A fellow student made an interesting case today that Thanksgiving was his favorite holiday. His logic was that holidays that involve receiving presents aren’t as fun as they used to be whereas for Thanksgiving he gets to stuff himself full of turkey and fall into a tryptophan-induced coma while watching the Detroit Lions lose another game. After all of that goodness—and let’s be honest, that is a pretty great holiday—there remain leftovers leading to what he terms the greatest of sandwiches, the Thanksgiving leftover sandwich: take two pieces of bread and put as much turkey, stuffing, and random vegetables between them as possible, then enjoy. Depending on circumstances of the attended Thanksgiving dinner, this can last for weeks!
This was a good case for Thanksgiving, but there are others to be made as well. Most people are raised being taught to thank people for gifts, compliments, whatever nice thing was relevant. Religions teach thankfulness to whatever deity for the good things in life. Thanking in general seems to be understood by most people as repayment, compensation, another gift given to the original giver. When people give gifts, they like to think that the gifts are appreciated, and the level and detected sincerity of the thanks provide signals of the appreciation. Giving thanks can reinforce good or courteous behavior, can create and strengthen bonds between people, can brighten someone’s day. If these were the only reasons to give thanks, they would be enough.
Giving thanks is, as mentioned, a sign of appreciation. And we can give such a signal regardless of the appreciation. Where once we heard, “Act as if ye have faith and faith shall be given unto you,” now we might say, “Act as if ye appreciate and appreciation shall be given unto you;” in another common phrase, “Fake it till you make it.” Giving thanks can lay a foundation for us to one day feel genuine appreciation, thus leading to more of the initial reasons for giving thanks. Again, if these were the only reasons for giving thanks, they would be enough.
But giving thanks is also a source and expression of humility. Giving thanks forces us to recognize something outside ourselves and to acknowledge that this thing outside ourselves gives us pleasure. Giving thanks forces us to put ourselves, our pride, behind this foreign source of happiness. Giving thanks forces us to prolong our interactions with this outside world. In being forced to do these things we are freed to better experience the world. In being forced to make smaller ourselves we are freed to make larger our world.
Giving thanks helps not merely the thanked but the one who thanks. Giving thanks forces us to make our world more important; it really forces us to make our world more interesting and more enjoyable. We often think of morality in terms of what is best for other people, and it is easy to make the case that giving thanks is best for others. The more surprising and important point is that morality often is what is best for ourselves, and that applies to giving thanks.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Hectic
Every semester has that few weeks where it seems like everything is happening at once. For me, for this semester, that time is now. Partly this is because finals are just around the corner. Partly this is because Thanksgiving break is next week. Partly this is because my second conference in three weeks has me on the go again, and those vacations make me feel as though the normal routine is overly busy.
But mostly this is because every semester just has that period, and now is that time. I traditionally have been able to keep low stress levels, so in times like this things usually get a little weird for me. I’ve noticed this week, with the busy period beginning, that I’ve been eating a little more than the last few weeks, so that’s something I need to control. However, I’ve decided to try a new approach this year (like always; maybe I should keep track of which ones worked in the past and use them again). This year, the approach is that things that would normally stress me will not be allowed to stress me.
While I’ll be pleased if it does, somehow I think stress-less-ness by fiat might not work.
Although t took four months, the feeling I anticipated finally arrived. I finally had the feeling this week that spending time thinking about new friends here might be unfairly discrediting my old friends back home. I don’t want to use the word “betrayal”, but I did feel a little bad about it. Partly this was from generally thinking about talking to people up here and moving forward with life, but mostly it wasn’t. Mostly, this was from thinking about my upcoming trips home, Thanksgiving and Christmas, and thinking about how I may want to get back north a day early for Thanksgiving and possibly a week early for Christmas to spend time with new friends.
Nothing significant today, try again soon.
But mostly this is because every semester just has that period, and now is that time. I traditionally have been able to keep low stress levels, so in times like this things usually get a little weird for me. I’ve noticed this week, with the busy period beginning, that I’ve been eating a little more than the last few weeks, so that’s something I need to control. However, I’ve decided to try a new approach this year (like always; maybe I should keep track of which ones worked in the past and use them again). This year, the approach is that things that would normally stress me will not be allowed to stress me.
While I’ll be pleased if it does, somehow I think stress-less-ness by fiat might not work.
Although t took four months, the feeling I anticipated finally arrived. I finally had the feeling this week that spending time thinking about new friends here might be unfairly discrediting my old friends back home. I don’t want to use the word “betrayal”, but I did feel a little bad about it. Partly this was from generally thinking about talking to people up here and moving forward with life, but mostly it wasn’t. Mostly, this was from thinking about my upcoming trips home, Thanksgiving and Christmas, and thinking about how I may want to get back north a day early for Thanksgiving and possibly a week early for Christmas to spend time with new friends.
Nothing significant today, try again soon.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
The Parts We Play
Here’s a rare second post for the day (couldn’t sleep and wanted this typed).
I always liked acting. Whether it was school plays or musicals, messing around with friends on school projects, even one night when a friend and I were voice-acting the subtitles on a friend’s video game. The video game was a little ridiculous I admit, especially since after about a minute of it he was threatening to strangle us with the controller cord (and we deserved it). I was best and most at home acting around friends, which is probably why of the two plays I did in high school, my performance was better for the one with a small cast of close friends. I suspect that the reason is, for someone who traditionally was an introvert, the energy cost in overcoming my fear of being outcast would exhaust me unless I knew there was no risk of my audience casting me out of the group—friends, for instance. Regardless, I always felt like a more entertaining person when I was pretending to be someone other than myself.
One of my favorite essayists, Robert Fulghum, has an essay in which he talks of the three lives everyone leads. Shakespeare had his “all the world’s a stage” line and the seven ages of man, and Fulghum has the three lives we lead: public, private, and secret. In reverse order of his treatment, secret lives are the ones entirely inside our heads. We not only don’t share these lives with others (even spouses and soulmates), to some extent we can’t. Some of this consists of things like that secret bias we have but try to hide (like mine for women drivers…oops, put this to a lie), but some is like the way we respond to certain powerfully emotionally stimulating things—we can’t share it no matter how we try. Private lives are the ones we share only with certain people. We keep some things secret from most, but share with certain friends. Relationship details, personal thoughts on that coworker/classmate we can’t stand, etc., these things are not meant for public consumption.
The last, which Fulghum rightly considered the broadest, is the public life. This is what everyone else sees when they look at you, though some (the friends) have other information as well. This is how we dress, our favorite conversation topics, how we laugh, and other things of the sort. One definition of introvert is that they spend energy in social situations while extroverts gain energy in them, and if so this is the life that introverts find draining.
I often wished that all social interactions could be scripted. That way, being an extrovert or, more likely and less difficult, being an interesting person (okay, perhaps more difficult) wouldn’t be a function of some things that I couldn’t control but instead would be something I could learn and with my talents, learning was great. But social behavior not only doesn’t work that way, it can’t and shouldn’t.
Chesterton wrote of the two great institutions for preparing one for a social life: the family and the neighborhood (or neighborhood pub, in his case). His logic was that in those settings you have to deal with people who don’t necessarily agree with you on everything (unlike, say, the clubs we voluntarily join), and thus we learn how to get along with other people which is the heart of being a social creature. In both settings, you can’t afford to hold a grudge because of how often you must interact with them: all the time.
Recently I started treating social environments in the same way I used to treat acting. Instead of trying to overcome my fears, I started trying to circumvent them by convincing myself that my public life was just another character to perform. And what I found was that Chesterton, Fulghum, and Shakespeare were right (the first two I suppose were to be expected, but I didn’t think that Shakespeare guy was good for anything). Our secret and even private lives define us. Our public lives are just a shell. As I get more practice with this acting job, I grow more comfortable with it. Though not an extrovert quite yet, I find myself getting excited over the prospect of heading out with new groups of people or starting conversations with people I’ve just met. For the first time in my life, I can see why the extroverts are extroverted. Coincidentally, given my belief that on this planet people are the most important thing, I’ve also had a happier default state (i.e. when not with friends, my happiness level) these past few months, though of course it nothing here has been close to the good times I left behind.
We get told all our lives that we shouldn’t care what other people think. Only recently did I combine that with 2 other bits of advice from television shows: one, from Sports Night, that says we shouldn’t try to get people to like us; and the other, from House, that says indiscriminate niceness is overrated. The combination of the three (though all are obviously too general and thus wrong in some respects) is something that I do believe to be true. There will always be people who like the kind of person you are and people who don’t. I can spend my life trying to trick or convince the latter to like me, or I can just accept that they won’t and not worry about them. That freedom has a lot to do with the aforementioned changes. Perhaps this is a sign of maturity; I fear that I am growing up and will get my “Toys’R’Us Kids” membership card revoked.
I always liked acting. Whether it was school plays or musicals, messing around with friends on school projects, even one night when a friend and I were voice-acting the subtitles on a friend’s video game. The video game was a little ridiculous I admit, especially since after about a minute of it he was threatening to strangle us with the controller cord (and we deserved it). I was best and most at home acting around friends, which is probably why of the two plays I did in high school, my performance was better for the one with a small cast of close friends. I suspect that the reason is, for someone who traditionally was an introvert, the energy cost in overcoming my fear of being outcast would exhaust me unless I knew there was no risk of my audience casting me out of the group—friends, for instance. Regardless, I always felt like a more entertaining person when I was pretending to be someone other than myself.
One of my favorite essayists, Robert Fulghum, has an essay in which he talks of the three lives everyone leads. Shakespeare had his “all the world’s a stage” line and the seven ages of man, and Fulghum has the three lives we lead: public, private, and secret. In reverse order of his treatment, secret lives are the ones entirely inside our heads. We not only don’t share these lives with others (even spouses and soulmates), to some extent we can’t. Some of this consists of things like that secret bias we have but try to hide (like mine for women drivers…oops, put this to a lie), but some is like the way we respond to certain powerfully emotionally stimulating things—we can’t share it no matter how we try. Private lives are the ones we share only with certain people. We keep some things secret from most, but share with certain friends. Relationship details, personal thoughts on that coworker/classmate we can’t stand, etc., these things are not meant for public consumption.
The last, which Fulghum rightly considered the broadest, is the public life. This is what everyone else sees when they look at you, though some (the friends) have other information as well. This is how we dress, our favorite conversation topics, how we laugh, and other things of the sort. One definition of introvert is that they spend energy in social situations while extroverts gain energy in them, and if so this is the life that introverts find draining.
I often wished that all social interactions could be scripted. That way, being an extrovert or, more likely and less difficult, being an interesting person (okay, perhaps more difficult) wouldn’t be a function of some things that I couldn’t control but instead would be something I could learn and with my talents, learning was great. But social behavior not only doesn’t work that way, it can’t and shouldn’t.
Chesterton wrote of the two great institutions for preparing one for a social life: the family and the neighborhood (or neighborhood pub, in his case). His logic was that in those settings you have to deal with people who don’t necessarily agree with you on everything (unlike, say, the clubs we voluntarily join), and thus we learn how to get along with other people which is the heart of being a social creature. In both settings, you can’t afford to hold a grudge because of how often you must interact with them: all the time.
Recently I started treating social environments in the same way I used to treat acting. Instead of trying to overcome my fears, I started trying to circumvent them by convincing myself that my public life was just another character to perform. And what I found was that Chesterton, Fulghum, and Shakespeare were right (the first two I suppose were to be expected, but I didn’t think that Shakespeare guy was good for anything). Our secret and even private lives define us. Our public lives are just a shell. As I get more practice with this acting job, I grow more comfortable with it. Though not an extrovert quite yet, I find myself getting excited over the prospect of heading out with new groups of people or starting conversations with people I’ve just met. For the first time in my life, I can see why the extroverts are extroverted. Coincidentally, given my belief that on this planet people are the most important thing, I’ve also had a happier default state (i.e. when not with friends, my happiness level) these past few months, though of course it nothing here has been close to the good times I left behind.
We get told all our lives that we shouldn’t care what other people think. Only recently did I combine that with 2 other bits of advice from television shows: one, from Sports Night, that says we shouldn’t try to get people to like us; and the other, from House, that says indiscriminate niceness is overrated. The combination of the three (though all are obviously too general and thus wrong in some respects) is something that I do believe to be true. There will always be people who like the kind of person you are and people who don’t. I can spend my life trying to trick or convince the latter to like me, or I can just accept that they won’t and not worry about them. That freedom has a lot to do with the aforementioned changes. Perhaps this is a sign of maturity; I fear that I am growing up and will get my “Toys’R’Us Kids” membership card revoked.
Busy times
The last two weeks of my life were spent taking midterms. These are definitely things that I will be glad to never have to take again; first, though, I must get through the next year and a half. To make the story even better, for my first midterm my alarm clock (read: cell phone) turned stopped overnight and so the alarm didn’t sound, and yes, I missed the midterm. Fortunately the teacher allowed me to make it up immediately when I got to campus that day, but then my calculator’s batteries died. The other two midterms weren’t so eventful, but I left them feeling about the same.
After that, though, I got to visit
On Monday I got to sit down with a professor here who is on the top of the game in the areas in which I have interest. We sat for an hour and talked about things I can be doing now (mostly passing classes and prelims), things I can start doing soon (areas for focus, working along with him), and decisions that, given I will stay in this field (as seems likely at the moment), I will have to make (what specific direction to take research). The meeting went very well and I left with a new group to enter, one focusing on my areas of interest.
Yesterday I went into
So today I finally get to rest. No homework is due tomorrow, no events are this evening, no meetings or conferences are scheduled tonight. Who knows, I might even get some sleep tonight.
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