aRrAe Blog

The Name of The Game

Good evening Sunday;

I play a game with a group of people for my leisure time. It is fun, has rules and there is some risk involved. It has the same mechanics of any game. It uses dice to determine risk as well as the amount of consequences from that risk, but it is a much more open-ended game than many of you may be familiar if you have only played board games. The nature of the game is that risk is rewarded. It has no board or visual components. Occasionally it will have simple props we manufacture ourselves. The game is played using imagination and the movements of the players are based on creative descriptions while the players, themselves, sit together around a table. The game has been termed theatre of the mind and has been favourably compared with radio dramas and co-operative improvisation, especially because player collaboration occurs in lieu of a script in the latter case.

And I was thinking that what happens here, on this site, is not dissimilar to my game, especially as I have been reading the posts that complain about the nonparticipation of some people here: the people who block; who do not reply; and who ultimately cancel their profile when they have attention. There is a perceived risk here, albeit less than in face-to-face situations, and there is an element of storytelling going on that exists strictly within the projection of our wish fulfillment onto another. Therefore, we may take it personally when a stranger decides to block our communication or deletes his or her profile. The game in that scenario gets played only with ourselves unlike the game I played yesterday with two other people around my dinning room table.

And it got me to thinking.

One of the players is very risk adverse. This player has always been risk adverse but it was much more pronounced yesterday because there were only two players rather than the usual group of six due to summer holidays. He is never on time, but he was one-hour late. We were to start at 14:00 and carry through to 19:00. The game is an ongoing story so there is no winner or loser and no end game unless you consider life itself a game in which case you can make your own comparisons. So we started where we left off with 4 hours left to play together before breaking until August.

The adventure I had written and planned for the players to interact with would lead them on a journey of 100 miles from where they started and provide a little risky adventure. Prior to embarking on the adventure, the players had to do a little bookkeeping related to their finance, and I was going to make that a very small but interesting aside to the game. After all, we would not be meeting again for more than a month. However this player would not let us get to the adventure and mired us in a game of passbooks and bank notes. It was very un-fun, and it continued until just shy of 19:00.

Now why would anyone behave like that in a game such as ours where risk is rewarded? Why would someone so risk adverse even consider playing such a game? And I got to thinking about a profile I saw disappear – a profile that caught my eye after I read it. I also got to thinking about a message I had sent to someone asking her for us to get better acquainted, not an unreasonable request given the emphasis on this site. And I made the mental comparison between these two ladies and the player at my game yesterday. What do they expect from this site. Or more to the point what benefit do they get from being a member of this site? And my answer to both scenarios, the one with the player and the one with the two ladies was surprising: they want to maintain their distance from what they want. It speaks to self-esteem issues.

My player is an international businessman. And the charisma of these two women appealed to me. Based on their profiles, I would never guess they are afraid of success. But that is the name of the game.

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Jun 2013
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Me And My Monkey

Good afternoon Friday;

I was reading a topic

http://www.connectingsingles.com/poll_0_14166_1/do_you_look_at_the_profiles_of_women_in_other_coun.htm?nt=6

that raises a good question about how prepared one needs be to enter a relationship. I am broadening that topic, of course, because I apply and extrapolate the questions raised there to myself. Am I ready for a relationship?

Well, am I?

I guess the answer depends upon what others judge to be criteria. We could be all self-actualized gurus atop Maslow’s mountain of needs but that knowledge is worthless if we sit in a sari atop the pyramid alone, in my opinion. In the simplest terms, I suppose we are ready for a relationship whenever we feel we are ready. But does my opinion alone mean I am ready?

Probably not..

With only 500 words for this blog, I have to skip over my personal musings about what makes a healthy relationship. So let us just agree that having a shared vision on life, if not an entirely lockstep opinion about how to travel that vision, is important in a relationship to be healthy. A more important concern than the physical decay, which happens to the individuals regardless of relationship, is the less certain intellectual amelioration that can happen together in a relationship. My idealized relationship sees myself hobbling along, all gray-haired and weathered, like a Shar-Pei dog, holding hands with my partner who is also seasoned by life and has lost some of her elasticity in places that once bounced in youth. I know this might be just me but it informs my current opinion I share with you.

I do not want to lessen the affect a youthful bounce has upon me so please keep that in mind, ladies.

The answers I keep coming back to while ruminating on the question(s) the forum asks me is that the question cannot be answered alone. Are you ready? is not the question for the basis of a healthy relationship. Much like that old saying the master will appear when the student is ready, the question here is: are we ready? Do we fit together? Are we going the same place in life? Will our relationship contribute different viewpoints to broaden our intimate, individual perspectives, and open us to further explore unknown vistas of a life lived in a Technocolor ™ panorama?

I know a dysfunctional relationship can “broadening my understanding of life” but I would rather look upon a colourful field of wild flowers, or grazing deer, or a sunset across a low horizon than inhale a smoldering distopian garbage of miscommunication and misunderstanding just to say I made love in such a place. Recognising the difference in these two places does take self-knowledge so, clearly, that much can be done alone. But I am focused on functional relationships that involve two self-aware people. That does not mean that these two self-aware people are ready for a relationship together – though the correlation is there.

So what is the expectation(s) I place upon myself; and the expectation(s) placed upon me by others? What is more important in a long-term relationship: my expectations or those of my partner? I would say neither but I also recognise both inform our self-awareness to what I and you can contribute, and, to what I and you need from a relationship. Our expectations can change over time because of personal development or due to situations beyond our ability to control. However this underscores it is the knowledge of how we fit together that is paramount. I am confident, in such a case, that you and I (we) can resolve whatever material or philosophical barrier confronts us (our relationship) – so long as we are intellectually and emotionally honest with ourself and each other, and the monkey on our back.

In fact, Tom Walters - @TomWaltersCTV - filed a story about a monkey on last night’s news….

http://www.ctvnews.ca/video?playlistId=1.1345293

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Jun 2013
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Ode To A Blue Moon

You can learn more about a person in an hour of play than from a lifetime of conversation - Plato

Good morning Saturday,

So here we are, as Bob Seger might sing – especially here we are separated by The Internet. We’re not even as close as on the telephone. That has me wondering this weekend exactly what it means for us to get to know each other here. I mean any one of you, not just the right woman, for me. How do we get to know each other; and what does that actually mean: “get to know someone” on a dating website? (This could be a very long post but I only have about 500 words so I’ll be brief.)

What is our first interaction? We have our profiles. I like to think I know who I am and what are my needs from a relationship. I have also given considerable thought to what I can contribute towards a relationship beyond lifting the toilet seat. I know what I think is important and have some idea of what my partner should also think is important because a life trapped in Monty Python’s Argument Sketch is not what I will sign on for. I know my weaknesses, those areas I look to a relationship for strength, and I know my strengths, those qualities I posses I can contribute to someone else in a relationship that strengthens my partner. So my profile expresses the two halves of the whole.

Let’s gloss over the stipulation about being a whole person in a relationship and settle on temet nosce being more salient and important here, subsuming being ready for an adult relationship is a given. I have never met a “whole person” who was not some form of a narcissistic dilletante. I am disinterested in sharing a relationship with a perfect dillentante.

But after advertising ourselves on our profile, what else exists? The blogs are good at attracting like-minded persons to us – if the like-minded persons read blogs. But 500 word snippets of discussion are just the sort of conversation Plato refers to. I do not plan to spend my lifetime on a dating website like it’s Hotel California. Conversations here also involve some fiction as anyone who has ever attended a business mixer can attest. There are just some things a conversation will never reveal and may actively cover up – hardly the kind of immediacy Plato recognizes in play.

How do we get to the play that Plato praises for learning about other persons? He’s certainly not recommending time wasters like Angry Birds or Farmville. I have taken one poorly executed quiz that was hardly thought provoking. Frankly, I am hesitant to take another knowing it reflects upon my profile. It would better serve my purpose to attach my Myers-Briggs assessment or reference my David McClelland Theory of Needs score on my profile than to haphazardly take amateur tests I, at least, find lack validity. These do not bridge a gap or build common ground, and my laughing at them produces the sound of one-hand clapping: useless upon uselessness.

These blogs are the closest to the immediacy of play we have for engaging one another here. I just hope the person meant for me reads the blogs and stops at mine. Maybe I will write something thought provoking that one-time, engaging her enough to actively reach out to me like I used to do in the night sky whenever I saw a super-sized moon.

I am sure there is a self-depreciating pun in that last sentence….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3wxebhMo3k

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Jun 2013
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Does Copious Choice Beget a Dearth of Decision?

Good morning Friday;

Does copious choice beget a dearth of decision?

I suppose there are as many answers to this question as there are respondents. It depends on what your experience has exposed you to and, subsequently, how you define copious choice. It depends on your perspective and how you process choice. Is an abundance of choice defined as three or more choices? For some people, it could be having as few as two choices that cause confusion. At what point does paralysis from analysis occur?

These thoughts make me ponder how copious choice plays out on a singles dating site.

I perceive the world has the appearance of shrinking. I see response time between a written message and its reply now counted in breaths, and how frequent contact with persons in far away cultures signifies a (superficial) exposure to every culture through the arbitrary adoption of idioms and phrases without necessarily reflecting any investment of time to absorb any particular worldview that shapes them; or even an understanding of the individual as a person who speaks them. It was once an accepted fact that one had to be immersed within a culture to appreciate it, but many people believe in the perception we live in a global village where space, time and even thought process are contracted today. And, for the most part, we live oblivious to the knowledge we are harbouring a kind of Mondocultural absolutism that, ironically, is a far greater barrier to our actual understanding of others than actual physical separation.

Yet, here we are, from Afghanistan to Yemen, from all points of the compass rose with one wish, seemingly unified but separated through our interpretations of this wish.

I look at the many photos and read the many profiles (you would expect that I do read the profiles, wouldn’t you?) and I wonder if all this is a mere illusion of choice? How many lonely but well-adjusted adults are actually taking themselves out of the equation of a successful relationship because they wait for the perfect person to flawlessly articulate an accurate representation of him or herself according to another’s understanding of what is written among an endless slideshow of candidates at their fingertips? A common picture of this would be flipping channels in an infinite universe of television programs searching for the right show to enjoy.

Is that the modern relationship? Well, if the majority of people believe the illusion then it becomes the reality within which we live, doesn't it? But that reality does not vouch for the strength of those relationships based in the illusion. It translates to our endless wait for the right person whom we believe will arrive, if we just keep waiting while we take no decision about what is around us today.

If we were immortal and able to comprehend the whole universe, or swallow all knowledge as the Polish say, that illusion might work out.

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Jun 2013
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Same As It Ever Was

Good morning Wednesday;

Yesterday's post started with a reference to the Interim Mayor of my home city arrested at his home at 06:00. And it is on my mind again today, now that he has officially resigned. Even as just the Interim, he was the first non-French mayor of Montreal in a century.

Since the October crisis of 1970, when the French Quiet Revolution exploded onto the streets of Montreal and then Canada's Prime Minister Trudeau enacted martial law to keep the peace, the ascending masters of Quebec provincial government conceived a new French Reign of Terror to attack the economic stability of English business. Where firebombs had failed, and the murderers of the Deputy Premier and Minister of Labour for Quebec were never brought to justice (one now teaches in a taxpayer funded school) the economic attack succeeded in the exodus of business headquarters en masse. Coupled with the draconic laws placed upon the French to restrict their children’s entry to English-language schools, the labour pool of literate business professionals withered. As the labour pool weakened, more business left for Toronto, which is now Canada’s economic centre.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-speaking_Quebecer

So what does all of this have to do with the current corruption in Montreal that implicates the leader of the province (being accused, losing his job, and quitting politics without being charged) and the arrests of mayors, city councilors and bureaucrats from the largest city in the province and its neighbouring boroughs? Simply this, people have to eat and they need the money to do it. After that, human beings need to care for their emotional and psychological welfare. Then, when the corruption needed to achieve this is systemic, greed follows. That is its cycle. It is destructive, mired in personal attitudes of survival, and poor models of communications.

I have been witness to and affected by it in my home city; and I have observed it in practice within the CIS and former CIS country where I now reside. I originally left my home, migrating to Toronto, because that was where my clients were situated. I had my own business because I could not overcome the economic barriers to employment I had faced back home. My own career, in the traditional sense, is a corrupt path: as a young president employing older mentors rather than working my way up to business owner.

This economic warfare accomplished its intended domino effect on my own family life. It shifted me, and other English kids I knew growing up, to foreign cities looking for work. It broke up our friendships before the Internet became big. It made me wonder, at 34, if I was destined to remain in dead end serial monogamy until I would be too old to enjoy the challenge of raising my own family. So I relocated, as I had already done once in my life, to another foreign city in an effort to break away from socio-economic warfare I had experienced. I chose Warsaw.

Much to my chagrin, I only realized how similar the common practices in CIS countries mirrored those systemic within my home city and province, when I met the local men and women. Here, like back home, no one wants to expend their energy to change the corrupt system. They just want to live well within it using the minimal effort. And this isn't how I was raises and or my style...

This brings me full circle to the news yesterday about arrests of another mayor and his councilors back home. And I am thinking same as it ever was.

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Jun 2013
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What A Racket! - Part One

Good morning Tuesday,

And what a day yesterday was! At noon Central Europe Time (CET) the Interim Mayor of my home city was arrested at his home while in the shower for fraud and conspiracy following the ongoing scandal that forced the Former Mayor to resign in November last year. This makes a total of two mayors in about half a year who have been accused of a racketeering scheme that has tied in the highest levels of provincial government with organized crime. (The former Premiere of the province lost his re-election due to his involvement in this scandal, exposed in a commission that has seen the heads of the local Sicilian Mafia brought in to testify.) It is a huge pallor hanging over the city that used to brag it was a “City of Champions” but I have seen this it coming for 37 years. That was the last year the city really had the financial backbone to claim such a lofty title, and the year the psychology of our provincial government started to breakdown….

But that was not what I had planned to write about today. Here’s the music for the post. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=01GgtZN8L1A&NR=1

I am new to this site, so it is natural I have thoughts about myself being 46 and unmarried. I suppose I am not alone in these thoughts, regardless of the age. So I guess it is natural I start my blog with the thoughts that first brought me here.

Now being unmarried is not a problem if I am a happy go lucky charmer with women happy to go from one to another like a pinball lighting up my face with electric lights and racking up high score. But I have never been that, and I tend to think most of us here are not like that. If you were, you would be a pretty sad case needing a place like this from which to find dates. I think most of us would like a little validation we’re just not getting from the real world – that space of oxygen around us.

My story is simple. I was the guy that delivered flowers to a girl who was sick from school but had them handed back to me as a dozen dried black roses she had kept in her school locker until we met a week later in class. I was the guy they made a stage play about because all the girls my age laughed at my advances – this was the period when John Hughes films were popular. And my advances were along the line of watching an opera or an orchestral concert and enjoying dinner afterwards. We’re not talking about a groping outside a McDonald’s or at a wild party. And paying for dinner for two, a taxi and a concert is a feat for a working class family kid who saved up nickels. So I have always been a marrying man and I have been interested in improving myself with a complement. You might say I was precocious, but that was how I was raised.

Until I came to Europe at 22 and met a beautiful professor and her young daughter, I had only two dating experiences. A couple of pre-Internet letters that never received a reply and I ruefully decided to move on. I decided to dated older women from there forward.

So I turned my attention to women 15 – 25 years my senior, hoping that the maturity of my dates would lead to matrimony. This was a more natural demographic for me than it looks because I was meeting these older women through work. I was working for myself as a communications consultant because my City of Champions was already going downhill economically, affecting the employment of unilingual English speakers in a place where the law makes hiring such persons a finable offense. I never found the right woman, and I was never taken serious. And I was serious as a heart attack.

The following errors occurred:
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Heh. I am still learning…

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Jun 2013
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This is a list of aRrAe's Blogs. Click here for aRrAe's Blog List

aRrAe Blog (18)

The Name of The Game

Me And My Monkey

Ode To A Blue Moon

Does Copious Choice Beget a Dearth of Decision?

Same As It Ever Was

What A Racket! - Part One

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