Slug "Passengers"

How do I confirm that I love a person?

[Answered on Quora.com by Antonieta Contreras]

What type of love do you want to confirm? Romantic? Fraternal? Familial? Pragmatic? The list can go on.

Upfront, I could tell you that if you really love a person, you then could live without them. Love is the opposite of ownership. For example, if you fall out of love because that person cheated on you, then you can be certain that your love was not the pure type. If you love a person for as long as that person fulfills your needs or expectations, then your love is pragmatic, grounded in conditions that can range from compatibility and convenience to companionship or financial support.

I wish answers about love were straightforward or that we could find a device, like a thermometer, that could confirm we are in love and that our love is genuine, unconditional, pure, and lasting.

But love is such a complicated phenomenon that we have not been able to agree on what it is. I’ll try to respond to your question, but let me talk a little about the maximum representation of love I have found in this human existence:

Love in its most extensive manifestation is equivalent to limitless freedom, wisdom, beauty, and peace. This type of love has no object, which means that it flows without attaching to anyone or anything. Love is a force that feeds and builds the universe and each one of its elements, us included, and so, we sometimes can channel it. Some people say it’s always there but we lack the awareness. Others say that we only channel it when we become a clean vessel.

When that force enters our system, everything looks, feels, sounds, tastes, and is better. Life becomes easier, more enjoyable, more fulfilling, brighter, shinier, greater. Can we channel that energy all the time? Hopefully! But we need to be so clear of all cravings, desires, and attachments, that it’s difficult to stay there permanently.

That type of love I’m talking about is not biological, but influences our biology, big-time. When we channel that energy, our brain lights up like a Christmas tree and produces all sorts of “feel-good” chemicals. We become healthier, more motivated, more energetic, more productive, more “alive.” We also turn out to be less demanding, less ambitious, less hungry, less attached to what we normally define as happiness. We become happier by accepting whatever it is.

The inverse is also true. Our biology can influence our energetic body and clear the way to pure love. When we accept someone as they are, our brain produces all those feel-good stuff, and our channels open, facilitating the flow of the love force. That’s when we float and enjoy every second, assuming we are in love because of the relationship we are developing with certain people. We assign an object to the force we are experiencing, assuming they are the source.

That type of openness is not caused by the person but by the chemicals that help us see everything beautiful and lower our guard. Our primitive circuits are nowhere active since the liking and accepting that new person makes us feel super safe. Safer than ever! As if misery will never be a possibility again, as long as we stay connected to that person.

If that connection is just energetic, you can continue being in love and misery won’t come near you. But that’s not what normally happens. We immediately want to own that person, tie the knot so to speak, making sure they will never go anywhere else.

But right there, as soon as we fear losing them, the channels close, the chemicals stop, and the primitive circuits make us feel at risk. And that amazing production of energy becomes a dark and all-absorbing black hole.

What I could say is that we humans have the capacity to experience the very energy that creates us if we let go of all our human conditioning. If our humanity is bigger than our mind, then we get stuck on the miseries of attaching to a reality that is so limited.

So, going back to your question, to confirm you love a person, you need to be certain that you could let them live their life as they please, that they can leave if they need to, that they can use their bodies as they find it necessary, and that you won’t close the flow of your great feelings if they don’t meet your expectations.

Since that is almost impossible to do, what I suggest is to “love,” period. If you “love” as your regular mental state, you may not need to be with a person. You may enjoy the company of love, which could make your life easier and more beautiful than any person could. Then, you share that mental state with those you are with and continue working on accepting that you and they are human and that it is our condition to have needs.

It is OK to practice conditional love. Your heart and soul could love unconditionally, but your daily activities, your body, and your brain need to work on meeting your needs to give you the opportunity to clean yourself of cravings.

The better your needs are met, the less you will need, and the less you need, the more open to receiving the universe you will be.

The bottom line is that it’s better to shift our perspective from seeking fulfillment solely through relationships to finding contentment within oneself. Once you are there, sharing that love with others will confirm that you love them.

Eric Hilton "The Source"

As a homeless person, what is the most important thing you could tell someone who finds themselves homeless for the first time?

[Answered on Quora.com by Robert Kerr]

1. Sell everything you have right now and just keep a few clothes. Everything you have is going to be stolen. Remove yourself from your possessions RIGHT NOW. Save yourself the heartache.
2. Nobody on the street is your friend.
3. Government won't help you, so don't waste the 6 months of runaround they'll put you through before you figure it out.
4. Churches are the best place to ask for help, some even offer shelter. Go there, get a bed, and volunteer. It isn't work, but you ABSOLUTELY need meaning in your life.
5. Save every penny you get until you have enough cash for rent. It'll take several months. Just push, you'll make it.
6. Lastly, use old soup cans for containing fire. You can get a makeshift stove going with a soup can and 3 metal tent pegs. Push the pegs into the dirt, using the short ends to hold down the can. Trap it good in the ground. It will be enough to keep you warm, and boil water.

Good luck, don't give up, and DO NOT GIVE OTHER HOMELESS PEOPLE ANYTHING

JF #50

I wish that you had lived to see this auspicious day.
Your mother is still happy that this day happened - but she misses you.

The B-52s "Revolution Earth" (official)

Anna's early morning dance party started with this fun and energetic - upbeat - song.

I had been wishing I could be walking through the forest, very much, this morning.
Yet I also know that the next few days will bring much forest time.
It would be wise for me to conserve some of my energy (and also goodwill, to keep working towards the common good).
So instead I vigorously dance the tarantella, amongst the tarantellas.

[Just. Just?] one observer at the center of my data point on 20240606

... though there be "no" [with an infinity already contained within that word] reason that there ... should be, may be ...
HOPE

... NOR the lack of HOPE (!) ...

Let that I may simply see myself rewriting, or rather retyping with my twisting old hand: a news report from another moment of 20240606:

Ukrainian Presidcent Volodymur Zelensky arrived at Thursday's International ceremony

... to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day, to a Standing Ovation and a Rousing Applause.

Zelensky's presence - and Russian leader Vladimir Putin's absence, despite Soviet Russia's key role in winning the war in Europe - is highly symbolic given how the war in Ukraine is casting a shadow over the day's events.

Several world leaders have already used their speeches to cast parallels between Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the aggression of Nazi Germany that sparked World War II.

What is an autism trait that everyone on the spectrum has?

[Answered on Quora.com by Kenneth Childers]

Some of the other answers [on Quora] disingenuously suggest that autistics don’t have any commonalities with other autistics, but I think there are some near-universal trends. They don’t all occur all the time in all autistics, but almost all of them occur at least from time to time in most people with autism, as far as I can tell:

1. We tunnel. Tunneling is hard to describe, but easy to notice. I’m coming home from a basketball game with a couple of colleagues one night - I co-sponsor a special ed basketball team - and all of a sudden feel compelled to comment to my colleague and friend on a very arcane matter, to which students individual educational plans may apply in the United States. When I had been discussing this with a teacher mentor form my school district, my department head had butted in and insisted that I was wrong - no, IEPs in the US can’t be given to non special-ed students. All of a sudden, that discussion came back to me on the bus, and I felt compelled to revisit it with my friend. Figuratively and sometimes literally, other matters fall to the backdrop, and my focus zeros in on such a matter. The matter can be almost anything, from gender in Spanish language geographic terms to something awry in the school kitchen.

2. We perseverate. To perseverate is to detain oneself on something intensely. That sounds like tunneling, but it’s a bit different though arguably related. Speaking of the above-mentioned department head, she brought to my attention some months ago that 1) I hadn’t been consistent in using dollar signs when teaching math, and 2) I had been a bit loose about decimal points. In point of fact, I had varied on the dollar signs but had taken an ink pen to sharpen up decimal points in a certain lesson concerning money. Oops. She should have checked her facts before presenting these admittedly small grievances to me as fact. Notice that the facts were only half awry. Nonetheless, I bitterly and unrelentingly refused to let the conversation move on, even telling her, “I will not let this conversation move on as long as part of your perceptions are grounded in error.” When I get caught up in such matters in the moment and everything else goes to the backdrop, that’s tunneling - and I was tunneling at that moment - but my remembrances on the event over these many months has been perseveration. Now I’ve also generalized that event to a broader skepticism of that colleague’s accuracy, and I think about THAT too in all and sundry situations.

Notice that this is not really a matter of “he said, she said,” nor a matter of “everyone’s entitled to their opinion, and we just have to be understanding, Kenny.” Autistics often get accused of being insensitive to or imperceptive of the feelings and ideas of others, and people trot out cases like this as examples. But there’s really no room for, “well, I know you have your way of seeing it, and I have mine” in this case: I either sat there for half an hour with an ink pen sharpening decimal points on my assignment, or I didn’t. And you better believe I did!

3. We notice little things that allistic people miss. Excelling at seeing little details of the world really isn’t that hard, especially when one is comparing oneself to allistics. That’s because a huge amount of allistic perceptual energy doesn’t go into rock formations; water lily types; the energy efficiency of a car’s air conditioning and heating systems; the statistical validity of international wealth comparisons; and so on and so forth. Oh, no indeed - you almost can’t even meet with non-autistic people on THESE MATTERS and keep the focus on THESE MATTERS! Silly me - I’d have thought that water lily types would be a great topic at a garden club meeting as compared to neighborhood scuttlebutt and someone’s grandkids. I could even live with water lily types being on a par with the grandkids, but needless to say they aren’t, particularly in a place like the US, where people are endlessly wrapped up in their own pet issues. When you add to that the obsession neuronormals have with social interactions, body language and hierarchies - sometimes their perceptual world seems just a series of flirtations and winks and nods - it’s no wonder they don’t see many things that are right under their noses.

4. We have sensitivities, often hypersensitivities. Formal and anecdotal writing on autism is full of examples, ranging from shirt tags to noise to even Sponge Bob Square Pants episodes. My own sensitivities are not over-the-top, but they are pronounced.

Here are a few good questions spearheaded by the autism specialist Dr. Natalie Engelbrecht ND RP a couple of years ago on sensitivities. I answered each question below, so you can just look the threads over quickly or read my own answers by scrolling down:

What challenges do you face regarding visual hypersensitivity as someone with ASD, and what solutions have you found to compensate for this?

What challenges do ASDs have regarding auditory hypersensitivity, and what solutions have you found to compensate for it?

5. I think that the social awkwardness of autistics - so pronounced that in the past it was proposed that autism was a social impairment or even a form of social retardation - is both well-known and overstated. Dr. Natalie Engelbrecht ND RP and I concur that neuronormal social skills ain’t what they’re cracked up to be EVEN under the terms of neuronormal society. Conversely, autistics can be very social and socially able, and can have many friends. However, we do seem to be a bit set apart socially. We don’t seem to care for small talk or banter, and avoid them. Likewise, though we can be socially graceful and good at conversation - when we care to converse - a lot of our etiquette and pleasantries can come across as - and indeed are - the result of reading and study, not natural social instincts. Conversely, good social reflexes among neuronormals are rarely the result of formal study.

This influencer keeps taking day laborers to Disneyland

This good person brings joy and help to others - and then others are inspired to add their own help and support.

Boys on the fringe of society aren’t so different from yours, this boy mom says

[By Shannon Carpenter, CNN, Tues June 4, 2024 10:00 a.m. EDT]

I know I’m not the only parent who has lost sleep worrying about the future of my sons.

My 16-year-old has begun to drive, and I have concerns about his ability to navigate curbs. My 11-year-old son loves to play video games, but I have to be careful about his choice of online gaming communities. Some are extremely toxic.

But even with those worries, I have some leverage, whether it’s the keys or the Wi-Fi password.

It’s the things I can’t control that keep my mind running all night. It’s a scary road for a parent to contemplate because of what I see out there. There is the “manosphere,” the collection of male influencers who plant seeds of hate in our young boys’ ears. That self-hate can turn inward until it explodes, either in self-harm, partner violence or mass shootings.

That’s what keeps me up at night.

That’s what Ruth Whippman tackles in her new book, “BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity,” which published on Tuesday.That’s what keeps me up at night.

“I was pregnant with my third son when the #MeToo movement just exploded,” Whippman told me. “I realized at that moment there was just this rolling horror show of bad news about men.”That’s what keeps me up at night.

The journalist, cultural critic and documentary filmmaker realized that #MeToo was exposing a “deep, systemic problem” with the way that we raise and socialize boys. “The fact that this experience of sexual violence and sexual assault is so common — there is somewhere that we’re going wrong. It’s clearly a blind spot.”

Whippman takes her audience into those influences our boys are exposed to, including the incel population, the pull of the false machismo of men influencers and the world that our sons are expected to join as adults.

I sat down with Whippman to learn about her experiences as a boy mom, what worries her as a parent and the surprising things she discovered during research for her book.

CNN: You start “BoyMom” with an interesting fact that baby boys are not nurtured as much as girls. How so?

Ruth Whippman: They’re about six weeks behind baby girls (in development), so a baby boy needs more help with self-regulating with emotions. They need more early care, but they get less. And there is a ton of research and studies that show that.

But the way that parents respond to baby boys — they project all these masculine qualities into them. So, when they cry, parents assume they’re angry rather than sad, and they pick them up less. They give them less positive touch. They use less emotional language. This is a pattern that goes on all the way through childhood into adulthood. So, all of the things that we think of as caregiving and nurturing — baby girls receive more of that. So, boys need more, and they get less. That has really long-term implications for the development of empathy, social skills and morality.

CNN: As boys grow, you say that they are not taught relationship skills or emotional development. The stories we read to boys are different than what we read to girls.

Whippman: This is something that really surprised me, because it was so invisible to me that this was even absent. It would have been so normal for me to read about relationships as a young girl. My boys will never read a story like that unless I actively go and give it to them.

There are very, very few role models for boys or stories for boys — movies, TV shows and books — where (boys) are saying that they have to take on emotional labor, that they have to think about other people’s feelings, track them and worry about letting somebody down. Their stories are always about adventure, battles and fighting. It all contributes to boys not growing up with a model of how to be a fully formed, relational, connected human being. I see it with my kids all the time.

CNN: What pressures does society put on boys as they reach school age?

Whippman: We give boys this vision that’s all about being almost superhuman in the hero narratives and these stories where boys see themselves as being special and important and the main character — but they have to be emotionally invulnerable. They can’t admit to weakness or admit to (having) feelings.

They have to be the best. They have to be better than girls and women. The story is that boys get girls, and women generally tend to be these kinds of side characters that boys get as prizes for being heroes. The damaging part of it is that in a million ways we communicated to boys that they need to be strong. They need to be stoic. They can’t admit their feelings, that they can’t be weak. We teach that sort of intimacy and vulnerability goes for women, but not men. So, I think this has a huge impact on their mental health.

CNN: How does that translate into how they act in school and with their peers?

Whippman: Boys’ issues are seen as behavioral problems rather than emotional deficiencies. We see boys as this kind of angry, masculine characters that are acting out rather than the sort of vulnerable emotional beings they are.

We tell them it’s shameful to be sad and to cry and to show weakness. We teach them to cope with their emotions such as anger or destructiveness on their own. We don’t give them other outlets or other tools to express their emotions. We don’t see the hurt and the emotions behind it. They’re scared to reach out, and they don’t get the help they need.

They get deeper and deeper into these toxic spaces. On the one hand, they’re the most hate-filled, horrifying, misogynistic, racist spaces. But there’s also this brotherhood amongst many of them. These are spaces where they find connection, and I think that is the problem.

CNN: Explain the term incel. In “BoyMom,” you spend time with this population. Who are they?

Whippman: They’re kind of unique within the manosphere because they are the guys who are (considered) losers in this system, as they say themselves. Involuntarily celibate. They’re very lonely, generally very depressed, and they’ve given up hope. They think feminists are to blame for everything and men are the real victims. This is very twisted, very horrible politics, and it comes along with a lot of misogyny. You can’t get women because it’s predecided (by this system).

CNN: What were the biggest surprises for you when talking with the involuntary celibate?

Whippman: One was that the of level of connection and brotherhood and tenderness between men, which was really shocking to me. I was so surprised that in all the places to find it, it was there and then. I mean a lot of them are horrifying misogynists. And I went in depth with one guy who really was like that. But I think I saw a lot of just sadness and trauma and feeling stuck and feeling like they had no hope to get anywhere else.

They couldn’t really see therapy. They thought they’d been boxed so far into this corner that if they went to talk to a therapist, that they would get rejected and told the same narrative, which is “you’re so privileged, shut up.” Which I think is a real narrative in our culture.

One of the biggest surprises was I expected incels to be these very fringe people, who were saying something completely different from the kind of so-called regular boys would say. It really shocked me just how similar they were to many of the sort of so-called regular boys that I talked to. That all the concerns that they were raising about loneliness, about friendship, about masculinity, about feeling emasculated, about the pressures of masculinity, all those things were actually just very mainstream.

CNN: Did you find any correlation between their father’s masculinity and behavior and their own judgment of themselves?

Whippman: Several guys said to me that their father had always said, “Man up.” I think that fathers are probably doing this out of love. I think fathers often encourage their boys to be tough and masculine and not to cry or express emotions out of love, because that is how they were taught, and that is how they think their sons need to be to survive in the world.

They want to protect their sons and (are) probably doing it the best way they know how because that’s how they were taught. But these messages are so harmful, and they have lasting consequences. I saw it all over with boys who have different backgrounds.

CNN: How do we reconcile these two halves of men? How do we keep traditionally masculine-identified values such as courage and assertiveness, and encourage feminine-identified values such as empathy and sensitivity?

Whippman: We start from the beginning. Take the gendered expectations out of those words. Bravery, courage, strength, assertiveness, empathy, humanity, nurturing and caregiving are human qualities. Get away from girls do this, boys do that. Then we would give people, boys and girls, more ability to be fully human.

CNN: How do we as individual men support the boys and men in our lives?

Whippman: We need to change the cultural conversation and give respect and admiration to the men who are trying to change the narrative and the women who are trying to help them in that effort.

In the home, I think it’s about making time for emotions with boys. Try to see boys as these emotional things, give them role models who express emotions, whether that’s in real life from dads, families and communities.

Boys and men don’t have the vocabulary to talk about this problem. We don’t know what to even call the harm that the patriarchy has caused to men. The more we talk about it, the more we can name it, the more we can correct it.

Shannon Carpenter is a writer, author of the book “The Ultimate Stay-at-Home Dad” and married father of three.

Analyzing my text messages with my ex-boyfriend

Teresa Ibarra's analysis can be read here.

Fighting the World's Deadliest Animal

CDC's deadliest animal

Kula Shaker "Start all Over"