The Curse of Awareness

I pride myself on being adept at recognizing and pointing-out (in detail) flaws in perception that lead to conflict...but people invariably think that I'm calling others "stupid".

I'm not...we're ALL "stupid" in certain ways...not because of a lack of intelligence but because of our unawareness of real limits to knowledge itself.

For example, if I "expect" Lindsay to come walking through the door at any moment, yet I am unaware that earlier in the day, Lindsay was struck and killed by an ice-cream truck, my expectation is not genuinely in-line with reality.

This doesn't make me "stupid", it merely means that I'm unaware of how the circumstances have changed outside of my knowledge.

Obviously, this is an extreme example, but I think any sane person can understand what I'm getting at...(Lindsay is just an imaginary person, by the way, so don't mourn her tragic disappearance!)

Mis-cues between expectation and reality are common fare in the human experience...and are frankly a function of healthy human cognition (a function of schizoid cognition as well...the main difference being that the healthy mind sees the error it has made and reajusts to accept the new information, the other type of mind DOESN'T--the schizoid mind somehow can accept that Lindsay is both dead in the morgue and about to enter the same room SIMULTANEOUSLY--a logical impossibility).

It's no great pleasure being aware that insanity is about two steps away from ANYONE (cognition as we know it is near-miraculous for as complex an organism as a human being IS...we just take it for granted). But it does help me personally to recognize the inherent need to treat ALL persons with dignity...no matter how unable I am to see eye-to-eye with them.

I'm even counting on the reader to glean something beneficently useful from words that may or may not make sense to them.

But I accept that someone CAN, so that's what matters to me.

--mattergy

Addendum 1:00 p.m. PDT
Just so Psychology professionals don't think I'm giving skewed information, I thought it appropriate to point out that the concept I am speaking of is not usually directly associated with Schizoid psychology (which is more commonly known by the tendency for withdrawal, or narcissistic behavior).

I am actually enunciating a secondary by-product of Schizoid detachment, that is, a marked tendency to ignore the very laws of physics and common sense (as in physical objects moving through brick walls). I was in no way trying to mislead the reader...merely to give the reader an example of truly unusual cognition.

The Customer is Always Right

I'm not an easily-impressed person. But I like to think that I'm at the very least a fair-minded one.

I know that it takes people of many walks-of-life to keep the engines of civilization humming...but occasionally I do become irrationally-irate at the wrong people, and for that I'm genuinely sorry...

Every once-in-awhile that hard-to-please aspect of my personality causes people to shine where others simply reject me as a "problem".

And when people shine despite my unruliness, I am geuinely appreciative.

One of the companies that recently impressed me because of their civility in dealing with a tough customer (me) is internet-storefront/retailer BUY.COM, that showed through subtle action its commitment to making right what was out-of-place, with the sort of professional attitude that I tend to associate with a truly winning firm.

Obviously, there's a fair amount of competition in this space, so I'm sure it's easy to get lost among the competition...and I am by no means trying to turn attention away from competitors.

I am just an ordinary consumer...with a bizarre and trying form of neural-damage that inhibits movement as well as my ability to process simple inconsistencies that most people accept without blinking.

Yet, as I've explained to my friends, even small inconsistencies can strike my brain as hurricanes of chaos. Yes, this may seem extreme, but the human brain moderates the whole person...and as I've mentioned ad nauseum, MY brain sometimes acts like a ball of electified-wire thrown into a bathtub...sputtering and short-circuiting without rhyme or reason.

For the most part I'm able to keep this effect in-check...but odd things like recorded-ads fed into the phone while I'm on-hold can result in an mild form of schizoid-behavior that I have trouble hiding...nothing overtly obvious, just irritating to the well-organized thought processes of MOST normal folks.

MY agitation in turn agitates others and in SOME circumstances it makes our communication somewhat caustic.

But the folks at BUY.COM absorbed, and accepted my ire--not complacently, but professionally, and THAT impressed me.

I don't want to be misinterpreted as saying that people should expect ANYBODY to act as a sponge for soaking up their anger. I'm only saying that in this particular circumstance, BUY.COM acted commendably.

And professional-behavior-under-fire is worthy of positive recommendation, in my opinion. Good job, folks.

--mattergy

Brothers-In-Arms With Unseen Injuries

I try to make clear that as agonizing as MY neural-damage is...that many young men and women returning from war will have unseen scars that are VERY REAL and equally invisible, so because I am a young man with mere brain-damage and must walk with a cane, I constantly remind people that INVISIBLE brain and nerve damage is the tip of the iceberg for these brave folks.

I don't pretend to understand how horrible war is, but I know enough about how insensitive people are to ME to anticipate that returning soldiers will need understanding beyond what the majority are prepared to offer.

Without actual experience a person CAN'T understand, so there's no need to feel bad about TRYING to empathize, and failing. These people will need PATIENCE more than anything.

Patience to accept behaviors that are so far from the Latte-fueled world of the people at home who think just merely "earning a living" is hard.

War is hard. Even utter destitution pales by comparison, I suspect.

I don't pretend to know HOW hard war is...but I predict that even the worst day for the homeless and disabled in this country is a cake-walk by comparison.

Anyway...I'm only trying to say that we're ALL going to have to learn to stop thinking of ourselves as the centers of our own personal universes in order to even BEGIN to understand the sacrifices these people have made...sure, some soldiers will have escaped any real exposure to the really difficult parts of war, but those who have borne the REAL horrors first-hand will not be the same people we remember...and out of love we must be willing to accept what they have become, no matter how much patience it requires.

The future of this country depends on it.

--mattergy

"We Don't Have Email"

Image Courtesy: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

I had an experience today that nearly resulted in an aneurysm. I was attempting to communicate with a division of a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical firm in the US, and trying to get an email address to send important medical information...

The response that caused the meltdown: "we don't have email."

Granted the subsidiary is in North Carolina...a place not widely known for it's technological prowess (although it IS home to what we in Silicon Valley refer to as "Silicon Valley East" [Research Triangle Park, NC] and the place where powered-flight was made a reality by Orville and Wilbur Wright at Kittyhawk, NC in 1903)

But no email.

So I figured that I would at the very least point these multi-billion dollar firms to a place that provides email service at a cost even a brain-damaged MS-patient living on Social Security can afford (Ironically one of the companies that pioneered public internet services in the USA...Network Solutions.)

No, I'm not a salesperson for NS, but I think it is next-to-Neanderthal for ANY US company to tell someone that it does not have email in the 21st-Century...especially a subsidiary of a Bizzilion-dollar pharmaceutical company :S

--mattergy