Posts by BenWilson
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Another blog and comment thread that makes me feel like a visitor from another planet.
Surely there's always going to be a lot of people for whom sex stands between them and intimacy with people of the opposite sex. This does not mean that everyone is like that. For people that it's not a problem, it would probably be fairer to say "it's not much of a problem". Just the fact that it's a problem for other people makes it a problem.
An old flame of mine is someone I keep in contact with probably once or twice per year. None of my friends, or her friends, can make head or tail of it. "Why would you?", I get asked. After a while, you begin to wonder if it is actually a weird thing to do. Even if it means nothing more to you than catching up with an old and dear friend, the idea that it means more to other people is off-putting.
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@Russell, next time, recite the Lord's Prayer backwards. You'll never be asked again.
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Funny thing about names and faces is that the techniques for remembering them are pretty well known, and easy to learn. But still many of us don't do it (guilty). Part of my reason is that I mostly don't care. I'll almost certainly remember any conversation I had, and that's usually what matters to me. People are much happier if you say "I don't remember your name, but last time we spoke, you told me all about your job, which is analyzing small cap stocks, and you'd been having a great year. How's the downturn been affecting you?", than if you go "Hi, Bob, isn't it? What do you do again?".
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I don't mind that, but there's a valid question to be asked of how long an MP can be paid to be an MP but not actually do the work. 2 months? 6 months? a year?
3 years per review. And if they're still getting voted in, then perhaps them not doing the work is exactly what everyone wants.
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wrt Alcohol, I went through the period where it helped a lot. But on reflection I don't actually think it's the chemical properties of alcohol that does most of the work here. It's that dealing with alcohol gives us a lot of social leads. It establishes a ritual which everyone can engage in, and the ritual is what leads to the socializing. So you have the "buy someone a drink" thing which sets up the "must buy them one back" dynamic. Or "Cheers", which is a shared activity in which you suddenly have an excuse for a lot of other activities. Just buying the drink itself forces you to move around the room in a certain way. The drinks are something to talk about. They make good props for hands that don't know what to do. I think it's the main reason for the popularity of smoking too. You can always hit someone up for a light, give them a cig, opt to decamp outside with someone, etc.
To that end, when hosting, a fantastic savior for the inexperienced is to be given a task that forces socialization, like topping up drinks, or organizing the music, or giving people name tags, or spreading some piece of information, or selling raffles, or taking a sweep on a game, or taking photos. Ideally, it's something important enough to give you an excuse to move on, but also unimportant enough that you can hang around if you're suddenly hitting it off with someone. At family parties, I think it's a very good idea to get the kids to do this stuff.
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23. It was a hard test though. "I find it easy to know how other people are feeling"? Well, I don't find it hard to judge what I think other people are feeling, but to "know"? They could just be covering it in some way. I could just be plain wrong. To be really sure, you need to establish a baseline, which you don't have time for with strangers, or to ask very curious and impertinent questions rather like Tim Roth in Lie to Me, which are just to provoke an emotional range and trigger probable lies. Even then, it's not certain, covering up and faking emotions is something we practice doing from a very young age.
No, seriously, that was my first thought on reading that too, that she fancied you.
I opted not to underrate David's writing talent, and presumed that as an audience I was meant to make that connection, and to point out to David he had missed the point, so that I could actually more clearly make his point. It was a pretty clever device, I thought.
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INTP here. Don't judge me, I'll perceive it.
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Well, I guess while your MP is contemplating legislation while wrapped around a hot water bottle, there might be one or two constituents in Te Atatu hoping someone is covering the constituency clinics.
There's a lot of ways they could spend their days that would be wonderful to people in need. They could go down to a soup kitchen and lend a hand too, or pitch in on the road works with a shovel. But I don't think it's really my place to insist they do. Basically their main job is to represent, and they have a lot of leeway in how they do that, and the mechanism for the constituents to reward or punish them is already in place.
I think you're being a little unfair on him too. DPF hasn't complained about MP working hours; rather, his past concern was about sitting hours.
Right, but he seem to equate the available sitting hours with work-that-should-be-done, and frequently rates the MPs on that scale.
I guess I have a very different opinion about the job of MPs. I couldn't give the slightest crap about how many hours they put in on whatever DPF thinks they should, if they end up voting for legislation that I think is wrong. Not one minute of the time they spent diligently getting their twaddle onto Hansard counts against that.
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I'm curious now, Ben, which way was I facing?
Eyes, head, body or feet?
Sorry Ben, that was a total case in point of my mind going totally blank! If it's any consolation, I've probably kicked myself a dozen times over that (lack of) conversation: "I could have talked about X; I could have talked about Y. Ben will think I'm a complete social retard, etc."
In a cartoon we could have had a shared thought bubble then.
It's brutal to watch one of these engineers when they've trapped an audience upon which they are inflicting a conversation.
They're extremely reliable radios. Leading questions can sometimes find a good channel.
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Even curiouser experience to read this entire thread through without being in the heat of it. It's like a symphony in 5 movements. Tuning in, I guess I can only say I'm anticipating a climax.
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