I woke up this morning with my eye painfully swollen and in my frustration I created something of a poetic masterpiece. Maybe I could win the Pulitzer or something. Enjoy.
I have a stye
In my eye
On which I rely
To see.
Why, me?
In pain am I
And here I lie
With a stye
In my eye
Sigh.
I’m graduated! I got my degree in the mail today! Very exciting! I’m a little sad that I didn’t get to actually attend my convocation. I decided it would be better to move to San Diego and get working and paying off debt than to stick around for it. I heard it was boring anyway. But the way I see it, I’m gonna be going to grad school and it’ll be much more satisfying walking across that stage to receive my PhD one day. This whole deal is a little weird though. Since I’m gonna be going to grad school eventually and I’m mentally preparing myself for four more years of school and since right now my job doesn’t feel like a university grad’s job, it almost doesn’t feel like I accomplished very much. But I did accomplish a lot! Hooray! That’s four years of post-secondary education under my belt that’s gonna open up great opportunities for me. And I did pretty well at it, too. Get back to me in a few years and I’ll have a job to match my education. Well, I guess that’s it. Just wanted to brag a bit.
I also want to dedicate some space to how awesome the University of Alberta is. It’s a great school. High quality teaching and facilities. I really got to like a lot of the faculty. Even though every student finds something to complain about while they’re attending classes, I think when it comes down to it the U of A is pretty darn awesome. And I feel blessed to have been able to attend there.
So, I’ve been really busy with work lately and haven’t had much chance to write anything. Sorry. But I saw something last night that I had to let everyone know. Everyone who knows me will get a kick out of this.
So there’s a trendy, little coffee shop next door to Barnes & Noble where I work and on Saturday nights they have live music there and it seems to be a popular little hang out. Well, last night I’m there working and I can see the front of the coffee shop and the tables outside from where I work at the cashier. And what do I see? I see a group of trendy-looking youth gathered around a small table outside, coffee and cigarettes in hand, and what, you ask, are they doing? They’re playing none other than my favorite word game in the whole, wide world – Boggle! So to everyone out there who thinks Boggle is solely a nerd’s pursuit, think again! These were trendy, coffee-drinking, cool people. Believe it! So, yeah. I enjoyed seeing other “cool” people publicly enjoying one of my favorite activities. So there.
I figured it’s about time I added something to my blog again. I’ve been getting a little busy with life and I’ve been neglecting you, my beloved blog readers! The only problem is, I feel like all I’ve been doing lately is working and that doesn’t seem to be a very fruitful source of blog material so far. But I guess I can probably extract something from it all.
Right now I’m just finishing up my training for the San Pascual Academy job. I’ve done my first aid/CPR, transportation training, cultural training and now I’m doing restraint training. It’s been kind of interesting. The trainer for all of it is quite an interesting guy. He’s overweight and smells like Listerine and he always wears the same stained cap to trainings. He’s got a crazy style of speaking, it’s like his tongue is too big for his mouth so when he speaks he slurs his words together and spits a lot. He constantly says to us “Does that make sense to you?” but when he says it it sounds more like “duzzat may senschah?” He also say words like “material” and “here”, “maturrial” and “hurr”. But despite all that he does an excellent job of keeping everyone involved and he keeps me from falling asleep. The trainings are actually interesting even if sometimes it’s a little frustrating trying to decipher what he means.
I’ve also been doing some on-site shadowing at the actual facility where I’ll be working and I’ve been getting to know how things work there. My first few days have been super easy. One day I got to play some catch and some pool, another day I watched 3 movies and read a book for my entire shift. It all depends on how many kids are there for you to look after (the kids leave the facility a lot on weekends) and how well-behaved the kids are. I feel like I may be getting a false sense of how the job’s going to be, though. I need something semi-serious to happen soon to keep me from getting complacent. But all things considered, I’m feeling really good about this job. I can see it being really good for me.
My Barnes and Noble job continues to be super easy. I guess I’m really good at selling B&N memberships, someone brought it up the other day. Kinda cool. I’ve really been taking advantage of the book loan program and my employee discount. In the last two weeks I’ve read “When You Are Engulfed In Flames” by David Sedaris, “For One More Day” by Mitch Albom, “Post Secret” by Frank Warren, “Night” by Elie Wiesel, and I’m halfway through “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch. I forgot how much I like reading. I could probably write separate blog entries about each one of those books. So good.
My social life is improving, too. I’m making friends and starting to like the people here. But my social life is doomed to progress slowly. Because of my jobs I keep missing YSA activities and I keep working weekends and evenings. This week, for instance, I worked this morning and this evening, I work morning and evening tomorrow, friday and saturday as well, and I work just the morning on wednesday and thursday. Kinda sucky. But oh well. I need the money. I figure I’ll probably only keep the B&N job ’til the end of the summer.
Well, I think that’s a pretty decent update, don’t you? I promise something more interesting soon.
I bet you’re all wondering what Peter would be doing if he wasn’t in psychology. What? You’re not? Well, I’ll just tell you anyway. I’ll start with the career I’m chasing right now and follow that with a few alternate routes that I would probably consider if my current one doesn’t work out :)
1. Counseling Psychologist – Since my mission, I’ve been pretty certain that I wanted to help people as a psychologist of some sort. I’ve been able to narrow it down to a counseling psychologist based on my experience in school and it’s compatibility with my ideals. The idea that I can help someone help themselves is exciting to me.
2. Professional Soccer Player – I’m going to be completely honest here. I could play soccer for the rest of my life and be completely happy. I would love to get to be on a soccer field and feel the intense energy of the fans wash over me as I just run back and forth playing the game I love. The problem is that I’m past my prime now. Maybe if I had been born in England and attended soccer boarding schools since infancy…
3. Rock Star/Singer – Hey, there’s no reason I can’t dream big, right? I love to sing, at least as much as I love playing soccer. I may not be the best ever, but boy do I love it. Plus, I’m sort of into myself and how awesome would it be to have people chanting my name and asking for my autograph and throwing their undergarments at me and wanting to have my babies? Pretty darn awesome I would say. And all for doing something I love doing anyway.
4. Novelist/Writer – I think everybody’s got a good story inside of them somewhere waiting to come out. And I feel like I must have at least one decent one hiding in there somewhere. In high school I hated writing and it was my worst class. Then in university I discovered that I’m sort of good at it and I that I kind of enjoy it. And, as you may have noticed, it has become my creative outlet du jour. I think I could really enjoy writing things for a living.
5. A Film Critic or Food Critic – Have you ever felt a little resentment towards guys like Roger Ebert, who sit on their fat behinds and whine about the latest movie and get paid for it, and you usually disagree with them anyway? I have. But have you also thought how awesome it would be to have their job? I love movies. I love food. I think I have good taste in both. I should get paid for watching movies and eating food. Period.
6. Forensic Scientist – I used to read books like Encyclopedia Brown and the Hardy Boys as a kid and I loved trying to solve mysteries and I think it would be way cool to solve real life mysteries using science! I’m not sure what would be cooler, accident or crime scene reconstruction, where you use physics to determine the trajectories of bullets and shrapnel, blood spatter, skid marks, or medical examiner, taking people apart to figure out what killed them. It would be coolest to be like the fake ones on CSI, who do a little of everything.
7. FBI Profiler – I feel like this might only exist in the movies, but it would be cool to be the psychologist who creates the profile of a serial killer like Buffalo Bill or John Wayne Gacy or David Berkowitz based on the pattern of evidence collected and that will eventually lead to the capture of the deranged criminal. They’ll make movies about my work and write true crime novels about me and the murderers I’ve helped catch. Yeah, that would be cool.
8. Food taster – I read an article once about these ladies that were food tasters; like quality control sort of stuff I guess – different than a food critic. Apparently they had some of the most refined taste buds in the world. They could taste the difference between two separate batches of Chips Ahoy cookies, for example. When they go out to eat they can essentially list the ingredients of their meal just by tasting it. Maybe my taste buds aren’t quite of that calibre, but I would be willing to learn.
9. Inventor – Ever since I was a little kid I wanted to be an inventor – of anything really. One of those guys who just dedicates his life finding a need and filling it with some creative, eccentric, possibly useless contraption. I would join the ranks of legends like Raymond Kurzwiel, Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway and whoever it was who invented the Thighmaster (I should clarify, Raymond Kurzweil is a legitimate genius, the others are debatable). The catch has always been that I’m not very mechanically inclined. It has sort of held back my inventor dreams.
10. Nude Model – This one is only half-serious, but maybe some of you won’t be surprised. I would be a nude model not because I think I have the sort of body that the world would want to see or that I want them to see it, but because of the joy and freedom I find in not wearing clothes. Why not get paid for it? Am I right? Haha. Don’t take me too seriously on this one, okay?
So I just recently finished reading the book Twilight by Stephanie Meyer. You’ve probably heard of it. Among the people I know, it’s the book that has replaced Harry Potter, in a sense. A book to build a craze around. I wasn’t dying to read it or anything but enough people had told me I should read it and that it was amazing that I decided to go for it. And since I just started working part-time at a bookstore I figured it would be good to know a little bit about one of the most popular books right now. It was an easy read and enjoyable. But it didn’t make me want to read more. Many of my friends will be disappointed at that. But I didn’t read all the Harry Potter books, either. I stopped after the second one. I just couldn’t get into enough to keep reading. Same thing with this Twilight series. I don’t know what it is about it; it’s well-written, it’s a decently interesting story, I guess something’s just missing for me.
Even though I can’t determine exactly what made me not want to continue with the series, one thing that I know of that bugged me about Twilight is something for which Twilight is not alone in its guilt. It’s the way that the supposedly teenage characters speak to one another. Teenagers don’t actually talk like that! They’re using words like ‘incredulous’ in everyday conversation and they speak more eloquently than the President! That sort of stuff should only be done by pretentious word nerds like myself.
And it’s the same with so many other teen novels and TV and so on. I remember watching an episode of Dawson’s Creek back in the day and thinking to myself that those kids have larger vocabularies than my English teacher. And that’s ridiculous! But mine is a futile protest. I acknowledge that that type of popular media may not be as watchable or readable if it were in genuine ‘teen speak’. And I’m not saying that it’s always that way; teenagers can speak intelligently and sound normal at the same time. But too often they don’t sound like teenagers, instead they sound like English PhDs. And it irritates the heck out of me!
And that’s my little rant for the day.
P.S. Remember my post about People Aren’t That Different? Well, I just recently discovered another phenomenon to add to the couple I had there. In California, when you don’t completely stop at a stop sign, but just sort of roll through, they call it a California Stop or a California Roll. Let’s be honest, people everywhere do that. Why does it get to be called the California Stop? And I suppose the answer is that Californians made it up.
Today has been a busy day for me. At least compared to my life over the last month. I had to get up sooo early this morning – 6:30am. I know I’m a wuss. I was really getting used to waking up at 10 every day. I had my first training for my new job this morning, first aid and CPR. The building the training was in was an old building and it smelled really weird, it was an unhappy smell. It smelled like maybe there were some old chemicals in the walls and floor that had been slowly seeping out over the last 30 years and now the room was saturated with its fumes. And it also smelled like it was combined with the accumulated body odor of many employees with poor hygiene. And the guy sitting next to me smelled like Listerine. Not my favorite morning ever.
I went from one unhappy building to another one, the DMV. The DMV gives you this gloomy feeling when you go in. I don’t like the place. If the DMV had an aura, it would be vomit colored. But I aced my written test for my Cali license! Now I only have to wait A FREAKING MONTH to take my road test! I was irritated enough that I had to take all these tests again. I don’t know how they can expect anyone to get their license within ten days of getting to Cali. Now I get to spend my Canada Day morning proving that Canadian drivers can drive in California.
Now after I’m done writing, I get to go to work at Barnes & Noble till 10. It’s a good thing it’s such an easy job. But I’m still gonna be pooped when I’m done. Till next time…
It’s true you know. And not necessarily in the karmic, “Will I be reincarnated as a slug or a swan?” sort of way and definitely not in the Secret “ask the universe and it will respond” sort of way. More like in the Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, sort of way. What I want to get at in this post is how the way we act and the way others act is, on average, very similar. Therefore, many of the things we do that affect others are likely to be done by others with an effect on us. The intuitive psychologist in everyone would probably say that that makes sense. What I think gets overlooked are the potential implications of that knowledge. In the immortal words of J. Timberlake, “What goes around, goes around, goes around, comes all the way back around.”
It’s all about actions and reactions. Actions by others often elicit a reaction by ourselves. Our interpretation of those actions influences the way in which we react. For instance, imagine you are driving and somebody cuts you off. A common interpretation of that action is that the perpetrator is reckless, inconsiderate and/or stupid. Based on that interpretation, a common reaction is anger and frustration. Now imagine you are driving and you accidentally cut someone off. The person you nearly hit immediately honks at you and pulls up beside you and appears to be yelling and making obscene gestures. What is your reaction? You probably feel that you are being treated unfairly, because you know that you did not cut the person off intentionally, and there’s a good chance that you will respond in kind – with anger and frustration.
Now imagine how this situation would be different if the initial interpretation of the action was different. What I mean is, imagine if, upon being cut off, you remember the times that you have accidentally cut off someone else. You should be more likely to give that person the benefit of the doubt, because if you are capable of cutting people off accidentally, it makes sense that other people would be capable of the same thing. This is where the Golden Rule kicks in. If you would like people to be lenient with you when you don’t pay as much attention as you should while driving, it would seem fair that you offer others the same courtesy. If the significance of that really sinks in, then you won’t rush to react in anger, thereby preventing a whole cascade of undesirable consequences.
What made me think of this is how often similar situations arise in day to day life, in regular interactions with friends, family members or even strangers. I am certain that everybody can bring to mind a time when they got angry at someone else for doing something that they themselves have done before. And I am equally certain that everybody can bring to mind a time when they felt unjustly chastised by someone who they believed was at least as guilty as they themselves were.
One particularly salient example from my own life comes from my experience as a missionary in the Los Angeles area. I quickly discovered that many people in the world are quite hostile towards Mormons. I would encounter them frequently on my mission. And I remember how angry and frustrated I would feel when they would launch a verbal attack against my church and my beliefs. I would often retaliate with some scriptural defense of my beliefs followed by an attack on their beliefs. The predictable result was that we both ended up being too angry and upset to come to any sort of peaceful resolution. What I eventually came to realize was that I was doing to them exactly what I condemned them for doing to me. I never intended to do that, but it happened. I realized that they had just as much right to believe what they did as I had to believe what I did. It didn’t change my goal as a missionary, but it changed the way I went about achieving that goal. I’m not sure if I was effective in changing any more people’s minds because of the shift, but I know that it created a much more positive atmosphere to interact in and that, in turn, allowed me and the hostiles to see with greater clarity our similarities and to be less preoccupied with our differences.
I am sure there are a number of people who would call my ideas naive and idealistic. And to them I say, So what? There are two reasons why I feel so strongly about what I’ve expressed here. First, we have absolutely nothing to lose by giving other people the benefit of the doubt in situations as benign as inconsiderate driving or everyday disputes. It’s usually as simple as choosing between being angry or not being angry. The second reason is a little less direct, but a great teacher once helped me realize that every prolonged negative emotion I feel in response to another’s actions is essentially a result of my relinquishing control of my emotions to that person with regards to that thing that was done. In other words, it is as simple as having control of yourself or someone else having control of you.
Please note that I am not suggesting that we just excuse others bad behavior. I am suggesting that we approach it with greater understanding and empathy. I also am not suggesting that we can fix major human problems like crime, poverty, war and so on simply by admitting that we all make mistakes and “I don’t want you to punish me, so I won’t punish you”. That’s much too naive and things are much more complex than that. What I would venture to suggest is that by learning to behave civilly to one another in the simple, everyday situations and learning to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes will create the kind of human beings that are capable of solving the major problems.
So, before I depart on a tangent, back to the point. People behave, on average, in similar ways. The good and bad things we’ve all done – other people have done many of them as well. Our strategies for dealing with people – other people use them, too. The things we do to others will often get done back to us. If we realize that, it can help us produce more informed and empathic responses to the actions of others, which will, in turn, decrease the amount of negative emotion and increase the amount of positive emotion in our everyday life. What goes around comes around, so do unto others as you would have them do unto you. You’ll like what you see.
I put this post together fairly quickly and I’m not sure how well I collected and expressed my thoughts, so I encourage you, my faithful readers, to comment on it and ask for clarification if you need it and hopefully then I can get across what I was hoping to get across.
I got my wallet back today!! Just thought I would briefly share how good that feels. It feels darn good. Disneyland found it on Monday and mailed it to me. I received it in the mail yesterday. My life was basically on hold while my wallet was missing. I couldn’t complete my orientation for my new job without all my ID saying I was legal to work in the States. Luckily, I was still able to work at my part time job in the meantime. But I had to drive to work every night without a license. Maybe not that big a deal because I’m a pretty law-abiding driver, but a little nerve-racking, nonetheless. And now that I have my wallet back, my life can start again. I can start my full time job now. I don’t have to worry about getting a driver’s license from scratch. And I don’t have to replace my Safeway Club card! Whew! And so much more. I guess this is just a long way to say that I’m so freaking happy that I got my wallet back! What a weight off my shoulders!
