Lookin’ Back on the Track for a Little Green Bug

I should really be careful about what I say in my posts…

While I’m on the subject of things about which I should be being careful… I should lick my fingers clean before typing because now there’s wotsits residue all over the keys.

It’s bugging me, I like my keys smooth, now they’re all bumpy. I wonder why that is? When did that become a thing for me? When and why did that story start? Is it mine or did it belong to someone else, then they infected me with it, and now I think it’s mine?

“We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn’t any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work.

Richard Feynman, from “The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics,” Nobel Lecture.

[I put this quote in later… you can time travel in post-writing… don’t worry if it makes no sense whatsoever now… don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense later or ever.]

The other day I mentioned that a local nature reserve which is usually boggy even when there hasn’t been much in the way of rain was bone dry – it’s not bone dry anymore.

Shortly after I said in a post that it was bone dry – the sky has been delivering package of rain after package of rain faster than Amazon Prime… and I didn’t order it, but I’m glad it came, hope I don’t get a bill for it. How much does rain cost?

I’m supposed to be doing some gardening right now instead of writing a post but the clouds are telling me they’ve got another delivery… and while I could garden in the rain, I need to use a machine which you’re not supposed to use when it’s wet.

I’m still reeling from the fact that I fixed the broken roof slate before it started pouring packages of rain… usually I don’t get things done before… but my narrative has been changing recently… I’m not quite used to the change in self-narrative so I still get excited about it… it would have bugged me if I hadn’t, and I’d have been poking myself with the sharp edge of the broken slate about it.

I left the broken slate outside the back door to remind me to do it… I haven’t moved it. A bug appeared on it. I notice small things. Put a big thing in front of me and I may or may not notice it, but put a small thing on the big thing…

I noticed yesterday that there’s a crack in the render of the house which needs filling… it’s small but rain doesn’t mind a small crack, rain can work with small until it’s not so small anymore and you shouldn’t have ignored the problem just because it was small. It’ll widen over time. Grow bigger.

The walls of my house are made of earth, clay, dug out from the ground it was built on so water + earth/clay = mud crumble. It’s been okay for about 200 years, and it went through a few abandoned building exposed to the elements phases…

All of that is very boring and I would have probably clicked away from this post if I was reading it instead of writing it – sometimes I do that while writing a post, click away from it, although that’s usually just a mistake caused by…

Oh, look, a bug:

this little green bug was chillin’ on the broken slate just outside the back door

I haven’t Google-looked-up what name humans have given to that particular style of bug – the bug wouldn’t tell me, in fact it was rude and grumpy, tried to get away from the camera lens which was invading its personal space, which isn’t why the pic is blurry but it didn’t help focus.

Focus…

I’m one of those people who spends a lot of time unfocused… until something bugs me, then my focus turns on and can get a bit obsessive, laser-like, burning holes, cutting through the facade, layer after layer, until I reach the core.

What is this thing which is bugging me? Why is it bugging me? Is it me or it? What’s the narrative? What’s the real narrative behind the superficial narrative being told? What’s really going on here?

Is there a small crack in this narrative which I can seep into like water and loosen up the render, the hardened veneer, get to what’s underneath, moisten the fixed structure of it, crumble away what’s become encrusted, find the structure of the structure, change it, change the narrative to change the structure, which changes what you see on the surface?

I was reading a post today by someone else wherein they wrote about something which bugs them. They regularly write about this same bug and how much it bugs them.

It’s a bug with which I can relate – I’ve had a similar bug, I’ve had an almost exactly the same bug.

However certain things were different, mainly in how I related to the bug itself versus how they appear to be relating to it. And those differences although small can sometimes become big over time.

One of the differences is that the structure of the bug narrative for them is to be bugged about something on behalf of someone else, someone near and dear to them – they’re bugged by it because of how they see it affecting someone near and dear to them, and how that affects them and their sense of self.

To them this places them in a position of being absolutely helpless, powerless, to do anything about the bug because they see themselves as being absolutely helpless, powerless, to do anything about it since they’re affected by it affecting someone else – but is that true or is that only true because of the narrative they’re telling themselves and others?

Once we share our internal narrative with others… it can heal it but it can also calcify it and cause us to get stuck in it, having to live up to it and keep living it because what would others think if we moved on? Would they think we’d lied, conned or cheated them in some way? Better stay the same forever and ever stuck in the narrative of us, our life, that we’ve shared for them to keep… “Liking” us… and we need those “Likes”. Do we though? Answer still buffering…

“Do not read so much, look about you and think of what you see there.”

Richard Feynman, from letter to Ashok Arora, 4 January 1967, published in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track (2005).

Whereas I experienced the bug mainly from the position of being in the position of their nearest and dearest, but also from the position of being the one who cared about their nearest and dearest – Someone had to care about me, might as well be me as those who were conventionally supposed to care about me… guess they missed the memo or misunderstood it.

In some ways I’ve been blessed/made lucky by having to care for myself because those around me, in the past anyway, were too wrapped up in themselves (wanted me to care about them but doing it the other way around was too hard and confusing), to notice me – so I had to notice me.

For instance – I have Dyslexia. I’ve been aware of it since I was about 4 or 5 yrs old and that writing backwards incident which I was never allowed to forget, but at that age I didn’t entirely understand it or what it meant.

I still thought – I’m normal/being normal/doing normal stuff. It was only after years and years of repeatedly being told by adults/experts and having pointed out to me and proven how not-normal I was that I had to change my I’m normal narrative.

That narrative changed to – everything about me is wrong, everything about everyone else is right, I’d better fix myself.

Which led to – shit, I’m forever broken, always wrong/being wrong/doing wrong stuff, I’m not normal, can’t fix it – I’m helpless and powerless. Now what?

Overlay onto my self-narrative my mother’s self-narrative – My child is defective, which means I’ll be seen as a defective parent because of my defective child, let me fix it.

She made it her mission to fix me – cue her home-schooling me because those mental institutions know as school were not efficient or effective. I went to regular school too as well as being home-schooled by her. Double-whammy of other people trying to fix my mind to work as they wanted it to work – likes theirs.

Her home-schooling was actually efficient and effective, I did well at regular school and was bumped ahead a year (almost got bumped ahead two years but the wise headmaster of one school said it was not a good idea to do that – he was right), perhaps because she’d have a tantrum when I got something wrong… even though it wasn’t always my fault, countries change and, that country no longer exists, that Capital city is no longer the Capital city, but she hadn’t updated her answers so I was wrong! She couldn’t possibly be wrong because she was the adult, the one with the right kind of brain, and I wasn’t.

And while I was helpless, powerless, couldn’t do anything about it either at the time, over time I figured out my own solution to the problem.

I’m not a fan of people feeling sorry for me… really hate it when I feel sorry for me. It’s fun to wallow sometimes in self-pity, like a spa day, but I don’t want to turn into a prune. Let’s get out of this rut!

Which reminds me of something I was superficially exploring this morning:

“The central thesis is a dichotomy between two modes of thought: “System 1” is fast, instinctive and emotional; “System 2” is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.

The book delineates cognitive biases associated with each type of thinking, starting with Kahneman’s own research on loss aversion.

From framing choices to people’s tendency to replace a difficult question with one which is easy to answer, the book highlights several decades of academic research to suggest that people place too much confidence in human judgement.”

excerpt from the Wiki page for Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

It had “the Linda problem”… oh how I hate “the Linda problem”! Even with the official correct answer it doesn’t make sense to me, the oca makes it less logical. But that’s not relevant… or is it? I’ll explore it more deeply later or not.

What I did like was the delineation of the differences between Fast Thinking and Slow Thinking. We all do both so it isn’t a competition, you don’t win anything… did you just lose interest? It’s nice to win something, isn’t it, for doing something? It’s nice to be given credit where credit is due… and not have to figure out how to find a compliment in someone not crediting you when you know they’re using your ideas, copying you, but being all hush-hush about it (old bug, passed onto to me by my father… thanks for that, still haven’t solved that puzzle).

It tied in with something which Bill Burr said in his stand-up – I’m watching his stand-up shows on Netflix in reverse order, started with his most recent one, working my way backwards in time, now I’m on one he did in something known as 2015…

He still hated bloggers then… that bug is still bugging him in the present and he still hasn’t figured it out, still hasn’t worked it out of his system, glitch still exists in all the updates since then, or is it just part of his routine now, part of his narrative, he still gets laughs for it so until it stops getting laughs he’s going to keep using it, saying it.

What do you keep saying simply because of the reactions it gets from others? Some people are after laughs, like Bill Burr, others are after Awwws, sympathy, empathy shots, poor you you’re such a saint for putting up with this bug and never ever dealing with it even though us sy-em-pathisers keep offering you solutions (all of which you reject because that’s not what you want).

My dishwasher doesn’t work properly – poor you, use your hands and some dish soap in the sink like those of us sans-dishwasher do – that’s a solution, I don’t want that, what I want is the energy you give me when you feel for me and my problem of having a broken but not totally broken dishwasher and how much that symbolises my life, me, my narrative and its structure which supports me and my identity and stuff. I know how to solve it… I don’t want to solve it, I prefer the rewards I get from having the problem and not solving it.

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Richard Feynman

BB was talking about going to church as a child and the whole repeat after me of that kind of activity which goes on there, and how as a child that stuff just sinks into your mind, becomes a part of it, regardless of whether you think about it or not. But he thought about it as an adult and decided that kind of thinking wasn’t for him.

He’s not an atheist, yet, he’s a let-me-think-about-it-for-myself-ist.

Fast Thinking accepts things it has been told to repeat after me and then repeats them to others as though it thought those things itself. Why? That’s what everyone thinks = this is reality, accept it, don’t question it, repeat it, pass it on to others. We must maintain this reality!!!

Slow Thinking thinks about those sort of things and then after some mileage decides whether to keep thinking them or not. Why? Well, this reality doesn’t make sense to me so I’m not going to keep repeating it, I’m going to question it and see if there’s a different reality I’d prefer to pass on to others, one which might make more sense or at least be more fun and less destroyer of fun.

The solutions I come up with to my problems, to what’s bugging me, after slow thinking them through tend to be unconventional. Or so I’ve been told… and have observed for myself when I share them and others look at me like I’ve just told them I pooped in the garden because the dog does it (I used to do that as a child… the horror, the horror… why the horror? Besides the dog ate it and so you won’t be stepping in it, not like you ever step in the bushes you only stick to the paths if and when you bother visiting the garden).

Sometimes it makes life harder because your unconventional solution butts heads with conventional systems which are rigid structures that refuse to accept anything but what they’ve decided is allowed even when they’re falling down and an unconventional fix might save what’s worth saving.

Do it this way. No. You have to do it this way. No, I don’t, look I’m not = so obviously I can do it another way. That other way isn’t an option. Yes, it is, I’m doing it, so it is, and it’s working. No, it’s not allowed to work. But it is working and look how smoothly it’s working, your way is all bumpy ride-y.

Sometimes it makes it easier which may make it harder because everyone else is trying to get you to do it the hard way because they’re doing it the hard way so how dare you do it the easy way.

So, do it my way and make life easier for yourselves. No. Why not? That’s cheating. It’s not cheating, this isn’t a game and… oh, you know what, do it your way and I’ll do it mine. If it makes it easier for you, call me a cheat and call my way cheating. Sometimes I think your way is cheating…

That reminds me of – Office (2015) – a South Korean film I saw the other night.

I laughed throughout… I’m not sure if it was meant to be funny, but it was (I may have been a bit giggly, in pervy crone mode, because I have a bit of a… and he doesn’t have a beard! – beware though this may be misleading, as it was in the film).

It had so many layers to it – some not funny at all, very serious issues, ones all humans face in life and usually have to solve for ourselves in our own way.

It was about getting caught in the conventional system, in the mental institution of work, office, which affects relationships (including the one with self – which affects all other relationships) and life out of work/office hours…

And how it can wear all types of people down, but there are two types of people (the film mentions this in its narrative)…

Those who when they get worn down – join the system, play by its rules to cheat the system which is a system designed for cheaters… trample on others the way they’ve been trampled on, pass the poison, the poisonous pedagogy, on.

And those who when they get worn down – beat the system in their own unconventional ways. Opt out of passing the poison on… but may get punished for it.

Although it’s not clear in the film who is who and what is what – which I loved because that’s life in the humaniverse. This person looks good, sounds good, seems good, but what if I’m just projecting? This person looks bad but… am I just transferring?

We all have to figure things out for ourselves…

Are you lonely because you’re not smiling back when people smile at you – this is a reference to a recent study done on people, comparing those who openly admit they’re lonely with those who claim to not be lonely (maybe they are maybe they aren’t), and how they react when shown pictures of people smiling.

Here’s a problem, bug, I have with that study – Where did they get those pictures? From Pixabay or some other free pics to use as you please place? Have you ever thought about the people in those free pics? Have you ever thought of them as people? Or are they just some “thing” you’re using to decorate your blog post, use in your study to prove a point which you’ve already made up your mind about?

Yes. Okay. I see a pic of someone smiling… but what if what I see is – that’s a fake smile, they were told to smile and so they did because they smile when someone tells them to smile, they learned to do this when they were little to please the adults, repeat after me, especially smile to camera you’re a model and you’re getting paid to smile to camera so many people can use this pic any way they want. But that’s a fake smile – look at the eyes! Those eyes say “I’m tired, I’m bored, I’m scared that my entire life is all about how pretty/handsome I am when I smile which makes others smile but my smile isn’t a real one, I’m sick of this shit!”

What if that pic of someone smiling fills me with a sense of how lonely we all are yet we’re not allowed to admit it openly instead we have to smile, fake smile, to the camera of other people’s eyes.

Show me a real smile and I’ll smile, it’s infectious… even if I feel sad. Fake smile… why would that inspire me to smile, it makes the sadness sadder. The loneliness lonelier.

I didn’t bookmark it, why would I, but it’s on Psychology Today somewhere… it’s fairly recent, if you can be bothered and really are interested. It may have been copied/pasted elsewhere too by now. Those sort of things get repeated and passed on via copy/paste.

“I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.“

Richard Feynman (I’ve been lazy and used easy quotes of his, but if you’re interested in his deeper/harder quotes which really make you think, check out his Wikiquote page where they are easily accessed)

Some solutions to problems only work for you and won’t work for others.

You could share it but it wouldn’t compute and thus be accepted and integrated by someone else – their rejection of your solution might make you… reject your own solution, reject yourself.

They have to find their own individual solution to their problem.

It’s more satisfying and lasting that way anyway.

The structure of their problem may be very similar to yours which you’ve solved but… it isn’t the exact same issue no matter how exactly the same it seems.

Your narrative and theirs… are similar yet vastly different.

You and them are similar yet vastly different.

So… what bugs you, have you investigated the bug, and what solutions has this bug brought to your life?

Please note: I’m not asking “who” bugs you because the “who” is always ourselves finding something which bugs us (often about ourselves indirectly) in someone else.

Before I go, a few more links, because I friggin’ love those!!! and it sometimes bugs others when I share them:

Melanie’s latest Share Your World – it’s not so much her Q’s which caught my eye but the intro which went with it which tied in with my bug theme… then the Q’s. I’m not answering a specific one but this post sort of touches upon one of them.

Lori shared a superb real life series on her blog, she’s a brilliant writer and I wanted to share her posts: Start here – Lori’s Lane: A Tale About Feet – and keep going from there. It does tie in with my bug theme… takes it to a whole other level, puts things in perspective.

And a silly yet serious post about relationships which I read recently, it bugged me, I thought: ugh what obvious nonsense, then thought that this is quite good advice because I totally did that stupid shit and it took me ages to realise my doing that stupid shit was the problem not what what bugging me about the other in the relationship: Four Fatal Flaws in a Relationship That You Can Fix – This researcher has a simple solution for each one by Donna Barstow