Category — Uncategorized

I am still enjoying American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld.  I don’t have any brilliant insights into how one goes about keeping someone close who holds divergent views from your own, but there have been a few moments where I’ve grabbed my notebook and jotted down something because it resonated with me.

One of these moments is early on in the book when she confronts someone who swindled a family member.  She slips between two houses to cry in private and have a conversation with herself.  Within moments, she is calm and collected, and she states: “Long ago, I had become my own confidante” (p. 138).

When she calls herself her own confidante, she’s not being facetious.  She talks to herself — in her head, but still addressing her feelings, answering questions, and giving comfort.  She is the advice giver she wishes she had outside her own brain, but she doesn’t stress the fact that some of her relationships are strained.  She is, after all, her own confidante.

I sat thinking about this idea for a long time because I am someone who likes to spend time with myself.  Sometimes I will joke about it when I’m going out with myself and sing a throaty version of “My Own Best Friend” from Chicago.  But while I’m out, am I really talking to myself?

The act of telling yourself something, as I often do on this blog, creates clarity.  It leads you to action or puts things in perspective.  Writing it down, putting it into words, matters.  And maybe THAT is the biggest loss of people not writing on their own blogs.  Yes, they are still throwing up small bon mots on Facebook or Twitter, but they’re not delving deep, telling themselves their own story.  In stepping away from that conversation with yourself, do you lose that role as trusted confidante of your own mind?

Do you tell yourself things, or do you just assume your brain already knows everything happening in your life?

I want to loop back to something that happened about a week ago.  The twins and I did Note to Self’s Privacy Paradox together.  It was pretty good.  I wish they had spent more time covering the pros and cons of some of the suggestions — it’s fine to point out an add-on, but the listener should also know how that add-on may affect their Internet experience — but, overall, it was a good reminder of how we are tracked every single second of the day.

One of the activities included a site where you could plug in a sample of your writing and it would analyze you in the same way trackers analyze and categorize you as you surf the web.  Not every “fact” that data gathererers like Facebook have about you are correct.  Some of them have been inferred by what you like or how long you spend on a site or how you word things.

This site, Apply Magic Sauce, states that it “accurately predicts psychological traits from digital footprints of human behaviour.”  I used the cut-and-paste feature to feed it a bunch of random blog posts.  The magic sauce is fairly certain that I sound like I’m in my mid-twenties and my psychological gender is masculine.

I’m more liberal (yes), more impulsive than organized (no), more contemplative (yes), more competitive (no), and more laid back (no).

Though it gave a deeper description that felt a little more accurate later on the page.

Lastly, it told me my leadership potential.

I’ve never taken that personality test, so I’m not sure whether I actually am an INTP, though it sounded pretty accurate reading the description.

What made me so amused was that each post I fed into the site came back with a high probability of being male.  Other facets of my personality changed.  I wasn’t always an INTP.  I wasn’t always in my twenties.  But I always male.  The lowest rating I got was 75% (“your probability of being male is 75%”), but most of the time it was in the high 90s.  Even my Valentine’s Day post yielded a 94% chance of identifying as male.

It made me wonder how I am categorized by various sites.  Do they know I’m a woman?  Do they know I’m introverted?  That I prefer solids to prints, paint to wallpaper, indoors to outdoors?  Do they know I always eat yogurt for breakfast?  That I care about environmental issues?

By the way, this post stating above that I am a woman still yielded an 82% chance of being male.  And it tells me I sound like I’m 22 years old.  But I’m still an INTP, so there’s that.

Go feed one of your posts into the site and tell me how it categorized you.

Something interesting happened on Facebook last week.  I posted about a man who does odd jobs around the house and how my inclination is to bend over backwards to get him to like me even though he gives me very clear signals that he either doesn’t like me or simply has a gruffness that comes out when communicating with women in general.  He is fine talking to Josh.

I mentioned that I had stopped myself from making him muffins (with the sole purpose to win him over) because it was very Kiera Knightley in Love Actually of me.  I think she’s one of the worst stories in the movie.  She spends the movie trying to coyly charm her husband’s best friend despite the fact that he clearly does not want to interact with her.  Either she has had the shortest engagement in history and therefore has only known this friend for a few weeks and is still trying to win him over OR she has been dealing with this awkwardness of months/years and is STILL pretending like she can just act cute and everyone will come around and love her.  Either way, things aren’t looking good for Kiera’s character.  Either she’s getting married to someone she just started dating or she is unwilling to understand that some people just won’t like her in this world.

So my post was merely about my own foible — my desire to make someone like me who clearly doesn’t like me and doesn’t need to like me.  That being a pleaser is part of my personality, but it is also a statement on women in general since this trait — making sure you’re doing everything to make the people around you happy even if it means making yourself unhappy — is one of our weaknesses.

Offer the man coffee.  Offer the man food I am already planning to make.  But also understand that it’s okay if he doesn’t like me.  I am not everyone’s cup of tea.

But it also raised a different thought for me — I didn’t hire him for his personality.  I hired him because he’s really good at fixing things.  He comes quickly.  He stays until the job is done.  He tries to save me money when he can.  All signs of a good worker.  Yes, he rolls his eyes when I ask a question, but I didn’t hire him to have kind facial expressions.  I hired him solely for his knowledge and trustworthiness and artistry.

I guess this struck me because I worked with so many kids over the years with differences that affected their personalities.  And I hate the idea of them having difficulty keeping a job just because they lack social skills despite having all capabilities to do a job in place.  You could make an argument that personality is a part of certain jobs, such as salesperson, teacher, or lawyer.  But when personality is not part of the job itself and the person isn’t cruel, should they be penalized or replaced just because they roll their eyes and sigh?  I don’t know.

I guess some people feel that if they’re paying someone to do a job, they shouldn’t have to deal with rudeness, but I guess I’m someone who is willing to put up with some rudeness for a job well done.  What I’m not willing to put up with is myself bending over backwards to make people like me.  Life is too short to worry about what this guy thinks of me.

And one thing you don’t know about this guy — he talks out song lyrics to himself while he works.  Talks.  Not sings.  Like I just got to hear a spoken word “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison this week, and it made me smile.  Even if he did sigh moments later when I went to ask him a question.

My cousin and I love meeting at a vegan restaurant between our two houses because we can have anything on the menu.  They change the menu every few months, so I jump on and check the menu before we head to the restaurant.  I’m that bad with surprises: I don’t even like my restaurant menus to look different.

I usually get one of the fake meat options because they’re something I wouldn’t make for myself, but this time I was super curious about a bagel-themed salad.  It’s vegan, but they had recreated the experience of a bagel and lox in salad form.

Let me begin by saying that I have never had lox.  I mean, I haven’t had any fish, but I have especially not had lox because the smell just about kills me.  But is there anything more Jewish than a bagel and lox?  Here was my chance to partake in the experience without having to actually partake in the experience.  I would know what everyone else was consuming, and I would not have to actually consume said fish to gain this knowledge.

So I ordered the salad.

And I hated it.

My cousin has tried lox before, and she said that the fake fish came pretty damn close to the taste and texture of the real thing.  Not only could I not consume the lox portion, but the whole salad had me feeling squicked out.

I was going to box it and take it home for Josh to eat because it was my bad.  The restaurant delivered exactly what the restaurant said it was going to deliver.  It was now my problem because I had ordered it.  But my cousin kindly informed our waitress that the salad was squicking me out, and the waitress told me it was no trouble to let me order something different.

I felt both so grateful and so guilty.  It felt so damn wasteful, and I hate waste!

I know that restaurants want customers to be happy.  This restaurant, in particular, has always gone above and beyond to accommodate needs.  But needs are different from wants.  Food allergies should always be worked around, but likes and dislikes?  I don’t know.  I was really on fence as to whether I deserved different food if I ordered poorly.

Have you ever sent back a dish?

We do not celebrate Valentine’s Day, but it’s not like we hate love.  It’s sort of like Arbor Day — we don’t celebrate Arbor Day, either, but it’s not like we hate trees.  (Arbor Day is for celebrating trees, right?)  We don’t do anything to mark the day, though I can’t really tell you why.  It isn’t a protest.  It isn’t a putting our foot down.  It just isn’t, and we just don’t.

But if Josh decided he felt like giving me a back rub tonight, I wouldn’t say no.

*******

I really do like an idea I’ve seen echoed around the Internet this week about declaring it a day of self love.  Taking a half hour to do something you really enjoy, or buying yourself a particularly good piece of chocolate.  THAT is something within your control.  You can choose to take a small amount of time for yourself.  It can be five minutes.  It can be thirty seconds of deep breaths.  But it’s yours, and no one can stop it from happening.

I am a big fan of things within my control these days.

So I am going to have a piece of chocolate.  I am going to read a chapter in my book.  And I am probably going to end up with a new game from the app store.  Because damn it, I’m worth it.

Happy Valentine’s Day.  What are you going to do to show yourself a little love?