It just so happens I have been doing a little cartography tonight, rather than practicing my writing, and your photo has inspired me. I am actually working on coast line using Campaign Cartographer 3 (if you know of it - great software!) and this is my first map. So the learning curve I am going through now is frustrating and, as I toil, I feel like I will end up filing this exercise under "G" in the circular file. Nice bit of serendity to come here for a break and find your photo.
It is an interesting conundrum to consider for sure. As we were attempting to play the game together on Saturday, the other player was losing his patience with all the dithering. He began to play with his iPhone. I finally put my foot down as well since the game was being shut down before it had begun. I had to talk over the dithering player but, given the fact his behaviour had gone on for over 2 hours by then, I felt not only justified but duty bound. (The game requires at least three people to play.) He just seemed very resistant to playing and it was upsetting to myself (for the effort I had put into the day’s activity) and the other player (who had wanted to play).
The player’s rudeness was unnecessary had he been honest with himself. He is generally a nice person. I had observed his behaviour before but, with only two players this time, it was ridiculously pronounced. It may also have a negative impact on his relationship with the other players since he appeared to waste our time. I do not know how the three other players view him (because I focus on the group), but I find it curious that he even showed up for the game on Saturday.
I parallel his behaviour to the complaints I have read over the weekend about people creating a profile, on a single's site, but closing up when approached for participation; unable to even reply a courteous “no, thank you.”
It looks to me like you have found almost everyone here and then some. I am new around here so I hope to read more about you on your blog... and maybe see you around the comments of my blog? Cheers!
I felt the same way when I came to Poland. I am unilingual English-speaking and have felt outside my province of Quebec, Canada, all my life. In fact, there are laws that ensure I feel this way and those laws have the misguided purpose to fight fire with fire stated in their charter – to redress the way French people were made to feel alienated. So the cause of my feeling ostracized is an open, objective fact. I had to leave everything that was familiar to me for economic reasons eventually but I never re-connected to a place or its community as I had for my first 20 years of life back home.
This led to my decision to come to Poland. It was a real tough decision and I was immediately homesick and scared. But I felt that all my feelings of estrangement finally fit my reality. Being aligned as a foreigner in a foreign land allowed me to work through those feelings of alienation I felt at home.
Today I do not have those feelings.
Poland is my jungle. My adventure here has been a cathartic experience in retrospect. Ultimately, very few people would choose to live alone in the jungle. Most people seek out a society of some shape or size.
It can be an overly complex effort for some to strive for what they want. So rather than move forward and progress, learning what they need to apply to their own development, they prefer to participate in the illusion of forward movement by making their surroundings appear to regress backwards while they stand still. The behaviour is a habit-forming law of inertia. We all suffer from it to a greater or lesser extent. (I have my own procrastinations I battle.)
Some people will seek out relationships to justify their own inertia. They engage in a blame game with their relationships. I just wrote some similar thoughts on my own blog.
Yes, I, too, find it difficult to avoid projecting my bad experience, emotional transference, onto others. It is an uphill battle where the incline increases proportional to the number of my broken relationships. But we endure.
Others do not emotionally survive this process, which may be reason for deleting or hiding their profile and avoiding kind words of respect in reply to unwanted attention. Disowning our responsibility for our relationship experiences is easier than owning them, making them part of the pronoun I, or accepting compliments when we do not feel worthy of them. These persons have seen it all.
I think the balancing act is in trusting ourselves. We may have, in fact, seen it all but we must never believe it unless we want to limit our opportunities that lay outside of our experience. Ultimately, that is why I am here. Maybe why others are here as well.
My religious beliefs are as an agnostic but, not having grown up in a bubble, I recall the words of Jesus reported in Matthew 10:16 - “be as cautious as a serpent and as innocent as a dove.’ I also recall, just this morning, that none of us are perfect.
Well our expectations change with experience and perspective, don't they clinjajune?
No one would typically expect a child to write an opera but Mozart did.... and as we get to know another person, as we get to know ourselves, we should expect our expectations to change, going up in some cases and going down in others. Expectations are relative and personal. Meaningful to share in relationship dialogues.
This is a different situation to having a discriminating palate, which simply indicates what level of taste someone is accustomed, and willing to accept. I would not go into a relationship expecting the worst or the least - even if just to avoid disappointment. That is too close to a self-fulfilling prophesy for my taste. That is where a discriminating palate comes into the equation, I think. But that is not to say, “Mileage does not vary,” because everyone’s experience is relative to oneself.
Be willing to see the good in everyone but avoid projecting good onto anyone.
Hi ekself, Facebook actually reminds me of mug shots and rap sheets. And the verb would be facebooking.
I cannot think of anything to add at the moment except some useless, even redundant business jargon Checkers101. But this is an amusing and thought provoking post!
"On the lamb" is an expression for "on the run" Abagail. Usually it is used in connection with running from the law. I thought about the present chaos in your home and, well, the connection was made.
The plentiful, colourful doors in Ireland are sights I still recall - and I have not been back since Dublin's 1,000 year celebrations! (1988?) That's a long time ago. But what an enjoyable trip it was straight out of university.
Your local trips also sound exotic to me. Lucky you! And lucky us who get to live vicariously through your posts!
Hi Abagail, What a great opportunity is ahead of you to record your thoughts while you travel and to explore your world! How long will you be on the lamb? I bet you will have many stories. I hope to read some of them on your blog here.
Being a writer in training, I am really flattered to read what I wrote sparked your popular blog post, nonsmoker. That is very high praise. I hope to continue sparking ideas and being remembered long after my thoughts have been read.
I intend to write again today after my gym routine. According to the weather forecast, I have a 4-hour travel window today when it won't be raining cats and dogs. I hope you will drop by again.
Thank you for the nice compliment. This is a really nice, strong turn of phrase. Your prose is very lyrical. I see the poet in you, reclining comfortably, in the solar of youth.
The story is not about resolving the betrayal but in living with it, and it is an exploration of betrayal on a variety of levels – not all of them from moustache-twirling design or with detrimental results. It is in three acts at the moment but they run long, particularly the set up. Might ultimately be three books.
It is more difficult than I thought to come up with something – even stuff from my own observations – that isn’t hackneyed or boring or too convoluted for a blog post. I started out with an idea of Love’s Illusion yesterday while on the treadmill but, as I was writing this post, the idea became something else. (That’s not about to get me a gig writing sales brochures.) I did keep the comparison between the McCartney song and my number one favourite though. And I hit that 4000-character wall again.
I have been ruminating on dedicating a week some time to write the prologue of my novel in progress here. The story is about betrayal. So, it is just a notion of mine. Hard to have work when no one thinks you’re working. Ah, sing it to me Croce!
When I was at peace with myself and not in a romance, I wrote down the most essential elements of a relationship I needed in order for it to be healthy and functional. Men have intuition too. Do not think only women have such feelings. But when I had those feelings I could look back to my list and decide if it was just me being nervous about something or if my intuition was telling me something was really wrong. Intuition is part of whom we are, in my opinion, not derived unique like a fingerprint from every and any given situation.
And there was a bonus to my list. I found it easier to be aware when someone was right for me. Not only that, but, I could compliment/complement such a person by articulating what it was I felt gratitude about. And I could do that with friends who were there for me when the right woman was yet to arrive.
The song immediately placed high on my list of favourites because the lyrics spoke to my longing. But I was undecided if it would it usurp my long-standing number one song? It took me a couple of days’ cogitation to come to that answer, and I think I have made the right choice despite the age of my number one song.
In the meantime while I puzzled out this important song prioritization, I remembered to put down my cell phone, write some more and look out my window sometimes to see what others were in the process of doing.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * If you like this blog, why not comment? And please check out my past entries as well.
Well, as you can see from my response to ekself, I have experienced two very different definitions of socialization, and I have a preference to the former over the latter. I can socialize with people without uttering a coherent word as I have proven in Poland (since I do not speak Polish). Nothing beats a willing listener and a co-operative spirit in a shared interest to commune.
Anyone interested in a relationship with me needs to share my philosophical emphasis on active listening in communication or I will drive them crazy. My style does not get on with drones, robots, the beligerent and the defensive.
Hemingway is an excellent model for revisions and clarity. There is no doubt in my mind. But I am going to venture into Faulkner territory once in a while – especially in describing elements of my personal philosophy and in general wool gathering.
Thank you for the compliment. You have a very popular blog I notice so I consider it an accolade to have you among my first readers.
Greetings morgen90210, Thank you for your comment.
The last three years, I have been in career transition mode after a 20+year career that dumbed-down my vocabulary (and my mother tongue has had no challenge living in a foreign-language country these last 12 years). My blog here is an attempt to discipline my writing and polish my vocabulary. This is where I do my own language exercises. So some words I use here will be a re-discovery for me, as well, after being out of practice so long with my language for so long. You are hardly alone!
So welcome and do not take my pretentious vocabulary as meaning anything more than my own pretentiousness. ;-)
I read your blog post, by the way. I quite agree with much of your own keen observations! You were quite clear, and I look forward to reading more from you.
When I was younger, I am referring to before I was 11, we kids used to all hang out together. I find that my strongest relationships hearken back to that time period. Later, as I was involved in an evangelizing church, we used to date within a group. No one dated one-on-one. In both of these settings, one could stand back and observe the person who brung ya. And there was no pressure. Once my family moved away from my boyhood neighbourhood and I started to question the gene pool from my church, I was dating women one-on-one and I can imagine I was not what they expected in a date.
What expectation, you may ask? Imagine the expectation from my inviting a young woman my age to a chaste sleepover at my apartment in order to extend the time of a 12-hour date. I have no reason to lie about that, or any idea how many other people went on such whole daylong dates. It was very frustrating for me until I understood getting to know me had a different meaning. I grew up in the time when I had a Pet Rock to see.
My professional experience tends to support my bias that a one-on-one interview is no substitute for observing someone in a group.
And those tests just reflect the person who created them rather than the person who made responds to them.
Abagail you’re very welcome. It’s a nice compliment to me to have you three folks respectfully commenting on my thoughts. It is nice to be engaged with you guys.
As I wrote to nonsmoker, I do not think the choices available on this site are an illusion. I think they are real – or, as real as we want or need them to be. The grass is always greener in the other pasture if we want it to be.
Your observation about focus - relationship participants focusing on the relationship like two birds building a nest together - is very much on point with my own thoughts. Was it John Stuart Mill who wrote happiness is to be found when our minds are not focused on our own happiness?
Well if the choice here is real – if all the profiles on this website are real people and let’s assume for the sake of argument that the majority of profiles are real, and more real profiles are added to the listings here every day – is this place illusory? I mean, the owners of these profiles are all here looking right? That would be the purpose, the attraction, of a dating site like this.
So does this (even if we just call it a belief rather than a reality) cause a resistance to making a decision? Do we feel we are settling by making our choice? Do we feel trapped by it? Children walk through a toy store and unabashedly want every toy that grabs their attention, but how often do even they play with the toys once they return home? Yet, on the next trip to the toy store, there are always more toys to bring home.
Now people do not want to think of themselves as commodities but is it not similar here? Without judging the individual profiles, there are so many pretty pictures and alluring profiles….
Now it is possible for people feeling trapped in a relationship to also come here and look at the menu. They may not be focused on finding the right person as much as comparing their situation against another type of illusion being sold here by… how to put this delicately: profiles of losers. They would seek these out for a kind of confirmation that their relationship isn’t so bad.
And, again, I feel that be a self-made illusion based upon the real amount of choice at their fingertips.
Just another reminder of our mortality. Death comes for all of us whether we're a mobster or just play one on TV; whether we're working hard or just taking in the sights in sunny Italy.
Hi. Well, I am still getting the hang of this so all the little tutorial notes I make to myself will be helpful later. Youtube insertion is not functioning today. There will be days like this I can tell.
Still, almost a thousand words today is not bad. I just divided the blog post into parts. I hope you find them entertaining.
Thanks for the heads up nonsmoker. I cannot see any information about comment notifications. Nothing in my inbox. Nothing flashing on the dashboard here.
aRrAe Blog Comments (120)
This is an impressive social site even if it is a little too busy.
RE: A picture
Hi nonsmoker,It just so happens I have been doing a little cartography tonight, rather than practicing my writing, and your photo has inspired me. I am actually working on coast line using Campaign Cartographer 3 (if you know of it - great software!) and this is my first map. So the learning curve I am going through now is frustrating and, as I toil, I feel like I will end up filing this exercise under "G" in the circular file. Nice bit of serendity to come here for a break and find your photo.
Talk about good timing!