And for everyone's viewing pleasure....me at my worst during the month that was Halloween. What was that??? And Bitches, stop looking at me funny! You're wearing a plastic vest! Haha 

Confidence is overrated? What?

Confidence - Garbage
You’re confident
So confident

You’re full of it
So full of it
You’re full of shit

Alright, so it’s taken me a while to say anything else, but I haven’t had anything useful to talk about. Until now. I have a question to pose for anyone who would like to answer it for me:

Why do we emphasize that confidence is necessary for your mental health, but when we see someone who is confident, we say they’re either (a) full of it or (b) full of themselves?

I really don’t understand this concept. I used to be told on a nearly daily basis that I didn’t have enough confidence in myself, or that I had low self-esteem and that I should work on that. And now, the opposite is occurring – suddenly I and other “confident” people I know are being told that we are either full of ourselves, arrogant, or we’re just trying to fool everyone. Apparently it’s good to aspire to confidence, but not actually to have confidence.

My theory is that people in this country are afraid to appear anything outside of ordinary or to know their own capabilities and be proud of them. And it’s not like people don’t know their own strengths and weaknesses (well I assume most of us do. I certainly know mine) but it’s like we’re afraid to say we’re proud of ourselves because we might hurt someone else’s feelings. What is this, the nation of egos? Everyone is exceptional in different areas, and you know what, I think it’s good to know what you’re good at and to be proud of them. Isn’t that what we ultimately aspire to be? Someone who you can look in the mirror and say – “Hey, I like you. You’re a cool chick/dude”?

As the cliché goes, you can’t get anyone else to love you until you love yourself.

The same goes with our puritanical view of love and romance – why are we so bent on getting married and settling down? I have plenty of friends (and sometimes including myself) who disappoint themselves because they haven’t gotten engaged or even necessarily found the right guy. And all of us are around the same age – about early to mid 20s. That’s pretty young in these modern times. But the need for that “one true love” seems to run rampant, and drive many people, mainly women, crazy because they feel like they do not have it. And I think that’s driven by our own insecurities within ourselves, and certainly isn’t helped by the sheer number of ideal romances that you see in the media. Not that I’m trying to put blame on something else. No one in our society would do that.

And besides wanting to get married, there still remains the view that sex as a whole is a bad thing unless you’re in a seriously committed relationship. I generally hold to that thought, but that’s just because I don’t think it should be that easy to get that intimate with me. Notice I said generally.

But I have heard the opposite from my foreign friend (haha I think it’s funny to call her that) – who says that we here are entirely too conservative in our views toward sex. Apparently where she grew up, it was considered a natural thing, and doing it shouldn’t necessarily be constrained just because you aren’t in love. I don’t know how I feel about that, but I can see where she’s coming from.

So I think that should cover me for another month or so. I’ll see you all after I have walked over the burning coals in my bare feet about 4 times – finals is friggin awesome. Yay caffeine!

Fight or Flight Syndrome

I’ve decided that I think I’m Carrie. I look at what’s going on around me and suddenly have a revelation about the underlying psychology behind the behavior when really it’s just an obvious pattern we all realize.

This week’s theory:

People have one of two responses to extreme stress. One is to ignore the event entirely, and the other is to immediately confront it – i.e., the fight or flight syndrome we all have when our adrenaline is rushing. And if you have a group of people experiencing the same stress, then the group will split off into those two sets of people. Finally, there ends up being a concentric circle pattern where those who “fight” end up dealing with the stress and attempting to handle it, and thus considered having the right to be there to make the decisions, and those who “fly” end up being left out and not considered to be strong enough to do the same.

Is this an extension of Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” argument? What I’ve noticed is that those who deny the issue and try to handle it on their own instead of cooperating with the “whole” end up being closed out of the circle. This occurs even in small families in dealing with a relative’s recovery. It kind of makes sense, but it also underestimates the people who run off – just because they do not have the compulsion to be at the center of the situation doesn’t mean they don’t have the ability to handle the stress. It’s just a different mindset.

Alright, I just had to get that off my chest and I should study now.

Burning Pumpkin of Death! 

The Domino Effect

I know that I’ve run this past several of my friends in the last month or so, and so if you don’t feel like reading about it after talking about it with me, then you can feel free to disregard this post. After all, I’m still convinced no one reads this but me and so I’m not entirely offended if you choose not to.

In any case, I think the theory bears merit. The domino effect occurs in any group of friends or relatives and comes in three variations: breakups, marriage, and babies. What I’ve noticed is that when one couple does one of those three things, the other people in their social circle start thinking about their own relationship in that context.

For example, my friend was the first one to get engaged and the first one to get married in several social groups. (Most people belong to more than one, so that shouldn’t sound odd.) She was certainly the first one in our group. In any case, her getting engaged caused me to wonder where my relationship was going at the time and start pushing for engagement, and I’m sure started pushing other girls in her groups to start pushing for the same. And then after she got married, at least 3 other couples announced their engagement/wedding date soon afterward, and now that social group is made up of mainly married couples.

However, in my social group, my other good friend broke up with her long-term boyfriend, and this started a chain of breakups throughout the group, including my own and my roommate’s – who didn’t even know her that well. Now, my roommate is back together with her boyfriend, but she was still involved in the chain in the first place, and her domino actually fell before mine did.

This effect isn’t something completely random – it’s the result of what peer pressure does when you’re in any social group. What one person does, no matter how isolated it may seem to her, affects anyone else within her social sphere. People as a whole are used to the status quo, so the thought of change makes everyone else evaluate whether they’re satisfied in their own situations. Even if the couple doesn’t break up, get married, or have a baby the domino effect has still made some sort of impact just because of the analysis.

If anyone else has a different perspective on this, I’d be glad to hear it. But I’m going to go back to studying now and stop trying to analyze everyone else’s behavior. ;)