12-06-10

on Cognitive Acclimation

Dear Shell,

What would life be without drama?

~ Love, Purveyor of Drama

Dear POD,

I suppose it depends on how you define “Drama,” it is a relatively ambiguous term. I am guessing your response is going to be less objective and more subjective: you will define “drama” by certain events that occurred in the passed. Drama is when a girl does this, this and this or a friend does that. By breaking down the events that lead up to your generalization on the matter allows you to identify actual traits in people you want to stay away from in the future. That being said…

Dramatic events and situations are difficult and often push us to the ends of our limits, but it is necessary not only for us to grow as people, but also to maintain who we are now. Humans experience cognitive acclimation to emotional stressors in the same way our bodies acclimate to environmental stressors like heat.

Let’s look at Holmes and Rahe’s Stress Scale as an example. The scale shows 43 stressful life events that can occur. At the low end of the scale, ranging from about 10-20 life units (LU) include vacations, Christmas and parking tickets. A bit higher in the 40-50 LU range is pregnancy, marriage and retirement. At the extreme end of the scale is divorce, imprisonment and death of a spouse.

Definitions of what defines a dramatic event varies based on what emotional stressors are already present in a person’s life.  For instance,”Trouble with the boss” carries about 23 life units with it. A person right out of college (end school:26 + change in residence:20 + change in social activities:18 = 64LU) might have a lower threshold to emotional stress, so their response to boss trouble might be more intense than to someone who is in the middle of settling down and starting a family (marriage:50 + pregnancy:40 + change in personal habits:24 = 114LU). To someone dealing with loss of life, this may not even register on their emotional radar (loss of spouse:100 + retirement:45 + change in health of a family member:44 = 189LU).

11-27-10

on Video Games

Dear Shell,

Seriously, 360 or PS3. Not which one has better specs, which is more fun? No reviews, which do you think is better and why?

~ Curious

Dear Curious,

I refuse to answer this question until Wii comes out with a Karma Sutra edition.

~ Shell

11-24-10

on Social Anxiety

Dear Geekery-Guru,

I find I want to be out tonight, but am afraid that my social anxiety/awkwardness will rear it’s ugly head once/if I do venture out. Any proven remedy for keeping the shyness at bay?

– Up But Not Out In The Empire State

Dear Empire State,

Social anxiety sucks, and even in it’s minor form can be crippling. First and foremost, if anxiety is to the point that it is interfering with your ability to lead a functional life you may need to talk to a professional. That being said, anxiety happens. It’s normal and everyone experiences it. However, there are a few ways to tame it:

1. Stay balanced. Many times things like caffeine, excessive sugar, drugs and alcohol can not only immediately exacerbate feelings of anxiety but can throw you off balance for a day or two after as well. Additionally, cognitive functions can be effected by dietary allergies as well. Gluten allergies have been mistakenly treated as things like ADHD and Autism so it may be worth considering how else allergies can manifest themselves in our body. Keeping a food diary to track your emotional and physical responses to what you eat is trite and boring but in just a few days can give you amazing insight to the way your body responds to certain foods.

2. Find out “Why?” Introspection can help you determine what triggers your anxiety by identifying what runs through your mind immediately prior to the onset of anxiety. More times than not it’s some sort of self defeating statement: “I’m too tall/too short/too thin/too cantankerous”. Here is a secret: everyone in the room is battling some sort of  self esteem issues. This is good news. It can be difficult for people to silence their own internal voices long enough to notice what you are worried about. You major area of concern is hardly a blip on their screen and chances are they won’t notice it.

3. Learn to laugh at yourself. Have a witty comeback when someone attempts to open a conversation with you on the wrong note. They are either fumbling with their own social issues or see you as a threat and are trying to beat you down. Either way a sense of humor will get you to the other side with flying colors. Embrace your uniqueness, it just means you don’t have to dress like a peacock to get attention in a room.

4. Strike up a conversation, immediately. As soon as you walk through the door, find a person or group of interesting people and force yourself to strike up a conversation. NOT WITH THE BARTENDER. This will do three things: 1.) help distract you from your surroundings and the attention that you are giving to your anxiety, 2.) help you develop allies at the venue and 3.) make you appear socially valuable to others at the venue making it easier to socialize and strike up conversations later in the night.

5. Remember why you came! You are there to have fun, why the hell would you waste your time if you could be doing something else? You are having fun, right? I mean, you didn’t let your friends drag you to a bar when you would rather be at a cafe curled up with a good book, right?

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

11-15-10

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.

11-11-10

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.

10-09-10

Desolation

Desolation is an intriguing concept: a vast empty space where the fauna has long since given in to the elements. Your words get carried off in the wind and the only thing you can do is keep walking. It is in these moments that you learn the value of hope and humility.

The other day I had the pleasure of hearing a minister speak at city hall. They were issuing a proclamation on Arts & Humanities month, but more importantly they were issuing a proclamation in honor of the PRIDE fest that is going on downtown today. The minister shared the moment with his partner of 20 years and offered up this quote:

“It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.” — Mahatma Gandhi

By doing nothing, you will surely perish, and the footprints you leave in the soil will be limited to those you laid down prior to quitting. But to keep moving in hope that things will clear up, that if you take a few more steps you will eventually stumble into some semblance of Eden, even if you die trying you never who will find your footprints in the future and what effect that will have on them.

10-03-10

Meditations On Mountains

A lot of my decisions are based on the idea that you must enter the valley before you can find the next peak (godin), but now I’ve gotten to the point I am questioning that. What if it is wrong? What if you leave the peak and its not a mountain but a free fall to a very unsavory end?

I started thinking about this and started looking at the behaviour of items on hillsides: gravity takes over and down they go. The only time you stop is if you find an object to hang on to or leverage yourself against. This builds unhealthy relationships with said objects who gain animosity at the strain and added weight.

Choices aren’t usually made at the tops of mountains unless you grow bored with your situation and decide to start the descend on your own free will (perspective from mountain tops can be skewed), therefore they are made somewhere on the sides: when your body is already competing with the force of nature threatening to take you to the bottom anyway. Choices will either slow your descend or speed it up. Not making a choice is still a choice, and usually contributes to the slower descend. A speedier descend builds momentum, which helps you get started climbing the next mountain.

But I wonder: mountain tops are barren and desolate, valleys have a greater chance of containing food and water. Were we even suppose to be climbing these mountains anyway or do we set out away from the comfort and certainty of a situation because of our own need to fly?

09-26-10

Meditations on Autumn

The natives are restless, perplexed by the unseasonable warmth, they speak of fall. They grow tired of the summer. To me, it’s all the same. Seasons ran into each other in Florida.

I stand at the counter pealing apples: silver knife, slick in the juices of the flesh of those that have come before, is raised to strike through the skin of the red and yellow speckled orb forever stealing this state from apple, deeming it to some other form from which it will never return. Perfectly cool and round, my mind floats to Eve as the excitement of its perfection floats over me. The hypothetical fruit is still a subject I am reckoning with, a topic for later and is pushed into my subconscious just as quickly as it surfaced.

I think of last fall: harvest in Pennsylvania and the apple festival. I thank Hera and Demeter for the experience, the exercise of baking, the perfection of the fruit. Then my mind travels to the tree and things begin to make sense. 42* is found in an apple, the fruit for which the tree concentrated all of her energy and now she doesn’t even get to reap it’s benefits. I do. I felt guilty. What right do I have to take from the tree the experience of watching the fruit fall, experiencing the relief and watching from afar as the flesh disintegrated into the ground and  her offspring that struggled for life from the seeds (then subsequently dies in the shade of her own branches.)

But that was it, what we all did, the circle: concentrate our energies on any one goal which will ultimately be more thoroughly enjoyed by someone else (the candy we hand out at Halloween, the apple that went into the crisp to nourish my friends or into the ground to nourish the soil). So perhaps the center, the balance is continue to concentrate your energies knowing that you, too will enjoy the ultimate concern of some other spirit at some other point in return.

And yet it ironically all spins back onto Eve.

* even in my philosophical states, you still have to be a geek to keep up with me. Hitchhikers Guide anyone?

02-16-10

Dancing with the Stars…er…Therapist.

Issue 1: Confront Your Fears.

Today I had my first therapy session: instead of Freud, however, it involved the Fox Trot and the Rumba. D and I have decided to forgo the traditional routes of “and how does that make you feel” by dealing with our issues in a more…direct way. And so, with much intrepidation and not nearly enough alcohol, I walked nervously into the dance studio.

Issue 2: Listen to Your Body.

I’ve always been fine with the cerebral of performing arts: writing and design and even memorizing the lines and spewing them in front of fans waiting on the edge of their seat…not a problem. But the few areas that require a person to expose themselves and to allow themselves to be vulnerable to the audience have always been the most mystifying to me. These, of course are always the parts and pieces that make a performance so intriguing–and just plain good. Hence I suck as an actress, or as a performing artist in general. Want me to parade around naked in front of an audience? No problem. Want me to lift my arm to express exasperation? Now we have a problem.

All it takes is some work, focus on where your body is, what it is doing…then stash it away in muscle memory and let your body do with it as it needs while you feel the energy of the moment. Not for me. Asking an Anorexic to listen to her body is like asking a paraplegic to wiggle their toes: it’s kind of mean. But it’s something that needs addressed.

Issue 3: Release Control and Learn to Follow.

Follow? Me? Hardly. ‘Nuff Said.

Issue 4: Relax and Have Fun

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