Tag: advice

Patiently working

There used to be an advertisement on television that said “Wait is a four letter word.” It was funny and indicated the fact that we don’t like to wait for anything we want. Just look at all of the ways we can order products and food and even home repairs these days. Things happen more rapidly than ever.

In the case of relationships you may be single and waiting to meet that special person. It may seem as if it is taking forever to get to happiness(I hope). Things seem to take longer when you are not busy and only focusing on waiting. So I suggest while you are waiting don’t patiently wait, patiently work towards your own self development and on creating a environment and self more suited to your liking.

Are we defined by the people we are in a relationship with? The answer to that is different for each person. When people speak of us do they speak of us as an accessory to our mate or are we our own person? When we get into a relationship do we cease to be an individual? Are we now just a soup of two people? That may be romantic to some of us.

I will not answer any of those musings but I will suggest that we keep moving forward and in that process meet the traveler that is on a congruent path.

 

Featured Image by: Skeeze https://pixabay.com/photos/construction-worker-building-job-642631/

Safety Factor

We can do anything we put our minds to. We are fearless and strong. Educated, skilled and qualified. We are world travelers, dancers, artists you name it. We are free!

With freedom comes glory and responsibility. The freedom to make decisions is also the assignment of accountability for the results of said decisions. Most unfortunately we also face consequences based upon other peoples’s actions. For example people who wish to harm us while we are in the process of living our lives and being great.

Across the world women have been protesting domestic violence, violence against women and femicide. Here in America we are somewhat insulated from the conditions women face around the world. Genital mutilation, child marriage, no reproductive control, no economic standing, no political representation and overall lack of what we see as basic human rights. We are also insulated from the sex trafficking and exploitation right here in America. As the media these days does mainly celebrity news, gossip, political exposes , paid ad content and other exaggerated stories about topics that do not advance humanity.

Right here in America, Indigenous women, from the reservations in the mid and south west all the way to Alaska are facing disappearances and death. All across America, immigrant women are transported from one corner of the country to another. From Mexico to New York, as depicted in a documentary I saw about two years ago.

We are totally detracted from the dangers other’s suffer until we encounter it ourselves. So we end up ill prepared to avoid and or prevent further occurrences. For example Uber was found to have suppressed approximately over 3000 instances where passengers were sexually assaulted by drivers. If the news media has exposed this information we would be more careful when getting into a vehicle. Maybe we would be more vigilant, even for a while. Maybe the offenders would know that they are under our watchful eye and find work where they would not be in a position to exploit their passengers.

The responsibility is never on the victims.

The responsibility is for the collective society to hold each other accountable to enforce an environment of security. To punish offenders and send a clear message that justice will be swift and inexorable. We have to share our knowledge to protect our neighbors and loved ones but how can this happen when the only place he Uber story was reported on was in the business pages?

We are living our lives, that in itself is a struggle, but it is made somewhat easier with information. What locations are dangerous, what times of the day are most dangerous, where are the places criminals frequent? Where is the safest place to park?

Some may see it as oppression but the fact remains that women should consider the safety of their environment even in our relatively liberated country. There are emotionally and psychologically disturbed people who do not view you beyond an object for economic and/or sexual exploitation. Be careful out there and travel at a reasonable hour. Let your loved ones know who you are associating with and let your associates know that your loved ones know who they are.

I understand you are a strong independent and fierce womyn. That does not mean you purposely and unnecessarily walk into danger.

 

Featured photo: Graeme Maclean https://www.flickr.com/photos/gee01/

 

Sabotage Pt. 2

I have written previous blog posts about friends who are threatened by your happiness and accomplishments, even their imagination of your happiness offends them secretly. The friends that try to engage you in situations where you will be embarrassed, degraded, devastated, drunk, fired, divorced, imprisoned, physically harmed, and in worst case killed.

In a blog post titled Sabotage I retold a story where a jealous friend gave a woman bad advice, telling her to engage deeper into a relationship with a musician that lived overseas. You can read the post here: https://goodguyfinder.com/2019/07/29/sabotage/ but it is not necessary to read it to understand this post.

Gossip ultimately is a terrible thing as it is a snippet of a much greater issue. Since we are not naming names, and hopefully I am using this as a example of how to protect yourself, I don’t wish this to be misunderstood as gossip. I will call it, current events.

So the current event is the younger lady she advised to go all-in with the musician is now pregnant with the musician’s child. While a new life is a blessing to the world, for a child to have the best chance the father should be present. Unfortunately in this situation the musician has advised the young woman that he will not be relocating as he has other children to care for in his homeland, but he will visit when he can. You can use your imagination from there as to how the months and years ahead will play out.

This to me is partially sad, as the woman is probably disappointed, while simultaneously realizing how silly she was to expect a musician who sings and performs hyper-sexualized music to be domesticated by her. Understandably she believed herself to be the exception, like we all believe ourselves to be, but that has to be followed by exceptional decisions for our selves.

Though I wrote the Sabotage post about five months ago, and expected things to go badly, I did not expect it to go this bad. I expected him to use her for sex, a visa, and money as she is a high paid professional. I did not however expect a child to have to suffer from her naive decisions or the maleficent advice of a jealous woman. I am confident that there were other women giving her bad advise regarding the relationship for their selfish entertainment.

The jealous people now pretend to feel sorrow for her but are actually reveling in the devastation because they themselves are miserable. Now that someone else’s life is miserable they don’t feel lower or threatened by the still  accomplished, but once perceived happy person. They achieved their goal of sabotaging her life, and if she manages to overcome and smile again, they will again be envious and seek to tear her down.

All the signals were here, there and everywhere she chose not to heed them, she sought out the advise of those who also saw the signals but enjoyed the ratchet reality show that was developing.

In conclusion beware of people encouraging you to act against logic. Beware of people who themselves engage in reckless behavior. They are acting based on emotions and if you hold yourself to be exceptional you should not make decisions that are not based on facts and stats.

 

Featured image: Ben Mortimer https://www.flickr.com/photos/mort183/

Attraction Distraction

Being physically/visually attractive and or funny people say is how you gain some ones attention and or interest. Both of those things are relatively superficial. Physical appearance is in most cases temporal and many times based on fads or fashion. Being funny or entertaining can last longer than physical appeal.

Entertainment in the broadest interpretation gives us an escape from the thoughts that burden us. We turn off our brain and allow the video, music, literature, speech, painting, sculpture, tour guide etc to take us into a different reality. Take for instance a most horrible example of slaves in America working and singing. Though their situation is horrific, they are aware that they must work or die. So to take some of the edge of and comfort themselves through their entire life of suffering they sing.

Without entertainment everything becomes more real. More in-your-face, or more in your head. Thinking about the difficult things causes you to either go into a depression(which includes acceptance imo), or causes you to act to cure the problem.

The example of slavery is extreme, but we all try to take the edge off reality in some way. We know what the problems are but just want to escape for a moment in our minds. We don’t want to, or are unable to fix the issues. For most of us its the former. We just don’t want to. This is a ultimately destructive behavior as the problems remain and wear on you. Instead of saving yourself the anguish by immediately tackling and removing the problem.

Suicide is never a solution. It is just allowing the enemy to destroy you completely. Murder is definitely not a solution as you will end up in jail. Additionally murder on a sick and crass level, does not agree with a vegan lifestyle jk. I only mention these things as we sometimes find justification where it is not present.

A love interest may be funny and/or attractive but that may be a cover for other flaws. Someone told me once that the first thing a con-man does is tell you a joke. So in my opinion, while you are laughing just keep in mind that we all have an agenda and the main agenda is not to make life unsustainable or more difficult than it already is. Don’t get distracted.

Special interest

I picked up a Cosmopolitan magazine that was laying around and read through about four articles. In between the articles were advertisements targeted to mostly young women I would assume in their teens to late twenties. Some articles referred to older women as “OGs” and young readers as “Newbies.” As this was my first time intently reading the magazine I was surprised at the amount of profanity used by the writers.

OK, I’m old. Maybe also lame. Maybe prudish but when I read something other than Fader, Vibe, Source or High Times magazine I don’t expect to read so much profanity. Terms such as OG I understand are taken from gangster culture in order to make reading seem cooler or at least as cool as the raunchy content on social media. All the profanity and acronyms show an attempt by the editors to gain the young crowd. Which understandably is where the money is, as the youth make up a large market.

Back to the ads and articles. I read a little big of Iggy Azaleas article, as I did enjoy her music and found it unjust how people treated her. Her article indicated that she wasn’t able to deal with the pressure of her fame and needed time to learn how to handle life(Justin Beiber recently said the same). She then went on to say she hopes to be with her current rapper boyfriend ten years from now and have some children, but marriage is not required. From a economic standpoint marriage is not in her favor(see Wendy Williams, Hallie Berry, Aisha Taylor). At her current net worth of only approximately 6 million, she doesn’t have much money to spare for an international celebrity. Her bf(7 years her junior) lyrics include the typical Cosmopolitan profanity with added, b*tch, thot, n-word, celebration of drug use and murder. Its art alright, right? So I don’t expect that 10 years of longevity. Hopefully the young ladies reading don’t believe they will have a happy Will & Jada happy(recently revealed not so happy) ending. Then again Will Smith prided himself on being the rapper who never used profanity, might explain the longevity of his marriage, go figure.

I went off track on Iggy as I like her material. So the articles were about legitimizing hookup culture, different sexual exploration and the ads were cosmetics and birth control. All those things go hand in hand. You get into a unsustainable relationship with a drug using bad boy, you get on birth control(as he will not take precaution), have eccentric sex, break up now you need makeup for your next date, that doesn’t work out so you have to buy another Cosmo for further instruction.

Ultimately Cosmo is out to help Cosmo and its advertisers generate more money. Buy more pills and makeup and Cosmo until you are so jaded and reach the age where you start to use empirical date from bad experiences.

If Cosmo’s intent was to help, they would give warnings that hookup culture will ultimately give you more depression because it is not sustainable. As progressive, liberated, empowered and tough you may believe you are, there is a point where you will interpret the hook-up situationship as exploiting on your side. There will be misunderstanding and without a structure or guidelines there is nothing to keep the situationship together. If there was then that would be a relationship.

I understand that we are in the information age and the on-demand age, etc. I get it, but we are still 75% water, carbon based creatures with some would say a spiritual being, and definitely a ego. Your ego if it is big enough to have sustained you to an autonomous adulthood will not allow you to stay in a situationship for long. I would say long is past 2 years. I am willing to retract that if I knew otherwise. I don’t believe there is enough data to dispute my claim as pride prevents people from sharing this info. We generally have a feeling hookup culture and situationships are on the rise but give me the numbers on a graph.

Cosmo is a corporation and a corporation’s number one responsibility is to make profit for their shareholders. The company is not a charity or a non profit. If profits can be generated from increasing entropy, from increasing loneliness, anxiety, depression, fear, then they will capitalize upon it. I repeatedly discuss friends who are bad influences. People who are bad influences, and from recent news we find that legally corporations are people. So we have to be mindful of the human people and the legal people we associate with.

Sick doctor

We most of the time, with sufficient consideration know what is the best thing to do. Somehow we find a way to end up not doing the best thing. It may be that we enjoy things that cause dysfunction or we are not observant of the relation between cause and effect. Maybe we feel dispair and don’t want to execute the solution.

Most things are easier said than done. Some people say talk is cheap. Talk is cheap but it might be more valuable than thoughts that are never vocalised or recorded. Speaking thoughts or writing them gives them a physical presence. For instance this blog. I could have kept my thoughts to myself, and that would probably be best for the world but for me it is therapy. When I read my old posts, I find things I had forgotten which I wanted at the time to remember. My past self is essentially teaching my present self. If I never wrote these thoughts down, I could have spoken them to someone and they may remember, or not, then the apiffany would be lost.

I’m getting off topic. Basically theory is easier than practice. We know what we must do but end up not doing what is necessary. You might encounter a doctor who smokes cigarettes or has a poor diet. They are on the front line of the causes, symptoms and results of poor choices. They have the most knowledge but in practice do not follow the theory.

How awesome and proud would we be if we resisted temptation, explored opportunity, developed our skills, mind, body, spirit and environment? All it requires is a first step and a focus on the person you dream yourself to be.

Nothing is absolute. There will be things to attempt to distract, dissuade and disappoint you but if we as much as possible live up to the standard we set for ourselves we will average on the up side in the limited time we have on this plane.

Good people happen to bad things.

Why me? Why somebody else? Why even bother asking. Maybe the question is why did I create the conditions that permitted this result.

Education, study, research, meditation, observation and critical thinking are not words usually associated with navigating human behavior. That is possibly why we are surprised at a person’s behavior while others expected the behavior almost intuitively.

In my opinion intuition comes from practicing observation and critical thinking. I would go as far to say I suspect people who are considered psychics exercise a high level of people reading. Similarly sales people, con men, psychologists and others.

So if you find yourself in a relationship with a person who exhibit undesirable behaviors that means you failed to analyze them during the dating stage. Likewise if you are dating a person with undesirable behaviors you need to find a way out before things get worse. During the dating phase is when people put on their best face. There are less obligations and expectations which allows all parties to be relaxed and overlook some important indicators.

I once saw a bio on a social media page that stated [Life is hard. Suffering is optional.] While that statement does not apply universally to all satiations, it does imply that suffering is a choice and that you are in control of your life. If you make choices that place you in an environment or relationship where you are suffering, then you are partially if not fully responsible for your current station.

In conclusion I will quote another person. I usually go for a walk during my lunch breaks for exercise. A few times I stop to talk to the groundskeeper of a nearby shopping mall and he gave me this wisdom [Bad cannot come from good and good cannot come from bad.] So the onus is placed on us to create the conditions where we have relationships with people and full our environment with things that respectively practice and produce goodness.

 

Forgive and journal

I have not been writing as much as I used to. I just about skipped a whole week of writing. Usually inspiration comes from the environment and from personal observation/experience. Although I have been inspired the subject matter would not relate to the blog. Specifically I have been researching holistic hair care and that is a whole culture within itself. Ultimately the sum total of holistic anything is you have to eat the right things and it takes longer to work than so calked conventional cosmetics or medicine, etc.

I’m using my phone to write this post and spellcheck is turned off so i will probably sound more illiterate than usual.

On the subject of forgiveness, someone probably said this but it is something that you give yourself. Whether you are forgiving another person or yourself, it is important to your healing process akin to a holistic cleanse. Cleanse sounds gross. Lets use the word exfoliation as I am now into holistic cosmetics.

You can’t beat yourself up because you made a mistake. You have to forgive yourself but also take note of what you dud incorrectly so you don’t repeat it more times than we like to admit.

Recently I picked up one of my favorite supplements at the supermarket and wondered why I had stopped using it. I went home and looked at the ingredients. It was because of one of my enemies the dreaded SUCRALOSE with its ties to cancer and disgusting aftertaste. This was a perfect example of not taking notes or making a journal of why I stopped using this product about 4 years ago.

Similarly we end relationships, and after an extended period of time forget the horrors that caused the break, including the warning signs at the beginning. So we end up missing the warning signs in a new or recycled love interest-then BAM you find out this person is filled with FAKE SUGAR. A bad taste is left as a reminder that you’re not taking enough notes or journaling.

Forgive yourself. No one is perfect and we are going to make mistakes as long as we live we just want to avoid repeating them and avoid making huge ones we can’t bounce back from. Avoiding hurried decisions is key in allowing sufficient mental resources to  become available to facilitate the right decision.

Evolution or revolution

Revolution implies some sort of war on the rich or the ruling class but as funky English words go it also means something rotating. Evolution in my mind brings thoughts of Darwin, dinosaurs and Dr. Ben Carson.

To evolve is to adapt to the environment in a way that will allow you to have the tools needed to make the best of that environment. Revolution is just a cycle of the same order of things over and over and not necessarily adapting to new or even existing conditions. It’s like the idiom “spinning your wheels.” Your working hard but you are not moving forward.

To get out of the cycle(revolution) of destructive thoughts and behaviors some times requires a evolution to a different way of observing, processing and executing thoughts and actions. It may require physical relocation, a change in diet, a change in social circles, a change in your preferred entertainment,  etc.

In what way and how do we evolve. We can get inspiration from successful people’s biographies. I would stay away from entertainment based celebrities as their perceived greatness or success or happiness is at times fabricated for the purposes of their field of business. Politicians similarly are masters of flattery and at times deception. So I like the stories of corporate CEOs and financial types. Especially those who have come from humble beginnings. Unlike an entertainer or politician, you have to actually produce something, study, build relationships, be diligent and mean when you must, to become a Ursula Burns, Mark Cuban, Carl Icahn, Ross Perot, etc. To evolve from operating in an impoverished to thriving in the most opulent environment takes a lot of will. Although their business achievements may not relate to matters of the heart directly they teach that learning never stops and that is how you adapt.

Adaptation and evolution are synonyms. Currently regarding matters of the hart we are all attempting to live the Shakespearian experience of Romeo and Juliet – minus the suicide – in the digital age. This creates a lot of confusion, disappointment, and dysfunction as we have not fully adapted, adjusted and given Romeo and Juliet cell phones, social media, Netflix, cable, podcasts and dreaded dating apps. Like the CEOs they would adapt, using technology not just as consumers but as designers of their lives. Hopefully they would be older as I think they were in their early teens in the book. They would have equal contribution to a relationship and communicate to determine their compatibility and sustainability before things got too heavy.

So in conclusion we have to take stock of our dating philosophy, and love language to determine how it fits to the modern conditions. Not to loose ourselves or deviate from our ethos and morals but to observe the external environmental changes and determine how we can maintain those qualities while thriving in the present time.

Not a doctor or a magician

In the old Star Trek movies methinks from the 1970s, there was a doctor on the ship. When he was overwhelmed he would bark at the captain “I’m a doctor not a magician!” I think he meant that he was trained in medicine, not in giving people a superficial or illusion of a solution. Medicine requires a thorough assessment of a variety of variables. Many afflictions exhibit the symptoms of others and misdiagnosis could have no effect or even worsen the patients condition. A magician is also a highly trained profession but they are trying too fool your senses into believing something. That’s not a cure, its not even a ban aid. So a magician in effect uses a placebo placebo  for every case.

Anyhow, we are not magiacians or doctors. Maybe you are actually, but imagine you are not then, humor me. So now we all aren’t doctors or magicians yay.

You can’t fix anyone, unless they want to be and since you are not a trained psychologist, your fixing may not be sustainable. I like that word sustainable, very holistic. Therefore you are wasting your resources(time) if you believe you can change an adult who has been enjoying being who they are. Additionally your attempt to point out their flaws can be received by their ego as an attack. Feeling attacked they may retaliate and/or dig deeper into the behavior you tried to help them correct. Unless they themselves see the error and sincerely want to change your efforts are futile(another star trek reference.)

This is not giving up on the person, and don’t let them guilt trip you into feeling badly. They must be allowed to come to the realization themselves, as they rebuffed your attempt to point it out or you may not have the know how. Although it is difficult, you have to save yourself or they might take you down with them. People love to see a train wreck and the proof is in the prevalence of trashy reality shows, celebrity news and social media. If they are a wreck, your stability, freedom, discipline even health may be offensive to them and they would enjoy seeing you brought low.

A better title would be “Don’t be a martyr” but I feel I may have used that title elsewhere. Yeah we remember some of the high profile martyrs, Joan of Arc, Jesus, MLK, Che, etc. Their deaths changed things for millions of people. Are you going to martyr yourself for one person who does not recognize that they need to, or do they want to be saved? Your close friends and family might remember what you sacrificed for that person, but is it worth the los of you resource(time) that will never return. You may have strong feelings for them, but how long will those feeling s last under unsustainable conditions. Be a hero to yourself, be a doctor to yourself, don’t be a magician to yourself. Definitely don’t be a martyr for someone who isn’t worth it.