Rusty's Blog

Since this is my personal blog, these links are not related to my work information. None of this is to be considered an interest in doing business with you over one of these connections.

Twitter – http://twitter.com/rusty0101
identi.ca – http://identi.ca/rusty0101
Jabber – xmpp://jabber.org/rusty0101
Jabber – xmpp://jabber.beresourceful.net/rusty
Yahoo Messenger – rusty_curry or JayRCurry
Google Talk – xmpp://talk.google.com/rusty0101

Personal Planet – http://www.rustyconnections.com/planet

Blogs

http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/blog

http://www.rustyconnections.com/blog

http://blog.myspace.com/rusty0101

Webcast/podcast (idle for now)

http://www.rustyconnections.com/cast

Photo Albums

http://picasaweb.google.com/rusty0101

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rusty0101/

– There are also albums associated with my myspace and facebook profiles.

Social websites

http://www.myspace.com/rusty0101

http://www.facebook.com/rusty0101

http://www.orkut.com/ – log in and search for rusty0101@gmail.com

e-mail
rusty@curry.net
rusty0101@gmail.com
rusty@beresourceful.net
rusty@vcu.cc
kc0@vcu.cc

Are there more places where I can be found? From time to time I’m on freenet IRC, I have icq, aim, slashdot, digg, and many other accounts. A lot of them end up showing up as rusty0101, although a few have used variations. If you can use the information on one of the above links to find me, and you need assistance at one of those locations, let me know. I don’t make any promises, but I can try to help.

Where am I physically? Probably someplace close to my car. you can get a pretty good idea where that is at http://map.findu.com/kc0vcu-15

I’m not immune from the possibility of job related issues from my public face. Neither are you.

First of all as I write this, I happen to work for Wells Fargo. And while what I do and say may reflect upon Wells Fargo, I have many personal views that are at odds with what some people, perhaps even a majority of people, at Wells Fargo may hold.

From an employee at Wells Fargo’s perspective, I am very happy that the company celebrates diversity the way it does. As it grows as a company, that diversity has given Wells Fargo the flexibility to enter new markets as a result. From an investor’s view, that is one of the reasons that Wells Fargo currently is the second largest financial institution by market cap, as well as the second largest by total deposits. Interestingly enough in those two comparisons 1 and 3 swapped.

From a personal perspective, I am not recommending that you maintain any financial association with Wells Fargo, unless you personally agree with the way the bank is run, and does business. For that matter I think you should take a look at a complete cross section of your opportunities and only bank with those institutions that you happen to agree with. If that means a local credit union, go for it. If that means Bank of America, I’m OK with that too. You should be responsible for where you put your money.

I’m also not going to tell you how to invest. I honestly don’t know what your investment goals are, and couldn’t tell you what the best strategy is to achieve those goals. Honestly even if I had some idea, I don’t know who I would recommend for you. There was a commercial for an investment firm on TV a couple of years back, where a customer was talking with a portfolio manager, and it was clear that the portfolio manager wasn’t sure that the customer knew what risk meant. So he point blank asked “Would you be OK if your investment portfolio lost half of it’s value?” For someone just starting out, that might be OK. On the other hand if you are a year or two from retirement, that might not work out so well. Or you may be more than happy to put a quarter of your portfolio in such a fund, understanding that one possible outcome would be to lose it all, and another could be to quadruple it’s value.

About the only bit of advice I can offer is that which I’m pretty sure most people are aware of. It’s the same bit of advice people get told about everything they value. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Spread out the risk across multiple investment opportunities. Sure Microsoft would have been a great place to buy stock the day after it went public. Most of us wouldn’t have been able to buy any of the stock the day it went public anyway. But today you might look at the core offerings of what Microsoft is selling, and consider the stock to be a fairly low risk place to put money, and also a place where you shouldn’t expect your money to grow wildly.

You’ll note that I’m not telling you to invest in Wells Fargo. If you do, you will be amoung many people who’s names you will recognize, but there are also names you’ll recognize that are not on that list. So I certainly wouldn’t recommend specifically investing in Wells Fargo. Do I have money invested in Wells Fargo? Yes. Whether it is a preferred place for my money to be is a different matter. For the moment I plan on keeping between 5 and 10% of my retirement funds in Wells Fargo stock. But you don’t have to. And I would honestly say that putting more than 10% of your retirement fund into any specific stock is probably not a good idea. For a short term holding when you believe the stock will grow significantly, you might put that much, or more in it, but not for the long term.

First bit of advice, find a real financial advisor to work with. That’s not me.

And that’s part of the problem with working for a company, and having a public image on the Internet. There are people who know and trust my recommendations. I don’t know how many there are, but the reason they trust my writing is that I’m not writing as a public face of Wells Fargo, or for the companies I worked for before Wells Fargo. I’m not telling people to jo sign up for jobs at Wells Fargo. If you’re interested, you’re best option is to see what’s posted. If you don’t know, the starting point is the wellsfargo.com home page, and their is a ‘jobs’ link there. If you’re not, that’s OK too.

And so it goes.

But the real point I want to make is that I write about a fairly large variety of topics, some of which are going to be very uncomfortable for potential employers. I’m not going to appologize to them for that. It’s my personal life, and asside from the fact that my personal life involves the same person as my professional life, they generally don’t have a significant overlap. I’m not writing about the latest in networking technology that I’m playing with at work, or learning for work. Office politics have no place in my personal life, and my personal life is not something I generally involve people at work with. If something happens where there becomes an overlap, perhaps I meet someone at work and we hit it off and things go great and we both have a personal life together that situation will have to be addressed by both of us.

So why all the rhetoric? It turns out that there are a lot of companies that are looking at the personal presentation people have on the Internet, and making hiring decisions based on that. Some companies are looking for things like number of friends on social websites as a sign of the prospective employee’s ability to work with others. Likewise a quick look at the pictures they post or have posted of themselves is an indication of how aware of what they are presenting they are, and whether that presentation is something they want to hire. Lots of pictures of the prospect drunk and half naked? While most of us have been there, it’s not something we felt it necessary to put someplace where just anyone could see them. Granted it wasn’t quite as easy to put those pictures out there for many of us.

Something else that comes up is the ‘what is your opinion on…?’ questions. Most of us have learned over time that our opinions change. The solid agnostic finds God in one or more of it’s myriad forms. The staunch conservative realizes that sometimes people need a bit of help and becomes a social liberal, perhaps while staying a conservative businessman. The card carrying democrat becomes disillusioned with the party and realizes that she now has a different view on politics. The social maven ends up isolated for weeks or months in some accident, and comes out of the situation unable to trust others without knowing why.

I’ve had an on line presence of one sort or another since 1988. I’d like to think that most of it reflects a person who is curious about technology and people, psychology and physiology. I’m sure that it shows a person who’s seen some rough days, and some better ones. I’m absolutely certain that some of what is out there is stuff that I no longer agree with. Either because I’ve learned better, or because it was true then, but is not now.

I’ve also written some stuff that has probably cost me either real friends, or potential friends, who have looked at my views and decided that they couldn’t accept those views in a friend. And honestly, losing friends that way doesn’t make me upset. This world contains a very wide variety of people and some are just not right for each other.

That also applies to potential employers. I don’t expect that I would be a good fit for a large number of employers. And that number will probably grow if they take into consideration my personality as presented on the Internet. And honestly I’m OK with that. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think it’s going to be a problem for me to deal with if that eventuality happens. I’ll probably be a bit upset about it then. But as I stated, my views are subject to change.

…when you settle into my lap, draw my arms around you, rest your head on my shoulder and fall asleep knowing we are, but that day is not yet.
…when we walk hand in hand feeling the sun on our backs, hearing the laughter of the world rejoicing. But that day is not yet.
…when I hear the moans of your passion, feel your body and min, acting as one. But that day is not here.
…when we can sit and discus, examine some dreams if not others, and just share in your company. Is that day now?
…when you realize that you mean, more than I can express, through words, thought or deed. Will that day arrive?

…and realized I was in the midst of a major change in my life.

I wasn’t looking for my glasses, concerned about how my contact felt. irritated with myself for having slept with my glasses on, thinking I needed to clean some lenses or another.

Several people have talked with me about the fact that getting Lasic or PRK (the procedure I went through) was a life changing experience. I didn’t doubt them in the least, and I’m not saying that this is evidence of that. It’s just that for one of the first times, as I was getting up, I Noticed that I wasn’t doing these things, and had a moment of personal celebration.

Is it something I would do again? Yes. I don’t know how I would go about setting things up differently, but definitely I would do it again.

As a reminder, I started out with a correction difference of about -8 diopters in each eye. Anything beyond about 6″ from my eyes was completely out of focus if I didn’t have glasses or contacts in. I could not read a book without glasses.

Well, OK if I held the book or paper within 6″ I could read, but you then run into parallax issues. Essentially what that means is that I could bring one eye into focus on what I was reading, but the amount of effort to get the other eye to actually look at the same word, and also focus was often impossible. Reading a page involved not just moving the page up for each line, but also moving my face across each line (or the page) as I could not focus on the entire line at once.

No what I have now is not perfect. And there were a few advantages to having vision that worked at such tight quarters as that. An advantage? I could, without a loop, see details in jewelery that many might miss entirely. Of course I had to hold it close to see that, but then so does a jeweler. The thing is, I don’t work in the jewelery business. I don’t buy and sell it, I don’t make jewelery, and I don’t expect to do so any time soon. And beyond that, there isn’t enough of a call for those capabilities.

There is a lot of talk out there about the difference between plain Lasic or PRK and Wavefront enhanced. From what I understand, I did not get Wavefront enhanced. Part of why, at least for my left eye, was that my correction is so strong that the advantages do not outweigh the extra work involved. Additionally it seems that the technology was not able to work with my pupils being as small as they were when they were doing the measurements. Yes they could dilate the eyes, but that does affect several other measurements, including the controls on the laser. It turns out that the laser equipment will abort the procedure if the pupil is dilated too much when it is trying to do it’s work. So for me the result was a straight prk procedure.

Now as to the ‘not exactly perfect.’ I do need reading glasses when looking at small text. I can work around that to some degree on computers. For example the text I’m writing this at my computer with is a 12 point text rather than 10 point. As my eyes heal, I may get some of that near focus back. However I knew going in that near focus would be a problem.

So I have several pairs of reading glasses available to me. and that works well for now. But I’m not putting them on first thing in the morning. Wearing them all day. Completely blind while cleaning them. Soaking them for 8 hours in a protein remover. (Contacts) Making sure that they have been cleaned of the protein remover before putting them in my eye. Perfect? No, but I wasn’t expecting that anyway.

I also have several pairs of glasses specifically for going outside. Sun glasses of course. UV will cause problems with the healing process. But also of concern is dust and stuff in the air. Drying due to a breeze or even the defroster/defogger on the windshield of the car. And so on. So since there is a lot of my life that is spent at night, I also have a couple of pairs of no-tint sunglasses, or safety glasses. I’m a little concerned about mercury vapor lights and florescent lighting, as both emit UV in addition to the light that lets you see about you, but not at the levels that the sun does, at least not unless I suddenly take up an interest in tanning beds and booths. (Which is fairly unlikely I think.)

Life changing? Yes. I’m seriously hoping that it is significantly life improving as well. But that’s another post.

Upon this beach, they once did lay
in wait of sailors who might stray
never more will they be here
never shore will this they fear

For long ago I traveled thus
not by boat, or even bus
walking every beach and rock
grinding sand from bits of block

The sirens thought they had me too
a storied song of love so true
that none could resist their call
that none would fail to fall

and none ever did, until they met me.
On hearing their song, I joined it you see
harmonized their lyrics and calls did parry
counter and block and in time left wary

slowly, it seamed, after years of the banter
it gently did change, the song became cantor
and as that became talk, the sirens did listen
and with that and with tears their eyes would glisten

I told my own story, and through that they fled
not all at once, but each with true dread
of a punishment met, they could not bear
and the tortures of gods they did not dare

The story was long, but it is not over
the love of one man, now forever a rover
as he walks all the sand, course and so fine
counting each grain for the glass that tells time

He did not seek this, but has nary a choice,
in the punishment met for raising his voice
“For this you’ll count every grain of sand,
on this, what you called ‘God forsaken land.’”

Too allow this to happen, you’ll have immortality
And your love as well, but just conditionally
Should you ever once utter her name again
You both shall be gone, never will you amend

But the worst of it was that apart we would be
I on all land, and her always at sea.
The salt of the ocean, is the brine of her tears
and none of it touches my skin all these years

When ever I come close to the sea it rolls back,
Dry mud at my feet, as if on hard tack
From continent to isle, and isle to sand bar
I’ve walked all the land both near and far

Only from mountain and then only that rare
I may glimpse my love some bowsprite so fair
I wonder at times, if she remembers me still
if this punishment of mine is leaving her ill

I’ve walked and I’ve counted, till all that is left
not a place of peace, but this island of death
After telling my tale, just this latest of times
and filling it with all sorts of bad rhymes

The mermaids that fled have discovered in me
a man immune to the siren song of the sea
For while there are many fish out there for thee
the one that I love, I’ve no hope left to see.

I’m probably never going to be perfect at it, but I hope like hell I’ve corrected one of my many flaws. I suspect that the result is introducing other flaws that will show up in time, but since I’ve realized that learning of, and working on flaws has been a continuous process, I’m neither giving up, nor going to get excessively worried about it.

Many many years ago, when my children were both living with me, I got to talking with someone about personality types. In the process I was shown that I had a very sarcastic sense of humor. Sarcasm would suggest that it was hardly a surprise to me, but let’s get past that bit.

I made a personal commitment to watch out for it, and work on correcting that when I was able, and otherwise pretty much let it go.

A bit over 10 years ago it came back to roost. A few friends of mine at work and I were joking around when on friend turned to me and asked me why I was being so cruel to her.

It wasn’t something I was intentionally doing, but when I looked at what I had been saying, I had to agree that my actions were cruel. And completely unwarranted. (OK, that’s redundant I suppose. All cruelty is unwarranted. Perhaps more accurately pretty much the opposite of what I really wanted to express. She is a wonderful person who I hope things have gone well for, but whom I’ve also lost all touch with.

The cruelty involved was my using sarcasm as a form of humor and being completely unaware of the result I was having on her, and other friends. As you might be aware, my sense of sarcasm as a form of humor hasn’t exactly gone away. But I do try very hard to redirect it towards myself.

There is a pretty sever down side to that of course. attacking myself with sarcasm is the antithesis of a constructive encouraging environment to learn and grow within.

You see, Sarcasm is presenting the Illusion of being smarter than the person being attacked. But if you are attacking yourself, the illusion breaks down as part of the attack, but the attack also goes past ones own defenses. If you think about it a bit, it makes sense. You know what your own most personal failings are, and so when that piece of you that is familiar with that makes an attack on those failings, it is the worst form of a personal attack.

“Get over it!’ The immediate (and sarcastic) response is ‘Sure.’ The reality is that it’s not so much something that one needs to ‘get over’, so much as it is something that must be stopped.

I hope with all sincerity that I have not left anyone feeling that I’ve been cruel to them in the past 10 years. But that hasn’t stopped the cruelty. It’s just moved it to another place where it is undeserved (except for the institution of remorse for my previous behavior, which should not be an ongoing punishment.)

So now the issue is to remove the sense of sarcasm. I’ve successfully demonstrated to myself that sarcasm is not a sign of superior intelligence. If anything it’s a sign of weakness. It is the pickpocket sneaking up behind you, noting a hole in your defenses, lifting your wallet, and sliding a shiv in your side for good measure.

So how to shut down this stupid sarcastic streak. I can tell you with some assurance that it isn’t going to happen through affirmations. Think of it as a call and response. The call goes out ‘I am a positive influence in the lives of my friends.’ response comes back ‘Yeah, right, just like last time!’. So it’s going to have to be a different strategy.

First of all is recognizing where I have been successful. I can here some people suggesting that you will always be good at what you work at. but that’s not what I really mean.

As an example, I’ve pointed out that I’m reasonably good at taking pictures. Not claiming to be a ‘pro’ at it, just that people like some of the pictures I’ve taken very much. And oddly enough I have been asked what my pro rates are. That to me is a success. When people believe you are at a higher level than you yourself feel you are, it is a success in the form of actually exceeding expectations.

Over the past few years I’ve achieved several forms of recognition at work. To some degree I consider them to be examples of doing my job. But they are also examples of places where people think I am doing my job better than others who are doing the same type of work. And whether that means I’m doing my job better than expected, as well as I should while my peers are not keeping up, or just better than others while none of us are as far along as we should be, it is recognition that should be taken positively. The worst sarcasm can suggest is that perhaps the peter principle applies. Not exactly biting. Is it? (I suppose I could be accused of fighting sarcasm with sarcasm there.)

The real trick is to replace the buzzkill which is sarcasm with something useful. To do that you need to know what sarcasm provides. Yes it’s an attack on a weak point, but it’s almost always followed by laughter. There is often a reason it’s called sarcastic humor, it fulfills a basic need in the human psyche to relieve the stress and strain of a significant pain that the person making th comment is under, or perceives in the people about him or her.

That stress and strain will continue to cause the pain, unless a different form of release can be found. That may be telling jokes that are not sarcastic, or if the stress and strain can be managed in a different way, perhaps working towards a resolution the the root problem.

What I did before was change the focus of the sarcasm. The stress was still there. The change is now to direct the energies that were focused on relieving that stress through sarcasm into toher venues, hopefully healthier.

Looked at how someone described themselves and wondered at how much they reminded you of you? Have you ever heard a voice, and strangely heard music that lifted your heart, but no music was around except in your mind. feels so comforting, and exciting too. Dreams flow past causing magic to flow, feeling closer, and both enchanted with rings bringing us closer, binding us with our own acceptance of the now, and feeling arms wrapped around us both holdine each of us will tall of our strength, compassion, caring.

Feel the stirrings of lust deep in our bodies, something that we share with each other, and perhaps more. Eyes deep in eyes, finders flowing through hair, gently holding that embrace, fingertips touching, tingling, teasing, tracing, embracing.

Words whispered, both calming and enticing. breath against ears, cheek against cheek, urgency and patience, that contrast between the pull of now, and acceptance of whenever. That recognition that what happens now is also a stepping stone to the future, and that what may seem urgent may also be the recognition that now is that whenever.

There is never a sens of having lost the moment, because the moment is never past, it is always a decision away, a yes, an acceptance, an opening, a recognition of inevitability that is just exactly what you were seeking, filling your needs, filling our spirit, reaching inside and opening us to the joy that can only come from starting with an eye caught and encouraged. A curiosity fulfilled and enjoyed.

What you can feel growing inside, a warmth that starts behind the eyes, is moved by your heart, flowing through your arms tingling your fingers, warming your chest, feel your heart race, hour breath come fast, Somehow reaching your toes, and flowing up your legs, and all coming together, bouncing off the small of your back to your belly button, and dangling, teasing, pulling you forward and raising you up, Feeling yourself floating on the pleasure, knowing it is both just for you, and shared pleasure of all.

Have you ever? Do you want to?

This should really only be considered entertainment. If you try to use this for something else, I don’t know if it will be of use to you. This involves the use of a fantasy world to look at and explore solutions to problems. If such a world is not something of interest to you, that’s OK, It’s probably not going to be of much interest anyway. However there are a good number of people who realize that this world is tied into experiences and thoughts that go beyond this world, and perhaps an sense of wonder and enchantment will appeal to you.

Most of us have a life in what we call the ‘real world.’ You know, the place where we get up several times a week, go spend hours doing something that someone else thinks is valuable enough to pay us for, or perhaps we spend time trying ot listen to someone try to make their idea of how something works, into something we can use. Work, school, commute to and from, home, friends, perhaps the bar, club, band, who knows.

But that’s not the only world most of us live in. Sure there are a few people who have little or no immagination, who only live in the ‘Now’ of reality. But if you, like me, find that not everything we consider important is really part of that world. Perhaps you spend some time each day getting wrapped up in a story on TV. You know that the story is fiction, or involves a part of reality that probably doesn’t otherwise touch your own, how many of us live in $3 million mansions, or get to work on dream cars? You get the idea. Perhaps it’s part of reality, perhaps not, but it’s usually something other than the reality of our daily lives. And we love to go there, if only for a while.

It’s pretty obvious that there are many of these worlds. And each of us only interacts with a few. Perhaps you game in the Diablo or Warcraft realms. Or you read space opera or romance. You might listen to a music that lifts your spirits in ways you can’t explain. It may even be an artificial world along side of our own, Second Life, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, or something else.

Perhaps you have friends who you only interact with them in that world. Or friends you interact in both the real world, and the illusory.

One of my favorite worlds has it’s foundations in fantasy, but is something far more. I think of it as the SuperReal world. It is a place where I can take the problems I have in my real world and just sit down and break them down to smaller chunks, each of which can be addressed, and what I bring back is a potential solution that I can use, or share. This world is connected with all the others, because it is a world of information, connections, and discovery. When you step into this world you can find a sudden strong sense of being connected to the world about you in ways you have never considered.

Not only are you connected to the world, but you are connected to others. You find strands of connection like gossamer threads that connect you with frineds. You see that they have a strength you didn’t know about. Perhaps you can find those threads to friends who have left, either the community you exist in in the real world, or even those who have left the world entirely. Yet a piece of them remains, and you find that any time you want, you can sit down and talk with them. And if you don’t need to right now, those people can all just fade into the rest of the world. There doing their thing, while you spend time doing your own.

As I said you can bring a problem you may have. all problems have shapes here. It may seem to be a sphere, or a star, A floating cube, or a pair of dice. For you it is something to be experienced.

If you haven’t been here before, you will find it oddly familiar. for it is a piece of you, though not just you. You may find it exiting, or spiritual. Who knows, you might even find some erotic sensations here. After all what you wear is up to you, and you can freely express just exactly who you are, and what you want or even feel you need. And if a sense of eroticisim is a part of you, then that is here as well. It is after all, you.

No matter why you come, if it’s just that deep sense of fulfillment being here , or if it’s to get your being wrapped around something you might think is more than reality, for now let’s take a walk through solving a problem.

Perhaps you are expected to work with a tool you’ve never used before, or have only used in a limited capacity before. that doesn’t really matter. It’s something you want to know more about. You’ve sat through the lectures, perhaps as attentive as you could be, or possibly letting your mind wander a bit, but still paying attention. You know that this tool can be used to do something specific, but it’s like looking through the information you have available to you, you’re just missing that critical component.

So let’s visualize the situation. About you are the pieces. You’ve found a comfortable place to sit, or neal, crouch or even lay down. For just a few moments, close your eyes and picture this area inside of you that is missing the knowledge you are looking for. Feel it out, taste it, smeel it, hold it. It’s in your hands, feel the shape of it. Feel the texture. Is it smooth, or bumpy? Does it have a soft, flexible feel, able to grow and stretch to accommodate new material as you grow, or is it hard and rigid, specifically suited to this one task. Only you know, but you are holding it and are becoming more and more familiar with it.

As you think about the pieces of possible solutions that are about you, perhaps you recognize exactly what it is that this space needs. Or perhaps there are pieces that come together and almost by magic fit together filling your need. Or as you think about it, perhaps you recognize that while you don’t have the specific pieces, that this is a similar shape to something you ran into before. Leading you to that connection to the real knowledge of how to fill this void in a most satisfying way. And just perhaps you are going to have to go beyond what you know or have immediately available. for along with being connected to all other universes, you being here involves you creating something more than you had before. You can reach into the universe, and pull out the raw material of what needs to be put into this space. You can form it, but even so you find that perhaps just a bit more knowledge than you have available is needed.

As I said, I am here with you, for this is your version of one of my worlds, and whether it’s because it amuses you, or you find it necessary, you can call upon me now to help. This may be your version of one of my worlds, but whether you just found I was here, or you dragged me in across the connection we hold through this world, you can bring me into this experience. Perhaps I can be there to listen as you relate the experience. Perhaps I have what you are looking for. Together we look at the problem. We take the situation in, feeling it become a part of us. Growing as your curiosity of what this really means to you now. Feeling your mind opening to new ways of taking in what is before you. anticipating the enlightenment and enchantment that taking in this new experience is causing to grow within you, the deeper into this we get. For with each piece of enlightenment and enchantment that begins to glow within your mind, you find that the next piece becomes even easier to accept and even more exciting to reach for and experience.

Enlightenment may not mean that you go back knowing exactly how to use that tool. it may simply mean that you have a better understanding of what you need to be able to get the tol to do. You are still going to have to tryi the ideas you’ve encountered, and some will give you surprising, and perhaps wonderful, results that may not have been what you started out looking to do.

In the end you may need to go to someone who has far more knowledge about the tol than you’ve aquired so far, and ask them for their assistance. But in examining what you want to do, in exploring it’s shape, feeling it, examining and accepting, and rejoicing in the recognition of what that shape means, you now have the ability to ask better questions about how to use this tool to achieve what you seek to do. And you are ready for the person who does know to pass that knowledge on to you, sharing with you the wonder of discovering just how that solution fits with your needs.

If it wasn’t there before, this world will always be available to you. Perhaps you will use it to consider solutions to new and interesting problems. Or you can use it to explore who you are, and what the person who introduced you to this world can do with or for you, here, or elsewhere. Perhaps you will use the world to discuss something that happened years ago, with your image of that person here. Or you can come and explore what you might have become if a decision you made had gone a different way.

You bring into this world what you carry inside of you, and you take away from it what experiences you have, what solutions you create or find, and perhaps a better recognition of the beauty and wonder that is within you, and a sense of enchantment, knowing that you have a place that is fully yours, you control, and that refreshes, renews, re-invigorates, thrills and mystifies, and when you want takes you wherever you wish to go, and gives you the strength to go back to the ‘real’ world, with the enlightenment of having been in your SuperReal world.

And hey, when you encounter me out there, and you will, you can decide if this world that is a gift for you, one which was spawned from an idea, but which you’ve grown and build upon yourself, is something you can share. With me it just seems that such a wondrous place is both something to celebrate, and to share.

We are all different. We each see the world through different pairs of eyes, and those eyes feed what they receive to a mind that has been shaped by things that it alone has perceived. Those previous perceptions affect how we perceive new things.

The thing is that a pair of Siamese twins will ultimately have sufficient differences in perception that they will have differences of opinion. They have one advantage over others in dealing with those differences though. They are attached in a way that they can not go separate ways when they disagree. Granted, with modern surgical techniques, this is less of a problem than it once was, but it gives them the advantage that they know that they are going to have to work towards a solution to those differences. One of the interesting results has been that in situations where people are forced to come to an agreement, the tendency is for one of the people to be submissive to the other. Post surgery, it is not uncommon for those rolls to be reversed. Why? Because the person who was formerly dominant realizes quickly that if they don’t work out some new arrangement that the person who was tied to them before, and could not escape, and could be dominated to do things for them, can now walk away. Essentially they realize that dominating someone who can freely walk away is not a reliable way of getting something done. The reverse is also true. Knowing that you can walk away gives you the power to exert control over what is going to happen as well.

Now I’m not interested in turning this into a debate over domination and submission. That can go in a wide variety of directions and at some point it’s going to be tied to sexuality and sexual themes. I’m not afraid to broach such topics. But that’s really not what this article is about, so skipping it.

There are really 4 different types of interactions between two people. Both feel they win, one feels they won and the other lost, there is an equal exchange or both feel they lose. Ok, there are variations, where one ‘loses’ and the other feels the exchange was equal, or one feels they lost and the other feels the exchange was equal.

There are people who feel that the only thing that happens in a human interaction is that one person takes energy from the other. It is a simple view that is fairly easy to explain, and when put in the right words, is something that most people would find has relevance in their interpersonal interactions. However it’s far from the whole truth that it is often portrayed as. Are there people like that? Sure. But a prime example is a mother/child or even father child interaction where the child feels that every interaction they have with their parent is negative. Or at least leaves them exhasperated, lost, and with the feeling that something has been taken away from them.

However look at what a parent is trying to achieve. Fir the vast majority of parents, the greatest day of their own lives is they day they realize that you have gone far beyond where they believe they will go themselves. The next greatest day is when they realize that you have gone beyond where they dreamed that you could get. Neither of these situations involves them taking energy away from you to do this. They both involve you doing something that may seem mundane for you, but they feel is extraordinary. And beyond what they feel they can do. Is this a loss of energy on either your side or theirs? No, it is an example of a win/win situation.

Some of us never experience that situation. I won’t go into ‘why that happens, but yes it does. And again, it is an example of how each situation is unique and involves different experiences.

We each will go through some pretty devestating situations at times as well. Perhaps it is the realization that our dream for the future will not happen anytime soon. Or ever. Or it may be that one of us has a really bad day at work, or even looses that work. These things happen. And of course how we respond to those things happening is highly dependent on what our mind is focused on at the time. Are you interested in going beyond what this experience suggests, or are you going to define who you are by this experience. It is not the experience which defines you, whether that experience affects you or not. It is the way you choose to respond to specific experiences that is useful in defining who we are.

Not all of those experiences will work out the way we like. and not all that we do will succeed. But that is good too. Every ‘failure’ is an opportunity to learn from the resulting situation. Fell down while walking? So what were the conditions in place when you fell. Is there something you can change about how you walk? Does doing that work out better?

As with things not working out the way we like, we don’t always learn from the way that things do work. In fact there is some credence to the claim that people in general don’t learn from their experiences. Take the declaration that Einstein is credited with that repeating the same steps, and expecting a different result is one definition of insanity. Others have pointed out that we go back to doing things we are familiar with, even though they are not satisfying the goal we claim to have, simply because we are more comfortable doing that. A good example is the person crawling around under the light of the street lamp. Asked what they are doing, the person reports that they are looking for their contact lens (or something similarly difficult to see at a distance.) And perhaps they recruit two or three other people do help them. After some time someone asks where were you when you lost the lens. The person says they were off that direction 10 or 20 feet. So why are you looking here? Because the light is better.

Individually, if you try to puzzle out why someone does something, it initially may look entirely like insanity. Clearly there are better ways of doing some things, and some of the things that each person does may very well seem to work completely against their declared intent. However in nearly every case it’s because at some level the person involved either doesn’t know or recognize a different way of doing something, or they tried a different way, found it wasn’t working for them, and went back to a way they were familiar with.

Heinlein (and very likely several others before and since) pointed out that science only rarely makes real advances. We appear to have made more progress in the past 200 years than in the previous 2000 years, but at the same time if you look at the state of science in the United States today, we have gotten to the point where topics I learned in Hight School 30 years ago are again subjects being actively legislated against being taught in many parts of the country. The people fighting to keep Evolution out of the class room have alternative ’science’ curriculum available that amounts to ‘because we don’t understand why this is, we declare that it can’t be understood, and you will have to go to some other resource to get an explanation.’ As some have put it, ‘The uneducated are beating at the doors of education, bearing pitch forks and torches, here to hang the people who have the inclination to help them pick themselves up out of the mud of the road.’

Reality of course is never quite that simple. The science that we declare as going back to Aristotle, has roots firmly embedded in the medieval Christian church, and tools that derive from the Islamic Empire that controlled a significant part of Spain before the Christians re-took the region. The number system you very likely use today has it’s roots in that exact region of the world from those events. Prior to that sequence of events there was no concept of counting ‘none’ of an item, and having a way to represent that. also the concept of numbers having a ‘place’ value has no prior history in western history.

So while there are significant ‘fundamentalist’ segments of the population who declare all science to be flawed because it does not agree with their interpretation of the word of god, the very science they are railing against happens to derive specifically from the religion they hold so fundamental.

We each are different. We each do things for our own reasons, but we also all have needs that involve recognition and involvement with other people. Some of us are really good at it. And some of us could use a lot of help. It may seem odd to some, but we also may very well be very good at some parts of working with and communicating with others, and not so good at other parts.

A prolific writer may not be able to put two or three words together in a coherent sentence when talking face to face with someone. A wonderful public speaker may not be able to correctly differentiate between to, too and two in the written word. Someone who can lead people in the roughest and most violent of combat, may not be able to convince their best friend to pack warm cloths for a trip to the Arctic for the winter. People who can play the most beautiful music and play chess at the grand master level, may not be able to interact with others in a reasonable way.

We are each different, and what may be strengths at one time and place may be critical weaknesses at others. Likewise just because someone is unable to run 5 yards does not mean they can not run a successful global business.

The thing is that most of us forget those things. We like to generalize and categorize. We make blanket statements based on a brief involvement with someone or some thing that we then apply globally to those things we have generalized or categorized. I don’t think I’m better than anyone else at doing this, or catching people doing it. I happen to think that I’m probably one of the most racist and sexist people I know. But that doesn’t mean that I have to live based on the prejudices that I’ve built. Because I am aware that I have those views, I’m doing what I can to watch out for myself behaving in a negative way based on those views. And I’m likely to be harsher on myself for any failings I find than I would allow anyone else to be towards me. And yeah, I beat myself up about these things. A lot.

Because of the way I beat myself up about these things, I hope that I’m paying more attention to the way that people around me are doing things. Looking for examples of where the generalizations I’ve made break down. Helping to tear down and tear out those false generalizations.

I don’t know if anyone else does this. I don’t ask anyone else to do that either. We each have our own way of dealing with the world, and I hope that in time we find that the ways that we find fail, we learn something from. But I know that some, or even many of us won’t. And while I’m sad to see that happen most of the time, It’s a very real situation that we have to move forward through.

In short, we are all different. It might just kill us, but it is also the very foundation of our success.

Usually.