Brian's World

Sailing

I don’t write about sailing nearly enough.  I could blame it on the satellite internet out here, but I only need the internet to post my thoughts, not to write them down.  Notepad does wonders for offline development of most things these days.

Call me old fashioned, but sometimes I just don’t trust that the GPS I’m using has me on the right route sometimes.  I mean sure, it’s never led me into a crazy storm or into pirate territory but it’s taken a pretty confusing route to get me where I am these days.  I think I need to dock somewhere and update the maps or something (assuming there are ocean maps that change) because lately I think it’s been sending me around in circles or taking extremely strange directions.  If it could hear me, I might be inclined to say “What gives GPS?”  Unfortunately, I’m left to hear it declare “recalculating” which I’ve identified is code for oops, didn’t mean to end up here… my bad, lets try again.  If I was the GPS I would try to recalculate less, putting more effort into avoiding getting lost in the first place.  The more it has to recalculate, the more I start digging around for those old paper maps that I used to use as a backup.  While they weren’t nearly as sophisticated and fancy, they generally worked fairly well (and I didn’t have to announce “recalculating” when I was lost).  When the GPS recalculates a dozen times in a row I’ve almost had the urge to throw it overboard or something but then I usually calm down an realize that would be polluting, which is bad… and it might have some good emergency use.  I’ll give it credit for trying, despite all it’s recalculations.  For now the GPS will stay in place as primary navigator, I’ll remain cautiously skeptical of any wildly sharp turns but we’ll see what happens.  What’s a little more time at sea anyways.

I also worry about cycles a lot.  I’m of the belief that life doesn’t have to be nearly as cyclic or repetitive as it seems, but changing the norm is hard and requires consistent effort.  There are lots of things I’d, in theory, like to explore changing about my life but they all seem very daunting and hard.  Wearing black jeans on Thursday was fairly straightforward change, changing a social dynamic is significantly harder.  I tend to accept that given the limited timeframe I should just give up and abort any thoughts that things can be different.  Better luck next time would be more encouraging if I knew there would ever be a next time, but I’ve cut my losses before and I can survive doing it again.  It’s too early to start my debriefing, but I will probably point toward a general lack of skill paired with an off-putting image.  I might also cite circumstantial / situational failures, but I’m of the more recent believe that those failures can primarily be attributed to the personal flaws.  A story for another day.

Good night moon.

Seating

I hypothesize that availability of a couch, futon, or other mass-seating structure contributes greatly to a location’s social desirability.  Based on my data, I can fairly conclusively state that the ownership of a couch significantly increases the likelihood people will congregate at any given location and, subsequently, the lack of similar furniture decreases the aforementioned likelihood.  Please pardon me, I’ve been writing some academic papers so my speech is a bit overly colloquial right now, perhaps I can adjust.

I don’t have a couch in my apartment.  I have a total of 5.5 distinct seats: 1 computer chair, 2 kitchen chairs, 1 tilted-bowl shaped chair, and 1 club-style chair with footrest (the footrest counts as .5).  This seemed very logical for me, most of the time there is only 1 person in my apartment, and having 5 chairs per person seemed like more than enough seating variety for me.

What never occurred to me is that those 5 seats are all independent, unique locations.  It’s fairly uncomfortable to share any of them with another person, which isn’t an issue because I’ve ever had >5 people in my apartment (I don’t think more than 2 chairs have ever been used at once actually).  The real problem is that disjoint seats don’t promote much social interaction, maybe it’s more reminiscent of being in a classroom or work environment.  While people sitting on a mass seating structure, like a couch, don’t always have to physically interact with each other the seating location tends to, according to my research, facilitate a shared social interaction.  Everyone sitting on a couch tends to talk to each other, watch the same program, etc.  People sitting in individual seats have individual experiences.  People sitting in shared seats have shared experiences.

For example, without a couch I can’t comfortable say to someone “Hello <name>, would you like come to my apartment and watch <tv show / movie>?” because I don’t have a couch, the common viewing place, for people to sit on.  Sure, someone could sit in the variety of seats I have available but then it’s like we are both watching the same material and just happen to be occupying the same space, which isn’t usually what I’m going for when this theoretical request is made.  (Disclaimer: I’ve never asked anyone to do this, it’s merely a thought experiment.)

This concern is slightly more fitting now that I actually have a TV in my apartment.  Before I had that appliance there was almost no reason anyone would want to potentially come to my place, listening to iTunes / the radio together was cool back in the 60’s… and my computer desk isn’t well positioned to facilitate  >1 watchers.

When I was getting this apartment, a couch was on the list of things that other people wanted me to get but I wasn’t really comfortable with the idea.  I think, similar to the Queen’s Throne, a couch would be one of those depressingly unused things.  At least my discrete chairs see some 100% utilization time, and they are much easier for me to move.

I’ve given some though to non-mass seating solutions, but I think you then get into the “class” of chairs.  In social interactions, it’s important for people to have the opportunity to be on the same level with each other, something a couch does really well.  A club chair seems inferior to a computer chair, and I always feel a bit strange sitting in the computer chair while interacting with someone in the club chair,  I suspect the tilted bowl chair would fall below the club chair.  The two kitchen chairs are logically of the same class, but they aren’t particularly comfortable (and it would be strange to sit side by side in wooden chairs like that).

Perhaps I will look into getting a couch wherever I find myself next, though I guess the logical requirement is also people that would use it (perhaps I share a similar underlying concern this year).  Until then I’ll maintain the status quo, just like my steak knives.   I have more steak knives than I have friends or steaks I have consumed this year.  I could probably use like 4 knives per steak, if I ever cooked something like that.  Despite my presentation, do not consider this blog an open invitation to show up in an attempt to prove my theory wrong.  Should I desire company, I will consider following the protocol as outlined in the though experiment.

Good night moon.

Wardrobes

One of the things I really dislike doing is pausing for a moment to look at where things are in my life objectively.  I think that most people actually avoid doing this out of practice because they might find something they’re not satisfied with.  I actually don’t mind if my life is full of things I’m not currently satisfied with, but I get fairly saddened (though you would never know it) when I find my current, or more importantly, future state has been worsened by a failed attempt to make things better.  Don’t worry, an example to follow of course.  I often think “well, things could be worse” when I’m uneasy about a situation and need to put my best foot forward but after putting my best foot forward for so long and finding things continually worse it’s hard to keep marching.

Time for an example, to keep everyone fairly rooted around the problem.  If you’ve seen me over the past decade or so you have probably seen me in a dressy collared shirt and a decent pair of cargo pants.  The closest I get to casual is Friday when I’ll put on a polo; certainly no sweats and t-shirts (implying nothing over the t-shirt) are only allowed in extreme cases during the summer like walking to a beach.  The plan was fairly simple and straightforward when I developed it, keep in mind this was a decade or so ago.  Most people dress like they’re just casually hanging out, sometimes those outfits convey a lack of caring about a subject or the person presenting it.  In an extreme, wearing PJ bottoms to class screams, in many instances, “I am too lazy to put real pants on, so I probably don’t want to be here.”  The second, and more important scenario would play out as follows:  I coincidentally run into someone cool / famous / future boss-like figure and they think “Hey, I will say hi to this nice young fellow because he looks like he has a clue what he’s doing / he doesn’t look like an idiot.”

I think I’ve gotten some use out of use case #1.  In middle / high school I think it served me well to dress professionally.  I doubt that was the sole reason that I rate my K-12 education so highly, but I do think I got my mileage out of that one.   Use case #2 on the other hand hasn’t really panned out for me.  I don’t think, aside from a handful of interactions, that I’ve ever bumped into someone who has decided to not write me off because of my dress…. not because people don’t think that way but because I just haven’t found myself bumping into anyone at all.  I think I had some dream playing out in my head where some super cool executive sees me “working” or something like that and decides to hire me, or at least pursue that option, because I look like someone who cares a little more than the person next to me.  No luck on that front.

I can take away a few things from all that:

1. The manner in which I present myself doesn’t necessarily convey I care in general, it implies I care about a very restricted subset of topics.  Someone who cares about interacting socially with others may care just as much, or more, about their dress however they just display that differently.
2. Kind of a corollary to #1, but my clothing selection tends to imply I don’t care about a lot of topics, sometimes a good thing and sometimes a bad thing.  My clothes probably don’t show a care for sports and I’m comfortable with that, but they’ve also been interpreted to imply I’m not interested in “having fun” which, despite popular belief, may not always be true.
3. There is no inherent value in matching a stereotype, only perceived value.

I decided I didn’t  like denim, like jeans, back when I was in like 6th grade.  I had a few bad experiences and decided they were the worst pants in the world… well, not as bad as those loud swishy pants, but the worst pants that I would be faced with on a daily basis anyways.  It wasn’t until my senior year in high school when my girlfriend and a close friend of mine decided I needed to buy a pair of jeans and try a new outfit to make Friday a bit more casual.  I am not sure if I went along just because it meant spending time with my girlfriend of if I was running low on cargo pants, but I did.  I ended up getting a pair of jeans, a blue/pink collared shirt, and a white/orange sweater thing and I wore them to school.  Being interested in the social sciences, I took notes as people remarked and generally found that people liked the jeans and were confused by the tops.  Fair enough I guess.

Recently, I acquired two new pairs of jeans.  One is not really of note, but the other one is a black pair that is sufficiently different from the previous pairs to make it notable.  It also stands out because my belt is brown, but that’s an issue to resolve another day.  I don’t really have a collared shirt that I think works great with my black jeans, and I started to hypothesize if/how things would be different if I wasn’t to strict and considered pairing just a t-shirt with said pants.  Ridiculous, I know.  I’ll start by saying that I can’t implement even a trial of this strategy because I lack an appropriate t-shirt to do so at the moment nor am I easily pleased by t-shirts with messages I don’t agree with on them.  I also have a feeling that most people stopped tucking t-shirts into their jeans back in like 5th grade and I’m not sure how I could handle the increased range of motion if a t-shirt wasn’t tucked in.  That’s not to say I couldn’t survive, I’m just not sure how physically comfortable I’d find that.

I’m lucky to be playing with clothes here, I can try them on in the comfort of my own apartment and no one has to know what they look like.  I can also very easily provide previous to other people if I really want their feedback, and talking about clothes is not out of the question.  At the end of the day, it’s just a pair of pants.

I think that is enough for now.

Good night moon.