We're All Mad Here

11-16-10

on Priorities

Q: What do u do when the man that u love and are having his baby in 3 months suddenly says u aren’t his priority anymore? #needadvice

A: Call Jerry? Priorities are a funny thing, they appear to change with whim and the wind. However, a person’s priorities actually follow very logical patterns depending on which needs may or may not be being fulfilled at any given time.

Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs gives a visual representation of this:

So where do you fit?

Can you keep him safe? You’re not a gun, no.
Can you provide him with shelter? You’re not a house, so probably not.
Can he eat you if he is hungry? er… let’s stick with “not really.”

Starting at the bottom, humans move up the pyramid once a need has been satisfied. A hungry person is ultimately hungry until he is satiated. Once fed, he is free to move up the pyramid to his next conquest, be it creative pursuits or some sort of self esteem validation exercise. He assumes that you are not a priority to him anymore because you are no longer in a position to fulfill an immediate need. It’s shit, it sucks, but it makes sense.

See where we get into trouble when our relationships are based on sex?
That’s the bottom of the food chain: forged at the foundation of the pyramid on the same tier of needs we share with the rest of the animal kingdom. These needs are immediate and often abandoned once satisfied until they instinctively rise again. “I need a hambuger/air/laid…now!”

Most advice we receive on relationships from society are naive preconceptions that seduction will lead the way in to a person’s heart and a person’s heart is equal to everlasting love. This is completely wrong. Seduction will lead the way in to a person’s pants and a a person’s pants is equal to about 10-15 minutes of love, if you are lucky.

The closer track to everlasting, or at least love with longevity is the age old adage of “friends first.” Relationships with roots strictly on the physiological level are not nearly as strong as those forged on fulfillment of needs from higher tiers (ex. friendship), and even less strong from those who weave through multiple tiers (ex. sex, friendship, love/belonging, self actualization…etc.).

As for your dilemma
In the words of Queen Ann (Landers) herself: “Are you better off with him or without him?” Either way, the best thing you can do for yourself right now is to start exploring your own pyramid, see the layers above Belonging and Family (those are already a given for you with the new baby on the way)? Self-confidence, self-esteem, respect of others? Those are your targets.

If you want to trump him and win, by modifying these areas, the worst you will do is tear out the foundation below him and position yourself at a higher value than his current status causing him to see you as a way to fulfillment of additional needs. Right now, he knows if all else fails he can fall back on you. Remove that stability. You are no longer his rock. You have options. You are of a higher value to society than himself. This hits him on two levels of the pyramid: you remove the stability of his lower, foundation level and you give him a way to leverage up to the self confidence level.

The best that will happen is you will realize that you are of higher value than him, and build your life around you and your brand new baby.

~Shell

11-16-10

Dear Juniata,

Dear JC,

As much as I am honored to be on your list of all time student achievers, I am not, nor have I ever been married. Funneh story behind that one, see. I’ll explain it to you one day. Now that I’m almost a year out, the newest addition to my “Things That Suck First Thing in the Morning” list include finding your fact checking is as flawed as the main stream medias’ at the moment. So please remove my assumed last name from your website.

As for any future plans of matrimony in my future, well, all I can say is “catch me if you can.”

kthxbia,

Shell

11-15-10

1.61803399

It starts by looking inside. Maybe it’s a little voice within that is telling you something and you are looking for the truth to justify it, or maybe it’s a truth and you are trying to find the voice. Maybe it’s a giant screaming banchee that haunts you in the night and steers everything else wrong because you are heading in the wrong direction and ultimately will not pay attention to anything else but utter destruction. Either way this is how it starts.

Then it spirals out. Your voice is quiet and the only people who can hear it are your family, it grows and gains momentum. Next your friends can hear it. Then a few people who don’t know you: the trend watchers pick up on it. You’ve landed on their radar. Soon it has built up to a size where it has a gravitational pull and people don’t have to hear it before they are pulled to it. Before you know it, the people you have had the privilege to call “family and friends” have grown exponentially.

And then it becomes an influencer: and people’s lives are made better by just the sound of that voice, and that’s intense.

This is how it works. There is no glass half empty or half full; you drink the water to help strengthen your voice and you move forward.

11-12-10

Note to Self: Ego Stroking For Future Reference

SD: seeing the evolution of your bad assery is awesome.

11-12-10

Reflections on Lan.2.0

I’ve been beating my head around the crowdsourcing element: how does one crowdsource advice without it being a yahoo answers sort of trainwreck? Then I realized…isn’t an advice column ultimately about crowdsourcing questions, not answers? The questions themselves act as a solution to a problem: the problem of content and community engagement. That is what made AL so successful: advice columns and editorial columns were the original crowdsourced information. Strike that, maybe not the original but definitely an application of the idea in old media.

I am imagining that crowdsourcing isn’t something that magically happened over night with the dawn of the intertubes. A lot of the “magically appearing social theories” that have been rolling out since the dawn of the digital age aren’t exactly “new” as much as “improved” or just “now with a digital bonus!”.

Take for instance farmer’s markets as an exercise of crowdsourcing. It’s not a digital platform, but the call is put out to find a solution to the consumer’s need, in this case “the best bananas”. Farmers from miles around bring their produce (including bananas) to the farmers market and the winner is chosen by the crowd. Votes are monetary, the best bananas speak for themselves. Capitalism free from monopolistic restraints are applications of crowdsourcing. Amateurs compete with each other using tactics the big dogs use to position themselves above their competitors, the most appealing product (Like the proposed “Gap’s a Bitch Contest“) or the best messaging or the the most sells…you get the point.

11-11-10

Dr. Suess on Self-Organization

Self-organization is the process where a structure or pattern appears in a system without a central authority or external element imposing it through planning. ~Wikipedia

Self-organization is a numbers game combined with natural selection. You have sneetches: they can either be the star bellied variety or not. There will be more sneetches of one kind than the other. The sneetches in the minority will fade into the background as the majority dominates and commands the interest of the observer, just due to numbers. Already patterns are becoming apparent, just by the nature of our minds. (ex. three coins: a dime, a nickle, a penny = most coins are silver).

Let’s pretend the sneetches mate (eww…lay off the coffee, shell). Looking at attraction theories, Alpha theories or even fear the unknown one can assume that the the majority sneetches would only be attracted to other majority sneetches due to perceived social value or out of fear to the unknown minority sneetches. Maybe it’s instinctual that we are attracted to qualities found in the populous in order to maintain healthy genetic codes (ex. a sick sneetch would act differently from the rest of the herd: sluggish, secluded, etc. Healthy sneetches act this way: procreate with the healthiest). Minority sneetches begin to emulate populous characteristics to in order to compete for mates, patterns become deeper. Just a thought.

11-10-10

Intellectual Property

SD: i asked him to read it again because (I did not send) the original email. Then i told him to not talk down to me blah blah. office politics rule.

Shell: i think sol does that in her class. Did you use “I feel” statements?

SD: uh no. i guess i should have.

Shell: “I feel like ass when you talk down to me, could you kindly be passive aggressive about it and do it behind my back like everyone else in the world? Please. Thank you.”

SD: mind if i copy/paste that so i remember it?

Shell: actually it’s copy written, so don’t go posting it around n’ shit

SD: damn.

Shell: sorry, just working on protecting my intellectual property. Get your own “I feel” statement.

11-09-10

Dear Abby,

Dear Madness,

So today…today it kind of hits me. The whole phone call yesterday. Yeah. It’s sinking in.

Luv, Shell

11-09-10

Madness in the Air

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature…. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” ~ Helen Keller

If you were in the Beaver Library last night, you probably saw a girl who looked relatively frazzled. She was aimlessly wondering the stacks pulling books, flipping through the table of contents, re-shelving with meticulous OCD, moving to the next book. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. She collapses in front of the vintage Dear Abby and Anne Landers books, gets up looking white as a ghost as she looks for a connection between the archaic advice columns and web 2.0. She moves back to the business books. On to the self help books. The children’s books. Rushing frantically around looking for a lost notepad and proposal on the shelves somewhere. Fidgeting at a table, staring blankly ahead at the gorgeous river surround by hills of fall foliage struggling against the winter breeze. Looking for answers amongst the shelves has always been a favorite past time of mine.

I wasn’t looking for myself this time. I found her. You just have to get really, really lost to find some really neat things. I was looking for patterns and inspiration. I was looking for structure. The shelves became the new host to my inspiration raid. It was delicious. Harrowing and delicious. Stick around the Madness for some interesting news in the future. More travels, more trouble. Just how I like it.