self conscious
People generally say, “don’t be so self conscious, people are not thinking about you”, as if the amount people thought about you really mattered. It’s not the amount thoughts people had about you, it’s what the people did with the thoughts about you they did have. You can be judged and written off in a split second.
I find that insecure people (me included) think about the things others judge us for a lot. I don’t think this kind of thinking is really that healthy but we’ve been brought up in this culture that believes things can be logically worked through with just enough application of reason.
Posting a DVD to Facebook with $19.95 worth of software (PC)
This tutorial assumes you have Windows 7 but the steps are very similar on other versions of Windows. All the software is also available for Mac but the instructions would be different. Please note this only works on unencrypted DVD’s (generally ones people burn themselves).
1. Put the DVD in the drive and when it autoplays close the autoplay program, you don’t want to watch it.
2. Go to Start -> Computer (On Windows 8 press Windows Key-E and Computer is on the left column on the bottom) and right-click the DVD drive. Select Open
3. Grab all the files and drag them to a folder on your computer
4. Go to the Apple Online Store and spend $19.95 for Quick Time MPEG 2 playback component (this tutorial assumes you have QuickTime already which comes with iTunes but if not you’ll have to download QuickTime first)
5. Download MPEGStreamClip (the non beta version will work).
6. Run the program and do File > Open Files. Now you will navigate to the files you copied from the DVD. There should be a VIDEO_TS directory. You want to grab the VOB file that looks like the one you want (you may have to experiment with this)
7. If the file name is broken into parts like _01 _02 _03 it will let you import all of the tracks. You generally want to do this.
8. If you only want part of the video you can press CTRL and click the progress bar at the bottom of the video. It’s a little tricky but you’ll get the hang of it.
9. Now go to File > Export to MPEG2 with MP2 Audio
10. It will take awhile but will retain the original DVD’s quality (no transcoding)
11. Now you have the MPEG you can upload it to Facebook. If the video file size is too large you may have to reencode it to H.264 which you can do with HandBrake but hopefully you won’t have to do that.
Lesson: Friendship Window of Opportunity
People give you a (often vanishingly small) window of opportunity to prove you are worth their acceptance/friendship. Once this window of opportunity closes it’s pretty useless to even engage them. The window’s size varies from person to person. Some people will notice your awkwardness or uncool cloths and immediately disengage communication. Others will probe you a little to see if you share some of their interests and back away if you don’t. Therapists will tell you that in social situations you shouldn’t be so self-conscious because people aren’t thinking about you. In a way this is true—they aren’t having any novel thoughts about you. However, every interaction with you they have are informed by the split second they made up their mind about you in the moment where that window of opportunity closed and they decided to reject you.
An example: you are a junior in high school and it’s your first day of Spanish class. The person behind you is being friendly to you because you both beaten Skyrim and unlocked most of the Steam achievements. These conversations go on a couple of days. However, a few days in you are having a stomach ache and ask the teacher if you can use the restroom. She says no and then you have somewhat of an outburst because it should make sense to her that crapping in the toilet rather than on the floor is the better of the two options. After this outburst your potential friend only gives you one or two word answers to your attempts at socializing. Your window of opportunity has closed.
It goes without saying that in the window of opportunity a lot of people are just looking for a reason to reject you. This is because while some people value common interest and virtue, most value adherence to social norms and social status above all else.
Those in power strongly disapprove of the reality that people give you a window of opportunity to get to know them (and any efforts to do so after this window has closed are futile). This is because a lot of what keeps a person in line in social situations is the hope that, by behaving, he can earn the respect and friendship of one or more of his peers. When this hope is taken out of the equation, there is no real incentive to conform.
I can remember the end of high school at a school picnic, I knew I had no chance at being accepted by any of the guys. So I actually chased butterflies.
Also, after giving up on caring (after eclipsing people’s window of opportunity), these people will jerk the hope chain. They will claim that they would have accepted you if you would have just acted according to their wishes just a little bit longer. This is to try to get you to feel remorseful because that there was some hope of them engaging you positively left (when there really wasn’t).
Windows 7 Recent Places Requester
The Recent Places heading in the Windows 7 (and I think Vista and 8) file requester feels useless when you click on it.
But then you click the Date Modified heading (you might have to click it twice if it’s going the wrong way)
And it’s suddenly useful.
Forgiveness and Indra’s Net
I am an angry, bitter person. Anyone who knows me decently well (or anybody who has read my writing) knows this well. So I wanted to write about the complexity of forgiveness.
The conventional wisdom has a serialized view of forgiveness. Let’s say someone gets mad at you and breaks your Wii controller. You are understandably angry and harbor some resentment but over time they make up and help pay you for a new one. So you willed yourself to forgive them and the resentment dissipated. The point is things went in a linear fashion. The wronging, resentment, and resolution came in neat little steps. The psychological establishment says this works for small things (like a broken Wiimote) so it must scale up and work for big things. It doesn’t.
The reason it doesn’t scale up is because life is messy and our experience and thinking is too nonlinear and interconnected. Think of your mind as a folder on your Windows desktop. The conventional view is that the files are all organized by the Date Modified heading so the ones in the past one doesn’t notice as much. But the truth is your brain clicks on those other headings. For example organizing the files by size, so a divorce that happened five years ago comes to the top. Or organizing by name so the close friend you haven’t seen in years is on your mind.
It gets even messier than that. The mind is a big Indra’s Net where the whole of it is reflected in every part of it. If something has embittered you to the point where you can’t forgive, a good portion of your non trivial thoughts will contain residue of the ramifications of what embittered you. I’m not talking here about dwelling on the incident or incidents that embittered you (though what I’m talking about does sometimes serve as a catalyst for this kind of behavior). I could write reams about things I’m bitter about but some of the things are being run and locked out of the vocational world (due to my disability) and the fallout that has occurred because of this. So whenever I think of church I think of the church people who rejected me because I didn’t have a real job. Or people who either ignore me or treat me like a charity case because I’ve fallen so low in society. The point is whenever I think of relationships (and who doesn’t) the residue of what embittered me is there.
Anything sufficiently big to put the adjective “bitter” by your name is not something that can easily be forgiven, if at all. It’s like if a computer virus had infected every one of the files on your computer and trying to remove it would render the files useless. Or like a scar that never fully heals, and then suddenly opens up as a new wound. It only takes something seemingly trivial to open it again. But the thing might have been trivial in and of itself but the way it was connected to the core of your being made it not so. Also, in most situations of serious bitterness the relationships involved are either completely broken or not up to the capacity where things can be worked through.
self-harm and chronic pain
Let’s imagine that one person is forced to go on medication that puts them in serious pain. Another person cuts them self. The former will be fighting tooth and nail to get off said medication. Doctors won’t listen to him. The latter will be hospitalized and everything possible will be done to prevent his self harm.
Both these examples involve pain but the person cutting them selves is bringing on pain in a way that isn’t socially acceptable to those in power. The kind of pain that is treated is the kind that one has power over (and consequently those in power aren’t comfortable with). If doctors truly cared about pain the person cutting them self and the person in pain caused by their medication would be treated with the same urgency.
Empathy
There is a tendency to view empathy as a positive thing. In my experience of it, it’s more like a technology (say splitting the atom) that can be used for good or for ill. I find that a lot of the people who lack empathy also less judging because they don’t have the cognitive tools to see how hopeless my social situation is.
numb
My cat died more than a week ago and the only thing I feel is numb. I even listened to Duruflé’s Requiem and felt hardly anything and that usually brings out a certain amount of catharsis.
I also sometimes think I see Frisky out of the corner of my eye. But then I look and it’s just something else.
Prayer
As many of you know, I am an agnostic. My approach to the faith has been opposite of most atheists. I just assume God exists and is who he said he was and then look at how that reality should play out in practical situations.
First and foremost if prayer actually worked the way it is purported to, those in power would be doing everything they could to keep the powerless from doing it. Look at the last presidential election, through long lines at polling stations and other methods the poor were systematically discouraged from voting in their best interests. Why do you think the poor are encouraged to pray for things in their best interests but not vote for candidates who promise the same? Now some would argue that prayer really isn’t about engaging a divine Santa Claus and I’d agree with you there. However anything, anything good (even if it’s just sustenance to make it through a day) empowers.
If there was actually a god behind prayer many people would be doing less of it. This is because God would convict these people to do something sacrificial for that person besides merely praying.
Mating strategies for women would change if prayer worked. Since things that make a man worth dating (money, health) could be modified, a woman’s optimal strategy would be to find a man who didn’t have much to offer (who would be an easy catch) and pray the good things into him. As it stands now your prayers have to have already worked to get any consideration from women.
Also, there is a double standard when it comes to praying for individuals with disabilities/chronic conditions verses individuals who are facing some kind of crises. The latter is intensely prayed for while the former is generally ignored. Crisis situations usually resolve or end badly. You praise God if they end well and you forget about them if they end badly. However disabilities and chronic conditions last forever and generally worsen. I think these things don’t get prayed for because people know it would make prayer look bad. I think if prayer actually worked there would be no double standard.
Perhaps the worst thing about prayer is it is uninsurable. This because the act of prayer is tantamount to accepting God’s charity. This means it works when it works and doesn’t when it doesn’t. In the real world things don’t work on the charity metric. If I miss my therapy session I am billed thirty dollars. If I don’t do something in time I get yelled at. The fact that one is expected to have faith in God’s charity is difficult, particularly for people who like stability and assurance.
placebo response
I have a deep, insatiable desire for the placebo effect. I have given up on seeking hope, just hope’s trappings. I once had the only church I really loved praying for me in 2005 and the placebo response from it resulted in me looking for a lot of jobs. Of course that ended with me being hounded and discriminated against on the basis of disability. Since then I haven’t had enough faith in anything to elicit the placebo response.
It’s sad. Last fall I was with friends in Wisconsin and we played the lottery. I didn’t win. But how I really lost was how I looked at that losing ticket in despair. To keep playing the lotto you need hope despite the impossible odds. And the placebo response is what does the legwork in this whole process. It’s what actually sustains you.
The fact that my placebo response was shot playing the lotto bodes poorly for my chances at religion. This is because the same mechanisms at play in aspiring to hit the powerball are also at play in religious discipline. The obvious thing being the jackpot happening after you die but there are more nuanced things at play as well like my example with prayer.
Faith itself is a delicate dance that requires a fortuitous relationship with the placebo response to really make work. If you expect or don’t believe at all you’ll fall into despair. But staying in between those two things requires hope. And when your placebo response is shot you might still have “hope” but you won’t feel it so it won’t matter to you.