It's Personal...

[Doom]

Normally I do not like my cable provider Cablevision

BBC America Launches On Cablevision This Week

Did someone say "Dr. Who?"

I LOVE my cable provider Cablevision

Lucky you, I had to break down and get NETFLIX to see the latest Who.

[RobbyPants]

If that was possible for me, I'd have done it already .

Are you saying you have a massive Wisdom penalty?

[Neeeek]

So I'm in Seattle hanging with Maj and Ess. Which is pretty cool.

[Maj]

And now you know the truth about us. We are frightfully boring, have no sense of humor, and constantly say imbicilic things.

Aside from me being absolutely nervous as hell and the weather being nauseatingly hot, I had a good time. Giovanni was asleep within ten blocks of leaving.

Thank you for your generosity and willingness to meet with us.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

As part of my efforts to be positive, I am helping a young man of my acquaintance not be just like me when he's my age. If I can stop him from hooking up with emotionally damaged women out of desperation, I will consider it a net positive that I existed.

I know that I will never find a woman that can love me, and I understand consensus is that it's 100% my fault. But if I can at least be a precautionary example and prevent other people from fucking up like I did, maybe I can redeem myself somehow.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Ug, the college girls are back. It is depressing looking at beautiful young women all day, I feel like a starving kid looking in a candy store window.

[Orion]

I don't think we ever said your problems with women are 100% your fault. We said your attitude and coping mechanisms are making it worse. Look, I happened to have some really fortunate early experiences with women that set the stage for me to develop a lot of confidence and a good attitude. Since I have tendencies toward anxiety and depression I can easily imagine having become a misogynist if my life had gone differently.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I am currently putting all my free effort into finding better coping mechanisms and changing my attitude. I don't think anything is really going to change until something physically changes, i.e. I get a better job or I find a woman that loves me, and not just what I do for women I'm romantically involved with.

I am trying my best though. Even if it's to stop someone else from ending up like me.

[Maxus]

Count, that's part of it.

About the best advice I've ever come up for dealing with negative feelings and not letting them impact my relationship with other people is "Just because you feel something, doesn't mean you have to act like it."

I've seen too many people go haring off and embarrass themselves because they acted on an impulse as soon as they felt something, without considering that maybe they're being immature, or selfish, or so on. I've done it myself, too. So about the best thing I can think of for it is...keep a lid on it until you've had a chance to figure out why you feel like you do about something.

It turns out you can trick yourself. A couple months ago, I was so down it felt like an effort just to keep breathing. So I started cracking jokes in the grocery store. My voice broke the first one, the second one I managed to get through it all the way, the third one I was feeling better.

Then no one could stand me for the rest of that day because I found something to laugh at in everything I saw and I was feeling better.

You've dealt with a lot more shit in your life though. And from what I know about it, you've come through it better than I would have.

So, uh. Yeah. Keep on, dude.

[Maj]

If you can stomach his writing style, check out Paul Ekman. His work demonstrates that emotions follow facial expressions, so if you can manage to use the right muscles on your face to imitate an emotion, you will genuinely feel it.

[fbmf]

That's the real-life Lie to Me guy, no?

Game On,
fbmf

[Juton]

In my psych lab someone recreated part of that experiment. Basically if you do a task while holding a pencil in your mouth (sideways so it touches both corners of your mouth) while you do a reading task you will have a more positive (ie happier) response on average. The effect is small but statistically significant.

[Wesley Street]

College girls are irritating. Give me a stacked and fit MILF any day of the week.

You're going to be hard pressed to find any man who hasn't had lady troubles. My own introversion and anxiety kept me away from decent relationships and landed me in a brutal marriage engagement that I ended up running away from in order to keep my sanity. When I pulled myself out of the gutter I realized a few things:

1. Happiness is primarily determined by your attitude in the here-and-now, not predicated upon some promise of happiness in the future. Grass is always greener and all that shit. It's good to have goals. It's bad to have completion of those goals be the sole measure to determine contentedness. Don't let a better job or a woman be the only things that will make you happy.

2. People don't like being around people in pain. There are sympathy thresholds. Some people are more empathetic than others but it eventually runs out. People want to be around those who remind themselves of what they want to be. It wasn't until I pushed the patience of my family to the limit that I was able to pull myself up.

3. Find things to do that you enjoy on a daily basis. If you don't have the energy, take a nap in the sun and/or meditate on a happy memory. Also, keep your brain busy. Work on a puzzle, write a story or create a game campaign in your head. I once wrote a small sketch comedy scene in my head while working a boring job and my coworkers asked me why I was chuckling like a maniac. Then they started laughing too. Visualize something you would like to do for fun and think of five different ways to approach it.

4. Keep busy outside of your daily responsibilities. Get out of the house. Find a social group through Meet Up.com or a local church or volunteer organization - some place where you can mingle with people and act like a human without the pressure or professionalism or romance. I actually started a community clean-up group and a dinner-night-out group on my own in order to meet people.

5. If you want to date, use match.com or another romance site. Go out as much as you can and practice, practice, practice being a decent human being. Decency, common-courtesy and being pleasant are habits that take time to build. Most of the time nothing happens with dates but at least you get out of the house and break your routine. I didn't hit it off with any supermodels or porn stars but I had a good time with nice women.

6. Do easy exercise like 30 minutes on an elliptical machine or a beginner's yoga session on a regular basis. Monitor your mind-body connection.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

And I already do all of those things, Wesley. Thank you for reminding me.

Seriously, guys. I got this.

[Orion]

Ok. I mean, when you say shit about women that's not true, we'll still call you out on it. I can tell you're doing a lot better lately, I can see the effort you're making, but I'm pretty sure calling you on your remaining bullshit is better than letting it slide, no?

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Oh sure, I wouldn't be here if I didn't expect that. If I didn't have that sort of thing in my life, I'd end up like Elvis.

[Blasted]

Oh sure, I wouldn't be here if I didn't expect that. If I didn't have that sort of thing in my life, I'd end up like Elvis.

If you ever start eating like Elvis , I'll be sure to harp on that as well.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Bah, didn't get the job. I would be taking this in stride better, but I lost out because I didn't bother to click on a link that would have qualified me for the job. I feel like an idiot. I guess there will be more opportunities, but who knows how long that will be?

I hate losing out because I'm a retard.

[Maj]

That's the real-life Lie to Me guy, no?

Game On,
fbmf

Yep (I love that show and was bummed it got cancelled). I would love the information he has in his brain, but getting it is difficult. I worked my way through Emotions Revealed, but the man bloviates all over the place. He'll seriously go on for pages about some theory and at the end take another two paragraphs to basically say that he thinks the idea is crap and won't be using it.

There's also quiz in the back of the book to test out a person's ability to recognize others' facial expressions, but anyone taking it pre-read will automatically fail because they haven't learned which category - anger, contempt, disgust, sadness, happiness, fear, and surprise - a facial expression that says, "Yeah right" belongs in. But if you caption the images with what you think the person is saying, the images are easier to understand, and then you learn from reading the book which of Ekman's emotional components make up the expression.

The whole idea that emotions follow facial expressions was one of the more interesting parts of the book for me. He talked about how he and his colleague were practicing angry facial expressions and they started getting pissed off and that sort of kick-started the research into that area. It's made me wonder whether whose people who frequently have somewhat negative outlooks on life just have a "natural" face that sets into a position that induces a more negative emotional state - mostly because all the people I know like that look grumpy all the time. But emotions don't always follow facial expressions - it's often the other way around, so I guess there's no knowing.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Here's psotivie thinking for you:

When i splti with my gf, I delletted everything I had that had her ingo on it. Which was wise on my part, I feel the urge to call her on her fucking BULLSHIT but was smart enough to prevent that from happening befor e I got drunk. So I'm not completly retardedd

[Kaelik]

Count I really hope you feel embarrassment about these posts, no one should post when too drunk to check to see if they typed the letters in the right order.

[K]

That's the real-life Lie to Me guy, no?

Game On,
fbmf

Yep (I love that show and was bummed it got cancelled). I would love the information he has in his brain, but getting it is difficult. I worked my way through Emotions Revealed, but the man bloviates all over the place. He'll seriously go on for pages about some theory and at the end take another two paragraphs to basically say that he thinks the idea is crap and won't be using it.

I liked that show, but I was amused when I read the various bits of research that say that expressions are completely dependent on culture, meaning the only way you could "read" someone is if you knew exactly what culture and subculture a person was from and they were an ideal member of a single culture and not a product of multiple cultures.

This means that the entire premise of Lie to Me is basically lies and fairy tales.

[Maj]

According to Ekman, he started off believing exactly that, but the more he actually traveled and studied emotions, the more evidence he found to the contrary. His research found that those emotional states that I mentioned in my post are universal regardless of culture. Show them to anyone anywhere in the world and they'll give you roughly the same meaning for them.

[K]

According to Ekman, he started off believing exactly that, but the more he actually traveled and studied emotions, the more evidence he found to the contrary. His research found that those emotional states that I mentioned in my post are universal regardless of culture. Show them to anyone anywhere in the world and they'll give you roughly the same meaning for them.

It's hard to ascribe to Ekman's theories when so many cultures use different facial cues to mask emotion. For example, I read quite a few bits of research about how the Japanese use smiles to conceal real emotion and how Japanese people actually use tone of voice and looking at someone's eyes instead of their mouth to determine someone's real feelings because as a culture they are practiced at faking expressions, and people often misinterpreted things like surprise with fear. It kind of makes me think he's trying to sell books and not advance research.

That being said, your emotions mirroring your expressions is pretty well established.

Anyway, it's a pretty interesting and new body of research, either way. It should be interesting to see how it shakes out.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Count I really hope you feel embarrassment about these posts, no one should post when too drunk to check to see if they typed the letters in the right order.

Yeah, probably not a good idea. I feel a bit better now, I find that chugging as much liquor as I can stand in one go leads to either an intense but short-lived buzz, or alcohol poisoning. (Ask me about the time I chugged a liter of Jager one time. I get sick smelling the stuff now.)

I'll bounce back from this, I always do. I'm just pissed at myself for making such a stupid mistake on a job that would be perfect for me, and I don't know how long it's going to take to find another chance like that. And it makes me feel bad because my dad always lectured me about how I was a "space cadet", and that I was going to be worthless as an adult if I couldn't pay more attention, and no matter how hard I try I just can't get my brain to cooperate.