keep away from it

There is an old guy at work that I am terrible to.  I learn from him because he is the best at what he does but he is a cantankerous son-of-a-bitch.  Whenever I can get under his skin, I do.  “One of these days I’ll learn my lesson,” should perhaps go through my head but fortunately someone learned it for me.

I go through life, of course, observing and passing judgment.  One of the best examples I can use of this is an uncle of mine.  He has been, my whole life, been held up as the ideal human being.  I have made it my business to emulate as best I can what he does correctly and eschew what he does poorly.  I think he’s a rotten jerk and I haven’t made mistakes like his.  I have made new and worse blunders. 

I learned a horrible lesson through observation this week:  do not put a hex on folks.  The salesman had sold this African lady a car that turned out later to be a jalopy.  Through the whole awful sales process that took many weeks of looking at different cars and through this whole time she always showed up in stuff, western attire.  After buying the car she decided she didn’t like it and appeared one day – in the snow – in native attire and put a root on the salesman.  It was a comical sight to behold and I had a hard time not laughing. 

Now, this salesman is a big guy.  I don’t mean he’s tall, I mean he’s fat.  He isn’t the Jabba the Hutt of salespeople but he blew past portly and into corpulent long ago.  Apparently, he’s rubber and this woman was glue.  The snowstorm unfortunately killed some of her family and left the rest in the hospital.  It came back at her.  Voodoo is do-do and crack is whack; keep away from it. 

We found this out while he was combing the obituaries for people he knows.  He does this every day and then comments on the funeral if he is going or has gone to it.  Occasionally he’ll discuss his own funeral and what he’d like to be like.  I like to pipe in about what I’d like at my funeral and which songs I’d like sung.  I told them, “So long and thanks for all the fish,” is what I’d like sung at my funeral but really, that’s only to ensure that Liberty van Zee and other celebrities arrive.  I can picture in my head Liberty belting out the song OR going through my stuff while everyone else is at the funeral. 

I find it morbid to fantasize about your funeral and I said so – dangerous considering that people who get in his way get dead – and he said, “Well, what do you fantasize about?”  He can be a foul human being and he was trying to imply something tawdry.  My dreams are far lamer than people might expect and my daydreams are pathetic.  I dream at night of Gretchen rescuing me from my self and bringing me home and I dream about being in my classroom again.  The dreams are ridiculous: Gretchen with a team of ninja math teachers, Gretchen with a team of music teachers killing people in the manner of Kill Bill, or Gretchen believing she needs to convince me to come back by bringing my seven children to get me fired from my job.  Any of these will work for me Gretchen but over-night a contract; it will do the same thing.  I daydream about lessons I could teach, turning events during the day into teachable moments, and exactly what kind of detention I would give my more sophomoric coworkers. 

I know the teachable moment of the week has to be: no voodoo in the classroom; leave your Santeria at home; and, the only roots I want to see are potatoes and carrots.  That stuff is the kind of thing that goes around comes right back around.  I would avoid it at all costs.  

Comments

[iidlyyckma]

Why do you think we judge so much?

[Spritopias]

I don't know why we judge so much, but anyone who professes not to is a liar and if anyone believes them it is only themselves.

[golfwidow]

I think we judge because our instincts tell us to do so: we must decide whether this other human is suitable to mate with, to hunt with, or whether or not we can protect ourselves against him or her.

Or we're just rat bastards. It doesn't matter too much to me.

[Trev]

Is the question, "why do we judge?", "why do we judge without enough information to pass a fair judgment?", OR "Why do we CHOOSE to judge without enough information to pass a fair judgement?"

Answering these questions from first to last, we evolve from limbic to neocortex thinking, or some might say, from raw truth to calculated deception.

1. We judge in general to gauge threats - a natural and involuntary survival response. We can't help but to do so. It's absolutely involuntary, hardwired, and absolute. (as are all things controlled by the limbic system.) We make hundreds of thousands of these subconscious evaluations every day - some only take fractions of a second to make.

2. We judge without enough information, because our brains have to fill in gaps between pieces of information that complete a scenario when information is left out in order to create a whole picture, and then move on to the next thing - if we stopped to assertively observe every thing going on around us with our conscious mind, we'd crash our hard drives - your subconcious takes in all the details and shoots the relevant info up to the surface IF it feels inclined to do so. This is kind of a cross between limbic and neocortex driven behavior. The need to filter out unnecessary details is essential to our sanity. The guess-work involved in building logical bridges between gaps in a scenario with only the information provided, (Which is often not enough to support your conclusion if you examine it objectively) is performed by the neocortex, and because it is, it's subject to bias, and emotion - which skews the fuck out of everything.

The answer to the third question is that we instinctively loathe inconsistency because inconsistancy equals unpredictability, and that, in turn, equals possible danger. So we may choose to judge in contrast to the implications of new information, to perpetuate the consistency of previously held opinions because changing your psychology is taking a risk, and taking risks equals exposing yourself to danger, either emotionally, physically or both.