Cold differentiation, fusion and stuff.

[Cobra]

Kett,

Cobra, I would be bored out of my mind, you're right. Well, I don't know, 15 minutes would probably be ok. Maybe not every night though. I do try to show an intelligent interest to the best of my ability ... ask questions ... because I want to understand that part of him ... but a lot of it is still over my head. We do discuss work, and sometimes he just needs to vent about the politics ... sometimes at length ... and that's ok. It's ok if he just needs to use me as a sounding board sometimes. But usually we discuss subjects of truly *mutual* interest. Because we're both interested in a lot of things, this usually isn't too difficult.

If you have a lot of mutual interest discussions, then you’re one up on me and lucky. Let me understand though, are you saying that you see what I meant when I said that listening to my W’s talks about her work can be boring? If so, what changed from your earlier post in which you said:

Seems like the point of meetings someone's needs/wants is to meet *their* needs/wants .... if you are primarily interested in giving to them your choice of what you think they should want or what it feels most fulfilling to you to give .... that's still all about you, and in a selfish way.

In all fairness you did also mention:

Unless of course it's totally one-sided and she only wants to talk and not listen to/discuss what interests *you* (as I believe you may have implied above). In that case, the power-struggley part makes a lot more sense and the resentment is understandable.

Was it the example I gave of you listening to your H talk about software engineering that helped you to understand my sitch in listening to my wife?

[Crazy Eddie]

Ok, see, Cac, this is where you failed to bore me .... why on *earth* would only passwords beginning with "a" work? Layman's terms, please (wink).

If 'a' is the first character, nothing in the password gets changed and the password checks out. That ranks up there with one of the weirder problems I've heard about. I'd love to know what was causing that little beauty.

I'd also love to know why the geniuses at Sun went two whole versions with a debugger API that lets you get the bytecodes to individual methods but not the constant pool that actually has the items you're probably looking for (like the names of everything the method refers to) that the method bytecodes are simply pointing to, or maybe, just maybe, let you see the whole classfile? You still can't get the whole classfile through JDI! Or really, any reliable means at all other than through a native agent (a DLL!) that registers a ClassFileLoadHook and then caches everything that comes to it. What were those guys smoking?

But the JDI does let you give it a whole new classfile. Without letting you see the old one. But the structure still has to match up with the old one that you can't use as a template because you can't see it. Gee, thanks.

Oh well, if it was all straightforward, there'd be a lot more people qualified to do it and I'd have to find some other way to make good money. A few more wrinkles in the puzzle is a good way to keep me busy.

I don't want to know the nitty-gritty specifics of how you execute your job on a daily basis. I couldn't possibly understand it because I haven't your training and decade of experience. And I'm not really technically oriented. Trying to talk to me in specifics is indeed pointless. What I'm looking to find out how *you* are. How are you doing? I have to wait for you to break out with a cold sore to know that you're feeling stressed about something. You can tell me that you're concerned about a major upgrade or installation of new equipment without going into technicaly specifics and I can listen to your concerns and support you.

Hmmm. That seems like a short conversation when you can't get into what you're laughing at or frustrated about. But sometimes inspiration does strike and I can make something about the day into a good story. Sometimes I can't. But one should regularly give the ol' right brain a good workout anyway and keep it humming, since one can't dance in any form without it.

I will at times poke fun at certain ideas, but if someone comes to me in all seriousness, I will listen to what they say and given my counterpoint in a logical manner. I DON'T think people who believe in UFOs are stupid. I DO think that many of the people who do believe have been duped by others who present their case in a sophisticated way. On its surface, there is no reason to think that those doing the duping are liars. But unfortunately many of them are.

It's a big universe. There's bound to be some funny-looking people out there somewhere. And maybe a couple of them come out here to the boonies and look around just for the hell of it. Probably members of a species whose females are wired to find alpha-geeks utterly irresistible. A species whose females are turned on hearing someone like cac4 go into technical detail even if they can't follow it, much the way that human females like to watch human males perform physical feats they can't match. A species in which chromosphere's brain would cause women to throw themselves at him regularly and he'd have a good shot at having dozens of illegitimate children out there somewhere building spaceships, getting laid like rock stars, and breeding like rabbits. Unfortunately, here on Earth Newton was a virgin when he died, a disturbing fraction of our best minds today don't do much better, and we're stuck with groundcars a full hundred years after the Wright Brothers' achievement and we're burning the same fuel that John D. Rockefeller got rich off of.

[Burgbud]

(Martelo) I know that Deida preaches the strength in standing up against the storm and the tests of women but where is the line between enduring a test and accepting abuse?

I think we'd agree that whatever else happens, there's no downside to not allowing the woman's "test" to negatively affect our own mindframe. So whether it's a test or abuse, standing up against the storm is preferable to bowing to it. Yes?

Man, you've hit on something that started out manageable in my head but now seems like a really big issue.

So let's assume that you've reached the Deida ideal and you're the perfect rock in the storm. At that point, I kind of believe that the issue of test vs. abuse is moot. At that point, her behavior is just her behavior...does that make sense or does it seem void of content? Right here is the part where I get excited about the idea of "an integrated man doesn't follow the rules, he makes the rules." Because if I'm following the rules, then I feel like I have to measure her bad behavior against some absolute scale: was her behavior abuse? If so, I have permission to fight it or rail against it or point it out or whatever I want to do. In fact, many would say that I have an obligation to myself to do *something* pointed about it. If, on the other hand, it's -not- abuse, then I have to figure out if I didn't like it because of some issue internal to me or if she was just having a bad day or whatever. The rules seem to tell me that bad behavior which doesn't rise to the level of abuse is something I need to tolerate or explore or deal with in some manner different from the manner with which I'd deal with abuse.

If I'm the rock, though, and bad behavior is just bad behavior, and I'm making the rules instead of following them, I simply get to decide what to do about that bad behavior. If I choose to tolerate it then I'll tolerate it. If I choose to confront her about it then I will. If I choose to leave her, so be it. I get to decide my actions based on my view of the world. I give her full freedom to decide her actions based on whatever I do. All well and fine.

Where the whole thing gets to be a really big issue is, what if I'm not the Deida ideal rock? How, then, do I determine what's legitimate abuse that I must not tolerate and what's just bad behavior that probably just needs to be addressed? If I'm allowing my self-esteem to be battered by her bad behavior and find myself becoming less and less of a person, when is it my obligation to protect myself by getting away?

[Kettricken]

If I'm allowing my self-esteem to be battered by her bad behavior and find myself becoming less and less of a person, when is it my obligation to protect myself by getting away?

IMHO, that's when.

(theoretical "you" engaged)

Or when, despite your good intentions, you find yourself in a pattern of being unable to resist reacting back to her in abusive and/or hurtful ways unbecoming your desired self (theory v. practice).

I think it would be wonderful if you could *truly* "rise above" (almost) any behavior ... but I think a lot of people delude themselves that they are, because they want to or think they should, but aren't really successful, to their own serious detriment.

And *especially* the virtues of tolerance must be weighed based on whether there are children involved who are getting their programming written about how adults should interact. (In fact, I wonder if that would be true even if you were the perfect impervious Deida man. Would your good example be enough to outweigh her unopposed toxic one? something to consider)

Then there's the whole question of if you are really doing your partner any favors by not firmly resisting their crap. My view is, not. But ultimately that's their concern.....

But I think what you are saying (in part) is, why should I conform to anyone else's predigested definitions of "abuse"? If I can take it and it *truly* doesn't diminish me, who is to say what I "should" tolerate? I can see the merit. But the above caveats make that stance a bit of a minefield, perhaps.

[Burgbud]

Hey Cac (that looks weird capitalized...maybe I'll just call you Chuck). Much to your future chagrin I've been thinking about you and David Deida; specifically something I noticed in going thru TWofSM here lately that didn't jump out at me before. I know Deida is about as appealing to you as a no-brand router with a shoddy, undocumented driver so I'll try to make it short.

Deida says, "The amazing thing is that 90% of a woman's emotional problems stem from feeling unloved. So don't stand back and analyze her, like a doctor diagnosing a patient, or like a therapist questioning a client. Give her your love -- the same love that is motivating your questioning -- immediately and unmistakably. Walk over to her, look deeply into her eyes, hold her and stroke her, tell her how much you love her, smile, hum her favorite song and dance with her, and chances are, her emotional problem will evaporate. She may still have some situation to deal with, and you may be able to help her with that, but the emotional aspect will be converted to love."

Chuck, I think you're in an ideal place to do a little experiment and test Deida's notion about women's emotional problems being 90% from feeling unloved. This might well appeal to the engineer in you, as well. Women are a b!tch because there's no input-output correlation, right? You can't do anything to make them happy, they don't know themselves what makes them happy, you solve their problem or help them solve their own problem and they're still not happy. Whatever you did that made them happy last week is just pissing them off this week. It's an engineer's nightmare.

I'm imagining myself as a software engineer (which actually takes zero imagination...thank GAWD for network engineers, because *somebody* has to do that crap...) and I'm dealing with a project that I can't seem to get to work no matter what I try. Code that worked yesterday is flipping out today. Stuff I thought was broken all of a sudden magically works, then breaks again. I'm dealing with interfaces that seem very clearly documented but don't do at all what they're very clearly supposed to do. (Pretend for the moment that I'm making that up for the sake of analogy, and that it's not my every day reality.)

In that situation, I'd love nothing more than for my boss to come over, observe my predicament, then say, "90% of the time these problems will be fixed if you call the foo() method and send it the BlackVoodooMagic parameter. That pretty much always clears things up, and if it doesn't fix everything, at least what's left will then be manageable." (Engineers aren't like scientists...we don't have to understand everything. We just need everything to work.)

So here's my thought for you: take Deida at his word. When you and the Mrs. get to going around about something and she's getting upset or irritated (for purposes of this experiment we'll assume "upset" and "irritated" are "emotional problems" in the Deida sense and we'll expect his 90% theory to hold under those conditions) and you can't figure out what the hell her problem is, just assume that she's not feeling loved and do whatever you can to make her feel your love. If she wants to talk about your day and you don't have much to say and she seems disappointed or a bit put out, assume she's not feeling loved and maybe say something like, "We could talk about my day or we could just kiss for five minutes." Or go for a walk around the block while holding hands. Or maybe tell her, "I don't want to talk about my day but I'll help you with the dishes," if helping with the dishes would make her feel loved. If you always do the dishes anyway, then that probably wouldn't count. Btw, if doing the dishes *does* count and you choose that instead of making out for five minutes then you're a nut. But hey, you're a network engineer and I'm trying not to judge.

If it works, that's an engineer's wet dream. Maybe literally. Problem frickin' SOLVED.

If it doesn't work, you've proven Deida wrong. Win/win for you, near as I can tell.

[Kettricken]

Cobra, I understand you to be saying that your wife shows no particular interest/willingness toward discussing subjects that interest *you*. If so, sincere commiserations.

If such were my situation, I would tend to run out of patience/interest for listening to S. talk about work *much* faster. Not admirable, but human.

I see this as being a bit different from the "wants/needs" discussion. I perceive you to be saying that you have no particular drive toward accomodating her desire to talk about her day. You do it, but you're not thrilled; it's not your preferred way to exchange conversational intimacies with her, especially given the lack of equal time for your interests. Fair enough, as far as communication dynamics go. I see this as being a somewhat different animal from "meeting needs", though.

To me, meeting someone's needs has little to do with expecting to enjoy it simply on the merits. I don't particularly *enjoy* listening to the periodically-recurring endless loop rants about outsourcing, management idiocies, or questionable hiring practices. But it helps him to get it out of his head. I don't enjoy it per se, but I enjoy being able to give him that listening ear by free choice. "It's just a little service we provide."

OTOH, I *do* (to a relative degree) enjoy understanding what he's working on and what's going on in general. Some days you get the cupcake, some days the broccolini. Some days I enjoy the conversation, some days I'm meeting a need. Savvy?

[Burgbud]

(Kett) But I think what you are saying (in part) is, why should I conform to anyone else's predigested definitions of "abuse"? If I can take it and it *truly* doesn't diminish me, who is to say what I "should" tolerate? I can see the merit. But the above caveats make that stance a bit of a minefield, perhaps.

Right, but I'm not trying to say, "hey, if it isn't abuse *to me*, then I'll keep taking it." I'm trying to say that if you're at the point of not needing to know if bad behavior rises to somebody's definition of "abuse," then you can just make your decision on how to handle the situation based on what you want to do. You can just say, "I don't like what you're doing and I don't like it to the point where I'm not going to be around it any more." Whether not being around it means for the next five minutes or next hour or next day or the rest of your life is also totally up to you.

You don't have to call it abuse or tell the other person they're an abuser. You just deal with matters at face value. If you believe the other person's abusive behavior stems from abusive behavior they received from their parent's, maybe you cut them some slack. Maybe you suggest counseling or whatever else, as long as you understand that you *can't change that person*, and that they have to decide to change themselves. Whatever you decide, as long as you're being authentic, it's okay. (An example of not being authentic is if a guy's wife throws some bad behavior at him and he decides that he's not going to be around that bad behavior any more for the rest of his life because he really wanted to run off with his secretary anyway.)

The point I was trying to make in all that is that what I originally said was less, "Since that isn't abuse to me, I'll stay here and take it," and more, "It doesn't matter to me whether that behavior is 'abusive' or not; I don't like it and I'm not going to be around it."

[Kettricken]

As opposed to (say) combing the web and trying to find "professionals" who can confirm that this is indeed abuse you're receiving so you can label it with a "Dr. Brilliant says ....." instead of just saying, "Nope, isn't working for me."

Gotcha.

[haphazard]

Crazy Eddie:

LOL! You know I can follow you cause that's all I get to hear about at work and some of it is funny if you've got an inkling of an idea what DLL, or an API or a debugger or a hook is.

A species whose females are turned on hearing someone like cac4 go into technical detail even if they can't follow it, much the way that human females like to watch human males perform physical feats they can't match. A species in which chromosphere's brain would cause women to throw themselves at him regularly and he'd have a good shot at having dozens of illegitimate children out there somewhere building spaceships, getting laid like rock stars, and breeding like rabbits. Unfortunately, here on Earth Newton was a virgin when he died, a disturbing fraction of our best minds today don't do much better, and we're stuck with groundcars a full hundred years after the Wright Brothers' achievement and we're burning the same fuel that John D. Rockefeller got rich off of.

Hey! That's not the women's fault - the guys are the ones that like to pick girls with a lower IQ than themselves. They hate being outsmarted by girls. When I was at uni I was engaged in a debate with a guy in the bar, when I made a point he didn't have an answer to he said "I hate brainy girls" WTF?!? What did he expect to meet at uni for chrissakes. I for one am quite turned on by brainy guys and I am more especially turned on by brainy guys that CAN communicate their deeply esoteric corner of the technical universe with the rest of us.

Plus why do geeks never work out or wear decent clothes? It would help.

Sometimes I feel like software engineers and other deeply technical guys are engaged in a form of mental MB. They actually don't want to share the mental joys of what they are doing with anyone else. It's done for their own private excitement. You don't get that with philosophers, artists, musicians, poets, writers etc.

You're right, geeks do need to use the right brain more. It's more fun if you do.

In regards to the "how was your day?" conversation. That is generally code for "Ok, I'm being polite by asking about your day but what I really need to do is vent about mine". The way good male conversational style generally goes, is different to good female style. Girls are very empathetic and make noises like "oh I know", "uh-huh", "yeah, I hate when that happens".
But sometimes that can get to be a bit of a pity party. I like guys, because most guys never let you wallow in self-pity and they generally do that by using humour.

So Chrome and others, next time your W says "how was your day?" you say "not too bad, how was yours?" and then when she starts venting about this and that, instead of trying to fix just listen and then steer the conversation gently round to a more humourous way of looking at it. The humour will relieve the tension and she will feel listened too and cheered up. Trying to look for the funny side ought to keep you engaged and less bored too


Wierdly though in the hap household it seems like it's generally the other way around. H is the one who likes to engage in a pity party and I'm the one trying to see the funny side. He hates it though, he thinks I'm being too frivolous about a serious situation

Fran

[haphazard]

Excellent post Burg! Hey how come there's so many geeks on this board?