Dialectical behavior therapy is based on the synthesis of acceptance and change. I’ve been having a bit of a debate lately with some friends about this thesis and antithesis:

• You should accept your life and be happy from within
• You should change your life so it makes you happy from without

I’m not going to cite any of them by name because the debate isn’t over and I can’t give any of their perspectives a fair summary. But hopefully I can give proper credit in future posts.

Today I came across the Pleasant Events Schedule, a list of events that some people find pleasurable. Psychologists use it for studying mood, depression, drug addiction, aging, etc. (eg: Are you unhappy because you never get out of the nursing home, or because they won’t let you do heroin?)

For each item on the list, give it two scores from 0 – 2:

For each question, multiply the two values together (if you didn’t do something or you didn’t like it, that event will get 0) and then sum all multiples to get your total pleasantness score. Compare your pleasantness over time to your mood journal.

Some of my favourite events:
18. Going naked
34. Talking to myself
97. Shoplifting
168. Taking revenge on someone
171. Protesting social, political or environmental conditions
188. Crying
222. Shocking people, swearing, making obscene gestures, etc.

I’m good at criticism. It’s what I do for a living (nobody reads a report of what doesn’t need changing). I’ve been called a “glass half-empty kind of guy”.

I’ve decided to make this blog about what I think not about what I feel. Perhaps that doesn’t provide as much value to myself or to others as a deeply personal account, but I have yet to be convinced of that.

So I find it easiest to write critical posts. I try to do one of these things:

• Find a unique, irreverent angle;
• Record information that might help people who randomly find the post in Google; or,
• Offer suggestions for improvement that I have a faint hope will make it back to someone who has the power to implement them.

Is the third one a cop-out from being the change I want to see in the world? Sure, but it’s more fun. And my interests are diverse enough that if I started trying to enact change I would have to tragically narrow my scope.

The problem with all this is that criticism doesn’t make people happy. Keeping a gratitude journal has been shown in psychological studies to be quite effective at raising happiness. I tried keeping a gratitude journal for a while in an iPhone app, but it felt like a chore so I stopped – maybe I’ll try it again now.

People like being around other positive people and so having a positive outlook on life is supposed to be quite good for your social (and love) life. I think I’m usually pretty positive in social situations, especially with people I just met, but I haven’t received feedback about that.

This post is a response to my friend Maya’s criticism of my ongoing Shambhala review series. I have no intention of going into my favourite personal moments (seeing as they’re personal). She has inspired me to consider whether I should try to make the tone of this blog more positive, but I don’t want to just turn it into my gratitude journal. (Although aren’t you happy about what I had for dinner?)

BC has been experiencing record-breaking bad, unseasonable weather. On Saturday the Times Colonist ran a front-page story about the economic impact of bad weather in Victoria. Three years ago, the article would have been about the role of climate change in causing the weather, but it isn’t even mentioned – how times change.

It’s amazing how far climate change fell off everyone’s radar when the economy became the top concern. What would it take to make people care again? Apparently the end of summer is not enough.

I would like people to make the connection that their airplane and cruise ship vacations in the winter are the direct cause of the weather we’re suffering. One week on the beach in winter = 4 months holding an umbrella in summer.

There was a point back in 2007 when I thought slow travel might actually take off. (I’ve embraced slow travel since it makes me feel superior when I’m driving my friends to the airport.) But now it seems that people travel as much as they can afford; just like how the financial crisis dropped carbon emissions by overthrowing capitalism – remember that?

Note the order of the title, it’s not Maude and Harold, because Maude isn’t much of a character. Normally I’d take this opportunity to do my favourite off-beat reading by proposing that she’s a figment of Harold’s imagination, but I have a more important issue to discuss:

Maude, like many women in film, is not a fully-developed character – she even ends up in the refrigerator for Harold’s benefit. More specifically, she is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a very important trope in Western texts.

This extensive blog that refers to them as “Amazing Girls” explains how Manic Pixies are misogynist:

The Romantics’ ideal of the pure and naturally innocent woman, a creature morally inferior to men but capable of spiritual perfection — in short, a childlike vessel for the projection of masculine ideals.

And Eye Weekly, in doing a similar criticism of 500 Days of Summer as my own, explains the damage caused by the Manic Pixie archetype:

There’s something very underrated about sane, functional women who act their age and do not try to be spirits of pure light and joy.

Given that I’m “an soulful, brooding male hero, living a sheltered, emotionless existence”, I definitely hope to “leave [my] cold, grey existence and one day meet this magical woman [so my] life will be transformed”. Yet despite my love of misogyny in cinema, I couldn’t relate to Harold. Maybe because being obsessed with death became trendy and then cliche since this movie was made? Maybe because although there’s more to Harold than Maude, he’s still not a very well-developed character? Maybe because the movie didn’t deliver an explicit sex scene (art isn’t supposed to make you comfortable)? I don’t know why, but the movie didn’t click for me like contemporary myths of the Manic Pixie.

My friend Ticia recently founded a Dutch chapter of the B (for Balance) Society, a Danish organization that advocates on behalf of atypical chronotypes. In English, people who are predisposed to go to bed and wake up earlier or later than the average person. Their basic test is this: if you use an alarm clock to wake up, then society is not designed for you.

I’ve been struggling with waking up on time since I’ve had a 9-5 job. I tried different alarms (my latest one is an iPhone app that senses my vibrations on the mattress), but I concluded that I was too tired for any alarm to be really effective. So it seems like I need to go to bed earlier, but I just can’t bring myself to. Whether it’s my social life, housework, the Internet, a good book or shifting from my weekend schedule, I can’t seem to get to bed when I think I should.

When I heard about chronotypes, I noted that I generally wasn’t tired when I thought I “should” go to bed, and diagnosed myself as a night owl (which I’d always self-identified as in folk psychology). “Great,” I thought, “it’s not a lack of will power, I’m just incompatible with society!” But then I realized the powerlessness of that position. In theory, I could ask to start work a bit later, but that’s not going to shift the rest of the world later. The B Society might work as an advocate in the aggregate, but it doesn’t seem like a good position to personally take.

So right now I’m experimenting with taking zinc and magnesium before bed to get more quality of sleep with less quantity. Other things to try include showering before bed, configuring my Internet connection to break at certain times, and getting rid of all my friends.

I subscribe to the theory of cleaning that if you remove all water- and oil-based matter from a non-porous surface and allow it to dry, all the microorganisms will die. If you believe that microorganisms need to be actively killed using bleach or oxygen, then this review will lead you to the conclusion that I’m disgusting. (Hippies take note: vinegar works using the former method, baking soda works using the latter.)

I dislike scented cleaners and try to minimize my impact on the environment, so I use microfibre cloths for most cleaning. This in itself was a revelation. But the cloths don’t remove soap scum in the bathroom – for that I use either environmentally-friendly cleaners that leave film or evil cleaners that don’t.

The other day my friend Marlene told me that she uses melamine foam (trade name: Mr. Clean Magic Eraser) all over the house and gave me one telling me it will “change my life”. She wasn’t wrong!

• Like a cloth, it picks up dust.
• Like an abrasive, it cuts through oil and soap scum.
• Like a sponge, it holds enough water for a whole cleaning job.
• You don’t have to keep putting soap on it.
• It’s scent-free.

The erasers are a lattice of plastic microblades that gradually wear down as they scrape. Melamine plastic will eventually break down into organic melamine and formaldehyde, but not fast enough to create a health hazard. It’s not great to fill the world with little bits of plastic, but it’s far better than filling it with reactive chemicals. Plus, a bacteria has evolved that eats melamine!

I haven’t used the erasers long enough to get an idea of how much it’ll cost per cleaning and I don’t care – if you’re willing to spend more time cleaning to save money, then I’ve got a French maid outfit you’d look great in.

In The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg is “Relationship Status: Single” and creates The Facebook to get chicks. In reality, he’s been dating the same girl since before the events of the movie, but she got edited out. If the movie were real, Facebook would probably be doing a better job of living up to its potential as a dating service.

There’s a famous sociology result that your acquaintances are more likely to get you a job than your friends, because you already know about most of the opportunities your friends know about. Acquaintances know just enough about you to guess that an opportunity matches your skills and recommend you over a random applicant.

Currently online dating is about as sophisticated as online job hunting: you crudely filter the results and send an application to anything that looks promising; then recipients have to weed through hundreds of applications to figure out who to interview. Active match-making is unlikely to discover good matches and have can a high reputational for the match-maker cost if things go badly.

Online Dating 2.0 should work like this:

1. If I’m single and(/or) looking, I tell Facebook
2. I get expanded access to the profiles of friends-of-friends who are also single & looking
3. Facebook starts matching me with friends-of-friends based on profile data and position in the social network
4. If I see someone I like, I can message them directly (our mutual friend never needs to know) or ask our mutual friend for their blessing and an introduction
5. Repeat for friends-of-friends-of-friends

Since your dating profile is also your social profile, you don’t have to write it (or half-ass it, as most guys seem to) and you can’t lie: prospective suitors see a snapshot of you life, not ad copy. Web 2.0 theory says that position in the network is more significant than content (this is how the Google Algorithm works) and the stuff your friends post on your wall should say more about than you can.

I just read this not-particularly-interesting New York Times article about “20-somethings” that do not act like “adults”. The article fights the timing but not the content of the incredibly old-fashioned five milestones in the transition to adulthood:

1. completing school
2. leaving home
3. becoming financially independent
4. marrying
5. having a child

In Erik Erikson’s 8-stage model of psychosocial development, if you don’t figure out how to make a long-term romantic commitment by 34 and raise a child by 65, you are developmentally delayed, unable to ever move on to higher stages of development. As you age, your options become constrained and you’re supposed to enjoy this forced focus of your energies.

I think it’s not that “kids today” have inserted another stage, pushing back the timeline for developmental milestones, but rather that our society is dismantling the linear progression:

1. School is not completed in a single sprint; the knowledge economy requires “life-long learning”.
2. Dwellings with a maximum of two generations are only standard in the West. Many baby boomers are spending so much time caring for their parents that we have to come up with something more convenient for the next generation.
3. The creative class are supposed to have a changing portfolio of income sources. Education and career changes form a continuous cycle.
4. Given divorce rates, choosing a marriage partner is not an item to cross off a list but a recurring project.
5. Nuclear families suck.

Personally, I’m trying to engineer a life that’s more dynamic than the track laid down by previous generations. That being said, the fact that I could relate to an article about “20-somethings”, when I’m at the end of my 20s made me feel a little old.

In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam uses Yiddish to distinguish between two kinds of people that build social capital:

schmoozer

“One who chats”, from the Hebrew “to report gossip”. Informal, friendly relationships; exemplified by two activities: eating dinner together and playing cards.

macher

“Big shot”, from the German “to make”. Relationships based on membership in formal groups, from churches to bowling leagues.

Both activities are correlated with education and income but Putnam says that schmoozers and machers tend to be different people. The rate of both schmoozing and maching has been declining in our society, but maching has possibly been declining faster: bowling is less popular than it used to be, but bowling in leagues especially so. This analysis of folksy politicians gets the definitions a bit wrong, but I think it’s worth considering whether there’s a cultural divide between schmoozers and machers.

The standard advice for getting more friends is to do maching: volunteer, take a class. I’ve been doing some of those things to build my social capital. But if you’re looking for friends to schmooze with, macher activities are probably the wrong way to go.

How do you foster “less organized and purposeful, more spontaneous and flexible” social activities? I’m pretty good at random dinners and drinks, although I probably don’t incite them as much as I could. Do I need to get better at entertaining at home? And what’s the contemporary equivalent of bridge – a Wii?

A lot of people who move to Victoria claim that it’s hard to build a social life here. They’re from somewhere else, so it’s at least reasonable to think that they’re comparing to other cities rather than just complaining that their social life isn’t like Friends. But a lot of people in my social group are moving here after university, which is of course the ideal socializing circumstance.

I grew up in Victoria and I’m not completely happy with my social life. I suspect other natives aren’t either. So it doesn’t really matter if it’s relative: Victoria’s social scene is not living up to its potential.

Some of the most literal urban tribes I’ve seen in Victoria are sports leagues: team mates and rivals party together, travel together, take care of each other when they’re sick, etc. So in the past I’ve looked at sports as being the city’s only stable social groups. But I should have thought more carefully about my running metaphor: running is easy to do by yourself and most of the runners you see are by themselves.

My friend Nina moved here recently. We were discussing my difficulty organizing Community Circles in my social group and she offered this theory: Victorians are not in exclusive cliques (tribes) that can’t be broken into, instead they’re all off doing their own thing. Victoria is a city full of people bowling alone. Who knows if it’s happening here more than in other cities (bowling leagues are a Middle American thing, right?), but we should try to figure out how to fix it regardless.