Rafter Zebra

The Small Value of Advice

cleetsauce — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:59:01 -0400

Can I give you some advice? It is perhaps one of the greatest bullshit rhetorical questions there is. When someone asks you that question, their advice is going to follow. Taking away the line used by movie villains in their first on-screen meeting with the protagonist, the advice you give or get when it comes to matters you consider vital to the head and the heart is minuscule. In fact, it is damn near irrelevant.

I think I overthink things. In my first post here I shared what was on my mind regarding making decisions. I postulated that my mind was already decided before I went through any amount of agonizing pondering over something that was important to me. Often times during that process I seek out the opinions of those whom I deem to have opinions worth hearing. I do listen to what they say, and it is folded into the milieu of white noise that is surrounding the problem set before me. Sometimes it is just to hear a different take on the issue, or it could be I enjoy getting the thoughts out of my head and out into the open to see how they sound bounced off someone else. The truth remains that the conclusion rarely comes down to what someone else’s input is. We are all selfish by human nature. Anyone who has independent thought might seek the wisdom of others, but ultimately it is your opinion that weighs the most. The best thing advice can do is perhaps trigger or reinforce a thought in your mind which was already there, helping you further along your course.

Haven’t we all been there: a close friend is in a bind, usually an emotional one…usually involving how they feel about another individual. They confide in you and may even ask what they should do. To you the choice is obvious: the other person does not treat them well, the other person does not like them, you don’t like the person they become when they are around the other. Since outright stating these facts is a risk, we usually dance around it. You try to subtely make them see what is right there in front of them like a 4 year-old searching for the last foam puzzle piece. The truth is that they don’t want to hear the truth. If they are a true friend they value you as a person, but they don’t want to hear what they already know.

Of course as a friend it is one’s duty to tell them anyway. Words are chosen delicately or should be. If you are too blunt your advice could turn into preaching in their eyes and uncountable number of friendships have dissaptated over this kind of dispute. Yet time after time I have watched as people ignore the advice that many are giving them, simply because in their own mind they are compelled, or duped to believe they are compelled, to make that decision.

Before I can judge someone else too harshly on willfully ignoring the facts of the situation, I look to myself. There have been many times I have ignored valuable advice in order to satiate the direction of my mind. It comes to the point where you either have to say that it is inevitable and internalize the situation as to not have to hear that advice anymore or you make the change. There is the small chance that the advice is fallible but you are not going in lockstep with it in the first place, if you do end up choosing that course of action it was of your own mind. Your friend was just giving you their 2 cents.

Why I Cannot See Myself on a Desert Island

cleetsauce — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 14:46:00 -0500

It’s a classic scenario. Stranded on a desert island somewhere in the tropics. Just you alone with your thoughts. It is often used as an example to determine your preferences; people will ask, for example, if you could only bring one book/cd/supermodel to the island which would it be. Those hypothetical situations are not what I think of when someone mentions a desert island. When it is mentioned I tend to think more in the realistic scenario of getting stranded on an island by myself without immediate hope of rescue. While on certain days I would welcome the chance to escape this white collar drudgery and on others I would love to put my Crusoe-esque skills to the test (if I have any) there is one glaring detail that I cannot get over. It prevents me from ever wanting to be marooned on the aforementioned island or archipelago.

[flashes back to 5th grade]

It all started in class. We had a pop quiz and the questions were on the chalkboard. Mrs. Bradin, our teacher who had bells palsy had written quite legible and large with her good arm the questions. I was not seated in the back of the class but all of a sudden I realized I couldn’t read the questions. I had to literally walk right up to the board to read them. That is when I knew I had bad eyesight. It should not have come as a shock given both my parents wore glasses. Still, in a small catholic school where even the slightest movement attracts attention and judgement, this was a hefty blow. Now there is nothing wrong with glasses, and those that had worn them from a young age had that marker as part of their image. Sure some were labeled nerds, Saved By The Bell certainly helped in perpetuating that stereotype, but there were middles and higher ups on the social ladder of our 40-some number of classmates that wore spectacles.

However, right as we were about to enter middle school my eyes expressed their genetic make-up. I am nearsighted. Without visual aids I cannot see anything 3 feet in front of my face. Not good timing in this case. I broke the news to my mom and off to the eye center we went. I got the news and got perhaps the most unattractive silver framed glasses possible. The selection process was set up for disaster. Here I am already loathe to be selecting eyegear and combined with my intolerance for shopping of any kind I nabbed the first pair of rims I see just to end the process quickly. I ended up looking like a young Bill Gates, the frames were just not flattering. Of course I was too socially sensitive about the whole thing. I got a few pokes and prods but after awhile I was just another kid with glasses. I could see the board when needed, although it did not give me supposed egghead powers like Homer.

A couple years later I was given liberation from the ill-fitting glasses and introduced to contact lenses. I’ve been with them ever since. After some initial trouble with them it’s second nature to take them out and put them in. I’ve had a few different kinds but right now I use the one-month disposable. They work well enough but sometimes I still have trouble with distance.

The point of that whole digression was to emphasize how important the lenses are to my vision. If we flash back to the present and assume I am on some kind of voyage over open water, be it air or sea and a wreck leaves me stranded on an island, vision is my top concern.

Assuming my contacts stayed in during the chaos that brought me to the island, I have no longer than a month to enjoy accurate vision. To further this problem, I take special care to remove my contacts each night. I know with the type I use it is important to take them out while I sleep, both to clean the lenses and give my eyeballs oxygen. It’s one of the basic tenants of contact care (I am aware there are a few types out there that allow for sleeping). Assuming I have to leave them in while sleeping because I won’t have a case and solution, stretching their lifetime out beyond the one month would be iffy.

Now in the movies or other stories there are usually some kind of convenient turn of events that allows for the stranded character to make due with his hardships. Tom Hanks had some Fedex boxes wash ashore (which I concede is plausible) but I assume that whatever luggage item carrying my contact case and solution will be lost at sea. The chances of me holding onto them are slim and even if I did, I only would have brought a finite amount of solution and only one spare set of contacts.

I can imagine trying to get as much done as I can while having adequate eyesight: trying to build a fire, stockpiling coconuts, checking all flora and fauna on the island, determining a help signal. However, once those contacts reach untenable levels of crustiness I will have to throw them away. At that point the world will be a very well-lit blur. I will have to stumble around, most likely using some kind of walking stick. At night I won’t be able to see anything, with or without moon or fire. If I were to develop a fishing technique it would be terribly difficult without the use of vision. Not having the contacts would reduce my chances of surviving and even worse, of getting rescued.

This knowledge prevents just about every desert island scenario from being a fantastical adventure. Of course there are many other things that could and probably would go wrong. I could suffer an injury without proper medicine. Some kind of wild animal could get me. There could be inadequate amounts of food or water. I might not be able to start a fire (I was never a Boy Scout but I think I could get a fire going eventually). Much like Piggy’s vision being central to survival for the Lord of the Flies, I don’t want to envision how I would have to stumble about no a tropical island with horrible vision. If forced to I would naturally do my best to survive and possibly my eyes would get a little adjusted to not wearing the contacts all the time but not something I would look forward to going through.

So if the conversation turns to what book I would bring with me to a desert island I can answer that easily (Count of Monte Cristo), but if it is time to imagine survival scenarios I hope it never comes to the point where I’m left with -6.25 vision.

Haiku #347

cleetsauce — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 09:04:08 -0500

The fall leaves wear frowns

Burned orange, dry gold and brown

Winds betray vibrance

A humorous take on this latest venture of mine from just about...

cleetsauce — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:41:00 -0500

A humorous take on this latest venture of mine from just about my favorite show ever.

The Philosophy of the Choices We Make

cleetsauce — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:19:37 -0500

I am not the sharpest piece of cutlery in the drawer, yet I am not the dullest piece of iron in the scrap heap. What the horrid analogy in the opening sentence of this blog is attempting to allude to is that people often tell me I think or dwell on aspects of life too much. It is a self-realization I have had since I was a young person and it does not necessarily mean I am a person of higher intelligence. You can play basketball every day of your life (warning: all my writing will contain analogies this vague) but not be really that good at it. Sure you will develop a certain comfort level with handling the ball, shooting, etc., but your natural ability and talent takes you as far as you will go. So while I often will ponder, ruminate and even sometimes marinate far too long on the workings of the universe it doesn’t mean I have attained a higher level of metaphysical understanding. In truth, I’m probably more lost than I was when I started out.

I’ve come to realize that it will not stop me from this exercise, and that got me thinking about….my thinking. I’m not the only one who wonders about how we as humans make choices. There are certainly a wide spectrum of opinions on the subject. I can’t speak with absolutism (should anyone though?) on the theories which religion and science have brought forth but I can relate my experiences. In the end that is really all we have to go on. I do think that the knowledge you gain from study in accompaniment to how you process your life experiences should form how you view existence. This is mostly because in the end you are the one person you are irrevocably attached to. The difficult part is tempering the passion of your convictions when relating them to others; a problem I do not believe the world has solved or has the ability to solve.

One of the tenants of life I learned growing up was that people had free will. I can’t say for certain if that is what most kids are taught growing up. Believe it or not I was even taught this in the Catholic grade school I went to. In my 7th grade religion class workbook it had the passage that read: “God gave man the free will to choose between right and wrong.” I was so entranced I pulled out my yellow highlighter and vigorously covered it in bright neon ink. Here I was, at odds with the stringent teachings of dogmatic Catholic faith that told me about everyday how it was God’s way (according to them) or the path of damnation and in a book used to teach me about that way was this revelation. It fostered my belief that we all had a clean slate in front of us, that nothing was pre-destined in our lives and the choices we made were what made our lives into what they would become. I cannot say for certain that the noble principle I formed back then is wrong, I just know I don’t exactly believe it anymore.

As I got older and was exposed to more of what life has to offer (the good and bad) I began to think that maybe there was a natural flow to life and our choices. I never got as far that all of life was a forgone conclusion and all our choices are merely steps that we have no control over as we wind down our eventual path. My freshman year of high school our English teacher made us memorize “The Road Less Traveled” by Robert Frost. “Two roads diverge in a yellow wood and sorry I could not travel both” it begins. I think the poem itself is more of a parable of going against conformity and the benefits that can bring but it made me think of how there are only two roads in this yellow wood. The choice is up to you but you are destined to choose one or the other. This brought about my thinking that one’s life could take a series of dramatic turns based on the choices they make, however one only has a certain amount of choices available. These choices were limited by all the circumstances the universe had constructed to put them in that very spot. From there it was the individual’s free will of choice that made all the difference.

So for a long time, through my 20s I was one of the mind that it was my choices that had put myself in the position I was in for better or worse. Within the encompassing frame of my existence I was actively forging the direction of my life. However, during this time the velocity of my life had slowed and for a good stretch of time I referred to my situation more as a crossroads than two roads diverging. Suddenly circumstances didn’t seem to matter as much. The bottom line is that my choices seemed to be more inevitable outcomes than meticulous culminations of rational thought in my head.

I used to give a lot of snark (hopefully in my head not outwardly) when acquaintances or even friends of mine would give me the “everything happens for a reason” line. I still view that line with disdain, mainly because of course there is a reason for everything that happens but it is not always a good one. It is a throw away line in my opinion to make people feel better when bad shit happens to them. It is like when a bird shits on your car and people tell you it is good luck or if it is raining on a bride’s wedding day people offer to her that it is a sign of good luck. Cause and effect does not always bend in your favor. I do know that religious people subscribe to the “everything works out in the end” theory of life so I just accept that is what they believe and I try not to deride it. I say try but I can’t get completely on board with that.

[I am not anti-religion as I have noticed this post might insinuate so far. I consider myself a believer in a higher power, I just don’t know who or what it is and what it’s purpose is in regards to the human race. Railing against organized religion may make me seem like another hipster atheist who says they are spiritual but it just is not true. My aim is not to deconstruct religion or God in this post but the tie-ins to my experiences in the past with the subject and with many friends whom are connected deeply with their respective churches is necessary to my thoughts.]

I sometimes get the “this is God’s plan” line but I can’t sit back and say oh well, the churning of my mind is all facilitated as part of a grand design. Once again I bite my lip for my friends merely trying to comfort or encourage me. Once again as time went on though, something to this effect crossed my mind. It had nothing to do with God, or at least in a theological sense. I began to wonder recently in the past months whether my actions and decisions were all as inevitable as I previously thought. I hearkened back to many crucial life decisions I had made in the past few years. I felt as if there were choices in front of me, but in the end I went with the one that I felt compelled to make. The one that was inherent in me to choose. Even the decisions that seemed to pull me off a planned track or derail what could have afforded me a more stable situation seemed to be an involuntary function.

There are theories out there (I heard about it on the podcast Radiolab) that the universe goes on and on and that since there are only a finite number of chemicals and molecules out there (given in a ginormous variety) and a finite way of arranging them (also huge number) that somewhere along the lines there is another you out there, arranged in exactly the same way with the same body and brain making the same decisions you are. This simply means the chemical make-up of your brain will determine everything about you and if you were created with exactly the same molecules you would act and decide the same way.

To me this goes to the other extreme of where I first started out. Most of the time I meet in the middle when my two extremes clash and this was no different. Lately I feel that there is most definitely an open choice before me, but my brain is going to compel me to choose one way no matter what. It’s not exactly a forgone conclusion, but when it comes down to it myself knows myself for lack of a better phrase. There might be people out there that are capable of making that other choice, but right now personally I cannot see it.

Perhaps this comes from my experiences and how my earlier life choices influenced the course of events. Now having gone through that my emotions and rational mind are in tune to what I really want and all the ponderous thought that would go into a decision are merely just a brain exercise. Deep down my mind knows which path I will take, and it get’s to that decision much quicker. This can leave me slightly unnerved that I am merely floating along. It also gives the feeling that I should make the opposite of a important decision just to break that pattern but then you fall into the classic conundrum of that’s exactly what my brain knew I would do and it ends up being the choice you make anyway.

So where this leaves me on my first meandering post of this blog is that for right now it appears I am compelled to make certain choices in my life. Not necessarily because of a higher power guiding me and definitely not because of a moral obligation of righteousness. It is merely what my mind knows what I want. I will never be impulsive, I always will over-analyze these choices, but from inside the walls of my cerebrum all that thought is just a way to pass the day, much like this blog.