The whole thing about lighting a single candle instead of cursing the darkness only makes sense to a person who prefers seeing to cursing. The numbers, however, of such people sometimes seem distressingly low.
Is cursing the darkness really THAT satisfying?
In Acne Society, the prestigious role of “Visible on the Drivers License Photo” is trumped by the aristocratic position of “Visible on the Passport Photo.” Being “Visible on the High School Yearbook Photo” means nothing, though, as there’s nothing special about THAT achievement.
I’ve never found worse judges of characters than people who claim to be excellent judges of character. It’s almost as bad as finding “empaths.”
This is not to say there aren’t people who are good judges of character. They simply aren’t ostentatious about it.
I am testing out a theory that compromise is only an assurance that people who mistrust each other achieve a seemingly equal level of discomfort.
One of the requirements of compromise is that everyone involved be convinced that their deal is marginally better than the deals offered to the others, so secrecy is critical.
Making it sound so scary just encourages me to seek consensus even more, which is usually a lot of work, and requires transparency, but as time goes on, I see more and more the advantages of transparency and consensus.
Our value is not in the things we DO — although that has some value — because that commodifies us and makes us a machine. Our value is in who we ARE — how we are DIFFERENT than our fellows. That is our unique contribution to the world around us.
People who understand that discover that they are much more powerful than they could ever imagine, and people who have the ability to wake others up to that realization are worth their weight in gold.
Fantastic name for a coffee shop. Horrible name for a sports bar.
Just in case you were looking for a name for your new business. 
Are you from a completely different planet, or what? I understand that you must exist, at least to satisfy the anal retentive Manner Mavins among us, but is it really necessary to vary from the Standard Spoon Shape that is designed for human mouths? Honestly, we would neither care or notice if you were, in fact identical. This weird shape you’ve adopted, though? The deep wide bowl shape? Forget it, Soup Spoon. I’m tired of abrading the edges of my upper lip, only to still end up with a soup slick at the bottom of the spoon. If you were a bit smaller, I could discreetly turn you upside down once you’re safely in my mouth (and let my tongue take care of business), but you have combined your ungainly shape with a bizarre size change such that the only way I could spin you in my mouth would be to dislocate my jaw like an anaconda trying to eat an emu.
So, I’ll be setting you aside in the future. Don’t be jealous — just fix your shit.
What do you do with a miracle you can’t share, or one that CONTRADICTS what you believe? What if your hedge casts a perfect shadow of a Biblical Event that they DON’T talk about in Sunday School, such as the Crucifixion Orgy?
I just can’t bring myself to accept as an authority a supreme supernatural being that wouldn’t have this sort of sense of humor.
Improvisation is an amazing thing and what’s so paradoxical about it is that people simultaneously value improvisational skills, yet at the same time either don’t know or refuse to see as learnable the basics of improvisation, which are VERY simple skills that can be learned quickly and easily practiced.
For example, there is a common “warm-up” game called “Yes, and…” which is easy to understand, but surprisingly difficult to maintain. It works like this: The first person makes a small statement, such as “I have a dog.” and the next person adds “Yes, and…” and then adds something else to the previous statement, such as “Yes, and he’s well-behaved.” Play continues around in the circle, several times, all adding things to the idea of the dog, until it just gets silly. The key, however, is to always ADD to the idea — never to contradict what’s already been said. This exercises a thought process called “accepting the offer.” Accepting an offer is simple to do, but much harder than it looks. People seem to want to be iconoclasts and mavericks and contradict a story, just to “make their mark” but this game forces each player to be a contributing part of a larger story, instead of a sole author.
This is a skill that is nothing but helpful in life. Because most of us interact with other people, it behooves us to do so with an eye toward cooperation. But, surprisingly, this can prove… difficult.
Go ahead and try playing the game. Watch what happens. Keep at it, though. Keep practicing accepting “offers” in conversations, keep thinking “Yes, and…” and see how much richer your interactions with other people become. You might be very surprised. Surprised and delighted.
Yes, and it’s fun, too.
I’ve never understood why the biggest “No Trespassing” signs are always strapped to the ugliest, nastiest, most uninviting pieces of property.
I would think that the fear of catching a disease from the terrifyingly wide variety of trash and grass-covered rust magnets would be enough to cause any intelligent human pause.
The key, maybe, is what I consider “intelligent.”
Perhaps this is why the signs have to be so big.
It occurs to me that if you live your life all about forgiveness, then you necessarily have to live your life looking under people’s skirts for things to forgive. Without “crimes,” then there is nothing to “forgive,” I think.
That somehow seems wrong.
It’s not that I think one ought NOT to forgive, but more like it needs to be in the proper perspective as a Defining Characteristic.
I think it’s better to get the forgiving part done and flushed out of the system quick and to not be ostentatious about it. The “forgiveness” part of the cycle really ought to be somewhat comparable to the “crime” part of the cycle, but maybe less so. I mean, shouldn’t forgiveness be a Boolean value? Otherwise, one comes across as being a bit of a judgmental asshole.
Although I suppose I could be wrong on that…
I’ve gradually come to understand that there are two kinds of criticism.
First, there’s the kind of criticism that makes you shake your head on the inside, murmuring “Aw man, you just don’t get it.” It might come from a well-meaning place, but it’s not actually connected to what it’s criticizing.
The second kind is the kind of criticism that makes you shout “D’oh!” the instant you see it, because you should have SEEN the issue before someone mentioned it and now that they have, you just can’t believe you’ve missed it all this time.
The former type of criticism you can safely ignore. The latter type you should pay attention to.
Music stores be closing up shop. Ain’t it a crime? No more record stores, no more places where old cardboard and vinyl smells wonderful. No more places where people gather and talk story for hours about their favorite band. Probably driven out of business by all those pirates. Those bad nasty pirates.
Weepy, weepy, weepy.
Bullshit.
Okay, just so I’m totally clear on this, I DO think it sucks when second-hand stores have to close, because CDs last a lot longer than records, especially if you don’t rollerskate on ‘em. And people who work at second-hand music stores (which, by the way, still usually sell vinyl!) LOVE music and will happily talk with you about music.
So, those closing up, yeah, that sucks. They’re often small businesses, and I’m very pro-small-business (after all, I have a small business, too).
But the big chains closing up, the big chains finding that people are buying DVDs and not CDs and somehow this is the fault of pirating, and somehow the customers are being bastards and not buying CDs anymore? Weepy, weepy, weepy. On THAT, I call bullshit.
For those of us old enough, here’s a very brief history lesson:
Secondhand record stores had to FIGHT to resell music because they were selling it CHEAP and the labels didn’t like that. The big new-music chains didn’t like that. There were lawsuits. The secondhand stores won. Bully for them.
When CDs started coming out and people started bitching about it, the labels and the big chains told ‘em “No, no, the process to make CDs is CHEAPER than the process to make LPs. Your music will be CHEAPER!” This, of course, was an outright whopper of a lie. A bald-faced mayor-caught-with-his-dick-in-the-cheerleader’s-mouth lie. At the time, LP’s ran about seven bucks and CDs came in around fifteen. TWICE the price! The secondhand stores told us “Look, we still carry vinyl and we love music.” But because people spent fifteen bucks on a CD, they were less ready to part with their CDs, and it took a while for ‘em to get to the secondhand stores.
When movies came out on VHS, they were spendy bastards. A movie typically cost eighty to a hundred bucks to buy. I’m not shitting you! Think of THAT next time you’re browsing through Wal-Mart. Customers just plain didn’t buy ‘em. I mean, c’mon, what the fuck were those idiots thinking? Blank VHS tapes cost a few bucks, so what were we paying for? Then movies started dropping in price. A LOT. You could buy a VHS movie for ten bucks within a year or so. Now, friends of mine advised me that they had heard such tapes damaged your VCR, which of course was pure liquid bullshit. Even if it wasn’t, people BOUGHT ‘em. people bought shitloads of VHS tapes, once they dropped below the magical scorenote threshold. For every one person who was willing to cough up eighty bucks for a copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark (which, by the way, I have watched and rewatched a MILLION times!), there was a hundred or more who were willing to buy it at twenty bucks.
This is important to realize.
Feel free to ask Mom for help with the math on that one.
The same trend continues in DVDs, by the way. Sure, if you feel you have too much money, you can buy fancy boxed sets and other overpriced garbage, but a basic movie sells if it’s under twenty bucks.
And it sells ESPECIALLY well if it’s under ten bucks.
If you don’t believe me, go to Wal-Mart. Manufacturing movies on DVD is quite probably the CHEAPEST way to reproduce a movie EVER. it’s so cheap that you find them in bins for five bucks. They’re so cheap that you find them in the freakin’ DOLLAR STORE.
And they sell.
So.
Back to those folks who looked us in the face and told us that CDs would be cheaper than records, that CD processes were cheap? We KNOW how cheap it is to make CDs. We can do it at home, and, I assure you, we do. However offensive the idea of mixing our own music must seem to the industry, we’re doing it at home. So, if CD technology is so, so, so, so fucking cheap, then why, when I want to buy a CD, are the prices typically just shy of twenty dollars?
Why?
Why are CDs twenty bucks each, but DVDs ten or five? Why would I pay twenty bucks for the soundtrack to The Rocketeer (hey, I’m nuts for soundtracks), when i can buy the movie for $9.99. On DVD. With extras.
Why?
This is why the big box record stores are going out of business. They are going out of business because, unfortunately, they are stuck with a product that everyone KNOWS is cheap to make, cheap to package, and cheap to distribute, yet is priced to tear flesh. The proof is in the aisle right next door. The DVD aisle.
Buy a CD for twenty bucks, or buy the concert DVD of the same exact performance for ten?
This is why CDs aren’t selling. Because, however much they might claim otherwise, people don’t want to be fucked in such a transparent fashion.
But there’s still hope for people who are weeping and gnashing their teeth about how the industry’s a poor victim. Here’s the hope:
Secondhand record stores.
Go buy your music from them. Please.
And talk to them.
And thank them.
(and they still have vinyl!)
You cannot rescue someone who has built their own prison.
The walls might be gauze and the locks insubstantial, but they weren’t built for you anyway.
Besides, you should be working on your own prison.
It’s funny how the people who happily embrace “I can’t” bristle at the thought of being told “you can’t.”
Not funny in a “ha-ha” kind of way, though.
I guess it depends on who’s telling them, and why the declaration is so important.
I always try the opposite of what the door tells me. If the door says “Pull,” I try pushing it. If the door says “Push,” I try pulling it. I think the whole idea of marking doors “Push” or “Pull” is ridiculous. How many different ways can a door be operated? Only two. So, basically, you have a fifty percent chance of getting it right and if you don’t, then no harm done and you can just do the opposite.
Most of the time, the doors can be operated both ways.
When I compare the amount of energy needed to push or pull a door erroneously, compared to the amount of energy required to produce fancy signs that instruct us to “push” or “pull” (when most of the time it doesn’t matter anyway), it makes me think we really have some weird priorities.
And furthermore, when I sit and watch one of these doors, quite often, people try it the wrong way anyway. Even with a door marked “Pull,” they’ll try pushing, or vice versa. So, not only are we wasting energy on signs, we’re wasting energy on signs that lot of people don’t even bother reading (unless, like me, they’re experimenting).
(if you think it’s funny to watch someone trying to push a door marked “Pull” or vice person, note that it’s seventy-three percent funnier to watch people try to push/pull doors that are turn-a-knob-to-open. Once they finally figure it out, you can tell from their expression that they’re mad at the door.)
If ever I should be confronted by an ultra-powerful space alien, and it tells me that unless I show it something uniquely contributory, it will destroy the Earth, I will offer it a blackberry milkshake.
I will not offer it a blackberry milkshake because I think blackberry milkshakes are uniquely Human gifts to the Universe (although I think they are). I will offer it a blackberry milkshake because so many humans have a deadly lactose intolerance, and I’d basically be gambling the great taste of the shake would distract it long enough for it to either die outright, or start vomiting so uncontrollably that it would think we are tough-as-shit creatures not to be fucked with.
And even if none of that worked, I’d at least get a blackberry shake out of the deal.
Don’t do the things you do because it will make you popular. If you do that, then you may or may not end up being popular, but you will be empty.
Do the things you do because your soul demands it and follow scrupulously those demands, as if they are given to you by the most important person on Earth.
As before, you may or may not end up popular, but at least your soul will be intact, and you will have deceived no one who offers admiration.
The problem with “mute points” is that the folks who claim to be identifying them don’t know what a “moot point” really is, nor do they know what being “mute” means, although I wish they were better versed on the latter.
If you act like a pawn, then no matter how many courtly figures you arrange about you, you are still being a pawn.