TimWoolery.net Documenting the Journey and the Learning Curve

Style, Substance and You

I was thinking about how people relate to each other and stumbled over a piece of the puzzle I wanted to share with you.  It's discussed in this article (and associated book title) but I wanted to apply it more toward human interaction and not just why people go to Starbucks when McDonald's also serves coffee.

Last year I was driving The Lady and other people nuts trying to organize group activities and socially relevant things to do.  I pursued it with the same focus and intensity that Lizzie Borden showed toward her parents.  The results were predictable.  I had to reconcile some different ideas and I think I've gotten to a point where I need to write this down, for myself as much as for you.

Crustacean Politics

"Expectations are premeditated resentments," Mike the Trainer used to tell me.  I don't know why pumping iron and philosophy go together so well but they do.  I think most of the gym rats I know are philosophers on the inside - it helps when you discover that your eyes were bigger than your muscles.  The sad truth is that expectation was the currency of my home life growing up and it is the currency of a lot of extended family relationships now.  Because of that, I can't be around them - you don't have the hands to hold you down and neither do you have them to hold you up.  You have to be your own strength and you have to be strong enough to live outside the normal family dynamic of people you can call on.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

I've talked about managing expectations before and now, after having a few 'Goofus and Gallant' moments I feel compelled to talk about setting boundaries.  I've also said it before and it bears repeating: when you aren't taught certain lessons of life, you can feel like the retarded kid who is still struggling to tie his shoelaces while the other kids are learning to drive stick-shift.  It can be enraging to see where your peers are and yet be unable to get there.  It can also be depressing on a level usually not seen outside of a Lifetime made-for-TV movie.  Now that I have spent months and years putting the puzzle pieces together - part of me wants to come back and tell you what the whole picture is.  This is the reason I wrote this.

I had a bad habit before, of being too available.  I was the guy you called to move the couch for free.  I was the guy you called to sit in the hospital room or unclog the toilet.  I'm good at doing the hard jobs and I used to, with not a small amount of wounded pride, talk about how 'I was the first guy to the job and the last guy to the party.'  I think I've been saying it for years and now, I don't say it any more.  Whatever source it comes from, I had the mistaken impression that helping people with something automatically brought you into their social circle and that just isn't the case.  People are friends because they relate to each other and they have something in common; not because one person owes something to the other.

I had to break the connection between the two and then surround myself with people I could relate to - I had to build new fences (fences are both boundaries and connections - I use the metaphor interchangeably) with the people I wanted to be neighbors with.  The thing that I had to get better at was learning how to respect myself as much as I respected other people.  I think the family hammered that lesson home  a little too well - maybe they were afraid I thought too much of myself.  In any case, I never learned how to build and maintain boundaries when I was younger; now I've spent the last 10 years puzzling it out for myself.

I think  a lot of people get to that point in their late 20s and early 30s, the relationships and the answers they had 5 years ago aren't working for them anymore and now it's time to evolve.  I've been to that place before and although it's never comfortable, good things always come out of it.  I'll keep you posted as to how it all goes.

Opinionated

Lot of stuff happening right now and I wanted to jot some notes down about being opinionated.

The Lady informs me that, while I am just as opinionated as I ever was, I've learned to keep most of it to myself.  Abrasive != Amusing and so I am now experiencing the joy of not putting my nose in where it does not belong.  Which is not to say that it is never necessary to discuss alternate points of view.  In Latin, the saying is: Qui tacet consentit, or, "silence implies consent".  I think my habit of expressing my opinion is born out of past experience where I found myself in an unpleasant circumstance because I did not speak up.

But living the other way doesn't make a lot of sense either - expressing your opinion at every occasion because you are afraid that you will somehow be roped into what you don't want to be roped into.  Life isn't black and white - sometimes it is important to speak and sometimes it is important to keep your mouth shut.  Experience will help you decide which is which.

Idiocrazy

...please go eat a rancid banana.  Drink the Kool-Aid.  Move into the compound in Waco and   I mean that sincerely.

Before Twitter and Facebook, I often wondered if people had the same thought process as I do - worried about the same things that I do - hoped and dreamed for the same things that I do.  Now I know the truth and the truth is that 90% of the planet is dumb.  We're moving toward a new government system called Idiocrazy and it's happening one Tweet at a time.