@Wudan07

икони цениI guess what I was ranting about last time is ‘the power of positive thinking’. But when you hear it like that, it makes it sound like one of those things you discuss in health class, like good body image or self-esteem. It seems like something you leave behind at some point, because things get real.

They do, don’t they?

Or do they? Remember when I asked you to close your eyes and try to capture something about that moment? Our minds tend to take in negative impressions and hold them very dearly. This is likely because our brains are wired to remember negative things easier – at one point in history, remembering a negative fact (like what plants to avoid, or setting oneself on fire) was important to survival. Now that we’re civilized, being happy is a focus, but our brains aren’t very good at storing and recalling a good thought as they are at remembering a bad thought. However, I asked you to capture a moment with your eyes closed. I’m trying to trick you in to capturing a happy thought because your instinct is to close your eyes only when you are safe, and often when you are safe you are among friends or family or doing an activity that you enjoy, which is what I was trying to go after. By capturing that moment, by marking it as a comfortable moment by closing your eyes, you’ll recall it as such.

Sometimes, it’s just good to close your eyes for a minute.

I hope you understand what I mean.

I’d like to think I live in an imaginary world where the only person who gets shot walking through a bad neighborhood is the person who felt like they might get shot. That somehow, putting that negative thought out to the universe, that negative burst of energy, would somehow attract the wrong sort of attention.

What I’m talking about, of course, are self-fulfilling prophesies. We live in a world of victims, because we plan for being victimized, and in a sense, we encourage it. Ever found yourself, standing in the middle of a train-wreck, saying to yourself, I predicted this? If you already think situation (A) will result in outcome (B), the outcome is a foregone conclusion. The train was wrecked before it left the situation. I think we’re conditioned to see ourselves as victims. Expecting a specific result from a specific action is a rational way of looking at things, isn’t it?

I have a homework assignment for you. Sometime, this weekend, close your eyes and try to ‘capture’ something about that moment. Take that moment for you, and ignore all the outcomes from your ventures. Yes, you’ve got ships out there. Let’s ignore them. Let’s just have a moment where things are not a foregone conclusion. We’ll revisit this in our next session.

Til next time, stop thinking so rationally. Stop being so real. Start being surreal.

Православни икониAfter 12 days of working I finally got a weekend. I got some sun, got to visit with family, got dunked in the water, inhaled the water (got dunked so fast I didn’t get to take a breath, so I was very panicky.) But I made it out ok, just a few scratches and a sad reminder of how out-of-shape I’ve gotten.

Anyways, it’s been a long time and I haven’t posted. Pepper’s doing great, taking a step or two here and there, but she’s not committing to walking because she’s such a speedy crawler.

The boy’s been doing great, he’s had a very busy summer and I think that has helped him enjoy it. He finally has taken swimming lessons (yay!) and I think he liked it a lot.

I had taken up some serious trophy hunting for Red Dead Redemption (a video game set in the early 20th century West) and I’m at an impasse. The boy and I had played through Dead Rising 2 but I think we’ve settled on starting the game over so that we’ll be better prepared for the final boss fights.

All in all, a good weekend. While we were out (sometime between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning) someone got in my car and rifled through the garbage in there, I’m guessing it was kids looking for a spare key so they could take my car for a joyride. Kind of disconcerting, feels like my personal space was violated, but I’m glad nothing was taken. If I had to guess a culprit it would be the next door neighbor’s gangsta friends, which is annoying since there’s no real course of action to take. No cop is going to care since nothing was taken, but it seems like it should be against some kind of law to go in to a person’s car and dump everything out of the glove box and center console.

Ok, I made some bread. It’s not terrific or anything, except that it is ROUND. Sukie got this rad bread-making Pyrex dish that makes round loaves. So how did it go?

Yes, you get to look at all the stuff on top of my stove.

There was a Twitter-Meme a few weeks ago that got me thinking.

It was basically where you tweet at your 16-year old self. In browsing through these tweets there was a universal theme; that people had regret about the pain they had experiences, but that it would be worth it.

Ok, this is true. I think I’ve mentioned before the merits of a life where you get knocked around a bit. It makes you stronger, but I’m certain that the negative needs to get tempered with positive. Enough to keep you sustained and pressing forward.

Back to the meme. I was a pretty angsty teenager, trying to mete some sensibility from my meager middle-class upbringing. I was, as we all do (in an ironic way), trying to figure out who *I* was. In thinking about this, I came up with the lyric:

When I was young \ I wanted a better world \ Where better words \ Were spoken by better people

This really perfectly describes my worldview as a teenager who believed the whole world needed to bend to my will. The world was messed up, and I just wanted to rule it. This lyric also rang true for me, because I recognize there is a duality to my nature, nature herself has multiple facets, but that is a post for another time.

It also did not ring true, because a world where better people speak better words is not a world where I would be speaking; you and I are imperfect and perfectly so. Time might yet find us upon golden shores and with fancy meals and good company; this is the dream, it is true, but it is not the reality, at least, not right now for me (though the company is top-shelf.) I believe that as each new improvement upon my situation is achieved, new ones will arise to challenge me, and the day when challenges are scarce and foes are fiew might never come, but the journey is the destination.

I am, to this day, just as full of angst, and just as full of a need for self-discovery.

I do not believe in regret, either, because I am committed to enjoying my life, and if there were mistakes that were made, they were mine to make. The imperfection is manifest in the result: if I can live with it, and not let it take me over, I am the victor and the mistake is null.

So what did I tweet to my 16-year old self? “They’ll never find the bodies”

Well despite Carebear and Frik being out of town, we had our Chile Verde + Board Games night. The chile verde was the best it has ever been, I tend to think this is because it simmered inside a wok this year. Sukie did all the work, LINK and I worked hard to get the homestead in presentable shape.

It was pretty good, we played hand and foot and Zombies!!! mostly, though I am starting not to like Zombies!!! so much. Probably because of those exclamation points on the end of the name there.

We also picked up Toy Story 3 on BluRay, it is a truly epic movie.

Tonight Sukie made a chicken pot pie.

Oh, and UDOT is horrible for allowing contractors to make all kinds of ungodly noise in the middle of the freaking night. Real classy, guys.

I’ve updated the sidebar widgets to be like they were, only better. I still need to fix the sidebar to add blogs, and I’d like to switch to using pictures instead of icons. Anyone have issues with me using their actual picture instead of icons? Should I just think of something that reminds me of you instead? Or something random? A totem creature, perhaps?

Ok, so it’s the default layout for now. Gravatars in comments supported, yay!

I’ll be modifying the comments and sidebar friends list auto-thingy to utilize gravatars instead of dumb old icons, so if you have one, put the URL to your avatar in the comments. It’ll be fun!

I just finished watching Clash of the Titans on Netflix – the old one. The effects are actually pretty good I’d say. It’s one of those things where they didn’t have the tools at the time to make the film exactly as they intended, but they did alright. I’m curious to see the new one, I haven’t seen it yet, and I hadn’t seen this one since I was in Junior High.

It’s been a few months, and we’re almost at November – Pepper will be 6 months old!

So much has happened this year, the summer just zipped right by and Pepper got to be a healthy sized baby. It kind of sucks because there’s a ton of clothes that she never even wore, but oh well, I’d rather she get big and strong than be small.

A guy at Gamestop (yes, that Gamestop) asked me if we were feeding her steak. I laughed because she was once so small she couldn’t keep her body temperature, so bigger is better in my mind.

I’ve recently changed modes in Twitter, I’ve un-followed some celebrities and I’ve started to follow local Salt Lake people. So far I’ve drastically enjoyed it better and it helps keep me from feeling like I’m lost in a sea of people and faces. I still follow some big names, but I think tipping the Twitter scale to a more local approach (even when you don’t really know them) is novel.

I’ll tweet about this and some of the people who’ve been kind enough to follow-me-back (and I don’t think you necessarily *have-to* follow me back, it’s not like you actually know me, and even then, I’d have to respect you if you didn’t. I’ll try to be interesting, but at the end of the day, being interesting can be exhausting. Feel free to comment on that) will possibly read this post and be like, oh, so that’s why @Wudan07 follows me. Interesting. In my own way, I found only one or two of them independently, then as they RT or reply to each other I’ll go and read that other person’s tweets and possibly follow them.

I think what sets Twitter apart from other social network sites is that it doesn’t try to be ‘the last goddamned site you will ever go to’ and for that I would like to initiate a slow clap, that grows slowly in to grandiose applause.

Twitter still tries to be elusive, I think that may be by design, but I think the death of it is when your mom would start using it. Your mom won’t get the 160 character (140?) limit, or what a character is. She’ll go back to Facebook and post and re-post some crap about bags of monies or some tongue-in-cheek naughty where-do-you-like-to-put-your-purse-down tidbit.

The last thing I don’t like about Facebook is that it’s just not secure; it seems like it’s bad design and an attempt at technology lock-in that just seems like it’s not there; a better technology will come along and consume it.