Remembrance

Logic works for me, probably far too well.

But, I still can't get my head around flying planes into buildings or storming schools full of children though, no matter how much I try to analyse the actions involved. I just have to conclude there is an discontinuity in that particular thought process, or things I thought to be self evident and axiomatic are just plain wrong or still open to interpretation.

People killing other people, no matter how well intentioned and how justified, sucks.

Eating out

My mother, bless her, is not one for new experiences. However I live in the big city many many miles away, and she lives with my father in my small provincial home town. The upshot is that when my parents come visiting, they are going to meet some new experiences.

One of the new experiences that my mother didn't like today was going to a little Italian restaurant. Mum is a veggie and ended up ordering a salad (green salad as it turned out), but she didn't like the olive oil and balsamic vinegar that the salad was sitting in, further she was not too happy about the lack of things she expects to be in salads such as tomatoes and cucumber. The end result was some random sniping (see previous entry).

In retrospect, it was quite clear before we even walked in through the door and took our seats that mum was a little intimidated, and that accordingly she had made her mind up that she was not going to have a good time. This is not the first time my mother has displayed such behaviour.

Given yesterday's rules for "asking what he problems is" and the "responses that don't work", and the fact that this was a social situation where others were present, I have concluded that I must formulate a new plan for dealing with further occurrences of this behaviour.

To whit I have a new plan. Essentially, I don't want my mum to be upset, but also I think maybe she need to be a bit more considerate of the feelings of others around her. We are after all English, and emotional displays are right out!

The plan is as follows, the next time this happens, I'm going to stand up, call a waiter and explain the my mother does not like the meal in front of her, order her a new veggie option for delivery ASAP so she can eat with the rest of us as much as is possible, and have the meal she does not like taken away.

Now I should note that my mother would rather bleed uncontrollably out of her eyes than waste money, especially when the money is wasted on her.

It is my fervent hope that I don't have to do this too often before she realises that I'm going to do it every time.

Hopefully she will understand that she makes me uncomfortable doing what she does, and that I am doing the same to her. Just possibly she will rationalise that into a workable model for changed behaviour around me. More than likely I'll just get a smack round the head, an even angrier mother and a linguini in my lap. But one has to try new actions, as my mother has been acting this way for so long that all the obvious things have been tried already.

Fingers crossed, I'll let you know what happens next time, whenever that happens.

A treatise on modern cognitive reasoning patterns, broken down by sex

Well not quite a treatise, but it sounds cool, no?

Essentially I have come to the following conclusions regarding male and female "logic" of the emotion behind displaying upset.

Before I get started, I'm making an observation here, I'm not a closet misogynist, I think women are great. I'm just putting forward my theory of how I think they work for the benefit of the more analytical male minds like my own. Essentially its an observation not a criticism.

As I have already mentioned, I am cold and logical, I think at their cores, men are essentially logical in this same way, just not to the same extent as myself.

In consequence a man's reasoning when he becomes upset with someone else, is as follows:

1. You did A.
2. The consequence of A was that B happened.
3. B upset me, I'm quite angry.
4. Since you are responsible for A and as a consequence B occurred, I am angry with you.

It is an obvious logical progression, and quite derivable as simple predicate logic.

However careful observation of various woman's reasoning seems to indicate the reverse:

1. You did A.
2. The consequence of A was that B happened.
3. B upset me, I'm quite angry.
4. I'm upset.

Sometimes stage 3.5 is present: I have put the logical progression together and understand that you did A which caused B causing me to be upset, as a result I am upset at you for A.

This results in a woman being upset and either not being certain of the reason for the upset (or in some cases I suspect she is unwilling to announce the reason for the upset). Invariably the end result is one of the following:

1. Random criticism: Acts of random sniping until you are upset too.
2. Historic retrospective: Something else (possibly dating back to 1977) which caused upset gets dealt with now, until you are upset too.
3. Frank Exchange of Views: A careful and reasoned analysis of events to determine the cause of the upset. (Rare)
4. Calm up: The silent treatment (for anything upto a decade). Thus giving you the opportunity to attempt to apologise for each and everything you have done since you left the womb, this being done of course on the off chance that that was the thing that caused upset.

Options are very limited at this point but analysis has indicated the following tactics in response work quite well:

1. The Sniping: Abjectly refuse to rise to the bait.
2. The Retrospectives: Very clearly and calmly state that everything prior to three months ago is off limits, she has had three months to deal with this, now is too late. I cannot stress enough, this is the only method that can possibly work in this situation, otherwise the historical truth will become so emotionally clouded and so extensively rewritten that at some point you will be accused of doing something so outrageous that you will have to conclude you have an evil twin brother your parents never told you about, and his favourite hobby is genocide.
3. The Exchange: Ask her if she is a transexual, if she is not, thank your luck stars, this never happens.
4. The Clam: Procedures are quite extensive:

Do not do any of the following:

• repeatedly ask, "What is wrong?". The answer is always, "Nothing" and the situation is exacerbated.
• Carefully think out the last few days in the hope you can determine what you did wrong, you will just drive yourself insane with self doubt and be no closer to resolution.
• Apologise. Do not apologise for anything, you have a 95% chance of apologising for the wrong thing, now she is going to be pissed of about three things. (Yes, three things, the original upset, the new thing you have admitted and finally keeping secrets from her about the new thing, even if it only happened five minutes ago!)

The only way to successfully deal with the clam, is to take the following approach (and it only works some times!):

1. Ask once, "What is wrong?".
2. When you are told "Nothing" or similar you must immediately say, "OK, well you seem upset, and I would like to know if I have upset you. But if you are telling me here is no problem, there is no problem, I'm glad.".
3. Now here is the tricky bit, you also have to explain you have both agreed that there is a problem, and this means that she cannot come back in a week's time and bring this moment up again. Essentially you have to explain that as far as you are concerned, when getting the silent treatment, the watch word is "Speak now of forever hold your peace". If you do not break the cycle, you are doomed to repeat it for ever.

Didn't plan on covering so much, especially the responses bit, I think more can be added to this entry, but I think I'll shut up for today.

Welcome to my public naval gazing

OK, I'll come clean, I haven't blogged in some time, and the last time I did blog it was elsewhere and somewhat abortive. A few things about me:

• I’m not a teenager.
• I'm not a Goth (Although I used to be one along time ago).
• I'm not a girl (Although… nah only joking).
• I'm not a drama queen (OK, I am a drama queen, but only occasionally and usually when a little drunk).
• I'm recently divorced.
• I'm moody, but not manic though.
• I'm cold, calculating and pretty much non-emotional.
• I’m not very physically expressive.

Amongst my peers I am considered to be very successful, what I do is not interesting and more importantly I don't plan to discuss my job, this is to protect the innocent, and of course to make sure that I don't get the sack.

I get to live the life of a comfortable man, but all things in my life are by no means wonderful. I have a number of "issues" and "problems" some of which will get discussed here, and again some are too close to the bone for me to talk to anyone about, although you never know, I may offload into the Ether now and again.

The main problem I have should be reasonable self-evident from the title of this blog.

Although I am not a perfectionist I hold myself to standards that super humans cannot attain. Don't think my insight into this makes a difference, I spend a lot of my time crucifying myself for failing to meet impossible goals.

There are a number of people my life revolves around (both pleasantly and not so) and a huge number of acquaintances that I see regularly.
A quick rundown of the revolving ones reads as follows:

• Parents, B and L.
• Daughter, A.
• Step son, MB.
• Brother & his girlfriend, MJ & T.
• Ex-wife, S.
• Close male friends, P & D.
• Close female friend, J.
• New female acquaintance, don’t think I can call her friend yet, V. [16/09/04: I have been infomed I am now a friend.]
  

My relationships with all the above seem to be reasonably good, although up until a year ago I hadn't spoken to my brother for a couple of years, with good reason.

My ex-wife is quite frequently a bit of user, but luckily when we divorced she was married to someone else within the week, she is now officially someone else's problem also I don’t get to see her very often. This is a good thing. This does not however stop me from worrying about the quality of care the kids are getting, and I know from bitter experience that the quality of parenting they are getting is quite poor and certainly not consistent like kids need.

My relationship with V is a strange one, I have made my feelings clear and so has V, she is not interested, so we will leave it at that. I’m an adult, I can cope with a little rejection, and to be honest she is the most refreshing person I have met in a long time. On almost every issue we have different opinions so there is always something to discuss. I like spending time with her, but being the Anal Control Freak (ACF from now on) that I am, I of course have crowded her, demanding more attention than she is happy to give. She likes to spend a lot of her time alone, I understand this, but once more, don’t let yourself think that insight into this changes much.

The nature of my job causes me to come into contact with a lot of new people on a semi-regular basis, consequently I have a reasonably busy social life, made all the more busy by my recent decision to acquire some contact maintenance skills and use them to improve my social lot.
So there’s your starter for ten… So what am I going to ramble on about now?

Emotions

Seems like a good start.

For many years I was an utterly cold fish, I suspect that I have borderline Asperger’s syndrome some days, my faculties for reading people are abysmal, very close observation is required for me to get a handle on people and their feelings. All my interpersonal reactions are carefully mediated by learned responses to cues I am reading. I genuinely have no idea what people are feeling inside at an intuited level, I have to read it from the outside. This causes me to be trusting too quickly for reasons too complex to explain today.

But that changed, the minute my daughter was born and suddenly I have had an additional delivery of emotions. Before she was born I could watch the news and see kids starving to death all around the world and it was terrible news, but not upsetting for me. Now I have this part of my brain that won’t shut the fuck up, constantly for the last few years I am being flooded with emotions that make no sense to me, and more importantly I feel like I am losing control... imagine how that makes the control freak in me feel. Yay you guessed it, yet more bizarre incestuous emotions on top of the ones I can’t cope with anyway!

So what am I to do?

I have it on good authority (from a semi-trained councillor no less) that I should let the emotion wash over me and 20 minutes later I will be fine. This thought scares the living shit out of me.

Hmmm… More pondering I think.