Category Archives: The Ones Where I Try To Give Advice

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Give a Friendly Reminder to the Machine

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Yesterday, I woke up with a parking ticket on my car. Mondays with parking tickets are generally advised against. It’s a sure fire way to allow yourself be tempted into complaining for the rest of the day. But I made a decision. In keeping with my consciousness against complaining I decided that I would take five minutes to complain to my mother, and then I would let it go. And no one else would know about it for the rest of the day. That was the plan.

Then, something really cool happened. It turned out that the fine on the ticket was for $0, meaning I only had to pay $0! Apparently, the ticket was just a “friendly reminder.” Now, I don’t know about where you are from. But where I am from, parking tickets aren’t generally written as “friendly reminders.” And it just kind of made me feel good about the whole humanity thing.

I started thinking. If everyone gave everyone else friendly reminders, we could change the world. So often, we think the only vehicle for change is direct confrontation or raging against the system. But most of the time, raging against the system doesn’t really get anywhere. Surely, there are times when radical action needs to be taken, but if we lovingly criticized each other more, the need for radical action would become less and less.

There’s something about friendly reminders – they are based in narrative. When the parking cop left a friendly reminder on my car she was probably thinking, “Oh I remember once when I couldn’t find a place to park and I was just a couple of hours late in moving my car.” She was identifying with my story.

I find this to be terribly true in my own life. It is so difficult to give anything other than a friendly reminder to people whom I know and interact with on a daily basis. And I think it’s fine. It allows us to trust each other, to actually contemplate what we are saying to each other. It’s easy to rage against a faceless nameless story-less machine. But there is no such thing.

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People Problems

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I knew someone once who started almost every piece of advice with, “I was feeling that same way about a month or two ago.” Whether that statement was true or not, it always got me steamed up. I don’t exactly know why. I just know that every time I heard that phrase I wanted to pick the world up and drop it on someone’s head a la Lil Wayne.

I’m in this Psychology of Personality class this quarter, which is really swell. And I enjoy it a lot. But I have a major beef with all of the personality theorists that we’ve studied so far. They all think that development is linear – that as we come across new conflicts and resolve them, we become a more full and better person. And I just think that’s silly.

Right now, we are learning about Erik Erikson. He believed that life development consisted of eight epigenetic stages. That’s just a fancy way of saying that each stage grows on top of the other and that if we get messed up in one stage, then it ruins the other stages for us. Each of these stages is marked by a conflict, and if we navigate the conflict correctly, we learn a new “ego skill” or virtue. The conflict in the first stage, for instance, is trust vs. mistrust. And if we navigate it correctly, we acquire hope. That first stage happens before we are a year old.

I don’t even know how to understand this.

These conflicts are never resolved. Aren’t we constantly dealing with whether or not to trust the world? Or take Stage 3’s conflict, initiative v. shame and doubt. This supposedly happens before you are 6. But pretty much every college student I know routinely bounces back and forth between hard-working and lazy, self-loathing bum (myself included).

I don’t think there are “teenage” problems or “adult” problems or “kid” problems in this world. I just think there are people problems.

What are your people problems?

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Refresh Yourself

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I spent my weekend hanging out with high school seniors. Hopefully, there will be pictures forthcoming. I think there’s something really refreshing about hanging out with the life stage immediately below you. The refreshing part about it is that life stages are really fluid and so their problems are your problems except different enough that you have solutions for their problems. That’s all a bit confusing. Let me explain.

I have a brother. His name is Ty. He’s wonderful. He’s my best friend. Our relationship is pretty simple. When we were little, we fought. When I got to high school, we started to respect each other, but didn’t feel like we could talk to each other. Then when he got to high school we became equals, peers. And that’s how it is now. And we talk, quite a bit. And that’s very nice.

When we talk now, his problems are my problems and vice versa. Both of us are trying to figure out how to juggle school, extracurriculars, and a social life. Both of us are trying to figure out what our next life stage is going to look like. Both of us are trying to figure out how to be more self-confident and how to navigate relationships.

But we deal with these problems in very different ways. Part of this is because we are different people. But another part of it is because we are at different points in our lives. Right now, I have a tendency to complicate things. And so when I hang out with my brother and his friends, they make me simplify everything. And right now, Ty and his friends have  a tendency to simplify things. And so I try to help them gain more perspective on a problem. (I don’t know if that’s helpful or true, but I pretend like it is.)

And that’s all very refreshing. It’s refreshing to know that the game always kind of stays the same, and it’s just your own convoluted brain that changes. It’s refreshing to know that there are people who care about you no matter what happens.