Perfection- Part 1- Inside out

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Humans always strive for perfection. It’s something in us. We can conceptualize perfection. We also know when and how we fall short, and in what myriad ways we fail.

To an extent striving for perfection in the individual is fine. To an extent, even, it is a — not unique but the degree of application is unique — part of the American character. When I first came to the US as an exchange student, I was startled at the EXISTENCE of a self-help shelf. Things on how to cope with brokenness, how to improve your performance, etc. ad nauseum.

Some of them were very obviously insane or infantile — I came over the first time in 1980, which is to say at the very end of the 70s when everything was infected with the pseudo-just-so-stories of Freudianism. (In fact, I’ve been reading a lot of books that came out late sixties to the early eighties, and it’s amazing how every author — every single one — dives into Freudianism to attempt to make the book “profound” or “literary.”) — but a lot of the techniques described still worked.

The techniques are usually behavioral, which, as an explanation for what humans are, for the human ethos, sucks, but as a way to modify and regulate your behavior for the inside works more or less unfailingly. (More or less. Humans can always invent new ways to fail.)

Note I said from the inside. From the outside… Well, every time a dog salivates, a Pavlovian must ring a bell, to paraphrase Heinlein.

Which brings us to the urge to improve humans from the outside. Those other humans. Yes, them, outside my head. While I might be falling short of my own potential, brother, what’s their excuse?

I mean, I won’t deny that I’m not a particularly charitable person. And I confess I suffer from intellectual pride. But there are exchanges one witnesses online — particularly between people we know both exist — where the only possible response is “I didn’t realize the baseline of humanity is mentally dead.” Particularly when one knows neither of these people are actually stupid by any other marker.

The truth is that raising kids who tested in the stratospheric line for IQ made me very skeptical of IQ as a measurement of any use for anything but academic achievement (And even then! For instance, until trained both sons scored abysmally in multiple choice tests, due to an inability to accept an answer could ever be “that simple” or “that stupid.” Instead they would try to complicate things and justify in their heads why an obviously and clearly absurd answer “must be” right.) Because while the kids — saltational development is a thing — could demonstrate some bizarrely high abilities, at the same time they could pull mistakes that you couldn’t even figure out how someone could make. And then I’d sit there, holding my head and going “And if these are the creme de la creme, how do other kids even survive?” (I have an answer to that, actually. Normal kids don’t get in half as much trouble, and don’t come up with half that many crazy things to do, that could either blow up the house or poison them, or whatever. It’s like raising my very smart kittens. It’s driving me bonkers. I’ve now raised fifteen cats, but none that got into drawers that are child-locked, to find twist ties to eat.)

Everyone seemingly is incredibly stupid at times. Geniuses just are stupid faster, harder, and from above, so to put it.

Come on, you know if you look back, there were entire periods of your life when you were convinced of something, or attempting to do something that in retrospect was incredibly stupid or at the very best misguided. (Around here we call it Sarah’s so called writing career. It continues, too.) But at the time you couldn’t see it, and what you were doing seemed logical. (To be fair, I’ve known it for some time. And it’s not logical, it’s compulsive.)

However, from the outside in, looking at other people, it’s easy to think you know exactly what they should be doing, what they should be trying, how they should be solving their issues and mitigating their trouble.

In my fifties, I finally understood mom’s most annoying habit. No, seriously, I’m now 61. I’ve been on my own since 22, so almost the time I was a child in her house, doubled, but if I mention I’m doing anything at all, from cleaning something to making something, I get advice as though I were about 10. And heaven forbid I’m having some problem, health or motivation or something, and mention it, because the instruction will be very minute, take hours, and tell me everything I’ve known for 39 years, give or take.

I understood it, because looking at my sons as they launched off into their own lives, the impulse to tell them what to do, so they avoided making the same mistakes I made was almost unendurable. You could see them tottering off to do exactly the most stupid things you did. And you wanted to physically reach out and redirect them.

It took a lot of self-control, and even more self-reflection to realize that no, it wasn’t my mistakes they were making, but their own. While sometimes there were echos, mostly because there is a familial temperament (depressive and anxious and neurotic as a shaved cat– like you’re surprised, right?) their path was not mine (thank heavens, even if both of them write) and their time is not mine, and the country they grew up in is not mine (We could ease up on the echoes of recent developments any time now, or why do you think my PTSD is keeping me up on the black-swan blind?) In the end turned out some of the things they were doing I thought were horrible mistakes, were not. And some of the actions I approved of based on my own experiences, might have been mistakes, and–

Now, these are our kids — speaking in the general — that we have that impulse about. And the impulse is often wrong. I know in the village, from listening in to the gossip of women, that half the “nice girls” women hoped their sons would marry were disastrous. And have of the “that whore” they did marry did turn out to be very good wives, and often very good to the complaining mother in law, as well. Yes, sometimes parents are right after the kids are adult, and beyond the obvious “don’t drink too much, drug too much, whore or waste money” but– It’s not often.

Almost all my friends were their family’s tragedy, taking a path that the parents didn’t like, and the extended family disapproved of. Often they were their own tragedy, balked of the initial path for some reason, physical, mental or just fate. Often they spent years lamenting the path not taken.

But in the end, we all came to a place where we’re doing pretty well, at peace with ourselves, and looking back, we can’t see it any other way. (Which is why the so called career still exists. That and because I enjoy writing more than having written.)

The point is….

Self-improvement is a grand and noble ideal if undertaken from the inside out. And it has been known to score some remarkable successes.

We often hear about them, and not just when someone is trying to sell you something.

Sure, about half of the prisoners who gave up drugs and found Jesus in jail will fall back into criminal behavior once they come out. Given what militates against them, from habit to the friends they choose, to the circles they’re used to navigating in, and the way they are used to things working, the big shock is that only half of them do so.

We tend to hear about the big transformation projects in movie-of-the-week type thing, and it’s always huge: the drug abuser who went clean and became a multi-millionaire entrepreneur; the alcoholic who went clean and became a philantropist, etc. etc. etc.

But those are not the most common transformations. In fact, I’d say those are the rarest, because they happen to people who had reached a level where saving themselves is almost impossible. It’s not one habit or one tendency, but an entire complex of them pushing them a certain way. And those are very hard to break.

The most common transformation will be the C student who formed new study habits and seemingly overnight becomes an A student. The basement dweller who wakes up one day and realizes he must stand on his own two feet, and starts reaching for everything and anything to make that goal happen, including putting in a lot of work. And similar cases, which we all know.

These cases we know and see every day, just about. We don’t fully remark on them, just treat them as “Oh, he finally grew up.” Or “Oh, she got serious.”

I’ve done this a number of times, with different things. Including fiction writing. I do really well with a regular writing schedule, and habits. This makes perfect sense, if you know I’m ADD AF. Habits or medication are the only ways to deal with it. But habits break, usually with…. moves, illness, various issues. Like, you go through two or three weeks of not being able to do whatever you made an habit of. So I will fall off the wagon, and have to reform the habit again. (I’m in the middle of this, which might or might not be perceptible from that side of the screen.)

The power of doing this is outright transformative. And therefore it gives people illusions.

“If I can change that much, I who am so superior,” okay, most of us know that’s BS, but self-obviously a lot of people don’t, “Surely if these mugs just did what I told them, and worked at it the way I tell them to, they too could be perfect. And then the world would be perfect.”

That is where the issue starts, because that’s not how any of this works. Habits imposed from outside are notorious for not sticking, if they ever take in the first place.

I think this illusion that you can change others from outside is one of the oldest temptations of mankind.

But in the twentieth century it became the illusion of nations.

More tomorrow.

142 thoughts on “Perfection- Part 1- Inside out”

  1. Completely agree that self improvement works better than imposed improvement.

    That being said, 56 years after leaving Annapolis I still fold my skivvies the way I was taught Plebe Summer.

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    4. External forces can help. Drug addicts trying to give it up have been known to choose shelters where they agree to random drug testing and will be evicted if it’s positive.

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        1. It can start externally, in the sense that motivations can be provided by changing the circumstances, sometimes. One counsellor discussed how judges’ threats would actually make the addicts serious, though a major part of her work was having them discuss what they could do if they shook the addiction.

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  2. When have we ever succeeded in imposing Liberty and Democracy on another country, from the top down, by force? After all, we Know the American Way is far, far better than their tyranny and kleptocracy. If they’d just do what we tell ’em, they’d be way better off!
    ———————————
    Only idiots believe they know how other people should live their lives. The stupider they are, the more blindly they believe it.

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      1. The Reader thinks it may be still to early to tell in Germany’s case. But he would add South Korea as a post WW II success.

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        1. So would I – I did a year tour in the ROK, at Yongsan AIG in Seoul, and I compared what I saw that year, with what my father and other Korean War vets remembered … and I could hardly see that they were remembering the same place.
          Korea works … and I loved being there. The Koreans were tough, jolly, open in a way that the Japanese weren’t. And also the snappiest dressers on the face of the earth, outside of the Italians.
          I watch episodes of MAS*H these days and want to throw something heavy and brutal at Alan Alda.

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          2. I love MAS*H as a kid in high school. After spending decade with no TV because hubby and I thought it best for the kids, I watched it again and was REPULSED! What horrible people. Not just Alda. Most of them.

            A decade ago I was teaching online English classes to SKoreans and found them to be great students, awesome all around people, and much easier to deal with that the uptight Japanese and more diligent with studies than the Taiwanese.

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        2. We didn’t really impose it in South Korea, though. The RoK wasn’t democratic until the ’80s. It might have pretended to be. But it was a pretty bad imitation of the real thing. It was protests in the ’80s that caused the government to become representative.

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      2. Japan definitely has elections and constitutionalized free speech protections and things like that… but no one there criticizes the government and only once has a party besides the LDP won the national election since WWII (there is a possibility that I am now wrong about this, I don’t know the outcomes of any elections there over the past ten years or so). The press, in order to have access to proceedings in the Diet must not report certain things in a certain way or else their access will be revoked.

        Other things I noticed while living there for so long (as well as having married one): the lifestyle seems unchanged from the Heian period. Sure, there are new jobs to do with the new technologies, but they are done the way they’ve always been done (even the new ones, I know that doesn’t quite make sense, but if you lived there for a long enough time you’d see it, too). We slept on a mattress on a straw mat floor (very high quality and very nice to lay on, but it’s still a straw mat floor). Important families from 1000 years ago are still important. The Fujiwara are still active in politics and business. Oda Nobunaga’s descendent is an award-winning figure skater (thanks to the family’s money and prestige which is useful in getting access to the right training).

        I suppose at the very least there is not exactly a samurai ruling class that can walk around beheading people in the streets for not showing enough deference. I never felt like I would ever be in danger for saying something unpopular and end up a political prisoner, as is entirely possible in China. All the western/democratic/capitalistic things they picked up and made work, they took at the end of the 19th century and changed to fit their reality. I’m sure that part of their history helped smooth things along in the postwar period.

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        1. “…saying something unpopular and end up a political prisoner, as is entirely possible in China.”

          And increasingly, I’d add, in the US and GB. And in any other place where “vocally unwoke” carries legal penalties.

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        2. Making the proper type of floor, and the proper kind of tatami mats, is a pretty specialized skill and kinda pricey. I watched a video about it (the maker trade organization has a channel, basically to get people to hire them to install this kind of flooring), and it really is a fairly high technology.

          Basically, the entire floor is raised above the actual floor, which has various advantages, and the mats are on a sort of giant mattress. And the mats and floor last for years before you have to change them out, and arguably cleaning such a floor is easier than cleaning other kinds of floors. (A special kind of grass is used, which I don’t think is around outside of Japan and the eastern bits of Asia.)

          So the video was basically arguing that the restful smell of grass and the springy feel, and the fact that it lasts for years and years, made it not quite so pricey as it would initially seem. I don’t know that the claims that it was good for your health or low on dust were so great, or at least they would demand proper cleaning and maintenance.

          (Anyway, the video said to please don’t change tatami floors into Western-style flooring, and to please come to us to get updates or a brand new tatami floor.)

          Putting things like a restful natural smell aside, I’m not sure how you would construct a modern technological floor-above-a-floor-to-save-heating-bills. Maybe the kind of springy floor that people use for indoor running tracks, or for dance studios?

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          2. There are a couple different ways you can do it, depending on what your floor-to-build-on is.

            The simplest way is to just put a thin layer of foam sheet (approx 1/8 inch) under your flooring. If you’re putting your flooring down on concrete slab, this is enough of a thermal break that the floor won’t be ice-cold to the touch in the winter, and if it’s closed cell foam it also gives a little bit of a vapor barrier. It won’t really be warm, though. Most frequently used with engineered floors that don’t have to be secured to the subfloor beneath, like click-lock laminates.

            If you want really good insulation on top of a concrete slab you have to … frame out a floor on top of the slab: put down joists and rimboards that rest on top of the slab, and then fill the bays with foam insulation – either sprayed in, or rigid sheets cut to size – then put a layer of OSB on top of that, then install your flooring on that. You can put wood floor on this, since there’s something to nail into.

            If you are on a framed floor – joists and subfloor over a crawlspace, basement, or lower storey – that’s super easy: you just put insulation in the joist bays under you. Then you don’t need the “Floor on top of floor”.
            Or you could build yourself a platform same as with the concrete slab and stuff it with insulation as you like.

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          3. I really quite liked tatami flooring. It is very forgiving to live on. All processes in Japan have always been involved, complicated and precise going back hundreds and hundreds of years.

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    2. If you assume the Founding Fathers to be the top, then America might qualify. Except they did something different; they took the common belief system of the American colonists, and codified it. So, you might consider it a simultaneous top-down, bottom-up construction. But more importantly, it wasn’t imposed, it was offered, and the individual states got to choose if they wanted it or not.

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      1. That reminds me. I just saw a video about Dutch water projects, and as an aside it got into a political science concept I’d never heard of.

        Apparently, when all the dikes and canals and polder reclamation of land was going on, and all the special war flooding was being planned, the various medieval and early modern planning groups decided that, since everybody was affected, every single person in the country should be asked their opinion on whatever was planned for their particular locality. And basically the whole thing was wrangled out until everybody agreed.

        This is called something like “polder group” and “poldering.”

        So… all this crazy stuff that the Dutch government has been doing lately, especially against the farmers, is the opposite of poldering and working the whole thing out together. That’s why the Dutch farmers were so freaking irate (besides the whole threat to their existence thing).

        The video also talked about how the Netherlands were the leading producers of vegetables and flowers in the EU, because all that reclaimed land is incredibly fertile, and it’s also great pasture for dairy cows and such. The Netherlands is actually more productive of food than France, apparently.

        So threatening to close down Dutch farmers was basically threatening the EU food supply, which makes it even crazier than I thought.

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        1. “They have to stop farming or we’re all gonna starve!”

          — in the Climate Catastrophe that is perpetually 10-15 years away, and has been for the last 35 years. Meanwhile, satellites are seeing a 15% increase in the area covered by green plants from 20 years ago. We haven’t all died of skin cancer from the ‘ozone hole’ or drowned from rising sea levels.
          ———————————
          Some of the politicians nominally on our side need to be taught the difference between ‘compromise’ and ‘appeasement’.

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        2. IIRC, the Dutch agricultural exports are the second largest IN THE WORLD (at least in cash profit; I’m not sure about volume).

          Behind the US, of course.

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  3. ‘…but none that got into drawers that are child locked…’
    I’ve referred to kids, once they start crawling, as ferrets with hands. And really smart ones are Kiki-on-Pixie-sticks level.

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    2. A YouTuber a couple days back felt the need to explain what ‘webcomics’ are, so it’s kind of neat to see a Sluggy Freelance reference in the wilds in 2024 without any explanation.

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  4. My aunt was clean. Got out, went back to school, became a rehab counselor.

    Eight years clean she gave shelter to a drug dealer just released from prison. Two weeks later she was dead of a drug overdose.

    With some habits it only takes one slip.

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    3. I’ve made sure to mention to my kids that the biggest indicator of whether or not you end up with bad habits is who your friends are and what they do. Their friends seem to pretty much be along the lines of “who has time for that crap?” so I’m not worried, just letting them know how that works out in the future.

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  5. A long time ago I led the temporaries in a bindery. Long enough ago that y’all probably don’t know what a bindery is or what temporaries are. I used to tell them I could tell the smart ones. They made the creative mistakes that I didn’t think to account for.

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          1. Me too. I was never bored.

            “How can you stay home all day and homeschool all those kids? With nothing to do?”.

            Seriously? You never had to coax your 3 boys off the roof and explain that ” No there are flaws in your math and youngest brother cannot parachute off the 2nd story roof with a bedsheet even though the square footage and his weight ratio check out.”

            Bedsheets and parachute cloths do not have similar resistance. Come inside, we’ll do the math over with different parameters.

            *Sigh

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            1. Ah, that babysitting gig with the 7, 5 and 1 and 18-month-old boys. One of them through a hole in the garage ceiling, jumped, locked me out of the house…his brother rammed a broomstick through the bunghole in the kitchen door (I’d gone into the garage to try and stop the jumping) and knocked the wind out of him. Fortunately he recovered enough to let me in to answer the phone, which was their mom calling me to say she’d be late. By the time she and her spouse retur Ed from marriage counseling the boys were taking the doors off the hinges with the kitchen knives.
              You betcha I got overtime.

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      1. $OLDEST_BROTHER did a bit for a Boy Scout merit badge. I have a well-thumbed, much beloved bible (RSV–the church left me, but the Lutheran still sticks) that’s in dire need of a new cover. I doubt anybody in Flyover Falls does such, but I’ll have to check. Perhaps online.

        I have a small collection of bibles (various translations, and I really would like to get a Catholic version–there’s a store run by some Jews-for-Jesus in town) but the RSV is my go-to.

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        1. There’s a bindery in Dayton. They were hiring lots of people a few years back. I gave serious thought to whether I could possibly overcome my lack of mechanical understanding, and decided that it would probably be a bad move for everyone (and my body parts).

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          1. I just ran through a price estimator from a bindery in Houston for that bible, and oof! I think I’ll price the New Revised Standard Version and see how the sticker shock compares. The old one can rest on the bookshelf…

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            1. Leaving aside the sentimental value, Bibles can be hard and, thus, expensive to re-bind because they’re often on onion skin paper, which is a bear to re-bind. If it’s a valuable bible, you’re best off putting it in a box. If not, fixing torn covers is not all that complicated, especially if the Bible was cased not bound. If it’s an at all recent printing, it’s probably cased.

              There are a fair few people around that bind Bibles, a few have how to sites on the tubes of you though I haven’t looked there in a long time. Hobbyists and semi-pro but they do a good job. A lot of them see it as a service, you might have a look and see what you find.

              I don’t do it myself, I’m just not timely and reliable enough to do for other people.

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              1. It’s more of a sentimental issue, decidedly not a valuable book. In the confirmation classes at church, each kid was given a bible with our names embossed on the cover. Flexible leather (thin, either cowhide or bonded leather). I would have gotten it about 60 years ago.

                A book binding site indicates that it was likely Smyth sewn. The cover is shot, but the pages are intact. I’ll have to take a look at the tube videos.

                Meanwhile, there are a bunch of RSV (or NRSV, I need to review the differences) editions that include the apocrypha, making it (I think) a “Catholic bible”. Casebound copies seem to be pretty affordable, so that’s an option.

                I have a half dozen different translations on hand, but the RSV is the one I grab first (which is why the cover shows it. :) ). OTOH, one more won’t hurt.

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  6. Agriculteurs en Coleres is the name the farmers are using. It seems to have spread to Portugal. Motorways are blockaded across the country. Ireland too. It’s hard to find a place where there aren’t protests, but a I don’t have the languages to follow them up. The English language news is useless.

    Things really got really ugly in Brussels today. It’ll be interesting to see what happens.

    The French government essentially folded yesterday, they being even less popular the Biden. But the protests continue. It’s getting interesting since this is really a grass roots thing, the farmer’s union has been calling for “calm” and being ignored. The uni-party is having its problems.

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    1. Portugal has tamped down hard on news. Communist socialist alliance in power last I looked (with half a dozen nutjob left thrown in.)
      Hey, BGE if you can put together a quick guest post with links, I’ll put it up this afternoon and link it at Insty. Enough people speak foreign languages, we can get watching going and spread it further. (I’ve lost my Dutch and Swedish, but I can cobble the rest.)

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      1. Could you kindly explain the distinction by which “communist” does not qualify as “nutjob left?” I’m not as well-versed in the taxonomy as I should be. (I’d never make much of a bird-watcher.)

        Republica restituendae

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        1. Nutjob left…. well, Maoists are communists. To be a Portuguese Maoist though you need to be particularly crazy even for a communist. (I don’t know if they exist now, but they did when I was young.)
          I do know there are several different … um… special interests amid the communists. Like some are particularly interested in the environment or whatever. So, it makes a difference. They’re generally communists, but they consider the other communists right wing….

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          1. Considering fellow communists you don’t like right-wing has a pedigree going back to Lenin. Such disputes are best observed from a distance … such as the orbit from which you’re going to nuke them.

            Thanks for the explanation.

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      2. I sent on the guest post to the warm mail address. Not sure if it’s what you wanted, but it’s what I was able to throw together.

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    2. Things have definitely started to get mildly interesting back home after some Algerian fuck stabbed children coming out of a Gaelscoil on O’Connell just a few blocks away from the GPO. Apparently Varadkar and Higgins, along with Sinn Fein and the Green Party spit have decided the Irish are no longer deserving of bein’ Irish and are importing a new Irish. Protests is Roscrea a few weeks ago about housing immigrants, seemed peaceful enough, but the Guards arrested protesters….

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      1. Yeah, I saw that. It was scary, but also kinda hilarious for the declarations that the bad foreigners needed to get out (for obvious reasons!); but that the French chef intern and the motorcycle helmet guy who beat up the knife guy could definitely stay, because they were obviously real Irish already.

        Anybody who’s ready to be a good neighbor and a friend in need, is probably welcome in any country in the world. If that country is smart, anyway.

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        1. What was scary was the Irish politicians trying to make people sorry for the knife guy.

          It’s amazing how many people are eager to pave dystopia with the corpses of little kids, and probably puppies and kittens too.

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          1. Don’t you know? We’re all supposed to be sorry for the criminals and terrorists and psychopaths! They’re Oppressed! The people they rob and rape and murder had it coming because they’re Oppressors! Or they sort of look like Oppressors, anyway. Or they have something the Oppressed! wanted, or…
            ———————————
            Why do so many idiots believe that our problems will be solved by the same shitheads that caused them?

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          2. Well the wanker was living on public assistance so of course he needs sympathy – and this was just acting out because of some sort of oppression…

            Bah. Bury him in the bog.

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        2. Indeed, but few countries in the visible head are anymore. Did you see the go fund me set up to buy Caio Benicio a pint as a sign of appreciation got to €370.000… loved that.

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      2. Was it also Ireland that just had the female migrant who was complaining about the personality of the people in the country she’d moved to, and how they all needed to change to accommodate her?

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          1. My mistake –

            She’s either second-generation, or immigrated at a very young age, as she apparently grew up in Dublin. But she’s a “Muslim activist”, and so her parents are all but guaranteed to have immigrated.

            I’m reminded of the old joke –

            How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?

            THAT’S NOT FUNNY!

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  7. Last one for a while, a I have to go do the day job. Threre’s a clip from, I think, the Netherlands where the cops brought in an armored car to break up a protest and the farmer’s tractors simply pushed it out of the way. LMAO.

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    1. rofl

      People make the mistake of looking down on farmers, what they do, and the equipment that they use. People REALLY shouldn’t do that.

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    2. I don’t know if it helps, but I was suddenly unwillingly and unwittingly unsubscribed from the Missus’s blog, and had to re-subscribe – which has this put me notifications and email preferences in a tizzy – perhaps looking into the settings for your profile would help? Appologies if ye’ve already done this.

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      1. Just checked my profile and responses were disabled.

        I’ve enabled them so we’ll see what happens.

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  9. I always try to remember that some things in my past that I would have labeled “mistakes” where quite often not “something you shouldn’t do” but more like “something you don’t know how to do well enough to not fail at” (yet ) …

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  11. I am reminded of the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, in which he recounted his efforts to perfect himself as human being over the course of… a month, I think. At least initially. He may have extended the time frame when the task proved more difficult that he anticipated.

    When I was young, I thought that his account – his attempt – reeked of arrogance. And it did, but in the process, he came up with a reasonable system for training himself in new habits.

    Which can be useful, when one is trying to change the way one lives.

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          1. Ruby Tuesday followed by Can’t You Hear Me Knocking on current playlist, sorry, I didn’t mute. My spouse and I are singing in disharmony cause neither of us can sing. Sorry.

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                1. Jeff Foxworthy on redneck astronauts (having discovered Marshall Space Flight Center and Huntsville in general): “Houston? We got a problem. The boys got into the freeze-dried Chilli and they’re tore up something awful!”

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  13. “If only I could explain things so that everyone understood what I was saying, everyone would do things my way”

    I still struggle to banish this thought from my mind.

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  14. Truth be told, I am the one in my family that makes all the wrong choices, generally for the right reasons, generally. It does serve as a good example of what not to do for others. In that I am a success. So am I a failure? Only if I give up. I shall succeed if only on my death bed, it shall still be a success. I am a Free Man, fear me for I will not quit, I will not be enslaved, so long as I can draw one breath I will light that candle to shine the light for others. We win, they lose.

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    1. I took your whole life to get out of shape, its going to take almost the same amount of time getting back into shape. Ditto for everything else.

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    2. Unfortunately, sometimes that works as well as trying to jump over a canyon in two leaps.

      A drug addict might have to entirely change his life to avoid the situations and people that would cause relapses — to take a simple example.

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      1. Some holes are too deep to work your way out of. Unfortunately, some small changes lead in the wrong direction, especially the ones motivated by indulgence, rather than improvement.

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        1. And motive doesn’t matter if the direction is the wrong one.
          “Just trying harder” when it’s something that is actually causing the problem will just destroy you.

          (Which is why the one size fits maybe a third type advice, especially medical advice, is so evil!)

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          1. Motive may not always matter, but it’s the way to bet. The trick with small changes is feedback: did the change actually improve things? Or was it a dumb idea? Improvement isn’t guaranteed, but it doesn’t happen by itself.

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            1. Motive may not always matter, but it’s the way to bet.

              Not really.

              It requires an undamaged source of information, both “what should work” and feedback.

              One of the things that is extremely valuable about Sarah’s blog is that the usual dance of “try this” “I did, it didn’t work” “you didn’t do it long enough, hard enough, you cheated , etc” is not indulged.

              Possibly because Odds are willing to actually DO things like spend six hours a day for several days straight, trying to learn to shoot a hoop, and record the results– and find that it makes absolutely no difference.
              (Yep, did that; seems to be a slower development of the relevant nerves, a decade and a half later I was suddenly able to start making baskets fairly consistently.)

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              1. What a wonderful unintended consequence! Who knew that hoops practice was good for fine control manual dexterity? Any more than I knew that obsessive computer programming practices would make me a better cook?

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                1. Who knew that hoops practice was good for fine control manual dexterity?

                  It wasn’t.

                  I realized that no matter how much I tried, it didn’t actually change anything.

                  It took waiting until a later stage of development for the interaction to correct to where it was POSSIBLE to change anything.

                  I’d graduated high school, gone through the Navy, and had a child between when I realized that practicing was doing absolutely nothing, on an objective measurement, and when the “controls” on attempting to aim started working.

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              2. I did that too. I still can’t make baskets, but I’m also not trying.
                Yes, those of us with significant Neanderthal ancestry — eyes your kids, too — develop weirdly, with intellectual much faster than normal, but physical/nervous system much slower. I couldn’t color within the lines till I was in my early teens. My handwriting was a florid disaster till my twenties (it’s a mess again, but that’s different.) And my already craptastic relationship with mom was made worse by the fact I couldn’t set a consistent stitch till I was about 13. Shrug. If more people knew about that development pathway, as well as that we seem to acquire our skills saltationally (We’re slower to be potty trained, then are potty trained overnight, for example) life would be a lot easier for little Oddlings.

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                1. I did Ancestry, which doesn’t search for Neanderthal. Maybe I need to go for 23 and Me. Ancestry has my genome already, so what the heck? (And Ancestry says I’m so northwestern European/British/Scots/Irish I should probably glow in the dark).

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                  1. I did both, because I was looking for a possible disease/genetic condition. I don’t have it. ;) Anyway, correlation of the two is the best way to see if you have it, and it’s cheaper than the specialized $2k test.
                    But Dan took it just to keep me company, and as a result we know we’re basically part of a secret Neanderthal recreation program. Looking at sons’ chosen brides, the program shall continue, supposing they reproduce.

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                2. The way I noticed is funny, at least to me– we use disposable diapers.

                  And I can actually get them into the garbage can. Often, even when I can’t see the can, if nobody has moved it.

                  Even when I miss, it’s closer than I use to manage.

                  The change was notable that my husband commented on it, even. :D

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            2. K, poked at it mentally– think that a car may be a good metaphor.

              Motive gives you drive-power, but unless the steering works, the brakes work, and you’ve got a map/the road goes where you need to get, it can’t manage it all.

              If one’s primary battle is against ones self– “all the other ducks are lined up, I just need to DO it”– it can be enough.

              If the situation involves an inaccurate map, steering that doesn’t work, no brakes and the windshield is covered in mud, not so much.

              And we’re dealing with a LOT of folks who are actively throwing mud, attempting to redefine what they want as a good thing– for example, the idea that your work doesn’t belong to you is pushed as a good, and it’s selfish to want to keep any kind of control of the results of your work. Or the many folks who are abused for trying to do anything to take care of themselves, vs bowing to the whims of the currently popular.

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              1. Random, she’s right. I’ve experienced it myself, and held it against myself as “I’m so stupid.” (To be fair everyone else did.) Until I went through it with my sons, and saw it. The same psychologist who diagnosed (I speak advisedly) eldest as profoundly gifted and younger as whatever is up from that, possibly “irretrievably gifted” told me about the slower and weird nervous system development that sometimes causes such children to be diagnosed as developmentally slow pre-verbal (A pediatrician tried with older, because he couldn’t pick up a raisin with two fingers at 6 months. He got told no, the kid was fine. by me. And it didn’t go on record.)
                It’s not quantitative, it’s qualitative. The brains are different. The co-relation with Neanderthal above normal is mine, but it seems to hold. It is however anecdotal and such should be noted.

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  16. Knowing and doing are two very different things. My healthcare insurance is spamming me with “sign up for our wellness program!” emails. I don’t need a wellness program. We all know what to do: Eat well, exercise, get enough sleep.

    It’s DOING it that’s difficult. Getting nagged via email doesn’t help me. Although I will admit that it might help others.

    BTW: Even though the little box under this text entry box says I’m already logged in, WordPress is making me login for every comment, again.

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    1. WordPress is peculiar. I don’t have an account with them, though when I first do a comment on a blog (“first” means the browser is restarted–the previous version of PaleMoon was pretty crashy), I hit the switch to save my particulars. I usually get a “subscribe” dialog box, and I’ll pass. That goes on for a while, then it just doesn’t bother asking me any more.

      I don’t ask for it, but it emails me responses to comments I’ve made.

      Of course, that’s how it worked this morning. It’s afternoon, and it’s WordPress. We’ll see.

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      1. I didn’t have a login for WP. Few weeks past I couldn’t do anything until I created an account. Still a PIA sometimes, just not as big of a PIA, plus can use Pepper as an avatar instead of funky monster.

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        1. Pepper is cute! (SIL’s Golden Retriever is also a Pepper. Her predecessor was named Porsche, and the thought was to name her Cayenne, but they thought it would be too confusing.)

          “You asked for a Porsche as a present. We can’t afford the car, but here’s a puppy named Porsche.” (From what $SPOUSE told me about the naming.)

          What can I say. Both BIL, SIL and Niece are trained as engineers, though the parents are retired, and the youngest is working on a far more important task, two toddlers.

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          1. I got a kick out taking Pepper to niece’s wedding (we asked, outdoor venue. I did need her. Stupid RH.). One of her new niece’s name is “Pepper”. “Pepper” enjoyed meeting Pepper.

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  17. “I didn’t realize the baseline of humanity is mentally dead.”

    Considering that humans are animals first, and supposedly evolved from other animals, if you assume animals to be mentally dead, then that makes a valid baseline for humans too. Except even animals usually display more mental ability than a plant, or a rock; so, not quite dead, yet. (Politicians being a notable exception.)

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    1. Young men (and a few women) under a certain age certainly act as if nothing exists except impulse on a mildly-regular basis. Tired kitty sigh Especially during a late winter warm-spell. Louder sigh

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    3. I suspect geniuses are not only stupid faster, but also recognize their own mistakes quicker so they can recover and move on to the next stupid idea. Which occasionally turns out to be not so stupid after all. And a humble genius (or one who doesn’t recognize the process) attributes his eventual success to “dumb luck.” As in “the smarter I work, the luckier I get” kind of dumb luck.

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      1. I’d revise that first part. 90% of geniuses, in Western cultures, are incapable of recognizing their own mistakes, because of our IQlatry. Which is what gives us the Lords of Brussels and the Davoisie trying to starve the world, because according to them (I found an article where they actually said this) there is a population bomb, and it must be stopped at all costs. The fact there’s actually no over population can’t penetrate the haze of intellectual pride.

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  19. I attended high school at a preppy-brat academy (Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, if you’re curious). You don’t know the half of what we got up to in my six years there (we carefully hid most of it from the administration). And talk about intellectual pride!

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  20. […] both sons scored abysmally in multiple choice tests, due to an inability to accept an answer could ever be “that simple” or “that stupid.”

    It took me till fourth grade or so (with occasional relapses due to unique circumstances afterward) to really understand that multiple-choice tests were not only written for the stupid students, but by individuals who probably had lower IQs than I did. Once I truly grokked that, I began to see the various patterns used to formulate the tests, and scored well virtually all the time (unless I was intensely bored). But prior to figuring that out? I was always looking for the better, more exact, or more sneaky answer.

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    1. Over thinking questions VS answers is a talent. I swear. I finally figured it out after first graduation. To the point on the last major test when I walked out feeling good about how I’d done and overheard other students, who I thought were better at this stuff than me complaining about how hard the test was. My immediate reaction was “oh S* dang. I blew it.” Take a breath. Nope. I know I did good. Did too. Had to. If I’d blown the test there is no way I’d pulled an “A+” out of the class.

      I still find myself double checking answers because I overthink them.

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      1. I still bless my high school algebra teacher for teaching me to check my work. I’d catch one or two careless errors a test after that. God rest Mr. Hayes’ soul. Not only was he a good teacher, he gave me my mental image of Chief Warrant Officer Sir Horace Harkness.

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  21. What do I consider my past mistakes? Nothing. Oh. Things I could have done better (will not elaborate). But different choices would not have lead me to be me now. Was Forestry the best choice for my first degree and career? 20/20 hindsight says “Nope.” For a lot of reasons. In that those that said so then would be correct. But they’d also be wrong. I wouldn’t be me now if I hadn’t made those choices. (Also wouldn’t have my small store of stories.) Just like we aren’t sorry we scrimped, saved, and managed to get our son through his college degree without loans. (We did get lucky in that he came out sane. Not beaten into the liberal woke form. We also scrimped and saved for our financial freedom first. Priorities don’t ya know.)

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  22. Welp, Team ObamaBiden threw Israel under the bus today and now they are preparing to back up and run over them again:

    https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2024/02/01/jewish-groups-slam-biden-executive-order-on-settlers-will-embolden-terrorism/

    Have no doubt that when Team ObamaBiden declares recognition of a “Palestinian” State, run by those whose mantra is “death to the Jews”, it will expressly declare that all of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem are to be Jew-free Arab states, and will insist that Israel remove Jews from the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem (i.e. East Jerusalem) and bar Jews from visiting their most holy sites. Of course, that will not be enough for Hamas, Fatah and the rest of the death to the Jews” crowd, which now includes the Democratic Party and the current regime, who will work towards wiping out the rest of the Jews in the rump Israel that remains, at least for a while.

    Of course if this announcement is made by the ObamaBiden regime, then Israel has no incentive left to not turn Gaza and the Fatah controlled areas of the West Bank, along with Hezbollah controlled areas of Lebanon and Syria, into parkling lots and fields of glass.

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  23. Team Biden is flipping and flopping so fast they are actively taking both sides of every Issue. He is quickly stabbing half of his constituents in the back with every flip flop. Hello Jews, how does that knife in your back feel? The Blue cities are falling apart and being over run by Biden’s open border. They won’t charge any criminals, unless you protest for life or any thing not Marxist approved. The persecutions of Trump and others are falling apart because those DIE appointed Liberals can’t keep their hands out of the till. And the much vaunted special council may have been illegally appointed legally tainting everything he touched. Fear not, we are winning. That maybe the problem, cue the frantic freakout by the liberal/progressive/Marxist communist traitors and the whores from hell that feed them. Interesting times indeed.

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    1. I can’t wait for Illegals to start beating up FBI agents and politicians, then getting released the next day, even if they deport you, as open as the border is you can walk right across again. ROTFLMAO At Blue Cities and States. I hope the illegals off all you liberal Democrats, that would be sweet Karma.

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      1. Yesterday one of those clueless Leftroid dingbats was lecturing Congress on how it was RRRAAACISSST!!! to deport illegal aliens convicted of drunk driving.

        My take on it: “I hope an illegal alien drunk driver runs over your worthless ass. Might knock some of the stupid out of you.”

        Then the bald black one was going on about how RRRAAACISSST!!! it was for Walgreens to close one of their stores just because it was getting looted bare every day.

        “We stock the shelves, we open the doors, and they just steal everything. We can’t operate a store under such conditions.”

        “RRRAAACISSST!!!“

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  24. I totally resent being told how i should think, i think like a typical American country boy from the 60s, brought up country with hunting, guns, cows, horses, girls in pigtails and lots of good food and beer.
    But now, for some reason that stuff that was just good old life is now wrongthink,,

    Buncha BS and ill be damned if ill change that.

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    1. Americans SHOULD resent being told how to think. TBF I don’t see any problem with any of that.
      I do see a problem with my being ADD AF, which is mostly what I’m trying to work on.

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  25. Seeing a little bit of mainstream coverage of the protests now, which means they must be big enough they can’t be smothered.

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