Opinions

Everyone is entitled to their opinions, and in fact, I am not sure it would be possible to stop some people from having them. Lots of them. But there’s a difference between having an opinion and expressing it, and also a difference between having an opinion and believing that somehow your opinion is the only right one to have. Or, worse yet, believing that your opinion entitles you to trying to coerce others into agreeing with you.

For example, let’s say your friend has set her sights on a particular career and is working hard to achieve that goal. If you have concerns about that career (safety, legality, suitability), then you are entitled to express your concerns once or perhaps twice. But only as concerns, and only as your opinion. Beyond that, as long as the career is not self-destructive, it is none of your business what your friend is planning to be, and in fact friendship demands that you be supportive of her choices.

But what if you think it is self-destructive of your friend to pursue her chosen career?  First, ask yourself if you are truly seeing things from her perspective, or whether you are instead judging her choices by your own preferences. What you may think is self-destructive may not have any reflection in reality if you aren’t separating your own preferences from your friend’s.

For example, perhaps you have a friend who is really well suited for the corporate lifestyle, but you personally would find that lifestyle stultifying. Don’t tell your friend to abandon her plans if that is your only concern.

Burnt Cookies

This is just a quick question/rant, and I sincerely would like to have someone answer it. Why do people donate burnt cookies (or burned other baked goods) to bake sales? I am talking about cookies that are completely black on the bottom, not just a little darker than they should be. (And even those should be kept at home for the family, not donated to a bake sale.)

I mean, seriously. They have to know those cookies are burned beyond edibility, and they also have to know that people won’t eat burnt cookies. People especially don’t like paying for burnt cookies in all innocence and trust that they were paying for a good product. It is so disappointing to purchase a tasty-looking cookie or brownie or whatever, and then when you unwrap it and bit into it, you find that it has that chalky, charcoaly burnt taste and texture. So you just throw it away, which the original baker should have done in the first place. (Well, in our household, it would be composted, so at least it wouldn’t be a complete waste.)

Anyone have the answer? Yes, I know that they usually have committed to supplying five dozen cookies or whatever. But for heaven’s sake, if these people burn some of the cookies, why don’t they just bake some more? What makes them think it is okay to donate inedible food? Don’t they realize they did not, in fact, meet their obligation after all, even if it looks like they did?

And then I have to ask myself, why didn’t I ever just take the cookies back and ask for good ones? Because I was being polite, I guess. But it is so totally not polite to foist burned food off on someone, and it doesn’t serve anyone to let them get away with selling inedible food. They might as well have had lumps of charcoal out—that would have been more honest. The next time I get burned cookies at a bake sale, I am going to take it back to them and ask them nicely to give me unburned ones. There is no possible other right response to that but to apologize and make good on the error.

The Issue of Faking It

Some people fake it, not necessarily all the time, but some of the time. At least, they only fake it some of the time at first. Unfortunately, the more they fake it, the more they lose the ability to know what is real and genuine, and then the more they have to fake it.

I am not talking about sex. I am talking about psychics. I sometimes come across Web sites expressing disappointment in some psychic or channeler or other, and I think it is time to talk about it. Of course, I already cover some of this topic in my article here, but I am adding to that information to specifically address the issue of psychics who fake it and the repercussions that such actions have.

The biggest issue is that people expect psychics to be 100% accurate 100% of the time. In addition, if the psychic is a channeler and especially if the psychic is a trance or whole-body channeler, there is an expectation (very often on the psychic’s part as well) that the psychic must be completely infallible and will never make a miscall or show any signs of being a human being and must have access to supernatural information all the time that they are channeling. And that not a trace of their humanity or human fallibility can leak through while they are channeling.

What Modern Poetry Is–And Isn’t

I love poetry as much as anybody. More than some, I am sure, though of course certainly less than others. I’ve studied it, written it, even been praised by a respected poet as having “it.” So I think I have some credibility in saying that much of what passes for modern poetry is not poetry. It is prose—sometimes pretty good prose—with odd line breaks. It is written simply by stringing together some words, maybe making some odd juxtapositions here and there, and then breaking it up so the appearance is that of poetry. Apparently the writers and readers of this non-poetry have no clue that this is not, in fact, poetry. Even some very well known “poets” are guilty of this.

I really don’t want to point fingers at anyone in particular. In all likelihood, the majority of the people who write this non-poetry earnestly and sincerely believe that what they are producing is poetry, and their feelings would be hurt were I to give some specific examples. Just as it isn’t productive to squash the first efforts of a child, I choose not to squash anyone in particular. It is highly likely that those who write this stuff, should they stumble upon this post of mine, will think I am talking about someone else anyway.

Yet still, if some people recognize themselves in this and are able to get past their hurt feelings and/or egos long enough to absorb what I am saying, the world may be a better place, with less faux poetry and more real stuff.

And anyway, maybe I am just being old fashioned here. Maybe what I should do is just relax and let people call any old string of words poetry. Heck, a computer program could be poetry. But—there is a deeper issue here, and perhaps that issue is worth exploring.

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A Turkey Visitor Provides Food for Thought

On March 27th, I was up early working at my computer with my balcony door open (which is pretty usual—I like lots of fresh air). I kept hearing what sounded like a turkey gobbling coming from down the street, but told myself it couldn’t be so, could it? It could have been a very weird dog.

The gobbling got closer and closer until it was coming from right in front of my house, at which point I had to get up to go check it out, because now it sounded unmistakably like a turkey. Sure enough, there in my front lawn was a young-looking turkey, strutting around. As soon as I stepped onto the balcony, though, it whisked around the corner into my side yard. I never realized that the land speed of a turkey was so fast.

I grabbed my camera and ran downstairs, then snuck quietly out the back door. It tried to come into my back yard but was foiled by the iron gate. When I came out, it turned around and headed for the northwest corner of my yard. I got a few pictures, one that isn’t very clear at all, one under the redwoods (taken through the iron gate), and a couple that I took by swinging wide and around the redwoods after it flew to the back fence. Then it spread its wings and flew away, rather gracefully and effortlessly for such a large bird.

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Recognizing the Truth

In searching for another topic entirely, I came across the definition of the new term, fisking, which means to take apart someone’s argument point by point.

Any well-educated person will recognize that this technique has been around for many thousands of years longer than the new name for it. It used to be called rhetoric. But perhaps the term Rhetoric has fallen out of favor because it has gotten a bad name; nowadays, I only hear the term used contemptuously, dismissively, meaning that whatever is being labeled “rhetoric” is hollow, meaningless, with no real power of conviction or persuasion. Pretty much the opposite of what it used to mean, in fact.

Intrigued, I pursued a few links and ran aground at one Web site where there was a bit of a flurry over the fact that Robert Fisk himself was quoted as stating that he never used the Internet (“I have to be honest,” he said, “I don’t use the Internet,” it having become “a hate machine for a lot of people”), not even email, he said, and yet, one commenter at that Web site pointed out that in an article that predated that statement by two years, Mr. Fisk had spoken of having received an email. The Web log writer then stated that Mr. Fisk said that email was being forward to him.

My instant question to myself was, How are those emails being forwarded? Are they printed out and delivered as paper mail? Or are they forwarded by email? In any case, who reads that forwarded email? Mr. Fisk himself? Or does someone read them aloud to him? No matter what the answers are, he can’t truthfully say he doesn’t use email. Even if he reads printouts of email, or has someone read them to him, he is still using email.

Maybe in his mind, he has a very precise definition of what email is and isn’t (like Clinton’s definition of sex), and therefore he can with ease say he doesn’t use email since he doesn’t–what? Compose it? Read it on a monitor screen (if he has it printed out for him)? Or maybe he was just speaking carelessly, in which case one hopes he is more careful with his facts otherwise.

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What to do with Criticism

Normally, when someone (let’s call them person A) says something about someone else (we’ll call this person B), our tedency is to believe it without questioning it. But this isn’t always the right thing to do.

The people listening need to examine the situation and the people involved to decide what is really going on. It is possible that what person A said has nothing to do with truth. But how does one determine this?

The formula for examining and evaluating such statements is that there are several things that could be the truth concerning what person A said about person B:

a. It could be a true and honest communication from A about B.

b. It could be person A’s misperceptions or misunderstandings based on any number of things: Just not looking at what is really going on, problems in person A’s communication ability (including problems in hearing what was really said), different beliefs about reality (“if you do that, that’s a sin!”), and so on.

c. It could be person A’s agenda, conscious or unconscious, getting in the way of person A’s ability to truly see or at least honestly state what is there, so that what is communicated has everything to do with the agenda and nothing to do with the truth, or has so little truth in it that it will take some digging to get to it. (An agenda is where a person has an ulterior motive for saying or doing something, such as to make themselves feel better by putting down or discrediting a person who threatens them. People with agendas are seldom utterly truthful; at the very best, what they say is incomplete and biased in favor of their agenda, and at worst is a complete lie)

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Understanding Denial

People in denial often state their denials in this form: “I’m not ___” or “I do ___,” when in fact they are ___ or they don’t ___. For example, someone might say, “”I’m not the kind of person to find fault” when in fact they are always finding fault with others, or “I always tell the truth” when the truth is a rare thing coming from them. These statements often accompany the action they are denying. For example, someone might say, “I’m not the kind to find fault, but didn’t you think that Suzie’s dress was a bit lacking in taste for this event?”

The reason for this is often that they are in denial about that aspect of themselves; in fact, that is exactly what denial is: Saying that something isn’t so when it is, or saying something is so when it isn’t. And yet some healthier impulse urges them to state the denial as its opposite, giving them a chance to look at what is inside, and giving others a heads up about what is really going on. If others hear someone starting to say, “I’m not the sort to find fault, but….”, then they know that whatever follows is almost certainly the person finding fault with someone, and they also know that almost certainly finding fault is a characteristic of that person.

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