Let's Process Our Feelings II

Off Topic
901

[quote]EmilyQ wrote:
Do you really believe it was about women wanting men to vacuum? Orion, it was about men punching women with closed fists and the women not having the wherewithal to get out. It was about men flaunting infidelity and women standing by powerlessly. It was about homely or “big boned” women having to tolerate and cover up for drunken pigs because they weren’t well-bred enough to go to college and become teachers or nurses. It was about shitty sex because no foreplay, or outright rape.

Yes, things have gotten distorted and there are many negatives currently for both sides as a result of the shift, but it was never about household tasks. Jesus.

I say this as a woman who LIKES traditional gender roles but relishes the security of an education and career.[/quote]

I wonder how you know all that, given that these were societies were the “women and children first” maxim was alive and well.

Notice the order and that it does not include the "big boned women are not really women " caveat clause.

Be that as it may, it is still no reason to make men pay through the nose to support womens choices without any real benefit to them.

The whole “well life did suck for women” spiel does not impress me, because:

  • why would I care?

  • why would I have to prop them up so it does not? Strong and independent, remember?

  • it will always suck for someone, why men? Given that they finance the show, you know?

902

[quote]orion wrote:

[quote]EmilyQ wrote:
Do you really believe it was about women wanting men to vacuum? Orion, it was about men punching women with closed fists and the women not having the wherewithal to get out. It was about men flaunting infidelity and women standing by powerlessly. It was about homely or “big boned” women having to tolerate and cover up for drunken pigs because they weren’t well-bred enough to go to college and become teachers or nurses. It was about shitty sex because no foreplay, or outright rape.

Yes, things have gotten distorted and there are many negatives currently for both sides as a result of the shift, but it was never about household tasks. Jesus.

I say this as a woman who LIKES traditional gender roles but relishes the security of an education and career.[/quote]

I wonder how you know all that, given that these were societies were the “women and children first” maxim was alive and well.

Notice the order and that it does not include the "big boned women are not really women " caveat clause.

Be that as it may, it is still no reason to make men pay through the nose to support womens choices without any real benefit to them.

The whole “well life did suck for women” spiel does not impress me, because:

  • why would I care?

  • why would I have to prop them up so it does not? Strong and independent, remember?

  • it will always suck for someone, why men? Given that they finance the show, you know?

[/quote]

Well, they don’t finance as much of it as before. More girls than boys in college, and all?

Anyway, the current game rules are in place and we can choose to either play to win or not. Of course we first have to decide what constitutes a “win.” For me it’s finding someone nice to be with and enjoying my life of chores that are shared but skewing toward a traditional division, and shared financial contribution, possibly not level for a variety of reasons. I’ll wear pretty underwear because I want to and he’ll do brave things to do with bugs and mice presumably because he wants to. And then? Profit.

You can refuse to play, of course, and sit bitterly on the sidelines wishing for a complete collapse. But why?

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid. – Franz Kafka

903

[quote]EmilyQ wrote:

You can refuse to play, of course, and sit bitterly on the sidelines wishing for a complete collapse. But why?

[/quote]

Because refusing to play is the strongest play there is.

So, women want to fuck the bad boys in their prime and collect their beta bucks later?

No.

Want to tax me through the nose to support ze strong independent womynz?

No.

Granted, sheer refusal is a bit hard for me when it comes to that and you are probably not that interested in Austrian tax low, Konzernbesteuerung and whatnot…

Let women 40 and upwards swallow anti anxiety and anti depression meds by the truckloads, let them whail where all the good men are at, let them realize that they the men who would wait diligently until they were ready to start a family with their then barely functioning uteruses are just not there…

Men will never unite to fix this, the intrasexual competition is just too strong, but one by one, men can just get up from the table and turn their backs on society.

There can be no civilization without us, just a not giving a fuck by a substantial minority is more than enough.

904

[quote]orion wrote:

[quote]EmilyQ wrote:

You can refuse to play, of course, and sit bitterly on the sidelines wishing for a complete collapse. But why?

[/quote]

Because refusing to play is the strongest play there is.

So, women want to fuck the bad boys in their prime and collect their beta bucks later?

No.

Want to tax me through the nose to support ze strong independent womynz?

No.

Granted, sheer refusal is a bit hard for me when it comes to that and you are probably not that interested in Austrian tax low, Konzernbesteuerung and whatnot…

Let women 40 and upwards swallow anti anxiety and anti depression meds by the truckloads, let them whail where all the good men are at, let them realize that they the men who would wait diligently until they were ready to start a family with their then barely functioning uteruses are just not there…

Men will never unite to fix this, the intrasexual competition is just too strong, but one by one, men can just get up from the table and turn their backs on society.

There can be no civilization without us, just a not giving a fuck by a substantial minority is more than enough. [/quote]

Um, the strong independent womynz are paying taxes, too, aren’t they? It’s the unemployed or underemployed, men and women alike, who aren’t.

From what I’ve seen and heard the women who give a fuck at 40 gave a fuck before that, too. The women who want to fuck bad boys at 25 seem to remain pretty much on that track, too, but with reduced options. This is why you don’t go after highly sexualized women or their male counterpart. They age poorly, with priorities that spoil in the long run. Who wants to be the mate of someone who shows a lack of standards?

That is NOT to say don’t look for women or men who like sex - that’s what healthy people want - it’s just not the healthy adult’s foremost accomplishment.

906

Haha. That’s our show for the whole week. I’m off to a continuing ed thing, then a weekend with Hockey’s family. There’s a baptism. Going to a college play with me if and when that happens will seem like the bee’s knees to him in comparison to the things he’s dragged me to! (Not that I mind. I’m happy to tag along to pretty much anywhere he wants to go.)

907

Wait, I have more to say about that. I’m probably making a quarter of what the doctors at my practice do (although the Dept of Labor thing suggested I’m making 62%, so I dunno) but in all other ways I’m treated the same, so my continuing education budget as a “provider” is the same as theirs. I’m used to having to hope I’ll get to go to 6 hour trainings a couple of hours away to get the credits I need. This week my best friend and I will be staying in a bed and breakfast in A Place People Like To Go, with class in the morning and afternoons free. We’re beside ourselves with glee over both the vacation and time together and the class itself, which looks cool as hell. I keep making people listen to the course description, lol. We’ve packed cheese and wine and chocolate and sun screen.

My feeling: a jumping up and down while clapping sort of thing.

908

[quote]orion wrote:

[quote]EmilyQ wrote:

You can refuse to play, of course, and sit bitterly on the sidelines wishing for a complete collapse. But why?

[/quote]

Because refusing to play is the strongest play there is.

So, women want to fuck the bad boys in their prime and collect their beta bucks later?

No.

Want to tax me through the nose to support ze strong independent womynz?

No.

Granted, sheer refusal is a bit hard for me when it comes to that and you are probably not that interested in Austrian tax low, Konzernbesteuerung and whatnot…

Let women 40 and upwards swallow anti anxiety and anti depression meds by the truckloads, let them whail where all the good men are at, let them realize that they the men who would wait diligently until they were ready to start a family with their then barely functioning uteruses are just not there…

Men will never unite to fix this, the intrasexual competition is just too strong, but one by one, men can just get up from the table and turn their backs on society.

There can be no civilization without us, just a not giving a fuck by a substantial minority is more than enough. [/quote]

One last thing - orion, how can you want to stand alone, bitterly holding down some imaginary fort with a handful of other angry men when you could have something like this:

Certainly the young woman in the vid is especially lovely, but this scene in its essentials is playing out all over the world. Without you.

909

Offtopic of the current thread…

I’m in some initial phases where I haven’t yet made much sense of things, but I’m really starting to see the [negative] impact of some of the changes I’ve made in the past couple years.

Sticking with the Covey quadrant model of Urgent and Important, I’ve always been pretty good at focusing on the stuff that’s both Urgent and Important, and especially been able to filter out and focus on the Important stuff among all the Urgent stuff. My problem is that as I’ve gotten myself to a much better place from a stability standpoint, career-wise, financially, etc. not much is ever Urgent or even Important anymore. And as such, there’s been a bit of a disconnect between “the time I have available” and “the time I actually need to spend on stuff”.

So in effect, I went from spending most of my time focusing on Urgent and Important stuff in the past, to pretty much just coasting along, becoming complacent, since so few things fit in that quadrant. Anything else pretty much just gets ignored.

The result is I spend a lot of my time just browsing the web, watching TV, while at the same time letting clutter build up in my place. The “important” stuff like eating, drinking, washing clothes get taken care of on more of an as-needed basis rather than an ongoing basis. E.g., I might not have a clean pot or pan to cook dinner right now, but when I’m ready to cook dinner, it’ll be taken care of. There’s no urgency to clean it right now, but “cooking dinner” will eventually become both Urgent and Important and be taken care of, along with all the prerequisites.

I also used to work on some “important” projects in my free time, at least in a possibly delusional sense of “important to humanity as a whole” type of projects. Stuff like designing a way for people to transition to using solar power in their households, or building voice-activated software that was able to “emotionally connect” with its users (think Jarvis, but with empathy).

But [another] problem is I get so involved with those projects, and have such great “flow”, that I end up neglecting real life. There seems to be no real balance… it’s either obsessive hyperfocus or nothing. So I just stuck with nothing, and the last year or so I’ve tried to live a “normal” life with routines and “entertainment” and so on and so forth… but I just can’t seem to make that transition, and it’s not really any more or less satisfying. It definitely has made me less “interesting”.

I can rattle off a list of movies and TV series I’ve watched to completion in the last year, but I can’t really name a single thing I’ve studied or accomplished. For whatever reason, most people I know (and know fairly well) seem to be satisfied with this kind of a lifestyle… but I struggle with it.

And now that I look around at my place, trying to make sense of some things before I move (more specifically, as I pull myself away from the world of cheap entertainment and focus on reality), I’m starting to question a lot of things.

What triggered this though was running across a few of my old projects and realizing “oh, wow, I forgot I did this and I didn’t realize I used to be so awesome”. Makes me feel a bit stupid and unaccomplished now, something of a “has been”… even though I made those choices for myself and they were intentional (with the goal of… “fitting in better” + “learning to be content”).

The result of all this is going to be some change of some sort, I’m just not sure what it is. Either changing my belief systems themselves, or changing my activities to be more in line with my belief systems.

Secondarily, and related, I’m trying to find a good model for “what to keep” and “what to get rid of” before I move, based around a projected future lifestyle. I’m really tempted to cut ALL the clutter and just re-buy things as needed. About the only things that will stick around in that case are tools and art.

Which means it’s time to rewatch the first few episodes of Battlestar Galactica.

(I’ve allowed myself to procrastinate too, in the past couple years, and I think that’s been a huge mistake.)

910

And in that one post I made it blindingly obvious that my background is in software/math/sciences.

911

[quote]EmilyQ wrote:
Well, they don’t finance as much of it as before. More girls than boys in college, and all?
[/quote]
Well that often means the same rich dudes are financing even more to cover their student debt lol.

912

[quote]LoRez wrote:
What triggered this though was running across a few of my old projects and realizing “oh, wow, I forgot I did this and I didn’t realize I used to be so awesome”. Makes me feel a bit stupid and unaccomplished now, something of a “has been”… even though I made those choices for myself and they were intentional (with the goal of… “fitting in better” + “learning to be content”).
[/quote]
Are you saying that you’re actually less skilled now than you were when you were around my age?

913

[quote]spar4tee wrote:

[quote]LoRez wrote:
What triggered this though was running across a few of my old projects and realizing “oh, wow, I forgot I did this and I didn’t realize I used to be so awesome”. Makes me feel a bit stupid and unaccomplished now, something of a “has been”… even though I made those choices for myself and they were intentional (with the goal of… “fitting in better” + “learning to be content”).
[/quote]
Are you saying that you’re actually less skilled now than you were when you were around my age?[/quote]
No. The skills are all there, they just don’t get used very often these days. I think my proficiency might have slipped a bit here and there out of misuse.

It’s more just a lack of growth.

For a commonly used analogy, the skills required in wartime are not the same as those required in peacetime. And I haven’t successfully adapted.

It’s an interesting problem since it doesn’t really have any immediate visible negative effects. Not entirely sure what to do about it.

914

This may be related but I also noticed a shift in my thinking about computers and systems. In effect I’ve become more “vain”.

These days, I seem to value things more for their interfaces than their capabilities. E.g., the computer with a better keyboard/mouse/monitor is “nicer” than the one with a faster processor/RAM. But that could just be because most computers are performant enough for most anything I ever do. (While at the same time, are still not powerful enough to do the things I really want to do.)

I share the same attitudes toward a lot of things though now… preferring better interfaces over better capabilities. Obviously there’s still baselines for both.

I dunno, there’s something there but I can’t quite put my hand on it.

915

[quote]LoRez wrote:

[quote]spar4tee wrote:

[quote]LoRez wrote:
What triggered this though was running across a few of my old projects and realizing “oh, wow, I forgot I did this and I didn’t realize I used to be so awesome”. Makes me feel a bit stupid and unaccomplished now, something of a “has been”… even though I made those choices for myself and they were intentional (with the goal of… “fitting in better” + “learning to be content”).
[/quote]
Are you saying that you’re actually less skilled now than you were when you were around my age?[/quote]
No. The skills are all there, they just don’t get used very often these days. I think my proficiency might have slipped a bit here and there out of misuse.

It’s more just a lack of growth.

For a commonly used analogy, the skills required in wartime are not the same as those required in peacetime. And I haven’t successfully adapted.

It’s an interesting problem since it doesn’t really have any immediate visible negative effects. Not entirely sure what to do about it.
[/quote]
Do you want more growth in this particular area?

916

I’m having feelings about whether or not Quincy is still lifting.

917

[quote]csulli wrote:
I’m having feelings about whether or not Quincy is still lifting.[/quote]
Now, now. I’ll have a go tomorrow just for you.

918

More feelings. I just got official approval that my company is ok with me working remotely. I’ve had the unofficial “there really shouldn’t be any problem” for months, but it’s nice for it to now be official. I’m both excited and relieved.

[quote]spar4tee wrote:
Do you want more growth in this particular area?[/quote]

I don’t know what I want. Mostly just the feeling of having “wasted” the last couple years to go away, or at least, to not feel like that in the future. There’s so many important, cutting edge things to be working on, that I’d love to be doing, but I haven’t figured out how to do it in a way that works for all the varying aspects of my life. If I want to live in a box under a bridge with a laptop and wifi, I know how to do it… but maintaining friendships, a relationship, a household, preparing for the ephemeral “retirement” in my future… that’s what I struggle with. Because of the way I personally work on stuff, the amount of intensity, energy and focus, it usually turns it into an either/or prospect. Either I do the things that make me feel like my life actually adds some value while everything else falls apart around me, or I don’t.

There’s probably something of a middle ground (besides paying people to handle everything else peripheral in my life), but I haven’t found it yet.

919

[quote]LoRez wrote:
More feelings. I just got official approval that my company is ok with me working remotely. I’ve had the unofficial “there really shouldn’t be any problem” for months, but it’s nice for it to now be official. I’m both excited and relieved.

[quote]spar4tee wrote:
Do you want more growth in this particular area?[/quote]

I don’t know what I want. Mostly just the feeling of having “wasted” the last couple years to go away, or at least, to not feel like that in the future. There’s so many important, cutting edge things to be working on, that I’d love to be doing, but I haven’t figured out how to do it in a way that works for all the varying aspects of my life. If I want to live in a box under a bridge with a laptop and wifi, I know how to do it… but maintaining friendships, a relationship, a household, preparing for the ephemeral “retirement” in my future… that’s what I struggle with. Because of the way I personally work on stuff, the amount of intensity, energy and focus, it usually turns it into an either/or prospect. Either I do the things that make me feel like my life actually adds some value while everything else falls apart around me, or I don’t.

There’s probably something of a middle ground (besides paying people to handle everything else peripheral in my life), but I haven’t found it yet.[/quote]
I’m somewhat different. Forgive me if I go off tangent as that’s just the way I am without someone or something to keep me on topic. My post will probably end up being more about me than you.

When things around me are falling apart, I become rather manic and obsessive about improvement because I don’t accept things as having to be that way. However, when things are going pretty swell, I’m actually more motivated. More so now than before which I’d attribute to coming out of my almost three year slump. I understand the feeling of wasting time and forgone accomplishments, but I just say fuck it. It’s the curse of being able to walk many paths. It’s hard to focus on one goal when you know you can do so many different things. It’s not easy to come to terms with those ephemeral losses. I say ephemeral because, while they are still very real possibilities, they are figments of your imagination. You have the pioneer’s spirit I take it? I’m the same. I can’t actively pursue something unless I know I can be a leader in that field or landscape.

I personally have been able to balance things fairly well lately; however, all of the elements are not in place, so I’ll avoid being premature in this assertion. My time follows the path of least emotional resistance meaning simply that I dump the thing I care least about when it comes to my time. Even if that particular thing was important. That seems to changing now. I now see it all facets of my life as a system rather than a series of parts, so instead of ditching something entirely, I just alter my workflow gradient slightly.

Guess I went off track again. shrug Do you feel that creating new and improved software and methods is the only way that your life can add value? Obviously it’s one of your better options for that since it is one of the things you are best at (obviously an assumption; disregard if inaccurate), but do you often see that as your only tool?

920

[quote]spar4tee wrote:
Do you feel that creating new and improved software and methods is the only way that your life can add value? Obviously it’s one of your better options for that since it is one of the things you are best at (obviously an assumption; disregard if inaccurate), but do you often see that as your only tool?[/quote]

No.

I’ve always been pretty intimately tied in with the business side of things, so my perspective on software is as a tool in context. Basically, I see technology not as a thing to pursue for its own sake, but rather as a means of augmenting humanity, in its needs, desires, enhancing the positives, minimizing/hiding the negatives.

But phrased like that it sounds very detached from reality, very sci-fi high-concept.

At its most basic level though, accounting software exists because it reduces the amount of human error (and the amount of human cost) in the pre-existing hand-calculated clerical systems. This is a very primitive tool, and in a lot of ways just a straight replacement for what already existed.

At a slightly more advanced level, I worked on a project where we needed to associate patient IDs to images of their patient records (microfilm and digital). Originally this was all human data entry, with plenty of errors. There was a lot of cost that went into extra verification and rework. So I made a change to the system so that OCR was used to identify the patient IDs, and then human verification was used to verify that the OCRed values were correct. Data entry is an error prone task, but seeing two numbers next to each other and saying yes they match, or no they don’t, is something that we do a lot better. So the system was changed to take advantage of relative strengths and weaknesses.

But it doesn’t have to be just software. I did some home automation work awhile back, where we were able to control lights, audio, video, opening/closing blinds, etc. One subset of this is the way we use our environment to alter or match our moods. What we had was very basic – you could program stuff in, various “themes” – but there’s a lot of room for growth if you had an envrionment that adapted dynamically to your mood and monitored how effective certain changes were at producing desired states.

And so on and so forth with examples.

But the basic point is that software, and hardware, and architecture, and landscapes, and a whole bunch of stuff… they affect how humans interact with the world. And by changing the technological or design aspects of things, you can make actual changes to how human systems work.

So, if we look at it as, technology is essential for bettering humanity from its current state… eventually… and then break it down into which things we can start making happen sooner. That’s the kind of stuff I think is important.

Unfortunately, a lot of technology today is either a rehashing of something we’ve already been doing forever (just a straight replacement of an existing system, like the accounting example), or it’s a way to keep us mindlessly entertained and preoccupied.

There’s a very big difference between products like Skype and products like Angry Birds. Or between microwaves with millions of presets and microwaves with the auto-reheat sensors.

The more I can help make technology integrate seamlessly with daily life, enhancing human strengths and supporting human weaknesses, the more value I feel I’m accomplishing with my life.

My real problem is as soon as I get sucked into any project is I get sucked into a project. And I think that’s what I need to figure out.