a person reading.  My aisle-mate arrived and I stood up to let him get to his window seat.  A break in my reading, and a break in keeping my head down not to have to converse with anyone occurred because of this movement.  Obviously, I had not properly planned this out.

We were forced to exchange cordialities.  He was in his mid to late fifties, a little overweight, gray hair, but still held on to a youthful vigor only discovered after he began talking.  

"What are you reading there?"  Dammit.  Here we go.

"Oh," I muster a deceptively fake air of outgoing charm.  "It's a book by Tom Robbins."

"Not very far into it, are ya?"  Dick. 

I rally.  "I just got it.  Brought it to read on the flight."  There.  Short, to the point.  Stated my intentions. Leave me alone.  He gets it.  And he really did seem to.  I continue reading.

The plane begins to take off in the late afternoon, early evening.  The sunlight is waning, but there's still enough that I can comfortable see the words on the pages.  The airline had taken measures to ensure a convenient experience.  I like to believe that the meeting went like this:

"Look, we can give them more leg space, bigger seats for comfort, or we can give them overhead lighting.  We can't give them both.  Cut backs causing strategic use of our funds dictates this.  We have some tough decisions to make, boys."  He probably slammed his fist down on the table for emphasis.  The members sitting at the boardroom table probably jumped a little at the unexpected punctuation.

"Lights."  They all agreed.  Except Smith, who always went against the grain.

"Fuck you, Smith, it's gonna be lights."

So there I am, legs curled up to my chin, thinking about how Smith needs to grow some balls and stand up for his convictions.  I reach up to turn on my overhead book light, since my side of the plane is angled away from the sun.  I push the button....and nothing happens.  Wow.  I lose.  I accept it quickly, and go back to reading in the dying light.  There's still enough to easily make out the words on the page.

"Ya have to hold the button in for a few seconds to turn it on."  My best friend next to me suddenly exclaims.  Apparently, my dilemma has not gone unnoticed.  I graciously say thank you and hold the button in.  I hold it in a little longer than what I deem necessary, but it's just so my helpful buddy sees and knows that I gave it a shot according to his directions.  No light.

"The flight is only 53 minutes.  How long are ya gonna hold it in?"  Holy shit man.  This guy just directed me to hold the button in and now he's ridiculing me for doing as instructed.  This guy!  I don't respond directly.

"Oh well." I say.  "No big deal."  Still using as little words as possible, no longer so I don't have to interact anymore, but because I've already decided that I don't like him.

He turns his light on and directs it toward me.  "Thanks," I manage.  Maybe he's okay after all.  I would never find out.  The plane touches down in Atlanta and I'm off the hook with him.  "Good luck in your travels," I tell him, and he, none the wiser that homeland security could very well have wrestled me to the ground if they had but known my thoughts as I exited the plane.  

There's more to the story, but my time to write is winding down.  Perhaps soon I'll revisit it and explain the rest.  Maybe, when its rainy outside, or the kids are at school and I'm alone in the house and with no idea what to write about, I'll create the second part.  Enjoy!

Don't Eat The Meatloaf

Somewhere, in the winding recesses of my brain, locked up tightly, and probably rightly so, is true, unadulterated honesty.  It's a promise of secrecy we often share with ourselves, careful to spill only a few drops out at a time for authenticity.  Honesty is a hard truth to tell, an array of a million judgmental telescopes, all pointed at the world around us.  We're victims of perception, slaves of an authoritarian device telling us what to make of things.  How we manifest those views into language, how we articulate the feelings to ourselves and others is the measure of how well others respond to it.  But, as the cliche goes, "the truth hurts," and so we elect to keep the pact of secrecy we've made with ourselves to spare someone's feelings.  It just might be a dangerous precedent.

Take, for example, my lack of desire to eat food that someone has made from home.  "Here's some ravioli," she says to me, eyes hopeful that I'll enjoy it, "I made it from scratch."  Declining the offer, undoubtedly, is offensive to the would-be chef and several questions immediately populate my cerebellum.  What does her kitchen look like?  Did she wash her hands? Did she taste a little of it and reuse the spoon afterwards, without washing it?  What do her pots and pans look like?  Have they been properly cleaned?  Has she made ravioli before?  Did she cook it at the proper temperature?  A slew of questions, which, in and of themselves would be offensive to ask before I gingerly accept the fact that I'm getting ready to put my life in someone else's hands.

I'm okay with the fact that this might be an absurd feeling to have.  I'm comfortable with it.  My comfort with the absurdity of it doesn't make it any less real for me, though, and I have opted for a tactic of preemption.  When I meet new people, it casually comes out that I have a propensity towards obsessiveness about not eating food from someone's home.  This happens when there is not yet even the idea of an offering.  Sure, it's a preemptive strike, hitting them while they are unaware to solidify the fact that I am not personally singling out your food.  It is a general irrational belief that all food from someone's home kitchen is somehow contaminated.  They dismiss it as an eccentricity and life goes on.  Three months down the road, when people at work somehow come to the conclusion that a potluck is in order, they are not offended when I tell them I will not be participating in the act of devouring roaches from their homes.  Obviously, I sugar-coat it to spare any residual offense they may take.  But the result is that people remember that initial conversation and connect, subconsciously in their minds, that its not personal, it's my 'eccentricity.'

Suppose, for a moment, that you selectively choose who's kitchen you think is clean enough to eat food from.  People see you try their food.  It's delicious.  You eat it up.  Then Violet, who might be one gene away from literally being a filthy pig, decides she will bring some food for others to try.  You've already eaten someone else's food.  She saw you eat it.  TROUBLE!  Now you really have to decline the offer, as meekly as possible.  "I'm full," you tell her.  Lie.  "That's okay," she says.  "Just try one bite and tell me what you think of it."  TROUBLE!  There's no way in hell you're eating her food.  You remember her telling you about her rat problem and how she caught one by stomping on it.  

When you premptively ban all food before there is an offer of food, it is essentially you saying, "It's not personal."  People cope well with it and all you might have to do is to remind them that you have an irrational mental hang up about food from people's homes.  They easily accept it because you've already set the stage.  But you HAVE to use the word "irrational."  People will not accept the notion if you try to defend it as something that makes sense.  It makes the concept a little more manageable for people to cope with, and though they don't understand it, well, they believe you don't understand it either, and that it just is.  

Back to honesty, back to the filter, back to the charity of sparing people's feelings.  We think offensive things about other people every day.  If we chose to unleash those thoughts on society, there would obviously be a retaliation strike and we don't want to deal with that.  I can certainly dish it out.  But I certainly don't want to take it, and not because I have a weak tolerance for meanness, because meanness is a false projection.  It's honesty.  I don't want to hear negative truths about myself.  I don't think any of us do.  The act of not being honest with negative thoughts and feelings about someone else is actually an act of self preservation.  There is no "high road" simply because you just want to spare someone else's feelings.  You are subconsciously quelling a retaliation blow to your ego.  

Believe it or not (though, how could one not at this point?), I think inwardly and assess situations mentally before I act.  But I move fast.  I suppose it means that I've had so much practice at it, I'm at a level of automation where people can't typically see the wheels turning.  I respond quickly to a million possibilities, choosing my perceived best option in nanoseconds.  I often wonder if everyone thinks this way, keeping that inner promise of negative honesty a secret, moving forward, compartmentalizing, cataloging perceptions, and choosing better options than instincts suggest.  

In the end, and I guess as a bottom line, please understand its not personal.  I do not want to eat your cockroach meatloaf.  Not today, not ever.

The State of the Union

I'm trying to decide what to write about today; feeling tired and its rainy out, so I'm just sort of coming off the cuff today with a few thoughts I've had lately.  An open mind is better than a closed mind.  I'm always open to possibilities beyond my comfort zone.  True or false, I dabble in the business of writing fiction, so any idea is always a good one to me.

I typically don't post on politics, and I plan to keep the status quo here, but right wing, left wing, it doesn't matter, aren't you people embarrassed by your leaders?  What has happened to government?

  Once upon a time, there were some people that wanted to be free from religious persecution.  They moved to a place where they could practice their religion without that fear.  And that fear was replaced by a new fear: hostile natives.  They did the best they could, built homes, created families, etc.  Then they decided that they wanted to control how their tax money would be spent and didn't like the government that had established itself as the leader of this new area.  So there were protests which eventually led to a war.  A lot of people died.  Strangely, the rebels won and were free to establish their own laws and taxes and overall to govern themselves in this new area.  The sun rose on a new nation and everyone was hopeful.  The people of that new area decided that there should never be one person in power, because they knew that one person in charge meant that they could be forced to abide by a whim.  The people wanted the people to be in charge.  This way, they could have a say in what new rules and laws would be enacted.  

They got the help of this one guy, who they knew was capable of writing well and asked him to write a set of rules that would forever keep the people in charge of themselves, so that no one person would ever be able to control everything and thus make the people that decided to live in this new area victims of someone else's tyranny.  Ultimately, this set of rules would prevent the situation they were trying to escape when they fled to the new area.  Again, everyone was hopeful.

Things went well.  The people began to multiply and it soon became obvious that the people, since their numbers were becoming so great, would have to decide upon an individual to be a spokesman for them.  Leaders emerged and the people decided that the spokesmen should be people that could represent their particular town or village.  The people knew that not everyone could easily agree on things so they decided that the best way to go would be to let the chosen leader of their town or village lean in a direction that appeased most of the people in that town or village.  Essentially, he would speak up on things that was important to most of the people in the town or village he represented.  The people of each of these regions patted themselves on the back.  They now had one voice.

The area grew.  Years passed.  People, with hard work and human ingenuity, could become a relevant member of society.  They found that despite humble beginnings they could achieve greatness if they made a meaningful contribution to society.  The shackles of status or class were not forever etched in their family's history.  The individual could now achieve more than he could ever imagine.  But, of course, hard work and the worth of that hard work played a significant role in a person's potential future.  Turning a profit was admired and respected by all.

At some point, the power of those chosen leaders of the villages and towns corrupted them and they quietly made back door deals against the will of the people that had chosen them as leaders.  The deals provided the chosen leaders with power or wealth and in most cases, both.  The leaders wanted to make sure that their families would be forever taken care of, but they did it at the expense of the people they represented's wishes.  Often the people didn't even know; they blindly trusted the leaders they chose.  The leaders began to manipulate the circumstances of the people's choices so that the leaders could stay in power.  Some people caught on, but they had a hard time convincing others to beleive it and if the majority didn't believe in the corruption, the corruption would inherently continue.  That, coupled with the compromised system of choosing representatives allowed the corruption to infest this new system of government.

More years passed.  The people that had originally moved to this new area to escape persecution and persue freedom were long gone, but their children's children were still there and a lot were desperately clinging onto the tradition and ideas that their ancestors fought so hard to achieve.  Unfortunately, most of their children's children didn't fully understand what they had sacrificed for freedom and became complacent.  They allowed their chosen leaders to power grab and amass so much wealth that they couldn't get out from under the oppression of the leader.  The leaders, however, knew the underpinning situation and continued to fool the people with empty promises.  The people didn't know the promises were empty, and frankly had stopped thinking for themselves, since the leaders had most of them convinced that the leaders themselves could think for everyone.

There was a shift in what was important to most people.  They were trying to make ends meet, to feed their families.  They didn't have time to concern themselves with the freedom their ancestors died for.  That battle, in their opinion, was already won.  

Quietly, a new battle had begun.  Like the militia who hid behind trees to hit their marks instead of lining up in formal battle.  The government was sneaking behind trees, firing, then quickly retreating back into a secret foxhole.  It was so quick, one could question if it ever happened at all.  The people's freedoms were quietly dropping away from them as they contended with their everyday struggles, oblivious that their leaders had stopped representing them and had begun an engagement of self preservation.  

More time passed.  Today, our elected officials break our trust and more than half the population is oblivious or supports it because they believe it's in the best interest of the nation.  Long gone are the days where we were accurately represented.  Re-zoning, vote tampering, law changing, and purchasing power of our elected leaders prevents the common voice from being heard.  Laws are now putting everyone in a choke hold so that achieving the American Dream has become more difficult than it ever has been.  Once upon a time, one could change their stars.  Government is taking away the ability to raise our station in life.  It is choking out the creativity and ingenuity that made us a giant in the first place.  

My fear is that the wheels are in motion, and the brake line is cut.

Choose

There are thirty people in a room.  There are explosives tied to these thirty people.  There is a madman,  in a remote location with his finger on the detonator, and he is waiting for you to make a decision.  You say the word, and he will push the button, annihilating those thirty people.  But also, in his other hand is another button that he is just as willing to push.  All you have to do is tell him which one.  This other button can remotely detonate a different location, on the other side of town.  This other room has a single person in it.  Which button do you tell him to push?  There are no other choices.  He is going to press one with or without you telling him which one.  If you do decide to tell him which one to push, he will comply with your wishes, but no matter what, he is going to push one.

We now arrive at a moral dilemma.  How could we possibly choose someone to die?  Who are we to play God?  Well, the obvious choice is to save the thirty people by losing the one, right?  Could you really tell this madman, "Yes, go ahead and kill the guy."  Congratulations, you just saved thirty people!  But, conversely, you will have to live with the fact that you are responsible for someone's death.  You may justify it to yourself because of the thirty you saved.  

Let's think about this again, but with a minor change.  Imagine the one person alone in room number two is a loved one.  A spouse, a child, mother, father, whatever.  Someone you love very deeply.  Now what?  Still save the thirty people?  

For a while, I thought about it and decided, "Nope!  I will not make the call.  I will let this lunatic with the two buttons decide which one to press and then I can live on, conscience clear of any wrong doing because it was not me who decided that someone should die.  Of course!," I said to myself.  "Well played.  I guessed the correct answer, ethics in tact."  But the more I thought about, the less sure I was.  What about this:  the madman will press both buttons if you don't come to a decision.  This puts a kink in the idea that not deciding is a morally sound choice.  More people die if you don't tell him which to press.

The point I guess I'm trying to make, albeit in a non-intuitive way, is that sometimes we are forced to choose the lesser of two evils.  When no choice is a good choice, at least maybe one could be a better choice.  We often meander through life in this way, making acceptable choices given a buffet of choices, some good, some bad.  Then, as in a game of chess, we sacrifice a good choice for a bad one, because sometimes the risk of a bad choice is acceptable.  Just like sacrificing a pawn to get in a position to take a better piece, a rook, perhaps.

Our goal, in life, is to make good choices more often than bad, and to delineate the lesser of two evils and choose that one, and to weigh the consequences of a bad choice and decide if it is worth making.  Most people, I would guess, make decent choices.  But I wonder, too, what makes a choice decent?  If I benefit from a choice, is it then a good choice?  Ideally, and I'm really only postulating since I just don't know what the right answer really is, or if there even IS one, a person should settle on a choice that benefits one's self while not infringing on someone else's ability to make good choices.

I would like to think of this as the meaning of life:  to be faced with a cavalcade of choices and always try to choose either the best ethical option or the lesser of evils.  Depending on your particular religious belief, if we are to be judged upon death, those choices become extremely important--in fact, it is what we are being judged against.  And even though it's a BIG no-no, let's face it, we judge the hell out of others too.  How people view you is wholly based on what choices you have made and how predictable you will be when you are confronted with a future decision.  When we feel that we can predict, with some level of accuracy, what someone else's choice in a given matter will be, we feel like we know them.  We are comfortable with them.  Our entire life is defined by the choices we make, is what I guess I'm saying.  And we choose to be close with people that would make similar choices.

When they are cornered and must make the best choice among bad options, it is then that we see a person's mettle, it is then that a leader can be born, or a will can be shattered.  Decisions can be tough sometimes, and hindsight can always force someone to second guess, no matter the choice.

So the clock is ticking.  Choose wisely.  Look at the big picture and never, under ANY circumstances, get into a situation where you must decide who gets blown up.