So here we are with the third post from my old ugly Geocities page. This one was posted on July 1, 2001. Fair warning - Jason gets a little snarky in paragraph 2.

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When we believe something very strongly, it’s tempting to try to get others to share that belief. We all do it, whether through argument or example, using reason or passion or guilt. The temptation can be inspired by many things, most of them benevolent, or at least neutral. Sometimes it’s a desire to be joined by others, to have company in our ideas. Other times it’s because we want others to get the same benefits from our belief that we’ve found, like a parent convincing their children to avoid drugs or to work hard at school. Maybe we really feel that if our ideas are ignored, something terrible will happen. You can see elements of this in some people with strong spiritual belief. It manifests itself as the desire to “save” others (what they’re saving others from depends on the brand of spirit they subscribe to). The point is, we’re always tempted to use the strength of our belief to sway others.

And we shouldn’t, ever, do it. To persuade someone through rhetorical skill or strength of passion doesn’t give you an ally, it gives you a follower. A follower is someone who can parrot ideas back to you, but can’t explain them without using your words. Their belief is based in large part on their belief in the person who convinced them. They’re also exquisitely boring people.

This doesn’t mean you should avoid discussing your beliefs. After all, your ideas are as valid as anyone else’s. What it does mean, though, is that your sole goal in the discussion should be to make your position clear. Your objective must be to have your idea understood, not adopted. This means fewer people will agree with you, and those who do agree will rarely accept your ideas in their entirety. Instead, they’ll modify, knock out a wall here and add a wing there. But in the end, if your idea is a good one, you’ll have something better than a dozen followers. You’ll have a partner. Someone you’ve inspired to do their own thinking on the subject, whether they agree with you or not. And someone who, believe it or not, might be able to show you and idea or two you haven’t thought of. Maybe it really does look better with that addition on the back…

1 July 2001

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Commence speaking from the future

I'm not really sure why it was so important to my 26 year old self to post this thing, but...well, for some reason it was. It's not that I disagree with most of the sentiment (though today I'd make more of a point of saying that religion is not the only arena in which this applies) - in fact, I still agree with it very strongly. It just pegs the, "Well, duh" meter strongly enough that I doubt I'd take the time to sit down and write it, these days.

Post #2 from the wayback machine. This one was written June 30, 2001.

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The Bite Me school of thought has its roots in my youth. Anyone with doubts about this can contact my parents. They will be happy to confirm that fact, I’m sure.

Today’s incarnation has evolved from a general attitude into a litmus test of sorts, a test of one’s beliefs. Before delving into the nuts and bolts of the test, a few words about what goes into our beliefs.

What is it that makes some beliefs something we’re willing to argue and fight for? There are two components at work here—how strongly we believe we’re correct and how important the belief is to us. The strength of the belief can vary widely, from the notion the feeling that something isn’t quite right to the ironclad conviction some people have that the death penalty is absolutely immoral, or absolutely necessary. Likewise, the importance of the belief ranges between extremes.

It is important to note that strength and importance do not necessarily correspond to one another. For instance, I might believe with no doubt at all that granite countertops are superior to Formica ones. I might even find that this issue is of critical importance to my view of the world. It may be that I go around looking for people with a contrary position so I can convert them to the joys of granite. Let us say that you think my preference for granite is dead wrong, that Formica countertops are better in every way. Let us further say that despite this fact, you resist my attempts to engage you in debate about this issue. You find yourself asking, “Who cares?!” The strength of your belief is equal to mine, but the importance of the issue is not. As such, it is not a belief you’re willing to advocate in an argument.

This example serves to illustrate that there are two components that make up each of our beliefs. These ingredients measure the truth of a belief. If we were to express it in a formula, it would read:

Truth = Strength + Importance

Sometimes we find ourselves caught up in our beliefs. This can manifest itself as an argument with a close friend or an inability to shift our thinking as easily as we should. Whatever it looks like, holding tightly to a belief that isn’t true is problematic at best, tragic at worst (Damaging a relationship beyond repair over an issue, only to realize later that it wasn’t worth the cost can only be described as a tragedy).

Of course, there are some beliefs that are true enough that the potential costs are justified. The truer a belief is, the higher the price we’re willing to pay for it. And this brings us back to the heart of the Bite Me Philosophy. It will serve as a test to see how true our beliefs are, how high a cost we’re willing to pay for them.

The test consists of a series of theoretical exercises. We will picture ourselves having a heated discussion about one of our beliefs with someone we know well, and finally concluding with, “Don’t like it? Bite me!” Then, we’ll consider the consequences of that act, and determine if the belief is worth those consequences.

Of course, the repercussions depend on who we say that to, don’t they? That's why the subsequent steps of the test will apply this theoretical situation to more than one person.

Start out by thinking of your baseline—that is, someone who saying, “Bite me!” to would have few repercussions. This can be someone you’re not very close to, though it doesn’t have to be. For me, my friend Jeff is the baseline. Not because we aren’t close—he’s one of my best friends—but because we have the kind of friendship where tossing off the occasional insult without any difficulty. If I say, “Bite me!” to Jeff, he flips me off and we continue about our business.

Now that you’ve established your baseline, jump to the other extreme. The top of the ladder is the person you can hardly conceive of saying these magic words to. The reason for your reluctance isn’t important. It could be your spouse because you hate the idea of how that would make him or her feel, or your boss because you’d be fired, or your mother because it would hurt her and your dad would kick your ass. The point is, this person is the BMGHP (Bite Me Grand High Poobah).

The endpoints of the Bite Me Ladder are firmly in place, but there are steps in between that need to be filled in. Go back to your baseline, and step it up one notch. This will be someone you could still say, “Bite me!” to, but there would be more serious consequences. This might be a sibling, a coworker, something along those lines. Once this person is established, continue filling people into your ladder.

The number of rungs in your ladder is up to you. It should certainly be at least five, and probably no more than eight or nine. The important thing to remember is that the steps need to be discrete. That is, there must be a noticeable distinction between the people on rungs three and four. Likewise, make sure that you’re not jumping too far between steps. Visualize the ladder if you’re having difficulty, and ask if you can get from one rung to the other without stumbling.

Once the ladder is established, you’re ready to test your beliefs. Take one of them, think about it for a few minutes. Now, using your baseline, apply that belief to the theoretical situation described above. Really picture what would happen if you told that person to bite you. What would the consequences be? If you’ve picked your baseline properly, it shouldn’t be more than a few minutes of awkwardness. Now, ask yourself the critical question: Is it worth it?

If the answer is yes, move to the next person in your ladder and do the same thing. Continue until the answer is no. When you reach that point, drop back down one rung on your mental ladder. Now you’ve established the truth of that belief. The higher you went before deciding it wasn’t worth the consequence, the truer that belief is for you.

This becomes more valuable when you have something to compare it to, so you should test several of your beliefs in this way to provide a valid context for comparing beliefs. This gives you not only a snapshot of how important that particular belief is, but a growing portrait of all your beliefs, a way to see their relative importance.

So how does this help you? The practical benefit of the test is that it allows you to determine the truth of your beliefs before facing the consequences of telling someone close to you to bite you.

Beyond this, it provides a visual way to compare your beliefs. What does this portrait say to you? Do you find that the beliefs that are higher on the ladder are really the ones you should hold dear? If not, perhaps it’s time to reevaluate them. Whatever you discover, you’ll be in a better position to make decisions about arguing for, and acting on, your beliefs.

--30 June 2001

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Present-day Jason speaks

Y'know, I still really like this concept. I didn't flesh it out as much as I should have done, and the overall tone makes me cringe a bit, but I think there's something to this exercise. Also, the "Truth = Strength + Importance" thing was actually quite a lightbulb for me at the time. That is why, on the original page, it was in bold red text against a black background - all the better to stress its importance to me through headache-inducing color choices.

Why yes, yes indeed. Many happy returns to one of my very favorite people in the world, langs_place. May you receive excellent technological toys (perhaps a new iPhone that you'll show off to me) and more mix CDs than you can possibly listen to. :)

This was the first entry to that old Geocities page I referenced in an earlier post, written in 2001.

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Think of all the people you care about, the ones you really put your faith in. Picture each of them, if you can, and hold that image in your mind for a moment. Close your eyes to get a good visual. Go ahead, take your time. We'll wait.

Got it? Good.

Now, know this. There are two kinds of people in that group: Those who have betrayed your trust, and those who will. Trust me on this one. It's easy to think of our own relationships as being somehow different, of course, but this is the one thing I can pretty much guarantee will be true for all of us.

Why is this true? Is it because the world is full of people looking to take advantage of you, people you shouldn't trust as far as you can kick them? Not at all. Most of the betrayals I speak of aren't motivated by malice. In fact, many of them aren't motivated at all.

But they do happen. They happen because of three of the most important words in language: People Are Imperfect. Repeat it to yourself, because it's a mantra worth remembering. It includes you, too, by the way. All the people who trust you can count on you betraying their trust at some point too, if you haven't already.

So, this means that trusting people isn't worth the risk. If we're guaranteed to have pain no matter what, what's the point, right?

BUZZ! Wrong answer. Thanks for playing.

In truth, trusting people is far more important when you accept that you'll be hurt at some point. This is true because it makes clear the most important fact about trust. Trusting someone is a choice that says more about who we are than it does about the recipient of that trust. More accurately, it says more about who we want to be than anything. When we accept that trusting someone is a risk, it is given meaning. Trust without risk is knowing your significant other will love you and stay with you no matter what you do. What value is there in a risk-free relationship?

Because trust is a statement about yourself, who you choose to trust can be a valuable tool to learn about yourself. If your relationships generally challenge, excite and fulfill you, the statement you're making is that you are worthy of happiness. On the other hand, if you find yourself extending trust to people who consistently treat you with disrespect and malice, perhaps you don't see yourself as deserving relationships with people who truly care about you.

None of this takes away the importance of being careful. I mentioned before that most of the betrayals of trust you'll encounter aren't malicious in nature. That doesn't mean that you won't be the victim of malice at some point, though. What's important is that you evaluate your relationships. Are you still learning from the other person? Are you teaching him or her anything? Are you both still having fun? If the answers to these questions are yes, it's worth trying to work through the rough patch in your relationship. If not, maybe it's time to think about whether you want to be in a relationship, Platonic or otherwise, that doesn't fulfill both of you.

June 2001

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Current Jason here again. Actually, there's quite a lot I still agree with in this entry, particularly the idea of trust being a statement about self at least as much as it is about another person. I could wish that I'd been a little less...forceful about the idea of betrayal here, but given the landscape of my life at the time, the tone isn't really a surprise.

Well, technically I guess I still have this really ugly Geocities page. I started the thing in June 2001 and posted...oh, maybe 20 times. Lots of indirect "my marriage is over" angst, but there was some good stuff there as well. Like many of my writing projects, I was pretty excited about it at first and then lost momentum after a while. I never bothered to take down the page, and while I haven't pointed anyone at it in years, I always liked the idea that it was sitting out there, not directly connected to my life today, but still around. A tiny island of my past, or something.

This summer, though, Geocities is shutting down, and I've been pondering what to do with those old posts. If my hard drive hadn't died an ignoble death last month, I would be inclined to just let the thing go. But after some more consideration, there's enough there that I still like that I figure I may as well port the stuff over here. The urge to edit is nearly overwhelming, but I will do my best to ignore it.

So, watch this space over the next few weeks for the illusion of productivity.

Happy birthday to River, who is officially entering the midpoint of her 30s a full six weeks before I do the same. Thanks, my friend, for your willingness to forge bravely ahead. ;)

Have fun, gang.

E: So do you want something engraved in your wedding ring?

Me: I hadn't really thought about it. Maybe? I don't know what I'd want, though.

E: You can have anything but "Plan B"

Me: (snorts with laughter)

When E and I got back from a week at the Grove, we found that my desktop computer would not power up. After some troubleshooting I concluded that, in fact, the problem was the power supply, and ordered a new one from Tiger Direct. I went with a beefier one than I need for this computer because I plan on replacing this machine in a year or so anyway (it's about 4 years old at this point) and I figured I might as well buy the power supply I'll wish I had when I build the next computer.

Yesterday, my order arrived and I set about the 15 minute job of opening the case, cleaning things up (hooray for compressed air), swapping the power supply, reconnecting everything and starting it back up. Problem solved, right?

Two hours later, the computer still wasn't working. The power simply wouldn't spin up. I double and triple checked all the connections and couldn't find any problems. Finally I started unplugging peripherals and eventually discovered that it worked fine as long as the hard drive wasn't connected. Which is all well and good, except...well, you know. The hard drive is kind of important. So the working theory at this point is that something shorted in the hard drive and the power supply is reading that when it tries to spin up, causing the machine to say "Screw this, it's dangerous in there, man!" and not powering up. Very annoying.

Now, I have a fair bit of religion when it comes to data backups. I maintain two backup images on an external drive. I am not, unfortunately, nearly as regular as I should be at running the backup, so the most recent image I have is a month old, rather than the weekly backup I always told myself I should start running.

But you know, losing a month of data is hardly the end of the world, particularly since I don't use the desktop for work stuff. There's a little writing that I will have lost, but I back most of that up to Google Docs fairly regularly anyway. Today, I am rather proud of my paranoia.

So now, for no good reason I'm running the machine off of a Live CD (TinyME, if you care) and marveling at just how quiet the thing is without a hard drive spinning all the time. Over the weekend I'll install a new shiny drive and use the recovery CD for Shadowprotect (my backup software of choice) to mount the backup image on it. I'm expecting a few more roadblocks to pop up along the way since that seems to be the way this week is destined to go, but I will succeed, dammit. Maybe.

The wedding is coming up in like 7 weeks and due to some...er...amusing developments related to the venue, we're not going to have access to the two large refrigerators that we were originally promised.

This is an interesting challenge, given that we are having a potluck reception. Oops.

This leads, inevitably, to a critical question for each of you:

Poll #1412622 Hey...got a cooler?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Do you have a cooler that Jason and Elizabeth can borrow for the wedding reception?

If Yes, how many can we steal from you?

If you answer "Yes," please add a comment so I know who the heck you are. If you answer no, you are dead to me¹.

¹: Not really.

Note: What follows is a small incident in the midst of a very awesome week. I am sure that as time goes by, I will manage to find far more impactful ways to screw things up. That said, I imagine this moment will hold a special place in my heart for some time to come.

( Cut for the disinterested or those who want to hear the story in person instead )

All told, it was no more than...I don't know, maybe 45 seconds of discomfort in the middle of an otherwise good evening. It felt like approximately 3 hours in the moment, of course. ;)

We got home later than expected last night for an excellent reason - we met up with mirandir for dinner in Champaign. Yummy BBQ and good conversation is worth an extra hour on the road any day. :)

Today, the original plan was to relax and be completely hermit-like, but after I spent a little while chatting with langs_place, artemis112 and joy_walker lured celaenos_aerie and I out with the idea of breakfast. Yes, after spending a week with both of them at the Grove, we then met up for breakfast. What can I say, it was the siren call of bacon.

That was a truly excellent time; we ended up at Toast on Damen and got to sit out on the patio. A great reminder of what I like about springtime in Chicago - breakfast food with good friends ranks way up on my list.

Other than that, today has proved to be pleasantly lazy. I just put the 4th load of laundry in and there might be some pizza in our future this evening. I'm really enjoying just relaxing and letting some of the last 8 days settle in without thinking too hard about what it all means. I'll be at work tomorrow, but for today there's a lovely breeze in the apartment, the sound of E playing Rock Band, and a very comfy bed to lounge in. Not a bad day at all.

On the way home from a week down at Diana's Grove. It was a pretty amazing week from a personal standpoint and I feel like I did some good work professionally, as well. There were some unexpected changes and other...interesting developments along the way, but in general our team stepped up to the challenges pretty well.

The group's makeup was rather different from that of previous week-long events I've attended. There was a much higher ratio of quiet, internal processors than usual, so the feel of the week was...not less intimate, really, but less obviously open than i've come to expect. It wasn't a bad thing, just different.

I also walked away from the week with a badge of honor: my first real "oh, shit!" moment in ritual. Telling the whole story will require some context, so I'll tackle that later. For the moment, I will just say that if you need a candle lit at a particularly impactful moment...do not ask Jason to take care of it. ;)

I'm hoping to get home before 11 tonight, and tomorrow there will be sleeping in, breakfast at noon and a whole lot of laundry.

Just testing a post from my phone. Nothing to see here...

aaaaaaaaangst.

So, today's to-do list includes:

• Try to figure out what's going on with some screwed up phone systems at two of our sites.
  
• Finish the quarterly update for our online procedure manual
  
• Kill Elizabeth's cat

Sigh. I just hate this. It's been time for a while - past time for a while, in all likelihood - and it still just blows. I hate that he's so sick, and that the only reasonable treatments are not particularly reasonable at all. He's 16, for crying out loud, and the combination of CRF and anemia means that we've just been putting off the inevitable for a good while. Like you do.

Thomas has been part of Elizabeth's life for...well, all of her adult life. She got him through a Siamese rescue online (so really, he was her first internet fling), and I know he's had a very good life with her. It's been hard to watch this steady decline, particularly because there's not a damn thing to be done about it other than try to make a decision that honors him as much as possible. I think Elizabeth has done a pretty darn good job of doing that. It's really hard for her, understandably, and it will continue to be hard for a while.

Me? I'm reminding myself that the cat drives me nuts. I don't like him, damn it. He pees on the floor and goes out of his way to puke on my side of the bed (I swear he does) and once faked me out while I was medicating him by pretending to swallow the medicine, then looked right at me and opened his mouth to let it drip down the front of his chin. Gross.

No, I don't like him at all.

*sniff*

Fucking cat.

...to complain, of course.

It's 4:15am. My alarm goes off at 5:15. Why, pray tell, am I whining on Livejournal instead of, say, sleeping? Two reasons, really.

1. A cat that's peed on the floor right by my side of the bed twice in the past 2 hours. This is happening with disturbing regularity and of course it's really a sign that the poor cat is very sick and there's nothing to be done to make him better (and that's really very sad and I am sad about that...but at the moment I'm not feeling sad for him, I'm just angry).

2. Upstairs neighbors who not only think that a)3am on Monday is the perfect time to play music loudly enough (and with enough bass) to wake me up but also that b)They ought not answer their door when I knock on it 5 times at 3:30 to ask them politely to turn the fucking music down. Hm. Maybe they couldn't hear me over the music.

Awesome start to the week.

Clearly it's time for me to share a link from someone else's journal.

Okay, okay, so maybe I'm not in such a creative place right now. Trust me though, this is brilliant.

This launched a while ago but I am way behind and never posted a link here. Oops.

Announcing! Only 9 days later than I should have!

The Perfect Reuben Blog!

Questions that need answering:

1. What, you ask, is the Perfect Reuben Blog? It's a joint effort from artemis112 and myself, documenting the creative process as we continue to work on our long-conceived, and ill-conceived, podcast. We're introducing the main characters, talking about the creative process (not to mention the occasional delays in said process) and generally poking fun at ourselves.

2. Why, you ask, is the blog called Perfect Reuben? This, along with many other questions, is answered there. So, y'know, go look at it.

3. Isn't this, you ask, just a way to convince yourself that you're working on the podcast when you're really just writing about working on the podcast? Yes.

4, What if, you ask, I have other pressing questions? Then this is the perfect time to head over there, because we're currently soliciting questions for the first Reader Question Wednesday. :)

I'd blame artemis112, but I actually like this one a lot, so...

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, (even if we don't speak often or ever) please post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL memory of you and me.

It can be anything you want - good or bad - BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE.

When you're finished, post this little paragraph in your LJ and see what your friends come up with.

4 days at the Grove + my brother's wedding = very, very tired Jason.

Sleep early tonight. More complex sentence structure tomorrow.