It’s About Making Babies!

Laurie tells the sad tale of frustrated and lonely Monica.

The tale is a ’shaggy dog’ story. It takes a long time to arrive at a ‘bad’ pun-type concluding one-liner.

Only, I read the story as a reasonable story of a reasonable woman. And I was a bit put off that the story was the butt of a joke. So, here is my response. Kind of raining on Laurie’s parade, once removed, so to speak.

—
This is sad. First, if you want someone - look for people of character: honesty, integrity, courtesy and respect, loyalty. Next, make some trusted friends, people that you trust to to refrain completely if they are the designated driver for the evening. People you trust not to peek, if asked. People you trust and respect. You need the stability of solid friends to learn the difference between friendship and the commitment of life-mates, and you need friends to balance the natural frenzy of living.

Then look around you. Look for the people living day to day, in quietly ethical manner. People not currently involved with another. Consider carefully the opinions of trusted friends (another reason you need the friends before you go looking, plus they can help you look).

Avoid someone skilled at attracting partners - they have invested a lot of energy into that particular life skill, and will never really put it aside. Imagine the morning after a major commitment in a possible relationship. Is ‘attracts partners’ the life skill you will most treasure - or most likely to assure building a life together?

Keep in mind the difference between joy and humor. There is no humor without pain. Blonde jokes and ethnic stories and ‘Ed Zachary disease’ are about pain, I mean humor. The joy of a gorgeous sunset, the delight of watching life about us, the satisfaction of a well-weeded garden - that is joy. Find someone that shares more joy than humor.

I look first for a welcoming smile. If I don’t get a smile, nothing else will matter, anyway.

—

Yes, I understand that laurie was telling a joke, a story. Only I lost a lot of my appreciation for ‘humor’ some time ago, when a friend (Thanks, Skip!) pointed out the difference between humor and joy. “There is no humor without pain.” That simple statement changed my life, I think for the better.

Scott Adams evaluates the comments to his previous post on the Dilbert Blog - asking whether the possibility of another dimension of time and space might invalidate the theory of evolution. The result? Possibly his worst post ever, according to the responses.

This time around Scott rationalizes that the point of that post was to test how many visitors would exercise their imagination against something out of the blue. Sure, that was what you meant, Scott. But anyway, that got me thinking about his current suggestion for mandatory classes for kids.

If I could add one required class to every school, it would be a class on imagination. The students would learn the tools of critical thinking to curb excess imagination, and they would learn to recognize and suppress their own biases so they can imagine things outside their social box.

I think the idea has merit. We acknowledge that we send kids to school to learn how to learn, and philosophy classes teach about thinking, so ..

I look at the horses out back. And there is a phenomenon with horses called ’spooking’. Generally spooking is a bad thing, with wagons or riders involved.

So fixing things to reduce spooking takes two separate approaches. One is to teach the horse to ‘freeze in place’ instead of run off or dodge, when something punches his trigger. The second is desensitization - introduce the horse in a reasonably safe manner to all sorts of triggers. Blowing pieces of plastic or Wal-Mart bags, chickens or cats darting underfoot, smells, noises. Get the horse familiar with both facing boogers (the technical term horsepeople use to name the various triggers that horses might be scared about) and trusting the rider/driver to help survive the booger attack.

I think training horses is a good metaphor for teaching kids, only the results show up quicker and you can sell the ones that don’t work out.

I think of ‘de-spooking’ a horse as being related to Scott’s imagination course. The horse has a wild imagination - anything new *might* be a booger - run away. Then we teach the horse that there are two of us, and anyway, you want to take a second to be *sure* that you really saw a booger. And then to work through whatever needs to be done. Instead of imagining a great, scary booger, we want the horse to check the shape of the thing, and determine if it really is a booger, or just something recognizable that can be dealt with, with assistance.

We want our kids (family, neighbors, psychiatrist, etc.) to recognize the difference between unexpected and wrong. Just think of the biases and hatreds we could avoid, not to mention bad decisions in personal or business life.

Thanks, Scott. It didn’t seem that bad, to me.