chatarra
All posts tagged "psychology"
Top 20 Unfortunate Lessons Girls Learn From Twilight »
So fucking great. 1, 8, 15 and 16 are my favorites.
- If a boy is aloof, stand-offish, ignores you or is just plain rude, it is because he is secretly in love with you — and you are the point of his existence.
- Secrets are good — especially life-threatening ones.
- It’s OK for a potential romantic interest to be dimwitted, violent and vengeful — as long as he has great abs.
- If a boy tells you to stay away from him because he is dangerous and may even kill you, he must be the love of your life. You should stay with him since he will keep you safe forever.
- If a boy leaves you, especially suddenly (while telling you he will never see you again), it is because he loves you so much he will suffer just to keep you safe.
- When a boy leaves you, going into shock, losing all your friends and enduring night terrors are completely acceptable occurrences — as long as you keep your grades up.
- It is extremely romantic to put yourself in dangerous situations in order to see your ex-boyfriend again. It’s even more romantic to remember the sound of his voice when he yelled at you.
- Boys who leave you always come back.
- Because they come back, you should hold out, waiting for them for months, even when completely acceptable and less-abusive alternative males present themselves.
- Even though you have no intention of dating an alternative male who expresses interest in you, it is fine to string the young man along for months. Also, you should use him to fix things for you. Maybe he’ll even buy you something.
- You should use said male to fix things because girls are incapable of anything mechanical or technical.
- Lying to your parents is fine. Lying to your parents while you run away to save your suicidal boyfriend is an extremely good idea that shows your strength and maturity. Also, it is what you must do.
- Car theft in the service of love is acceptable.
- If the boy you are in love with causes you (even indirectly) to be so badly beaten you end up in the hospital, you should tell the doctors and your family that you “fell down the steps” because you are such a silly, clumsy girl. That false explanation always works well for abused women.
- Men can be changed for the better if you sacrifice everything you are and devote yourself to their need for change.
- Young women should make no effort to improve their social skills or emotional state. Instead, they should seek out potential mates that share their morose deficiencies and emotional illnesses.
- Girls shouldn’t always read a book series just because everyone else has.
- When writing a book series, it’s acceptable to lift seminal source material and bastardize it with tired, overwrought teenage angst.
- When making or watching a major feature film, you should gleefully embrace the 20 minutes of plot it provides in between extended segments of vacant-eyed silence and self-indulgent, moaning banter.
- Vampires — once among the great villains of literature and motion pictures — are no longer scary. In fact, they’re every bit as whiny, self-absorbed and impotent as any human being.
“We tend to think of mental hospitals as “snake pits”—places of nightmarish squalor and abuse—and this is how they have been portrayed in books and film. Few Americans, however, realize these institutions were once monuments of civic pride, built with noble intentions by leading architects and physicians, who envisioned the asylums as places of refuge, therapy, and healing.”
Random Wikipedia Facts: Behavioral sink »
“In 1958, ethologist John B. Calhoun conducted over-population experiments on rats on a farmland in Rockville, Maryland which resulted in the publication of an article in the Scientific American of a study of behavior under conditions of overcrowding.
Calhoun provided a cage of rats with food and water replenished to support any increase in population, but the cage was fixed at a size considered sufficient for only 50 rats. Population peaked at 80 rats and thereafter exhibited a variety of abnormal, often destructive behaviors; his conclusion was that space itself is a necessity. When forced interactions exceed some threshold, social norms break down […].
Notable conditions in the behavioral sink include hyperaggression, failure to breed and nurture young normally, infant cannibalism, increased mortality at all ages, and abnormal sexual patterns. Often, population peaks, then crashes. Actual physical disease, mental illness, and psychosomatic disorders increase. There are eating disorders; in human populations, drug and alcohol use rises.
The only known counter to the effect of the behavioral sink is to reduce the frequency and intensity of social interaction.”
The Referendum »
“The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt. The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home. It’s exacerbated by the far greater diversity of options available to us now than a few decades ago, when everyone had to follow the same drill. We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning.”
A must read for anybody between 25 and 35. Particularly if they’re not married. Particularly if they feel they’re standing in the middle of some kind of existential crossroad. I insist.
(via Tiffamander)
Broken Koans and other Zen debris »
This is the kind of primal truth that runs background in one’s mind until some -deceivingly- simplistic exercise of thought puts it into words and then a few unexplained things make sense. To me, at least.
I know almost nothing about Buddhism, but I found this “broken koan” poignant: a student is complaining that other students, through various means, gain enlightenment, but he has been doing these things for two years, and things don’t make any more sense to him. The teacher replies:
Well you see, for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It’s impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse.I think I, and a lot of other people, are stuck thinking too much. Overanalyzing. Never being fully present in a moment, because our minds are also busy analyzing the moment as it’s happening. And how the fuck do we get out of that quagmire? Resistance is futile. Whatever we decide to do is going to be a method, and the whole point is not to look at the world through methods or analysis, but to simply live it. I’ve been meaning to write about that feeling, and may still do so, but writing about it is kind of futile, since writing about it is the kind of overthinking that I want to avoid. In the meantime, the broken koan will have to do.
Tu post de autoayuda favorito 1/3
Esto promete.
Desde que era pequeña he fantaseado con hacerme millonaria publicando libros de autoayuda. Me parece como gastar una broma privada a escala universal y me encanta el concepto “broma privada”, por no decir lo que me encanta el concepto “ser millonaria”. Sin embargo, mientras lo consigo o por el contrario me quedo por enésima vez finalista, pero no ganadora, del Premio Nobel de Autoayuda, creo que mis fieles lectores deberían tener una primicia de lo que sería el esquema básico de cualquiera de mis libros, así como la receta de la felicidad absoluta en versión concentrada (que este post es largo? jaja, pues veréis el libraco que me gesto! er… usando un lenguaje más literario, por supuesto).
Así que allá vamos. En el primer capítulo, que en este caso será un párrafo, no entraré directamente en materia sino que daré un largo rodeo a partir de algo que esté de moda, como por ejemplo… los vampiros. Efectivamente, los vampiros. Se puede saber el por qué de toda esta locura humana en torno a unos seres inmortalmente aburridos, que además, añado un pequeño detalle: NO EXISTEN? Y mirando un pelín más atrás, a santo de qué se vuelve la gente loca con las escuelas de magia? Y qué hay de esas naves espaciales con sospechosa gravedad en las que viaja un individuo con orejas puntiagudas, o bien una individua con orejas ocultas bajo ensaimadas? O si nos remontamos un poco más en el tiempo, a qué viene todo eso de Dios? Bien, la respuesta es simple: la realidad apesta. No es que sea mortalmente mala (para la gente que puede darse el lujo de comprar un libro de autoayuda y leerlo) es que es un gran PSÉ. Un universal “ni fu ni fa”. Un rollo, vamos.
Somos arrojados al mundo con el único propósito de procrear y luego, si te he visto no me acuerdo, ya te puedes morir, como las cucarachas del anuncio de Cucal. El único “plan” perceptible es que la especie perdure, adaptándose más y mejor al medio y prolongando su existencia en el tiempo. Como individuo, a no ser que hayas nacido con una extraordinaria y superpoderosa mutación (lo que nos llevaría otra vez a la ficción como vía de escape), no importas más de lo que te importes a ti mismo, o en todo caso, a otra persona (ya veremos ese punto más adelante). Las preguntas existenciales que nos hacemos bien podrían no ser más que un efecto secundario de ser más inteligentes, y por lo tanto más “adaptables” o “perdurables”, que un mono. Así que más vale no preguntarnos quiénes somos y a dónde vamos, porque la bromista de la evolución se va a hacer la loca, y casi mejor, porque tal vez la respuesta fuera de lo más cruel.
Lo que nos lleva claramente al suicidio.
(Continuará… en serio!)
To the person reading this post, please fucking click the ‘like’ button, ok? Thank you very much.
(via)
World Builder on Vimeo »
Acabo de FLIPAR con este corto. Si os gusta la ciencia ficción, vedlo. Y si no os gusta, es una manera estupenda de empezar.
Now that’s just wonderful. (Even if you’ve seen it around, I’m sure watching it again is worth it.)
“Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
“More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn’t engage the identities of any of the participants. What makes politics and religion such minefields is that they engage so many people’s identities… The most intriguing thing about this theory, if it’s right, is that it explains not merely which kinds of discussions to avoid, but how to have better ideas. If people can’t think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.”
Your math is irrefutable »
Joder, es la vida real.
