People who make New Year's resolutions and those who don't.
My wife, Debra, doesn't make them. I make them but break them immediately.
I am already having a third cup of coffee. And pretty soon I will eat some carbs, probably the bread that is on the kitchen counter. I get resolution-breaking over with quickly so I don't fret about it.
Every family needs a keeper and a thrower, one each.
The "keeper" doesn't throw things away. The "thrower" discards unusable stuff. A keeper finds a place to store broken tools, stained clothes, and chipped dishware. A keeper can imagine a future use for unusable things. A thrower doesn't want clutter. The thrower realizes he or she will never be able to fix what is wrong with the item and would rather buy something new if by some remote chance a use for the item emerges. Debra is a keeper. I am a thrower. It works for us because I give in 100% to her, so long as she stores useless things in places that don't clutter places I go into.
Some people want to get to airports early. Some like to get there just in time.
This would be a deal-breaker if my wife and I disagreed, but we don't. Neither of us likes airplane-departure anxiety. Surprises happen and we like to build in buffer time. We know people who love to cut it close, indeed ideally being the very last person running to the airplane door a second before it closes. They like the adrenaline rush. When I want a rush, I have another cup of coffee sitting quietly waiting for my flight group to board.
Some people like to load the dishwasher carefully and methodically. Some don't.
Loading with care rather than haphazardly, one can get substantially more dishes into the dishwasher. The careful-loaders want a full load arranged perfectly. The quick-and-dirty loaders are perfectly OK putting through a load with wasted space. My wife is the former; I am the latter. This could be a marriage deal-killer, since she could easily interpret my lack of interest in a well-loaded dishwasher as a sign of disrespect of her wishes. And I could perceive her discontent with the way I nestle the bowls near the dishes as nitpicking. We resolve this by my doing it her way 100% -- at home in town. Remember, I don't care much, so it isn't worth a disagreement. I load carefully to her standards, and then she reviews what I do and adjusts everything anyway. But at our farmhouse, where I go often and she goes rarely, we do it my way. I run my coffee cups through with the dishwasher a quarter full. She doesn't see it, so she doesn't know to complain. I feel liberated and powerful, an alpha male in his domaine.
Debra and I have a two-state solution, and it works.
Some people go to bed late and get up late. Some are early-birds.
My wife stays up. I don't. I wake up early without an alarm and am at my desk writing blog posts by 4 a.m. There is no conflict. We each do it our way. She picked up our son at the airport this week when he arrived for a Christmas visit at 11 p.m., no problem. I took him to the airport at 4 a.m. when he departed a week later, no problem. A movie or theater performance beginning at 8 p.m. is a problem for me but wouldn't be for Debra. We deal with this by attending matinees. We can work things out.
Some people think that the world divides into two kinds of people. Others don't.
This blog post looked at poles on spectra, but neither my wife nor I think this is really how the world works. We are both comfortable with nuance and multi-dimensional thinking in a multicultural world. I see a great deal of white/black, good/evil, us/them thinkers in international affairs and in domestic politics, especially now. Bipartisanship is out of favor. It implies irresolution and lack of principle. Duality messaging elevates people into political power. We are right; they are wrong. We are the good guys; they are the bad guys. We are entitled; they are illegitimate. I don't like that reality, but I see that it gets people on TV and in front of cheering crowds.
11 comments:
Nice blog Peter. I am a thrower and my wife is a keeper. We had an item that was apparently an art project possibility that had been a part of two house moves and sat on a garage shelf for SEVEN years. I took it to the dump figuring it was fair game as it had sat around the household for 14 years. That afternoon my wife asked me about that item as she needed it for an art project and I had to admit I had just taken it to the dump. It’s risky business being a thrower when your married to a keeper.
I presume everyone is aware of Trump’s demented New Year’s message. It promises to be a very interesting year. May we all do whatever we can to preserve our Republic against the ongoing onslaught of the MAGA
confederacy, and then enjoy the show.
Nice, seemingly light-hearted essay about personal presences, but is really about peaceful coexistence that preserves the most important thing through mutual compromise on the minor things.
The question I seriously ask Trump absolutists is, are you willing to completely dismantle 250 years of (imperfect but effective) democratic system, to put in place a “ruler” who has open contempt for that system, and even the patriots who died to defend it ( they are suckers and losers by the way. 10 or 15 years from now, when he’s out of the picture one way or another , where will you place your hope? What will you tell your children and grand children about the representative system you helped destroy, and the dystopia of despotic leadership you helped create? You will have forever stolen their ability to choose. Over what?
I had to go look at former guys demented "messages". He belongs in a Rubber room, not the Oval Office, and yet a significant plurality continue to support him. Vladimir Putin must be laughing himself sick at the success if his program to help the U S. sink itself.
Thanks again for another year of consistent insightful, informative and (sometimes) annoying missives.
Buckle up for 2024!
So very well said, a most pertinent question.
I suspect that there are very few Trumpers who read this Blog, perhaps some of the "Anonymous" posters. I also believe that if you were to ask that question of live, sort of sentient people waving Trump 24 flags, you would be met with a vacant stare and shrug of the shoulders.
That notion of essential duality is itself a Big Lie, a bigger and more pervasive one than Trump's lie about having won the 2020 election. There are more than two kinds of nearly everything.
But not in Boolean logic and computers. Binary rules in those domains!
The fallacy of Boolean logic:
Computers are classically Boolean machines. Internally their binary logic is absolute. There is no “gray”.
Programmers create logical structures which must conform to this rigid binary rule, imperfections cause random unwanted results.
To make computers useful in an essentially non binary world empirical inputs must be quantized, or measured accurately. Thus the presence of the “least significant bit error”, or absolute measurement perfection. I would argue that imperfection makes the ultimate validity of computation questionable. Boolean logic is comforting in its absolution but illusory in its “perfection “.
Binary concepts are all over simplifications of real world objects. It’s all spectrums and shifting contexts.
Happy new year, but I admit to a sense of foreboding and gloom coming along.
Tom is correct in that Boolean logic is not the correct tool for every problem, and certainly not for every real-world problem. But sometimes it is the correct tool, and the only one that will get the job done.
As Clint Eastwood once said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.“ He also has to know the limitations of his tools.
"There are more than two kinds of nearly everything."
That's true, but it's also true that we are one. As Einstein said:
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Q: What did the Buddhist say to the hotdog vendor?
A: Make me one with everything.
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