Reposting this (with a couple edits) so that others' thoughts might trickle in from various people:

In regards to love and honesty, even the best of us tolerate bullshit more than warranted, are intolerant of or feel disconnected (or feel like disconnecting) when someone demands more honesty, and engage in a lot of summary explanations of our feelings and experiences even going so far as to package thoughts and answers for easy digest.

The reason I put a negative connotation on summary explanation is because it's a truncation of content, a necessary evil that eliminates all the detail that really makes up an event or experience or emotion that has shaped you or your state of being or mind. I hope you know what I mean by "summary explanation": where you don't want to "get into it" too much so you explain yourself in 'shorthand' so-to-speak. And to "package for easy digest" seems to be a step further where you use cliches and idioms so that folks can understand without the particulars - in my mind it's the particulars that make up -you- and your situation or experience. In this way it's possible to take yourself out of any story you're trying to tell about yourself!

Summary is extremely important to conversation and communication. With people you just met, they may not know the people in your life or your background that is context for whatever you may try to say, and you'd have to fill in the important blanks in an expedited manner. With people you do know, you have to be careful sometimes and summarize so you don't betray a mutual friends confidence in you, for instance.

On another level, ultimately everything we say is a kind of summary - it would be impossible to conversationally explore every nuance to each thing being talking about. Use of language itself is summary, an encoding of a mental conception of something which is really greater (has more meaning or nuance) than we could ever express. When we speak we have to decide on what we believe the meaning of something is - not absolutely but certainly enough so that we can choose words with which to represent it.

Where summary becomes a problem is where honesty is obscured (intentionally or not). It's a problem when you've made a mistake in ascribing meaning to something so that you can talk about it - you leave something out that could be important for the other person to re-interpret what it is you're talking about; you mention something or call something by a name that misleads another into thinking a certain way.

How often do you phrase things you say in such a way as to leave openings for further interpretation or close openings and attempt to nail down something definitively?

I think...
Honesty shouldn't be about transferring your understanding of something, it should be about giving someone else access to what it is you're trying to understand, yourself.

I'm embarrassed to report that I have just encountered this for the first time:
the Library of Congress website of digitized works: American Memory:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html

Wow, my LJ account is still here.. crazy to read about who I was and what I was experiencing back in '03. Shout out to all you crazy LJ people. Nice to see wasome folks alive and kicking.

This great big ball keeps spinning...

( Read more... )

( playing catch-up )
I'm going to Dragon*Con and to visit friends in Atlanta and I'll be back in a week.

Cya!

( boring daily entries )

Well this weekend I'll be in MI at a family reunion on my mothers side. They tend to focus on my choice of hair style than much else in my life, but they're good people who just don't know me very well. I suppose we may be able to fix that. Hopefully they'll like the music I'll share with them and hopefully I'll feel like some real connections are made, more conversations will be true-to-being than small talk, and I'll have a relaxing time. An extended family member has come out of the closet, and there are plenty of little ones running around these days. This side of my family is less concerned with when I'm getting married and having my own little ones, probably because I'm not (nearly) the eldest of my generation.

I didn't get everything I had hoped to get done before leaving done.

I got up early and worked all day on things. Got to spend parts of the day with favorite people, but had to deal with a bunch of weirdness, too. I think it's always the case that when you get upset you release upsetness chemicals that may keep working even when there's nothing left to be upset about. It wasn't me who was upset. But what do you do when you have to somehow address whatever the problem is for someone who is upset in order to make them feel better and be able to interact effectively, and then after they think a whole bunch of stuff is the problem and you reveal not that they are mistaken and wrong but that there really isn't anything to be upset about (even though it's ok for them to be upset..) and there's no way for them to not be upset? Well, I guess they're upset and there's nothing to be done about it. It's ok, things will work out.

Today was less interesting

Worked and am learning things, and I really did enjoy the outdoors until I got too many bug bites, but I can't wait for certain things to be done with and out of the way, so I'm going to get back to helping that be realized.

I made an awesome quiche and was told real men don't like quiche. I played Counter-Strike with my brother and did extremely well, even better than some other really fine players. We had a nice dinner after my sister came home from England. We waited for her, you see, and she came home and then immediately left to be with her boy, without any explanation of her trip or pausing to really visit with us. Ah, so it goes. But the mango, yes, the mango was exquisite. Best mango I've ever had. The mexican food was good and the corn on the cob sweet as hell, as if hell were sweet.

Ok, so I guess I proved that I don't have to post to LJ and that if I do it's only because I want to. I wasn't really trying to prove anything.

So here goes: I will attempt to post something every day in order to get myself in the habit of writing. It'll be good for me, and probably uninteresting for most most of the time. But all the same..

Today I woke up with a headache, right-side, migraine potential. I don't usually wake up with headaches, but I thought it was just a headache, took 600 mg Ibuprofen (sp) and hoped it would go away. Instead, it was full-out migraine time. You try your best to relax, not tense up, get through the pain, but when it makes you so profoundly comfortable that you can't stay still and at the same time it hurts to move, any bright light or loud sound is excruiating, and there are knives in your brain cutting their way out.. well, it's just not happy time. I almost vomited a few times, but no, I managed to keep the medicine and water down both of which probably did some good. Eventually the pain broke like a fever and I was able to sleep, only to wake up in the afternoon feeling exhausted.

Here's to the rest of the weekend being better, and to actually keeping a journal.

Well, a couple more people have started to pay attention to my journal. It makes me more inclined to take it seriously and express myself through it often. I don't know if that will actually happen, but I do know that I like the concept of public journaling a lot.

( Read more... )

I meant to tell you of the clouds yesterday. There were rays of light coming out from them. The cool thing was that eventually off in the distance the rays of light were virtually completely virtical, and thus were huge pillars of light. Perhaps they were orbital mind control lasers. =P

I suppose I am doing ok. There's lots for me to work on. I'm going to get to it.

There were Monet clouds in the sky tonight, just like in Vanilla Sky. Sun was setting and though I couldn't see it I could identify 16 different colors in the sky (not by name of course). Simply amazing IRL...

The roses are gone out of Chicago garden now, and they'll be missed, but there are some nice flowers still in bloom.

The morning was especially perfect, and the early night last night, too. This mild summer has been wonderfully comfortable, for the most part.h

What does it mean that my dreams have become more real to me than reality? It sounds like a bad thing. I've dreamt very heavily recently. Perhaps you always have the same amount of dreaming and I've just been more aware of my dreams, because of the heat, because I'm not sleeping as well as normal, or because I've slept too much, who knows.

Of course, dreams can't be more real than reality, but they sure are a special kind of real. I'll wake up and go back to sleep in order to keep dreaming. Dreams have not been particularly good or bad, certainly a little strange at times, not been especially interpretable. They make their own internal sense, and if someone has any conclusive info on the role of dreaming in the mind please let me know. It seems like coded logic working out real problems, and if so maybe there's a good reason for them to feel more real than real.

The lightning was amazing tonight. I saw it arch across the night sky like an opening flower in time-lapse photography, taking a full second and a half to finish. Amazing!

From the Guardian Unlimited comes a brilliant article, just smashing, regarding irony. It's really -too- tempting to misuse the word 'ironic'.

"The sorrow that has no vent in tears may make other organs weep"

Henry Maudsley, M.D.

Thought I'd share. I laughed. Maybe you will.

( Read more... )

While depressed and dealing with things, I haven't posted, but I have been to my cousins wedding and been touched by it, among other things. I use too many commas. perfora asks for pictures, but I'll have to find my webcam (and I don't know where it is). It was really good to see and talk with allida today. I hope I see her again soon. I'm playing too much Counter-Strike, but I haven't played it in a long time. It's nice to revisit a well designed competitive game involving teamwork. Now I'm reading Transmetropolitan. There's lots I need to do...

( Answers ) to the interview questions. Post a request and I'll ask -you- questions.

That was great.

Most of my band came over and we played for 3 hours. It sounded better than it ever has, better than any show where we're trying to pack in our songs; this was just a jam session. No, I did not record it, and should have.

My family, neighbors, and the friends attending the block party danced and conga lined and sounded like they were really impressed when talked to about it. My sister and her friends stayed in front the whole time to catch all the music. Two kids walked in off the street and bought CDs. Bicyclers and dog-walkers stopped in just for a few minutes of our music. People cheered, and like I said, we played the best we ever have. There's definitely something to the right crowd and right environment (playing outside felt good and sounded good).

I'm very happy.