Cat Facts!

A kid posted his number on his Facebook account. He then received these texts.

Gay Rights

This video is awesome.

STOP SOPA

http://sopastrike.com/


No post today. If you care about having an open internet, if you care about not letting corrupt politicians pass horribly drafted legislation, go sign the petition on that page and tell your friends to do the same. Thanks.

How do I forgive my boyfriend?

Dear Edahn,


I just moved in with someone in another city. He's 17 years older than I and we have been dating a little under a year. He was in a divorce over a year ago because his ex-wife had an affair for 2 years. Since we've been together I walked up behind him sending "I miss you" messages to an ex-girlfriend. And today I found an email from his ex-wife saying they had sex 2 months ago 2 days after we reconciled. His ex-wife also claims to have been pregnant and miscarried a month after we met. I'm a moderately honest person and I want to forgive him. I have not brought the email to his attention. I'm so ashamed of myself for snooping. Can I forgive and trust him? Being young I now feel naive and fooled.


YOU FEEL FOOLED BECAUSE you are being fooled. This is not someone you should trust. You have all the evidence you could ever want and more. That part is obvious and not really controversial. It sucks that you moved in with him, but I really think you should reconsider your decision. The real question here is why you're selecting these kinds of guys and even considering going back to them after they've shown themselves to be untrustworthy. 


I don't know what it is about this guy that attracts you, but whatever it is, it doesn't overcome his poor character. Character isn't something you can change, and in the end you'll get hurt. Try dating someone closer to your age who has real integrity--someone you deserve. You can even consider taking a break from dating while you explore your values and take a closer look at your relationship choices. I wish you the best of luck. 

Why am I afraid of holes?

Why do I have a fear of patterns, holes, or marks that repeat themselves? I get chills, very itchy, I can't breathe, and feel very anxious when I see eaten corn cobs, honey combs, repeated holes, or trees with bumps all over the bark. It's very disturbing to me. I've only known two other people with this reaction. How can I get over it? Exposure therapy?

THERE'S SOMETHING CALLED TRYPOPHOBIA, which is the fear of holes or clusters of holes. READERS: don't google it because you'll see some images that will give you the phobia if you don't have it yet.

No one know why it develops, and it isn't really an "official phobia," (i.e., there's no Wikipedia page for it) but all phobias develop in the same ways. One way is through a traumatic incident associated with a pattern. Maybe you saw something gross on TV while eating matzah (a traumatizing experience in itself). Or maybe you just saw a friend react to something with holes are learned vicariously to do the same. Then again, maybe you're just more easily grossed out by things. Truth is, it doesn't really matter that much why it exists; what matters more is how you handle it.

Exposure therapy is a good idea. I'd suggest you aim to tolerate being uncomfortable rather than eliminating your discomfort altogether. Make a list of 7 things that scare you from least to greatest. The first 4 you'll just imagine. The last 3 you'll actually be looking at live. Every day, take 5 to 10 minutes to imagine or look at the object. If you freak out that's okay, it'll pass. Just try and keep your breath slow and flowing, nothing else. Eventually you'll calm down, the itching will stop, and you won't feel anxious. When this happens, you can stop the exercise. Every week, move from one object to the next. Again, the point isn't to make your reaction go away, but to make you more tolerant of your discomfort. The rest will happen naturally. Lemme know how it goes.

Got a question? Ask here.

How do I brand myself?

Dear Edahn,

I'm trying to do my design portfolio right now and I don't know how I want to brand myself because I have a lot of talent. Any advice?

BRANDING YOURSELF IS HARD when you're creative and competent. It's hard to decide which product represents you and which you want to focus on throughout your career. But it's important part of your development as a professional. People will be more likely to hire you when they have a sense of what type of work they're going to get, so it's important that you create a strong, consistent, commercially viable brand.

APPROACH #1: Talk to a mentor or teacher you really respect. Bring your portfolio and see what they say.

APPROACH #2: Gather all your work and lay it out on a table. Try and rank your stuff across 4 factors:

1. Is it commercially viable?
2. Am I proud of it?
3. Did I enjoy making it?
4. Do I like looking at it?
5. Did it reflect some part of my personality?

Find the pieces that rank highest and start building a new portfolio around it. All the pieces in your portfolio should have the same voice. (Samples.) When you finish putting your portfolio together get some feedback from your mentors. If you need to build 2 portfolios, that's okay too, but keep them separate to avoid diluting your brand.

The real challenge here is transitioning from student to businessperson. As a student, you don't have any restrictions on what you create, but as a businessperson you're using your work to make a living. You have to be thoughtful and channel your creativity in ways that feed your brand and business. It takes restraint and maturity, but it's something you have to do.

How do you stop loving someone?

How do you stop being in love with someone if you've shared so much of your heart with them?

THERE ARE TWO KINDS of love. There's the love you feel for a friend or parent, and then there's romantic love. They're the same in that they make you want to be close to the other person, but they're very different in their mechanics. Romantic love is possessive or even obsessive. Romantic love is kind of like an unsealed balloon. If you're not continuously inflating it, it starts to deflate.

Like a balloon, romantic love is perpetuated by certain thoughts of longing and desire that trigger emotional, often painful reaction in your body. If you want the feelings and emotions to stop, all you have to do is stop thinking all those thoughts--stop thinking about the person. You're probably thinking how the hell do I do that? Right. Well, don't try and not think about it, because by not thinking about it, you're actually thinking about it. In fact, don't try and manage your thinking at all. Instead, focus on your behaviors. Change some things in your life so you don't have to think about it/him as much.

For starters, delete his name from your phone. Throw away or delete pictures of each other. Completely stop contacting him, email, phone, texts. Go out with your friends, pick up some new projects. Go out on some dates. Make your life interesting without him. Yeah it'll be hard, but it's the only way to move on, even if you can't really picture it.

5 Tweets

I sometimes like to wonder what I'd teach people if I was completely wise, if there was such a thing. What would I say and how would I say it? What if it was just one tweet? 180 characters to impart profound wisdom is a difficult task.

Here're some ideas I'm toying with.

1. Don't ever be afraid to experience fear. It's actually much more afraid of you than the other way around. #badassmotherfucker #courage

2. Whether realized or not, everyone is searching for intimacy. Being close to others and to one's self is the true source of meaning. #onelove

3. We blame others and ourselves instead of caring. Underneath our masks, we're still children who just want to experience joy. #untainted

4. You don't need to have it all figured out. Do your best to make the right decision at every opportunity. #dropbydrop

5. When you're on your death bed and you look back on your life, what will make you proud and what will make you ashamed? #compass

Got some? Leave em in the comments. Appreciated.

Democracy.

Are men turned on by rape?

Dear Edahn,


There seems to be a new surge of sexism in today's popular TV, with shows like Game of Thrones and Mad Men depicting women being raped, sexually harassed, and objectified. In these shows, women just take it; they don't fight back. As a woman, and as a survivor of three periods of sexual abuse by men, I find these shows incredibly difficult to watch. My female friends often feel the same way, although they haven't been abused.


My male friends, on the other hand, barely seem to notice the sexism, let alone be bothered by it. And these are men that are supposedly understanding of the women's plight. They'll skip ahead the rape scenes, but only because they see that I start shaking with fear from them. As a man, what do you feel when you see women on TV being the target of sexism or gender violence? What do men think of sexism against women? 

THINK BACK TO FREUD for a second. I think most men, at some level, fantasize about dominating women, sexually or otherwise. It's part of our id and part of our genetic heritage (but by no means a justification, obviously). But our superego, i.e., our conscience, says "uh uh uh! you can't do that because people are getting hurt and that's not nice."

There are certain situations in which the superego gets hidden and the id comes out to play. One awful place is in crowds, where people experience anonymity. People commit awful crimes in crowds that they would never commit alone like rape, theft, and murder. The anonymity makes people think they're not responsible for their actions, so the superego fades away, making room for the id to run amok.

Another situation is in the cinema. While watching television, we know people aren't really getting hurt, so our superego isn't as offended. Without that voice telling us "uh uh uh!" we can indulge in our dark fantasies. We can watch women get dominated, we can watch people get hacked up, we can explore all our private paraphilias (fetishes). And that's exactly what we see in modern cinema with shows like Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones, and movies like Saw and Secretary. Women usually don't have urges to dominate other women (at least, not sexually), so they're less aroused and more bothered.

In sum, people have competing thoughts and urges--to help, to pity, to conquer, and to hurt. What comes out depends on the interplay between the person and their environment which are constantly in flux. Great question! Please "like" if you can, thanks.

Reflections: Occupy Wall Street

People have been criticizing the OWS supporters for not knowing what they're protesting. That's not true. They're unhappy. Some know why, other don't, but they don't like being unhappy and unsettled, and they're finding people like them. Many have zeroed in on some of the systemic problems they've observed in our society, which could be crudely summarized as CORRUPTION. Corruption is all over in many forms, from the obvious corruption in politics and business, to the less obvious forms like public relations and marketing. They all possess elements of deceit and taking what hasn't been earned, or what hasn't been earned fairly.

The Occupy movement is about looking at our world through a mature, humanitarian lens instead of a greedy, reptilian lens. It's about reforming institutions and conventions that generate conflict, misery, and rob people of their dignity. It's a natural step in our evolution as a species, one that can no longer wait.

A Timeless Question

Dear Edahn,

Down through the ages has been the question: "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Now I read that according to Buddhism, "the chicken is in the egg, and the egg is in the chicken". Has the question been answered then? And if so, where the heck do we go from here? ;-)

NICE TRY, BUT SINCE only chickens can make eggs, . . . all chickens come from eggs, . . . every chicken was once an egg, . . . the only source of eggs is chickens, Ahhh, fuck it.

Here's an actual picture of a chicken-dinosaur that predated both of them.

Keyboard thing

Try this out. It's awesome. Turn your sound on.

http://www.m0ar.org/4335

Prediction Time

I'm gonna make some predictions about the next few years. I love doing this stuff. Take it very very not not seriously.

1. More angry weather. More violent weather and strange astronomical as the Earth tries to flick annoying humans off of it. Bigger earthquakes, storms, hurricanes, and even asteroids. Cataclysms begin to reorganize communities to be closer and more self-reliant. New social rituals are born that emphasize human contact.
2. #OWS dies and is reborn. OWS protests don't make a significant impact this election, but splinter groups form and create a powerful labor party that call for social reform and new political institutions. 
3. Buy local movement. A turn to buying local will become much more popular. Corporations will suffers from national boycotts but will find ways to persist by networking with local businesses. Attempts are made to identify these connections, but they fail.
4. The US, Israel, and France bomb Iran. Iran fires rockets at Israel. No one helps Iran.
5. China and the US begin exchanging threats. China continues its cyber-espionage. The US issues condemnations, and the War of Words starts. No attacks.
6. Birth of the cybermafia. The OWS reforms start strong but begin to crumble. The mafia who have currently infiltrated business, education, and politics, take a more subtle approach and turn to hacking and cooperating with enemy governments. The cybermafia is born.
7. Mass suicide. On facebook. Studies begin to surface about the negative affects of computer and cell phone addiction, naming facebook as a key contributor. People abandon the site completely and replace it with a streamlined app (not a site) like the one I'm developing right now. SHHHH. (I'm serious.)
8. Dubstep continues to prevail as the best music, ever, EVAR. Woooaaaawoooaaaawoooaaaawoooaaaaw.

Got any of your own? Leave a comment.

What are people searching for?

Dear Edahn, 

What do you think everyone's looking for? What makes people content?

ON THE SURFACE, PEOPLE are looking for all sorts of things to fill them up. Their minds and bodies chase all sorts of stimulus/stimulation. Academics may crave intellectual stimulation. Althletes and celebrities crave physical stimulation. Strippers and therapists may crave emotional stimulation. Other people spend their life chasing certain thoughts and the feelings they trigger like “I’m smart” or “I’m valuable” or “I’m successful” or "I'm on the right track." It’s not always pathological, but very often, it is.

But in the end, there’s something I think they’re all secretly chasing, even if they don’t know it yet. That thing is intimacy. Intimacy isn’t just something you experience between you and another person—it’s bigger than that. It’s something you experience between you and your surroundings, with strangers, with music, and in a big way, with yourself. That kind of universal intimacy calms you in a very meaningful way. In fact, I think it’s the door to meaning (but that’ll take a little more to explain). Universal intimacy is always necessary for contentment and often times sufficient. Without it, you'll always be chasing something to make you complete.

The Happiness Myth

Happiness has got to be the buzzword of the last 10-20 years. There's a growing army of "positive" psychologists researching happiness in labs and via surveys (sounds childish to me); the self-help movement only recently exploded with happiness manuals; and magazines and talk shows have become saturated with tips, advice, cures, and whatnot to help you feel better and think better.

I don't believe in it. Any of it. Even worse, I think it's destructive.

I believe people can achieve contentment. In fact, I think they should do everything in their power to achieve it. But I think people enter the early stages of contentment when they stop searching for things. Part of this even means giving up the search for things like happiness, which can become an elusive obsession.

It all comes back to the thought that something is missing from us, or something is missing in our lives, that we need to achieve, whether it be spirituality, money, family, security. Let's call it existential inferiority. These things aren't bad; in fact, they're wonderful. It's wonderful to have the ability to experience life in a rich, deep way. But it won't connect to you if you're doing it for a reason: to fill the void in your life or self-concept. When you're being driven by inferiority, you're always miserable on some deep, subtle, significant way.

There's nothing you can do to help yourself, because anything you do is just another attempt to escape your perceived inferiority. The good news is, there's nothing you need to do. There's nothing you need to think or feel or control or change. Or not think, not feel, not control, not change. When the time is right, when circumstances align, you'll forget to think something's missing--the partner, the prestige, the happiness--and you'll just be there, quiet, watching, content.

How do I learn to trust again?

Dear Edahn,

I've been dating a man for a few months now and we've had a rough relationship. When I found out he was being dishonest with me, I ended it and distanced myself from him. We talked and got back together but I'm so afraid of getting hurt again. I feel like my fear of getting hurt is going to break us up again. I really think we could grow into love, marriage and kids! Any suggestions on what we can do to build trust and have a healthy relationship?

IN ANY RELATIONSHIP, YOU never get a 100% guarantee that your partner is going to be honest with you, or even faithful. Instead, you have to talk to them and learn about them, their body language, and their personality until you feel sure enough. It's not really an intellectual process, but more an intuitive process that just happens.

If that confidence in your partner has been shattered, then your perspective changes because your "raw data" changes. To rebuild your confidence, you need reasons to build your confidence rather than suppressing thoughts of betrayal (how other people tend to do it). In other words, if you want to rebuild trust, you need to see what's changed. Has anything changed? Has he grown? Does he truly understand what he did and why it was wrong? How will he respond if the situation presented itself again? Picture him in that situation and, as realistically and honestly as you can, try and picture how he'd react. As long as you, objectively, you picture him betraying your trust, then he's hasn't earned your trust--for good reason. Focus on trusting yourself, not on trusting him.

Self-Acceptance or Self-Improvement?

Someone on a site I post at recently asked what people would choose between self-acceptance and self-improvement. It's a bad question because real self-acceptance is self-improvement. They are not separate things. The problem is when people don't really understand what self-acceptance is all about.

Some people take self-acceptance to mean "if I have an urge to say asshole things, I should let myself be an asshole and embrace my assholery in full." That's a very shallow understanding of self-acceptance. Self-acceptance is a psychological shift that happens when you forgive yourself for all the way you fail to measure up to your own--and others'--expectations.

Most of our expectations are held in secret. They're so subtle that you don't even realize how pervasive they are. It's like air: it's everywhere, so you don't notice it unless someone points it out. Expectations drive all of our self-improvement efforts, and all our self-management efforts. When you meditate because you don't like some aspect of your current experience or think there's something missing, you're dealing with self-acceptance. You're rejecting the part of your experience (and the part of you) you can't look at. It's what Jung meant when he was talking about the Shadow as a personality construct.

When you accept the way you feel and the chaos and confusion in your life and all the ways this moment might be missing something, you lose the urge to fight. You lose the urge to be an asshole. You see how it is and you figure out, very immediately, what's valuable in life and what you need to do--your mission. In other words, you take a big leap towards self-improvement.

Is it wrong to hang out with your ex?

Got a question? Email me at askedahn@gmail.com.


Dear Edahn,


I've been in a long-distance relationship for 7 months. I recently got a text from a guy I hooked up with a few times. We were intimate when we first met, but it was extremely casual and ended quickly because I wasn't interested. The text said that he'd been dumped by his girl and wanted to grab a beer and catch up. I told my boyfriend about it, explaining that it was just a drink but he asked me not to hang with this friend. I texted my friend back and explained the situation and he was really understanding. We decided not to see each other. When I told my boyfriend about my decision, and he was pissed that I confided in my friend although he was satisfied that I agreed not to see him. I feel really uneasy about the whole thing. Was I wrong? 


IT'S IMPORTANT IN RELATIONSHIPS that you gauge threats accurately. If Ryan Gosling asked my girlfriend to come over to have some wine and watch some porno while they fed each other mussels, I'd be legitimately incensed, and not just because I think mussels are gross. On the other hand, if I felt threatened when my girlfriend's dad asked her to come over and make him toast, I'd be overreacting. If you're reading threats where none exist, your partner will feel oppressed and confused, kind of like how you might feel right now.


I don't know if your guy is gauging this threat--the invitation to the bar--accurately or not. When I first read your story, it definitely sounded suspicious. This guy's vulnerable, he has a brief history with you, wants to drink, and purposefully mentioned his ex. On its face, it sounds like he wants to connect with you...emotionally, penisly, everythingly. But I can also see the other side of this: that your boyfriend is being possessive, and maybe his insecurity (which could likely be connected to the long distance) is making him afraid of losing you to anyone, especially this guy. He might have no idea what he's feeling or might be too ashamed to admit it. Talk to each other and try and figure out if this poses a real threat or not. Don't be afraid to speak up if you really feel you're being mistreated.

#OccupyAskEdahn

The Logo I Did for OWS

So the Occupy Wall Street movement is gaining traction. A few weeks ago I sent them a logo I made for their website and they took part of it. Awesome, right? Right.

I'm so glad to see this movement. It restores my faith in humanity a little bit, and I'm glad it's being run peacefully. When the Arab Spring turned violent in Egypt, and Libya, I lost hope in all long-term reform. Violence begets violence, begets violence.

I'm also glad to see the OWS being creative and organized. When some people are pissed, you can ignore usually ignore them. When a lot of people are pissed, you can still ignore them. But when a lot of people are pissed and organized? Watch the fuck out.

The OWS movement is about fairness and justice. On the fairness side, people want money to be distributed more evenly across classes. On the justice side, they want rich people to play by the same rules as others and not rig the system through bribery, lies, and thievery. Makes a lot of sense.

There a moral dimension to the OWS movement that's hidden in their economic demands. We've lost touch, as a nation, with our conscience. We're become so obsessed with our own lives, our notions of success, our group identities, and imaginary threats that we've forgotten some very fundamental lessons about being a good person and living with honor. Dishonesty and exploitation are some of the first lessons you learn as a kid and also some of the most important ones. These aren't principles we should ever open to debate or rationalization. They're principles we need to hold sacred with unshakable confidence.