Thought Processes

It's occurred to me over the past several months that while you hear terms thrown around---particularly in election years---about "right thinking" and "wrong thinking", I'm not sure how valid those terms are. Thought is a process, not an event, and generally what folks mean by "right thinking" is not that your process is particularly good, or that the steps meet some obscure objective correctness test, but that your conclusions are "right", also known as "in agreement with the person judging the quality of your thought."

And of course "wrong thinking" is "you don't agree with me, you MUST be doing it wrong."

But unless we're actually talking about "you are (according to the rules of logic) taking the wrong steps in processing a syllogism", I don't think those are valid terms.

We "think" about things in a variety of ways; the things we think about are also widely varied. It makes sense to me that, then, the important measure of how we think about some particular thing is whether or not it's productive.

Seems like most folks tend to think about just about everything in their life in the same way: some folks deal with everything emotionally and/or intuitionally, and their language reflects that. "I feel that Sam is the correct candidate" "I feel it will be a long time before he gets that raise" "I feel that 20 people will respond to our party invitation" and so forth. And it works for them, more or less---well enough that they tend not to stop and look at where it fails and why and...oops, wrong group. :) Well, they tend not to feel where it doesn't work and do something different.

Then there's the analytical folks, and it may well already be long obvious reading this blog that I'm in that bunch. Always have been. Not a fence sitter but severely in that camp. Which of course means that sooner or later it should occur to me to stop and analyze exactly when and where stopping and analyzing doesn't work, no? :)

Later rather than sooner, I guess. All that has been to lead up to this point: I've been trying to figure out why trying to sort out certain people/events/situations throughout my life has always failed. It's always become a circular morass with no solution---something of a logical equivalent to dividing by zero. And I've finally found the mantra that covers the situation.

You cannot apply logic to dysfunctionality.

Long version has something to do with dysfunctionality by its very nature being a form of chaos, and logic assumes coherence. Doesn't matter. The point is that dysfunctional families, dysfunctional households, dysfunctional people, dysfunctional friendships, dysfunctional work situations, dysfunctional parishes---whatever---do not operate by any logic other than an internal, twisted version of logic. Usually one living in one individual's mind, to which the other inhabitants of the situation learn to imitate well enough to function in the situation. And that learning is so subtle and gentle, they don't realize that what they're learning in "getting to know the place" is the rules of its dysfunctionality.

(That may be true of all situations, and there may be no true functionality anywhere. But I'm referring to the more severe cases, situations which tend to be destructive to many or all persons involved.)

But that's not "source code" to the logic, it's just a "workaround"---so that the longer a person is outside that dysfunctional situation, the more of an "outsider" they become---if the situation is past, they lose their understanding of how it functioned; if it's current, they lose their ability to blend back in, and/or the rules continue to evolve without them, so that they no longer have the correct key, nor can they.

Doesn't entirely matter. What matters is acquiring the ability to derail the brain from that circular trap by repeating the mantra.

You cannot apply logic to dysfunctionality.

You cannot apply logic to dysfunctionality.

You cannot apply logic to dysfunctionality.

You cannot apply logic to dysfunctionality.

Here endeth today's lesson. :)

Kids Just Take Over Everything.....

Some five weeks or more after taking the desktop computer to the Apple store for hospitalization (it was *before* Sweetpea was born!), it's home and fixed.....

And the baby of the household seems determined to make the leap that that makes the laptop HER computer. Doesn't seem to matter how often she's evicted. It's HERS, thank you. To type on, dance on, sleep on, and try to catch those funny characters on the screen.....

Baby Cakes: The Movie

New Grandbaby!

She's here, I've seen her, I've held her....and the picture above is by her big sister, Baby Cakes.

Miss Sweet Pea is here! And she's adorable, as all grandbabies are of course........ :)

A Bafflement to Me.....

Here's a question that's been in my head for a while, now, and I've posed it to a number of people over the years.

Nobody's ever had a usable answer to it; I throw it out here in case someone reading this has one.

Why do companies send you bills for a specific amount, for which their known policy is "we do not accept partial payments, payment is due in full only".....

.....and then put a box on the payment slip for you to fill in that says "Here' s how much I'm sending."

"Hey! Ya owe us $128.37! We demand that you send us $128.37! No more! No less!"



"So! How much ya sending us, huh?"

Only company I know of that doesn't do that is American Express. They presume their customers are bright enough to understand the rules......

A Quotation that Struck Me.....

Kin-folks! They are such homey sounding words and strong, too, and sweet. Folks who are akin---why they need not even be relatives or “blood kin!” What a vista that opens up! They are scattered all over the world, these kin-folks of ours and we will find them wherever we go, folks who are akin to us in thought and belief, in aspirations and ideas, tho our relatives may be far away.

--Laura Ingalls Wilder, Missouri Ruralist, 5 August 1916

More Tails of the Cat Door......

[Post edited 8/21/08 to add mug shot of The Culprit....]

Wednesday night, sound asleep.

The cat door is right next to my bed. The only cat who uses it is Sarah. It's now permanently set to "can enter, cannot exit" courtesy of Astra's adventure.

(Astra, as we know, would love to, but she's not permitted. Morgan's too afraid of ending up homeless again to go out unless I'm less than a foot away, and Tondra won't use the cat door, although she loves to go out.)

I wake up enough to hear the thwack-thwack of the cat door being used, think "Sarah's in", go back to sleep.

I hear a crash, half open one eye, see shadowy form of cat in dark having knocked down the extended platform at the window. Think "Way to go, Sarah", go back to sleep.

I hear the sounds of a major cat fight in the hallway. There are still signs of less than perfect harmony in the household, with half the cats being resident less than two months, but it has always been hissy fits up until now. I think "Okay, somebody's having a major disagreement about the pecking order" and get up to go make sure nobody's taking unfair advantage of the kitten.

And realize that it was NOT Sarah who came in. It was a grey and white cat who lives somewhere in the neighborhood.

He/She had stuck his head in the cat door before, seen me reading, and vamoosed. Silly me, I thought that had taken care of its curiosity. In retrospect, knocking down the platform was probably related to "what do you mean, this door doesn't work to get back OUT? I gotta get OUT right now!"

Middle of the night, I'm chasing a cat who doesn't belong there all over the house. I have Astra behind closed doors, and the front door propped open, but this cat keeps going past it to try to insist on going out the living room window. Eventually, he figures it out and scoots out the door. I then spend the next hour cleaning up the disaster he's left in his path.

Hopefully, that's his last adventure with the cat door. We'll see.