So now I'm old. Last Friday, the 29th, was my on-line birthday, making me 40, as one particularly astute correspondent pointed out. So I'm old. Last Friday wasn't my real life birthday, which comes in October, making me Libra, balanced but judging. Which I try not to do - I want to understand and analyze and accept. If I look at the last ten years, I hope "analyze and accept" describes how I've developed.
I never thought about profiles showing my age changing, only about them showing my birthday, so I list February 29 as one more non-fact of anonymity. I assumed that any real person - as opposed to spam robot - who saw it would figure it was made up, just like the way I list my zip code sometimes as 90210. It's funny when I get spam saying "Hi I just moved to Beverly Hills and want to meet some cute single guys so it sounds like you fit the bill." Obviously spam (okay, obvious on a number of fronts). And no, I don't live on the set of an abandoned TV show, though sometimes I feel that way.
But these little deceptions don't get around the fact that time is passing and I am getting older and as I get older it is easier and easier to give up some things. I listened to an REM CD - nothing says "this is 1990" like a solid series of REM songs - including "Blame." I have given up my belief in Blame.
Blame, like Credit, expands as you share it. The more you keep for yourself, the less there is to go around. So I try to act accordingly.
I had a job once where Blame was our main focus. We had more workers than work and were all waiting to be axed in a seemingly endless series of lay-offs. We had little to do but to study Blame. Whenever a mistake was made, no matter how seldom, we would convene a team to form a policy to prevent its future occurrence. It didn't matter if our recommendations required far more work than simply fixing the occasional mistake when it occurred - we as a company were dedicated to the eradication of mistakes even at the "expense" of effort required, since we had excess people on hand.
The one good purpose of the Blame Game is to look at things you did wrong and want to swear never to do again. Maybe it makes you feel more secure hoping that you can keep a bad experience from ever recurring. We're all learning, aren't we?
Well, now I'm old - at least on-line and soon in real life. Maybe I've given up on learning. Maybe I'm starting to think "it's not what happens to you but how you recover that's important." I have already long thought that my mistakes were a reflection of my personality and accepted (after analysis) that I am actually pretty darn likely to make them again.
Cat is no longer here, after so intimately sharing every aspect of my life for so long - but I have nothing to point to and say "I'll never do that again." Probably not even that I'll try never to do that again. Did we make some mistakes? Yes, I'm sure we did and I did. Do I regret any of it? Only that we couldn't find a way to make it work. Did I, or we, give up too soon? No. We tried as hard as we could, we tried everything we could. Did I, or we, let it go too long? No. We wanted to keep trying, there's no blame in that. Should I, or we, have foreseen that it would turn out as it did? Maybe - but if we did I would have still taken the chance on it.
Maybe this means that at some point in the future I will be back to exactly where I am now, which is far from perfect. Maybe it means that I will enjoy several or many years of my life but not develop, not progress, not learn from my mistakes at all. I think I can accept that, which I suspect is a sign of getting old.
The company I worked for did manage to eliminate a lot of mistakes - but it didn't make them perfect. Maybe it didn't make them disappear, but it certainly didn't prevent it. I think for me, personally, I will rather go on making mistakes and trying to recover than being paralyzed with fear or suffocated with caution.
I never thought about profiles showing my age changing, only about them showing my birthday, so I list February 29 as one more non-fact of anonymity. I assumed that any real person - as opposed to spam robot - who saw it would figure it was made up, just like the way I list my zip code sometimes as 90210. It's funny when I get spam saying "Hi I just moved to Beverly Hills and want to meet some cute single guys so it sounds like you fit the bill." Obviously spam (okay, obvious on a number of fronts). And no, I don't live on the set of an abandoned TV show, though sometimes I feel that way.
But these little deceptions don't get around the fact that time is passing and I am getting older and as I get older it is easier and easier to give up some things. I listened to an REM CD - nothing says "this is 1990" like a solid series of REM songs - including "Blame." I have given up my belief in Blame.
Blame, like Credit, expands as you share it. The more you keep for yourself, the less there is to go around. So I try to act accordingly.
I had a job once where Blame was our main focus. We had more workers than work and were all waiting to be axed in a seemingly endless series of lay-offs. We had little to do but to study Blame. Whenever a mistake was made, no matter how seldom, we would convene a team to form a policy to prevent its future occurrence. It didn't matter if our recommendations required far more work than simply fixing the occasional mistake when it occurred - we as a company were dedicated to the eradication of mistakes even at the "expense" of effort required, since we had excess people on hand.
The one good purpose of the Blame Game is to look at things you did wrong and want to swear never to do again. Maybe it makes you feel more secure hoping that you can keep a bad experience from ever recurring. We're all learning, aren't we?
Well, now I'm old - at least on-line and soon in real life. Maybe I've given up on learning. Maybe I'm starting to think "it's not what happens to you but how you recover that's important." I have already long thought that my mistakes were a reflection of my personality and accepted (after analysis) that I am actually pretty darn likely to make them again.
Cat is no longer here, after so intimately sharing every aspect of my life for so long - but I have nothing to point to and say "I'll never do that again." Probably not even that I'll try never to do that again. Did we make some mistakes? Yes, I'm sure we did and I did. Do I regret any of it? Only that we couldn't find a way to make it work. Did I, or we, give up too soon? No. We tried as hard as we could, we tried everything we could. Did I, or we, let it go too long? No. We wanted to keep trying, there's no blame in that. Should I, or we, have foreseen that it would turn out as it did? Maybe - but if we did I would have still taken the chance on it.
Maybe this means that at some point in the future I will be back to exactly where I am now, which is far from perfect. Maybe it means that I will enjoy several or many years of my life but not develop, not progress, not learn from my mistakes at all. I think I can accept that, which I suspect is a sign of getting old.
The company I worked for did manage to eliminate a lot of mistakes - but it didn't make them perfect. Maybe it didn't make them disappear, but it certainly didn't prevent it. I think for me, personally, I will rather go on making mistakes and trying to recover than being paralyzed with fear or suffocated with caution.
