Thursday, September 29, 2005
I tried to teach a butterfly or moth to fly early today.
What did the caterpillar do to deserve this extra lesson you ask? Well, I found the damn thing on my tomato bush where it had already proceeded to gut and eat one of my unripened tomatoes. To add insult to injury, the little bastard couldn't satisfy itself with just eating the tomato, but found it necessary to shit it all back out all over the branch he ate the tomato from.
So I threw him off the back porch.
Monday, September 26, 2005
Today, I was sitting on the bus in nearly the same sleep deprived delerium that caused me to fall off of my chair this morning (yes, Kenneth, just like boom-plop but without the humour) and I realized that my lips were chapped. I pulled out a stick of lip gloss to tend to them and then put it away with no great effort of mind. My mind, continually growing like a fungus extending mycelia to soak up information continued to play free-association like it normally does but it just proceeded slowly due to the fatigue. As I got off of the bus a few minutes later, seemingly having completely lost a few minutes of my life with no memory of where they went, my mind got onto the track of makeup in general and I tried to figure out the difference of when makeup is just a plastic cover to cover up the more pure natural layers and when it is used in deep and vibrant hues or in patterns such that it evokes a sense of splendour and is a good thing. As I neared my apartment building, my mind lost track of that thought, having never come to a good conclusion, but still a little sense of wonder. As I entered the building, one quote I've come in the past few minutes to rather like, was invented in the machinations of my brain and so I'll share it here: "All tools can be used either for creativity or as agents of hegemony."
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Today I had an experience that gave me insight into one of my theories that I call my social theory of contextual connaissance for lack of a better term. (connaissance is french for knowing/to be familiar with... it's the only word I could come up with to explain the essential concept in one word for a title). As previously defined, it referred to the fact that most of the time when I "know" a person, it is in a specific context such as a class or a club or a job and I never know them outside of that sphere.
So, today I ran into a girl that was in my biology lab class last spring and as I finished talking to her and ran off to class I connected together two of my theories with this experiential data to give my new social theory of connaissance.
The other theory used for input was the idea that for me to get friends I need a large quantity of exposure to the person in order to develop the familiarity and comfort in my mind to try to develop beyond a contextual relationship (e.g. student<->student to person<->person).
The new theory combines those two as well as an observation from my runin today and finally explains some advice I'm constantly given that never made sense to me in a way that makes absolute and perfect sense to me and shows me the fallacy of one of my previous methods of attempting to increase my social level.
So, here it is:
Premise 1: Generalized social comfort level will increase as the personal social comfort level with an increasing number of individual people in the group increases.
Premise 2: Personal social comfort level increases as a function of the interaction between the number of contextual exposures and the sum length of each single-context exposure.
Premise 3: Number of unique contextual exposures is much more powerful than sum length of single-context exposures, however, at least a small length of single-context exposure is inherent in the definition of a unique contextual exposure.
So, how this works in the example of the experience today:
Unique contextual exposures:
1. In biology class (Bio Lab Student In Class <-> Bio Student In Class)
2. Runins on campus (Bio Lab Student Out of Class <-> Bio Lab Student Out of Class)
3. Today's runin (Ex Bio Lab Student <-> Ex Bio Lab Student)
The addition of that third unique contextual exposure today caused in me a change in my perception of the girl to one of more familiarity and comfort.
The advice that this theory finally explains to me is about why I should get out of the apartment and do things even if I don't know people. The reason it was failing consistently before is that all I was doing was achieving one very low-grade unique contextual exposure with many people. They were low grade because they were almost exclusively observational on my point and not interactive. Note that even if they were interactive, it would still not be worth as much since it is a short exposure and one context.
So, my hypothesis is this:
If I want to increase general social level, I need to seek not to increase exposure time to a people and not to expose myself to many people, but to expose myself to the same people repeatedly in different contexts.
I think the reason I made more friends/acquaintances in high school than college is because I was often in different classes with the same people as well as periods like lunch. Though related with all being school, each was still a different context. Those friends of mine that I made during high school that have lasted outside of even school such as Matt and Jeremy have been primarily those that I had some unique exposure outside of school as well. In Jeremy's case it was church and then neighbour. In Matt's case it was through Jeremy.
From here there are several new methods I can apply:
1. Go out extensively and hope that chance will take hold and I will randomly run into the same people in enough contexts to ground something.
2. Specifically seek out additional contexts with people I have already one contextual exposure to. This could include specifically going up to someone I have seen in class outside of class and creating an exposure, no matter how simple or it could be as complicated as actually trying to ask someone to do something that would create an exposure (for my own sanity I'd require at least a few unique contexts to have the comfort to do that though)
So basically now that I have the theory designed, assuming it is correct, I should merely need to step only slightly out of my comfort level and apply my hypothesis at that level and social level should drastically increase.
Anybody see any confounds or reasons why it shouldn't work?
Monday, September 19, 2005
Tonight Lambda Alliance held its meeting to vote on new constitution changes and the new officer positions that the new constitution created. It was a generally assumed fact that the incumbents (elected in the spring) would be voted into the new position equivalent their old. for most of them, that was overwhelmingly the case. I, however, lost my position as finance director in a vote that came 17-15-4. I was the 4. I think it is perhaps because the other candidates when asked to give a speach were enthusiastic and gave a speach and I merely said that I had nothing to say. I'm not sure how I feel about the loss now though. In some ways I don't mind, and in fact, I voted for the others instead of myself because I do believe they are better qualified for the positions. It'll also get me out of the work that I would have had to do and weekly board meetings. I took the position originally because the old officers all wanted me to run for a position and that one was open so I just kind of walked in unopposed and apathetic. I've still got control of the club website so it is not as if I have been completely shut out of the runnings of the club. In addition, the new executive officer (a field director in the old constitution system) pulled me aside to let me know he had been hoping I'd win and wanted to make sure I still want to be involved and didn't feel like I was being moved past with all the new upstart freshmen that were elected into the new board. On the other hand, despite my anticipating, and perhaps even facilitating my loss, I still feel a little bummed about it.
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
I wish I knew of a big clear area like a field or even a parking lot where I could just close my eyes and walk uninhibited for as long as I wanted.
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Sometimes the daily grind makes life so predictable that events that would otherwise be upsetting generate instead an interpretation of excitement. Just as every morning, I got on the bus to downtown this morning. Like many other mornings, I was tired to the point that my short term memory hadn't fully awoken. A few minutes after descending into Kesey's world (I finally got around to starting to read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), I looked up and realized that I had no idea where I was. I saw the street signs and recognized the names but couldn't place where exactly they were. I wondered if somehow I had managed to completely miss the city hall stop where the bus becomes a different route and whether I was on the new route and where it might be going. I had a test in the first class that I was going to so I couldn't really afford to be late so that heightened the anxiety a little. Instead of turning into a disturbing panic, however, the minor panic I was experiencing was refreshing. I like to have a variety of experience and panic like that is something you can't easily intentionally induce and it can be difficult to find when you are lockstep into a clockwork daily routine. As it turns out, there was construction on the road the route normally takes and it was merely taking an alternate route around that portion of the road but was still on its way to city hall so in the end I lost nothing. When I got off of the bus, my disoriented state continued a little bit due to its inertia and I was just excited about it because of the interpretive changes it made to my worldview for a few minutes until I returned to right mind.
Saturday, September 10, 2005
Kenneth had some fun tonight with the bottle and so I decided to let everyone else share in the fun too. Click here to have some fun at his expense. [Note that link will not be permanent but should be good for a couple weeks]
So, after seeing posters around campus for this Dawgs after Dark thing with some activities that actually sounded interesting, I decided I'd try my hand at social activities to see if I couldn't turn over a new leaf. Big mistake.
After crawling through the literally stop and go (with emphasis on the former), I drove to my normal night time parking lot on campus to find a parking spot. In the weave of the parking lot layout, someone had parked their car overstepping the lines leaving a rather small space for the car in front of me, me, and the car behind me to try to slide through. I had to move forward and back repeatedly and even so I bumped the side of my car against the front of the overparked one. Due to the slow and slight movements I was making with the car, it left no mark or damage on either car but increased my stress level and I began to worry whether I was even going to be able to fit or whether I was going to have to navigate myself back out of the wedge and back all the way out. I eventually made it through and went to a parking deck a bit up the road. Strangely, it was nearly empty, so I parked on the bottom floor.
As I walked toward the student center, I saw spotlights in the air and my anticipation of what great thing was waiting at the end merged with the already neat feel of beautiful north campus in the nighttime. As I got closer to the building, my hopes began to sink as I saw nearly nobody around outside the building. On my way in I had passed the hustle and bustle of downtown and figured I could always retreat to there if this activity was boring. As I got within sight distance of the door I saw the large crowds inside. I soon discovered that these were not merely social crowds, but massive, wrapping lines to all of the booth activities such as free chick-fil-a food, caricature drawings, inflatable trampoline, henna tattoos, etc. While that all sounds fine, the lines were such that I would have been standing in line all night and maybe gotten to do one or two of the booths. I was so disheartened at this appearance that I didn't even bother to get the wristband saying that I was allowed to do the activities.
I promptly left, deciding to fall back on my backup plan of going downtown. I hoped that perhaps I would run into Kristen or Allison since they are among the only very few people I know in this town. As I wandered through downtown, what had appeared to be a festive atmosphere turned out to be in face a lot of frat types and rude drunk people telling me to get out of the road when I had the crosswalk or asking whether I had just checked out a girl who I had barely even noticed the presence of. As I walked, becoming increasingly melancholy, I was accosted by a bum wanting money that he claimed he wanted for pizza. Being broke I told him I didn't have anything. As I wandered on past him, I muttered under my breath, "I wish I had something," referring of course to something more abstract than money.
I wandered through or past several of the bars that I thought I might have a chance of finding Kristen or Allison at to no avail. As I walked back toward the parking deck, I overhead a piece of a conversation between two girls probably 20 feet behind me. It went something like this "Girl 1: Doesn't that girl have a date? How sad. Girl 2: He. Girl 1: Oh, he." I assume they meant me, and it kind of penetrated that they were right. Even if they weren't referring to me or even if they hadn't really existed, that conversation expressed the zeitgeist of my night; not that I necessarily needed or wanted a date, but that I just wanted to spend time with people and I utterly failed.
When I reached the parking deck and began to pull out, I saw a girl walking around trying to figure out how to raise the bar to let her car into the garage. I stopped to tell her to push the button and she happily found that that opened the gate. They parked not far in and it is good that they did, as the exit gate wasn't open and I couldn't figure it out since noone was working in the booth. The people I had just helped lifted up the bar so that I could slide my car underneath it. As I thanked them, they said "de nada, motherfucker."
I could have let the night end like that, but I decided not to. On my way home, in the middle of the radio's playing Metallica's Unforgiven, I decided to throw myself a pity party. I went to Kroger and said to hell with health and to hell with money and bought myself a pudding cake and a nicer ice cream brand than I have before and a soda and some chips. It only came out to around $14 too. Now that I'm done with this post, I'm going to indulge in my party treats alone and watch a movie until I'm too tired to pay attention anymore.
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Woohoo! My name appears in the book Hacking Exposed 5th Edition. I'm on page 433 and in the index. Here is an online image of the index page I'm on (listed as "Golden, Michael").