Where Everybody Knows You're Numb

Nightowlhoot3 wrote:

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 and then my friend emailed me today and said can you pick me up so i dont have to drive? that adds another hour onto my misery yanno? what she really means is can you pick me up so i dont have to pay for parking and thats the part that sort of galls me. she can afford to pay for parking at the airport for one day and that means she aint thinking of whats best for me and that leaves me conflicted about the relationship. <Psych

Maybe as you're leaving the airport together, she'll surprise you when you pull up to the "pay me!" window, and lean over and say: "Here -- I'll take care of this ... you drove and paid for the gas -- its only fair."

Hey, it could happen.

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If she's defined pretty much by her frugality I doubt anything short of "oops, left my wallet at home" will work. And, that will work, SHE just got off a flight, not you. She's got, cash, cards and postage stamps on her. Guaranteed. Lemme know how that works out next time. :)

Nightowlhoot3 wrote:

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when my kids were little and i had to spend xmas eve putting things together i could never read the directions and get it but i could look at the box and figger it out. are you a box looker or a direction reader or does it work best to have something explained to you? <Psych

I use both pretty much equally, flipping back and forth from one to the other.

My office chair is still in the pieces it was three years ago.

dontcha hate that when it happens? i have a total gym i purchased about three years ago too. i think its rusting in the garage or maybe the basement. i havent thought to look for it in years but i got frustrated putting it together so never finished.

That's atypical, though. Usually, I'm pretty good at putting things together.
Oftentimes, I think I'm better at putting things together than the writers hired by the manufacturers are at explaining how to do it; a lot of that can be attributed to language and point of origin, I think.

and the hiring of the technical writer who will never actually have to sit down and put the thing together that they are writing about. its rare to find written instructions that are complete or easy to follow.

I liked the instructions I got with something I purchased awhile back (and I can't remember what it was, now.) I opened it up, and there was just a picture of the thing sorta pulled apart, with arrows.

yep those are usually helpful if there is a numeric order aspect to it. ikea furniture is often laid out this way

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Nightowlhoot3 wrote:

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that seemed reductive to me

Ya think?? I would have said: "Oh, my big brother phoned it in to me..." and then given him a look. OK, I probably wouldn't have done that, but I would have asked him what kind of "thinking" women are capable of executing.


what was more inexcusable from my student end of things is that clearly the dude was not preparing to do the job he was paid to do and from the comment i conclude that in a class of women only he didnt think anyone would notice if he was unprepared and simply winging it. to this day i have conflicted feelings about the guy. from that day on he did a lot for me career wise and was one of my strongest supporters thru my grad education and beyond but on the whole he was a misogynist by nature. his female colleagues wanted to be rid of him and that sometimes spilled over to me because they would come to me as an age equiv. peer and look to get the goods on him. i remember one female prof coming up to me to warn me about him and i said, i can handle him, he reminds me of all of my motherland cousins, same dynamic and she said do you think these 23 year olds have that same ability? a bind to be sure and not a line that any student should have to walk.

have there been instances in your life where youve thought it wise to give up and yet hung in there with good result?


Excellent question/observation. Thank you. I'll try to better remember that. See? I think my problem is I so rarely think it's "wise" to give up, clearly, when, it retrospect, it would have been.

what are the commonalities in those situations? what was it that youd be giving up?




then this side of me is more easily recognized. I guess I'm just a sucker for "happy endings." Sometimes, the "happiest" ending is just ending; just saying: "I'm done" and walking away. I'm learning that. Have been learning that. Not fully there yet, but a lot closer. I suppose in a way, it's related to bad boundaries.

this is perhaps one of lifes hardest lessons. it goes against most that we are taught throughout life, especially as females. handling conflict is a part of it. in looking at my own situations where this has come into play, i can almost universally say had i stepped in with higher boundaries earlier the friendship/relationship may have developed differently. when boundaries are set low people tend to step over them and it establishes part of what makes a relationship. if you change them at a later time the result might be very different than if you had kept them in place from the get go.
ive let go of a couple of friendships this year. if we allow people in our lives who dont support us or who try to keep us in a state of upheaval its prolly best to let them go. those who do dont have your best interests at heart and if they dont there isnt much of a friendship/relationship there to begin with. i think because my family of origin is all gone now, ive come to cherish those who have stepped in and filled that void voluntarily. that said there are people in my life that ive known all of my life that i sometimes have difficulty keeping the boundaries high enough. they are enough like family after 40 years so that i can weather a few storms but occasionally they get my version of thunder and lightening:)
case in point. i have a very busy week coming up. i have to be at a conference most of the week in the carribbean and that requires getting up at dawn, thinking about dealing with the hurricane floating around out there, a furnace at home that needs looking at and this weekend i am going to an out of state party. i first said no to the party because, honestly, i dont know if i can physically do 4 flights in one week and getting up at 4am 3 days this week is gonna really kill me. good boundaries would have meant sticking to my no for the party but ive allowed myself to be talked into this by my oldest friend in the world. we are going to fly out on the first flight out attend the dinner part of the party and fly back on the last flight home. this means ill get home at 1am monday morning and i have to be at work at 8 then i have to get up the following morning at 4 and fly out again. so i have sort of resolved myself to this, really bullied myself into it by berating myself for acting like an old person:)  and then my friend emailed me today and said can you pick me up so i dont have to drive? that adds another hour onto my misery yanno? what she really means is can you pick me up so i dont have to pay for parking and thats the part that sort of galls me. she can afford to pay for parking at the airport for one day and that means she aint thinking of whats best for me and that leaves me conflicted about the relationship.

Hunh. OK. I'm really not all that familiar with the R/L thing. Interesting.

i have a couple of quizzes and some info on the r/l thing in a folder of things i use when i teach intro classes. when i get some time ill post one of the quizzes. id have to type it in and that aint happening this week but next week ill have some time.

it does, its possible to be good at both or better than most at both but to still be better at one. you might be a more visual learner too.

I'm almost positive I am. When I took anatomy and phys, I just couldn't get it from listening to lectures, but the second they brought a visual aid in, then, everything fell into place.

when my kids were little and i had to spend xmas eve putting things together i could never read the directions and get it but i could look at the box and figger it out. are you a box looker or a direction reader or does it work best to have something explained to you?



Heh. Actually, I'm gifted with a boss who has already suggested I might do that; branch out on my own, once I finally mastered it, as long as I saved some time for her. I think she was trying to be encouraging.

mebbe but im thinking shes more objective about your progress! she perhaps sees something in your handling of the material that suggests this possibility!

Perhaps we should draw a more definitive line of distinction between "truth" and "fact." That said, I'm more apt to rely upon "facts" for my "truthfinding" than "faith" or other indoctrination. Can a "true" fact be an untruth?

lol. well....in my head, yes! maybe not an untruth but an incomplete truth.

 I mean in ways other than misplaced application of the fact leading to a conclusion. Further, if it cannot generate anything "factual" about itself, can a concept claim to be "true?"
how the question gets framed, what gets left out, what is measured, heck what gets looked at, decides the truth. other framing, other ways of looking might yield a different truth.



Sooo ... if I understand you, then, it's not true that ice cream will make me fat? :))

not if ya jog after eating or not if you have a metabolism that allows it and not if its made with that nasty fake fat that makes it all leave the bod in less than pleasant ways anyway:)

i wanna get to whats below but i am due to go to the playwrights new works fest tonight and tomorrow and i am of course running a hlaf hour behind!

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How "right brained" of you. LOL. But that would be difficult to show contolled results supportive of the practice, wouldn't it. You're right, of course. I prefer a combination, for instance, of Western medicine and Eastern remedy, but neither, IMO, is equal to preventative. It just struck me that in a way, Western medicine is a lot like the American automotive industry. "Wanna drive? You need a V-8. Sorry about what it does to the environment, and your wallet, but oh well. That's the way it has been, the way it is, and the way it will be." One of my great hopes for this new administration is that it will somehow ease the American people into new paradigms -- that we'll break down, and then restructure the way we look at things like "lightbulbs" and mpg tags on vehicles, and social things, as well. I hope that we'll be encouraged in that direction.



in a perfect world we could integrate knowledge so that we dont cling to the polarities so much, yanno?

http://www.addresources.org/article_shadow_syndromes_ratey.php

take those online tests now, I sometimes get very different results depending upon what I've just finished doing -- if I've been working on left brain stuff, my scores seem to indicate I'm left brained, and vice versa. I wonder if it would be beneficial to kids to have some sort of concrete idea of which brain dominance they have ... if it might help teachers better teach them, if that sort of information were provided them?

if money were no object all kids would be tested to see how they best learn.

But see, that's sort of the crux of my question: Is how they best learn today going to be the same tomorrow? More significantly, will determining a course of study based upon those results influence further (and perhaps detrimentally) the actual way the child learns, pigeon-holeing them into a pattern which might not be the same as what a natural and undirected evolution might create?



as it stands now only the problem kids get specifically tested and thats often a waste since the overburdened teachers havent the time or resources to work with them in individual ways.
i remember the battles i had to do each year with my daughters special ed needs. in march of each year theyd test her. 6 weeks later wed have a ppt to discuss the results. theyd say were gonna come up with a plan and wed meet 6 weeks later to tell me what theyd come up with. by this time it was usually may and there was little more than a month of school left. then in sept, itd begin again. a few month would go by, the teacher would express concern about her getting things, a ppt would be scheduled for march and on and on. the only thing that stopped this process was my hiring am ed spec lawyer for her and an educational consultant. the lawyer got the whole process moved so that the plan was implemented from the first day of each new year with the lets see how shes doing at the end of the year and the ed consultant kept weekly tabs on the teacher to make sure the plan was implemented fully. it worked well for my kid but the other special needs kids got left behind. she was mainstreamed in the first grade, went on to graduate high school and college but the other 4 kids that were in her initial special ed kindergarten ended up with certificates of completion for their high school years and all 4 are in sheltered workshop employment now. those kids were the neediest of all in her class and they did not get the attention they needed even in a specialized environment. imagine how the average kids in the regular classes fared?

And that's a part of the heartbreak of education, and educators, isn't it. "Good intentions" can only go so far with limited resources.

Should educators try to reshape this in kids, making them all eagles, or support what is presented them as is, and then encouraging the eagles to soar high, and the gazelles to run fast, both equally appreciated and honored? Coming, as I have, from the Arts, it's obvious I'd prefer the later. I wonder too, if I'd been told at some point in my life that I was "right brained" if I would have been content to left the other side atrophy. That doesn't seem a very satisfactory solution, but seems a very real potential hazard in the identification of the dominance. Even so ... if you're a right brained person, should you still be forced to go through life not knowing that, and trying, time and time again, with limited success to succeed in left brain fields?

but if the brain is not fixed and children are equally exposed to activities that target either side and those activities are given equal weight then perhaps the development of both gets done and it becomes one of those things you were speaking of earlier where you can be good at both but better at one depending on preference?

See ... I could have never been a McDonald's university graduate, because really, that's all left brain -- there are specific rules for how things must be done, and they must be done that way every time. Me? I'm the person wondering how that "Big and Tasty" might be with just a hint of horseraddish. I did better as a waitress, where each customer got unique treatment according to them, and the situation.

lol, but but the waitressing thing for me was a real left brained endeavor. one has to remember which person at the table had which thing and how they wanted it done and what was in their glass. this requires great organizational skills!

Ah, but see? Not for the right-brained person, because the right brained person knows that that guy with the brown eyes and the silver glasses always likes three sugars in his coffee, and always wants a bagle with both cream cheese AND butter. :) See, for me, it was all about the faces .. the people. I don't think I could have ever done it by rote, or by the table number. I just "remembered" that the woman in the red dress asked for French dressing, and then I'd try to find that woman when I had the salad in hand. Actors are asked all the time: "How did you memorize all those lines?" Well, the answer is simple: I didn't. I remember the ideas, and the character's feelings, and then reached out for a way to communicate that, and to my very good fortune, someone had graciously provided me with precise words to use as the tools with which to express the feelings. The words themselves sprang to mind just from muscle memory -- just, again, like putting in the clutch, or hitting the turn signal. If I had to actually think about remember those ... what? Several thousand words, and in a specific order ... oy! But too, there are cues -- for me, visual ones, which trigger the recall.

The funny thing about this, is that is doesn't always work in your favor. The muscle-memory thing, I mean. Actors sometimes looked at me as if I'm insane when I explained to them that they had "memorized" that this was the place they forgot their line. It happens, though, and more than one might realize. Just as your mind tells you, after it's seen Brad shake the cornflakes box that you need to walk down the steps and say: "Lovely morning, isn't it, Petey?" so too, does it tell you: "BLANK!"

I was once in a show where another character and I had to stand center stage, and look at a photo, presumably of his mother. The lines went:

Me: This is a picture of your mother.
Him: Me mother.
Me: Her name was Irene.
Him: Irene.

Thing was, we had a prop crew with ... a sense of humor. Also, I adored the actor with whom I was working -- we really clicked together on stage, and laughed a lot. So? The prop crew would hand us a different "picture" every night. Sometimes, it would be a stick figure, with flies circling about its head .... and other times it would be more ridiculous. Thing is, it always cracked me and Russ up. Every night. And? That became part of our "muscle memory" for that moment in the play, as well. I'd start...

"This ... is a picture of your Mother.

And he'd say:

"Me mother."

And then, we'd just lose it. Didn't matter what was on the paper. We had to work hard to UNlearn that pattern before the show actually opened. Of course, by then, the whole cast an crew was on to our problem and ... didn't much help. I remember one night, feeling myself starting to go, and looking off stage left, just to "break out of it" and seeing three actors MOONING me. I then looked off right, and there was my dresser doing the same thing. At a total loss, I cast my glance up to the elevated glass enclosed lighting booth at the back of the theatre, and there, pressed against the glass, were two bottoms. :) Fortunately, it was an "over the top" melodrama (Rags to Riches) and I had a little bit of freedom to ... escape. Another show, I probably wouldn't recall the episode with the same fondness. It was good training, though. I mean, after that, there wasn't much that could rattle me on stage, and that was WAY early on. :)

But yeah: "Muscle memory" in part, and conceptualizing the whole, rather than trying to remember "words."

-- Edited by Nightowlhoot3 at 20:42, 2008-11-06

 

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nottattlbytch wrote:

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My situation isn't a crushing one ... I mean, yeah, sure, I'm having a hard time with it and all, but my post's intent was more generalized, I guess. Maybe that's not practical, and things such as my situation need to be taken one at a time on their own merit, but it did cause me to ponder the whole generalized spectrum of "giving up" -- when it's wise to do that, and how one knows. Surely there must be a line separating tenacity with stubborn foolhardiness, but I don't know that I know where that line is, and I was wondering if it's possible to establish some sort of criteria as a guideline which would be generally applicable. I mean ... is it just when your gut tells you: "you're in over your head" or what?

have there been instances in your life where youve thought it wise to give up and yet hung in there with good result? i think this is one of those things that is specific to each individual. both sticking with and giving up present a door opening closing situation. when we give up we move onto other situations where we have other experiences. we may have missed those if we refused to give up the initial endeavor but in giving up the first we close the door and will never know what might have been. what do you value? where do you want to go? will this take you closer? will it take you farther away from where you wish to be if you give up? i think we all get to answer those for ourselves, tho a guidebook would be a lovely thing to have..sigh.

Psych: Yeah, my Mom was suggesting I'm right brained -- her exact words were: "Well, of course you can't get it! This is all left brain stuff, and you're all right brain." Now, I know I'm not "all" right brained, but there is, I suppose, some reasoning at play there ... I spent a lifetime working in the Arts -- my career was largely right brained.

which means youve engaged more with right brained tasks, which doesnt necessarily mean that you cant do left brain kind of things or that youre worse at them, just that youre better practiced in right brained skills. but too, the particular arts culture that you are a product of also brought us literary criticism and all of its side philosophies and wandering through all of that is a decidedly left brained skill as is the interpreting and analyzing of the culture that happens when one takes up acting or directing. there is much there that requires the left side of things even visual arts requires a geometric mind set. i briefly dated a woman once who made her living writing and to pay the bills she often wrote things like technical books for tractors or brochures on recycling, lots of environmental stuff actually tho she was no expert in the environment and lots of mechanical idustrial technical stuff. but her engagement with the material caused her to read up on the subjects and to read her final product youd never know that she wasnt an expert. she enjoyed learning about things outside of her area of expertise and because of that she knew a whole lot about a lot of things. her area of expertise was sociology not the hard sciences. ill bet shed be a bitch to play trivial pursuit with. lol

, I suppose, but for me, it makes even taking a test to determine whether I'm right or left brained, difficult. Testing with the multiple choice answers was always difficult for me, has always been difficult, because I've always been a person who can (not by choice) think of the one exception to the rule ... the one out of a hundred, or thousand times the rule doesn't apply.

im like this too. especially when its a true false kind of thing. im ok with the multiple choice things since i can weed out which is most true but t/f? im always thinking of the exception. now to me this is a skill necessary for left brain thinking. its being able to hold one part of the info in the head and tinker around analyzing with the rest of it. that requires good spatial awareness and good critical thinking skills.

I was the student in class always putting an asterisk beside a true/false question on a test, and filling up the whole bottom and back of the paper with supportive information explaining why it could be at once true AND false. The bottom line, both in life, and on those tests is that if you don't pick either true or false, then it's the same as no answer, and no answer means you lose the point, and your grade is lowered.

yup! gmta:)

So I suppose I am really more right brained than left, if I had to be one or the other. A part of me, the part which holds my intellectual vanity, (such as it is) recoils at that notion, but it's served me fairly well throughout my (Aquarian) life. But if it's true that I'm "better" with faces than names, I'm still unwilling to accept the false conclusion that I'm "bad" at names, if that makes sense.

it does, its possible to be good at both or better than most at both but to still be better at one. you might be a more visual learner too. some people do better with auditory learning others are more visual some need both. i tend to be a visual or both learner. my attention drifts when something is presented in an auditory only way.

I think a part of this conundrum too, is I really thought I'd pick this up in no time at all. Psych, I could so relate to your story about sitting under the tree with those books. That's pretty much exactly what I went through a few weeks ago, and am still, to some extent, experiencing. What's frustrating for me too, is that I think I've "gotten" it, and then am shown how much I didn't get. A lot of the stuff is just storing tons of new information in my head all at once, and keeping it fresh. I tell myself that this process is like learning to drive a car (back when most were standard transmissions) so much to do all at the same time, so much to remember, and at some point, putting in the clutch pedal does fall to muscle memory, but I'm just not there yet; I'm still thinking about the sound of the engine, how to move the gear shift lever to fourth gear, how much pressure to keep on the gas petal, and oh yeah ... how to push in that clutch, and how slowly to let it out, without causing the whole vehicle to have a major hiccoughing (which, I guess is now accurately spelled "hiccup" -- the way it sounds, which is irritating, since I had to unlearn that years ago, in order to spell it RIGHT, and then they went and changed the rule on me, just like with "snuck") spell, followed by a cringe-producing death in the middle of the road. I know it takes time to master things like this. The question is, I guess, how much time should one invest, before pulling out the bicycle?

it sounds like youre well involved in getting it tho. when we first learn something the process is often one of forgetting some aspect of it after weve thought weve had the whole of it down and then we relearn that until it becomes as youve said "muscle memory"

And there it is ... "creative." But when there's no room for "creativity," when that is, in fact, a handicap, rather than an asset ... what then?

then you take what youve learned on the job and think about how you might use it outside of the job:) just dont sign any non compete contracts!

And we're back to the right/left brain stuff, I guess. I need to learn more about that. I noted, Psych, your comment about the mother's mood contributing to the determination of that. I wonder what else does, and how late in life it may change?

anything we encounter will cause the brain to respond and those responses can change brain function sometimes temporairly and sometimes those changes can take a bit of root with us. habitual thinking can cause things upstairs to flow in a familiar way but when we shake it all up we create tributaries in the brain chem and pathways where non have gone before. its not fixed. our brains are constantly changing. this is interesting because id just picked up a book the other day that caught my attention the name of the book is shadow syndromes and thats where i read a brief note on the study on mothers mood and left/right brain function. i immediately got out my sticky pad and attached a note to self to find the study and look it up for work purposes something that may occur later this week when i aint so busy. but the whole book fascinated. my end of these things is sort of the we are more than the sum total of our biology end of things. i find the current paradigm to be mechanistic, tho i find that a hard position to defend these days, in a world where "scientific evidence" is the sole basis for truth. science is a philosophy tho not the only one and science bears the fruit of many "truths" to be sure but in holding that particular end up for truth bearing we can lose sight of what cannot be measured easily. but here below is a link to a summation of what the book is about. my "scientific" left brained side is saying wow, this is a big leap forward in understanding but my right brained non scientific side is saying that this kind of understanding is akin to saying that aspirin cures headaches. aspirin may alleviate the symptoms of headaches but its a leap to say that headaches are caused by a lack of salacytic acid in the body. it is, after all our experiences that may cause the shift in brain chems and neural pathways and our experiences are not always singular experiences. unhappy mothers can muck with a kids brain functioning, and that simple better living through chemistry one answer but not the only one. rather than tweaking the kids brain chemicals with designer drugs we might consider sending the unhappy mom to vegas for a long weekend as a less invasive alternative. in a perfect world we could integrate knowledge so that we dont cling to the polarities so much, yanno?

http://www.addresources.org/article_shadow_syndromes_ratey.php

take those online tests now, I sometimes get very different results depending upon what I've just finished doing -- if I've been working on left brain stuff, my scores seem to indicate I'm left brained, and vice versa. I wonder if it would be beneficial to kids to have some sort of concrete idea of which brain dominance they have ... if it might help teachers better teach them, if that sort of information were provided them?

if money were no object all kids would be tested to see how they best learn. as it stands now only the problem kids get specifically tested and thats often a waste since the overburdened teachers havent the time or resources to work with them in individual ways.
i remember the battles i had to do each year with my daughters special ed needs. in march of each year theyd test her. 6 weeks later wed have a ppt to discuss the results. theyd say were gonna come up with a plan and wed meet 6 weeks later to tell me what theyd come up with. by this time it was usually may and there was little more than a month of school left. then in sept, itd begin again. a few month would go by, the teacher would express concern about her getting things, a ppt would be scheduled for march and on and on. the only thing that stopped this process was my hiring am ed spec lawyer for her and an educational consultant. the lawyer got the whole process moved so that the plan was implemented from the first day of each new year with the lets see how shes doing at the end of the year and the ed consultant kept weekly tabs on the teacher to make sure the plan was implemented fully. it worked well for my kid but the other special needs kids got left behind. she was mainstreamed in the first grade, went on to graduate high school and college but the other 4 kids that were in her initial special ed kindergarten ended up with certificates of completion for their high school years and all 4 are in sheltered workshop employment now. those kids were the neediest of all in her class and they did not get the attention they needed even in a specialized environment. imagine how the average kids in the regular classes fared?

Should educators try to reshape this in kids, making them all eagles, or support what is presented them as is, and then encouraging the eagles to soar high, and the gazelles to run fast, both equally appreciated and honored? Coming, as I have, from the Arts, it's obvious I'd prefer the later. I wonder too, if I'd been told at some point in my life that I was "right brained" if I would have been content to left the other side atrophy. That doesn't seem a very satisfactory solution, but seems a very real potential hazard in the identification of the dominance. Even so ... if you're a right brained person, should you still be forced to go through life not knowing that, and trying, time and time again, with limited success to succeed in left brain fields?

but if the brain is not fixed and children are equally exposed to activities that target either side and those activities are given equal weight then perhaps the development of both gets done and it becomes one of those things you were speaking of earlier where you can be good at both but better at one depending on preference?

See ... I could have never been a McDonald's university graduate, because really, that's all left brain -- there are specific rules for how things must be done, and they must be done that way every time. Me? I'm the person wondering how that "Big and Tasty" might be with just a hint of horseraddish. I did better as a waitress, where each customer got unique treatment according to them, and the situation.

lol, but but the waitressing thing for me was a real left brained endeavor. one has to remember which person at the table had which thing and how they wanted it done and what was in their glass. this requires great organizational skills! i was the worst waitress imaginable. i actually managed to get fired, rehired and fired again at the local ihop:)

To further complicate the issue, I wonder too, if I am indeed predominantly right brained, how much of that is just because I was told that ... the whole math thing, for instance. The family line has always been that I've "never been very good at math" and I've always gone with that. Oddly, though, on the major academic tests, I always got my highest scores in the "math comprehension" sections. Even so, my lowest grades in HS were algebra and geometry. I wonder how much of that was because I really couldn't "get" it, and how much was because I BELIEVED I couldn't "get" it. Sometimes, I really like working with numbers. That always sort of surprises me. But when it comes to looking at a whole page which is one equation, and seeing all those Greek characters, something in my head just shuts down: "does not compute, because YOU cannot compute." "Yes I CAN," I stubbornly insist ... but maybe I can't.

i think its very possible that you have bought into the i cant do it aspect of this. the math scores show that you have the capacity for it but the desire may be lacking? if you had a vested interest in the outsome i would bet that youd whiz through it. i remember taking the GRE exam in New Haven on a snowy december afternoon and i was supposed to meet friends at JFK in new york that night for a 9pm flight to paris. so i did the verbal part, then the math part, then the analogies part came up. at this point it was 5pm and i was thinking snow, rush hour traffic to new york, yanno? i tried really hard for the first few questions but honestly? i was reading the taxi driver question complete with politically incorrect names and i really, honestly, with my whole heart, didnt care who got the red light first, samier, abdullah or joe. i mean wtf? i had a plane to catch so i started filling in the bubbles randomly just to get out of there. to this day those sorts of questions bother the hell out of me and i find them hard to attend to. now if i were in a situation where samier and abdullah were my lifeline out of the city id know which got there first in a new york minute but otherwise? lol. the scary part is that i didnt do badly on the analogies subsection despite merely filling in the bubbles with wild abandon. goes to show you how predictive those tests are eh?

I wonder if people would be better off if they partnered with others who shared their brain dominence ... if those relationships are more successful than the "opposites attract" theory. I know I've been with women who I just puzzle, just as much as they do me, and no matter how much time is spent together, when we come to a given crossroad, I'm always going to turn right, and she will always turn left.

the worst relationships ive had have been with people who were fairly evenly matched with me. ive found the best seem to be with people who are very different than i am. they bring a freshness to my life because they have interests outside of mine that i can explore and they have different ways of looking at the world which makes them intriguing to me.

Sometimes, many times, actually, I've tried to force my feet to go left, just for the sake of the shared journey, but I can never seem to stay long on that too-foreign path, and my body is pulled, as if my some massive magnet, back, to where I've left my path in the dust ... and again, I wonder (this time, specific to relationships) how one determines where to give weight to importance of issues. If the humor is a good match, for instance (which is huge with me) does it matter if you like to walk through grocery stores or nature preserves slowly, and she insists upon marching through them like Sherman? I was once partnered with a woman who seemed to go through life as if her pants were on fire. Conversely, she told her daughter that my home state (Arizona) was "the Lollygag" state ... that we had it on our license plates, on our cars. :)

lol. i think i dated her once:) i had an ex who used to not only call me right brained but nicknamed me pokey because things like a hike in the woods for me is a time to explore unknown paths while a hike for her was a marine march in double time with a specific end time in mind.

This is a fundamental difference, really. Does it matter? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. I guess one must look at what else is in the relationship, but if there are more things like this in the relationship ... maybe the separation between right and left brained people is the one thing love can't conquer, because it spills over into so many other areas. I would guess, for instance, that right brained people have more knick knacks in their homes. If you have half of a couple with three different sets of dishes, and knick knacks, and the other half wanting only four coffee cups, plates, salad bowls, soup bowls in the whole house ... and NO knick knacks ... you may compromise on that, I suppose, but what if it's more than just that? What if it's everything, like ... chosing where to park the car at night -- and each of you see, so clearly how your choice is the best one, because that's the way your brain works?

my take on this relationally is that whoever has the problem should come up with the solution.oh and the solution shouldnt involve asking the other person to change. lol i had an ex who was, well not very neat, id follow her around picking up dishes and socks and papers. picking them up was ok with me tho. we shared the space and it didnt bother her when it got messy. it did bother me. i couldnt concentrate when things were messy so i owned the problem. far easier to pick it up as i went along then to get involved in nagging or trying to get someone to go against who they were. a toughie for people ive partnered with has been my lack of need for sleep. rather than forcing me to lay in bed staring at the ceiling the best relationships ive had were with women who would say come to bed with me now but its ok to get up and do your thing after ive gone to sleep. its a compromise yes but when someone is secure in the relationship those things become acts of love not reasons for disagreement. that said there are some lifestyle choices that in the end will lead people to grow so far apart that the relationship dissolves. im willing to participate in things that a partner is interested in but i expect some reciprocation. id expect a partner to take an interest in what interests me and to support those efforts as i would support her in her choices and interests.

Ok, a lot of that is mother/daughter stuff, so maybe it doesn't apply. But she requires noise in the house constantly -- she functions better with that. Me? I need quiet to function well. When I'm working on a mental task, I don't have even music in the background. It's distracting for me. Just the opposite with her.

im like your mom in this. i need a certain amount of background noise to engage the part of my mind that wanders. once engaged i can concentrate. weve been using headphones for this and i am promised that for xmas im getting that ear thingy advertised on tv. you know the one where the announcer says you can even hear conversations from across the room!

BoxDog wrote:

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This reminds me of a family that adopted a dog. An adult one, no puppy issues to contend with or anything, etc. They desperately tried to communicate with the dog, to the point that they had him tested for possible deafness. He just didn't react to them, from a verbal pov. They eventually decided to take the dog "back" to the shelter it was adopted from only to find out the dog was previously owned by a Mexican family. The dog, literally, was a Spanish "hearing" dog. The family kept him, learned the Spanish language, to the extent that they could communicate with their pet effectively and lovingly. It was simply a matter of finding the missing link between the right and left brains, not the issue of dismissing one or the other. More of enriching the weaker link to bring better balance. And then they were all deported. Just kidding 'bout that part. The remainder is a real story.

Oops, forgot the most important thing. The dog wasn't "stupid" or deaf, he just needed some help with the language, well, really, the family did. ;)

-- Edited by BoxDog at 23:57, 2008-11-01

-- Edited by BoxDog at 23:58, 2008-11-01

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nottattlbytch wrote:

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Nightowlhoot3,
Hi, I'm new here....

Hi! Ok, I confess your SN stumps me, and dangit, I'm usually pretty good at figuring them out! LOL.



just reading around the board....I came across this one and can so thoroughly relate to what you're talking about!
ok, if the questioning is about making a software application work for you, getting through a sewing project, doing homework with your kid, figuring out a new gadget--I've found that not only do I have to force myself to take a step back, and cool off--if I wait too long, I have to force myself "back into the ring", to get back at whatever it was. Funny thing is, till I started writing a reply to your post, I didn't realize that I deal with relationship issues in pretty much the same way: if I don't pick it to death, I try to "get over it" on my own (doesn't work out so well). I have to say thanks for that post...everything is indeed connected, just like all people are connected (even the ones we'd rather we weren't connected to....lol).
It's not that you're not smart enough, either! I say this without even needing to know what the task is! I think it is much more likely that it's your unfamiliarity with the given task/project/whatever--as irritating as it may be, it is true: Practice Makes Perfect.
How to know when to give up? I've went by this rule: how important is it to me? When it comes to people, I like this measure: if I burn this bridge, can I live with the idea of never being able to cross it again?......but I really don't think of myself as any sort of a relationship wizard by any means!!!! lmao

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I've told myself from the get-go that this is one of those things I need to do for myself on a lot of different levels, not the least of which is preventative medicine in order to ward off Alzheimer's... keeping that specific part of the brain active.

My situation isn't a crushing one ... I mean, yeah, sure, I'm having a hard time with it and all, but my post's intent was more generalized, I guess. Maybe that's not practical, and things such as my situation need to be taken one at a time on their own merit, but it did cause me to ponder the whole generalized spectrum of "giving up" -- when it's wise to do that, and how one knows. Surely there must be a line separating tenacity with stubborn foolhardiness, but I don't know that I know where that line is, and I was wondering if it's possible to establish some sort of criteria as a guideline which would be generally applicable. I mean ... is it just when your gut tells you: "you're in over your head" or what? 

Psych: Yeah, my Mom was suggesting I'm right brained -- her exact words were: "Well, of course you can't get it! This is all left brain stuff, and you're all right brain." Now, I know I'm not "all" right brained, but there is, I suppose, some reasoning at play there ... I spent a lifetime working in the Arts -- my career was largely right brained. I remember faces rather than names... I'm better with music than math ... (although music IS math, so...) and see? I think that's a part of my problem, too. Most of the the right/left brain tests I've taken give me pretty clearly a 50-50 split, which, on the outset would seem to be desirable, I suppose, but for me, it makes even taking a test to determine whether I'm right or left brained, difficult. Testing with the multiple choice answers was always difficult for me, has always been difficult, because I've always been a person who can (not by choice) think of the one exception to the rule ... the one out of a hundred, or thousand times the rule doesn't apply. I was the student in class always putting an asterisk beside a true/false question on a test, and filling up the whole bottom and back of the paper with supportive information explaining why it could be at once true AND false. The bottom line, both in life, and on those tests is that if you don't pick either true or false, then it's the same as no answer, and no answer means you lose the point, and your grade is lowered.

So I suppose I am really more right brained than left, if I had to be one or the other. A part of me, the part which holds my intellectual vanity, (such as it is) recoils at that notion, but it's served me fairly well throughout my (Aquarian) life. But if it's true that I'm "better" with faces than names, I'm still unwilling to accept the false conclusion that I'm "bad" at names, if that makes sense.

I think a part of this conundrum too, is I really thought I'd pick this up in no time at all. Psych, I could so relate to your story about sitting under the tree with those books. That's pretty much exactly what I went through a few weeks ago, and am still, to some extent, experiencing. What's frustrating for me too, is that I think I've "gotten" it, and then am shown how much I didn't get. A lot of the stuff is just storing tons of new information in my head all at once, and keeping it fresh. I tell myself that this process is like learning to drive a car (back when most were standard transmissions) so much to do all at the same time, so much to remember, and at some point, putting in the clutch pedal does fall to muscle memory, but I'm just not there yet; I'm still thinking about the sound of the engine, how to move the gear shift lever to fourth gear, how much pressure to keep on the gas petal, and oh yeah ... how to push in that clutch, and how slowly to let it out, without causing the whole vehicle to have a major hiccoughing (which, I guess is now accurately spelled "hiccup" -- the way it sounds, which is irritating, since I had to unlearn that years ago, in order to spell it RIGHT, and then they went and changed the rule on me, just like with "snuck") spell, followed by a cringe-producing death in the middle of the road. I know it takes time to master things like this. The question is, I guess, how much time should one invest, before pulling out the bicycle?

This stuff I'm dealing with right now: I do want to learn it, but it's a job, and maybe I'm just not cut out for this particular kind of work. Maybe, because of the way my head is built, ten years down the road this will still be difficult for me, and (in some ways, worse yet) I'll still get back C- grades on my work. How much time, I ask myself, is the "right" amount of time to try this? I'm usually the kind of person who will pull the refrigerator halfway into the boat, before I'll cut bait. I've always believed (and often preached) that "problems" are really just opportunities to find creative solutions in disguise.

And there it is ... "creative." But when there's no room for "creativity," when that is, in fact, a handicap, rather than an asset ... what then?

And we're back to the right/left brain stuff, I guess. I need to learn more about that. I noted, Psych, your comment about the mother's mood contributing to the determination of that. I wonder what else does, and how late in life it may change? I know that when I take those online tests now, I sometimes get very different results depending upon what I've just finished doing -- if I've been working on left brain stuff, my scores seem to indicate I'm left brained, and vice versa. I wonder if it would be beneficial to kids to have some sort of concrete idea of which brain dominance they have ... if it might help teachers better teach them, if that sort of information were provided them? Should educators try to reshape this in kids, making them all eagles, or support what is presented them as is, and then encouraging the eagles to soar high, and the gazelles to run fast, both equally appreciated and honored? Coming, as I have, from the Arts, it's obvious I'd prefer the later. I wonder too, if I'd been told at some point in my life that I was "right brained" if I would have been content to left the other side atrophy. That doesn't seem a very satisfactory solution, but seems a very real potential hazard in the identification of the dominance. Even so ... if you're a right brained person, should you still be forced to go through life not knowing that, and trying, time and time again, with limited success to succeed in left brain fields? See ... I could have never been a McDonald's university graduate, because really, that's all left brain -- there are specific rules for how things must be done, and they must be done that way every time. Me? I'm the person wondering how that "Big and Tasty" might be with just a hint of horseraddish. I did better as a waitress, where each customer got unique treatment according to them, and the situation.

To further complicate the issue, I wonder too, if I am indeed predominantly right brained, how much of that is just because I was told that ... the whole math thing, for instance. The family line has always been that I've "never been very good at math" and I've always gone with that. Oddly, though, on the major academic tests, I always got my highest scores in the "math comprehension" sections. Even so, my lowest grades in HS were algebra and geometry. I wonder how much of that was because I really couldn't "get" it, and how much was because I BELIEVED I couldn't "get" it. Sometimes, I really like working with numbers. That always sort of surprises me. But when it comes to looking at a whole page which is one equation, and seeing all those Greek characters, something in my head just shuts down: "does not compute, because YOU cannot compute." "Yes I CAN," I stubbornly insist ... but maybe I can't.

:) I'm talking in circles, I know. Must be a right-brained thang.

I wonder if people would be better off if they partnered with others who shared their brain dominence ... if those relationships are more successful than the "opposites attract" theory. I know I've been with women who I just puzzle, just as much as they do me, and no matter how much time is spent together, when we come to a given crossroad, I'm always going to turn right, and she will always turn left. Sometimes, many times, actually, I've tried to force my feet to go left, just for the sake of the shared journey, but I can never seem to stay long on that too-foreign path, and my body is pulled, as if my some massive magnet, back, to where I've left my path in the dust ... and again, I wonder (this time, specific to relationships) how one determines where to give weight to importance of issues. If the humor is a good match, for instance (which is huge with me) does it matter if you like to walk through grocery stores or nature preserves slowly, and she insists upon marching through them like Sherman? I was once partnered with a woman who seemed to go through life as if her pants were on fire. Conversely, she told her daughter that my home state (Arizona) was "the Lollygag" state ... that we had it on our license plates, on our cars. :) This is a fundamental difference, really. Does it matter? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. I guess one must look at what else is in the relationship, but if there are more things like this in the relationship ... maybe the separation between right and left brained people is the one thing love can't conquer, because it spills over into so many other areas. I would guess, for instance, that right brained people have more knick knacks in their homes. If you have half of a couple with three different sets of dishes, and knick knacks, and the other half wanting only four coffee cups, plates, salad bowls, soup bowls in the whole house ... and NO knick knacks ... you may compromise on that, I suppose, but what if it's more than just that? What if it's everything, like ... chosing where to park the car at night -- and each of you see, so clearly how your choice is the best one, because that's the way your brain works?

As I write this, it dawns on me that this may be the core of the problem my Mother and I are having with one another right now. She's recently moved into my home, and ... it hasn't been a picnic for either of us. Thing is, we seem to switch back and forth on our brain dominance ... in some things, I must have order, and she creates chaos -- in other things, I want to know ... well, like yesterday: I was driving, she was telling me where to drive. Thing was, she wasn't giving me the information I needed. She only gave me two cross streets as the final destination, and when we got there, I had to backtrack twelve blocks -- had I known where we were actually going, I would have taken a whole different route. Ok, a lot of that is mother/daughter stuff, so maybe it doesn't apply. But she requires noise in the house constantly -- she functions better with that. Me? I need quiet to function well. When I'm working on a mental task, I don't have even music in the background. It's distracting for me. Just the opposite with her. That's largely, I think, why I am "Nightowl" ... because in the dead of night, it's more quiet -- no phones ringing, fewer, if any, cars on the road, and you can really think. Well, at least I can. 

And now, I think I need to prepare for the sunrise, and make some java. I've really appreciated all the posts on this thread -- all have really good thoughts which have helped me, and so thank you for that. I hope the conversation continues.  :)

Nightowlhoot3 wrote:

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I've recently embarked upon a wholly new endeavor, and it's hard. REALLY hard.

Last weekend, the thought flitted through my mind that maybe it just boils down to the fact that I'm just "not smart enough" to do this.

I seriously doubt that is the case. 

That... took me back a bit, I confess. Not that I've ever thought myself a special genius, or anything, but ... I get by, yanno? And here I was, faced with something I was really working on, and just not succeeding the way I expect myself to perform in most situations.

I don't think this has anything to do with your intelligence level.  Your brain simply has not yet comprehended the task at hand.  Once your brain understands what it needs to do, the rest will come easily for you.  I always use the term that I need to "wrap my brain around this".  It's just my way of saying, I need to simplify it and understand the basic concept here, then I will be able to do...whatever. 

My Mom tells me it's because of the right brain/left brain stuff. I find some solace in the fact that it's material with which I am completely unfamiliar. Even so ... a part of me wonders if I could more easily do this stuff twenty, twenty five years ago. I think I probably could have.

And you probably still can.  It may take a little extra work, because it's harder to learn new things the older we get.  That's why we go to school starting at age 5 and ending at age 25. 

That's a hard thing to face.

Then appears the second question: is it a matter of tenacity? If so, at what point does continuing to try to "get it" become fool's work? How much time, energy, does one invest in a venture, before it's time to pull the plug? How does one know when the right time is to call it quits? What part of our inner selves holds that answer in safekeeping for us?

I don't recommend quitting.  Not unless it's causing you financial or physical distress.  The challenge will keep you going, and when you tackle it and beat it, I can almost see you dancing around the room in excitement.  I might suggest, however, reducing your amount of time and energy on the project, at least temporarily.  You may find that when you return, the answer will come easily. 

The application of these questions extends beyond this one thing upon which I now find myself focused, and I think about things like relationships -- all kinds of relationships, and realize that with the exception of a very few, I have, and have had an uncomfortably vague and limited knowledge of when the best thing to do is simply walk away. Sure, there are particular acts which dictate those things, I suppose, but in their absence, I mean. When is "quitting" the right thing, and when is it the wrong thing, and how do we know the difference? 

---

I don't know that anyone can answer these questions, because the answers will differ by the person.  Some people are good at just walking away when a relationship has completed its journey.  Others will hang on until it implodes on itself completely.  Others will return even after the implosion.  Which ones are right? Which ones are wrong?  We can list any number of circumstances which would make leaving right, and other that would make leaving wrong, but the answer lies in the decider's heart not on a piece of paper.

BoxDog wrote:

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Nightowlhoot3 wrote:

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 The dog, literally, was a Spanish "hearing" dog. The family kept him, learned the Spanish language, to the extent that they could communicate with their pet effectively and lovingly. It was simply a matter of finding the missing link between the right and left brains, not the issue of dismissing one or the other. More of enriching the weaker link to bring better balance. And then they were all deported. Just kidding 'bout that part. The remainder is a real story.

Oops, forgot the most important thing. The dog wasn't "stupid" or deaf, he just needed some help with the language, well, really, the family did. ;)

very good point!
-- Edited by BoxDog at 23:57, 2008-11-01

-- Edited by BoxDog at 23:58, 2008-11-01

 

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Nightowlhoot3 wrote:

---

I've recently embarked upon a wholly new endeavor, and it's hard. REALLY hard.

Last weekend, the thought flitted through my mind that maybe it just boils down to the fact that I'm just "not smart enough" to do this.

That... took me back a bit, I confess. Not that I've ever thought myself a special genius, or anything, but ... I get by, yanno? And here I was, faced with something I was really working on, and just not succeeding the way I expect myself to perform in most situations.

My Mom tells me it's because of the right brain/left brain stuff. I find some solace in the fact that it's material with which I am completely unfamiliar. Even so ... a part of me wonders if I could more easily do this stuff twenty, twenty five years ago. I think I probably could have.

That's a hard thing to face.

Then appears the second question: is it a matter of tenacity? If so, at what point does continuing to try to "get it" become fool's work? How much time, energy, does one invest in a venture, before it's time to pull the plug? How does one know when the right time is to call it quits? What part of our inner selves holds that answer in safekeeping for us?

The application of these questions extends beyond this one thing upon which I now find myself focused, and I think about things like relationships -- all kinds of relationships, and realize that with the exception of a very few, I have, and have had an uncomfortably vague and limited knowledge of when the best thing to do is simply walk away. Sure, there are particular acts which dictate those things, I suppose, but in their absence, I mean. When is "quitting" the right thing, and when is it the wrong thing, and how do we know the difference? 

---

This reminds me of a family that adopted a dog. An adult one, no puppy issues to contend with or anything, etc. They desperately tried to communicate with the dog, to the point that they had him tested for possible deafness. He just didn't react to them, from a verbal pov. They eventually decided to take the dog "back" to the shelter it was adopted from only to find out the dog was previously owned by a Mexican family. The dog, literally, was a Spanish "hearing" dog. The family kept him, learned the Spanish language, to the extent that they could communicate with their pet effectively and lovingly. It was simply a matter of finding the missing link between the right and left brains, not the issue of dismissing one or the other. More of enriching the weaker link to bring better balance. And then they were all deported. Just kidding 'bout that part. The remainder is a real story.

Oops, forgot the most important thing. The dog wasn't "stupid" or deaf, he just needed some help with the language, well, really, the family did. ;)