1. The unspeakably pleasant weather outside must be putting everyone in a good mood. Today at Panera the cashier spontaneously decided she’d give me the cookie I was buying for free. It was quite the munificent gesture.<\/p>\n
2. I think I’m going to start using my Gmail account as my primary e-mail service. Lycos has been great but after 4-odd years and only 25M of space, it’s reaching the end of its service life. Time to step it up. My Gmail address is the same prefix as my current address with “@gmail.com” tacked on the end. I’ll update all the references I can.<\/p>\n
3. Night flight this evening. It will be a break from the routine in not only that aspect, but also in that it will be my first dual time in fully two weeks. Yes, I had that stage check two Mondays ago, but since there was no instruction, only evaluation, I might as well have been solo. I’ll see if I can’t snag some pictures tonight.<\/p>\n
4. Obligatory pretentious philosophization: Have you ever thought about the connection between acceptance and understanding, specifically from the standpoint of relationships? This subject ran through my head on the way home from work a week or two ago and Elizabeth and I speculated about it further returning from the ski trip last Saturday.<\/p>\n
I arrived at the subject thusly: Pulling out of the parking lot after a particularly long day, I breathed sighs of relief and decompression, and in doing so just muttered random thoughts and phrases as I am wont to do occasionally. Song lyrics, bits of conversation from the day, etc. That particular evening I thought about the concept of understanding, and I said, flatly, “Everybody just wants to be understood.” But as soon as I said that I thought about a similar universally-held desire, acceptance, that I had heard referenced in more contexts than my own mind. In other words, it’s more common knowledge that we all want to be accepted<\/i> by our family, peers and so on. It’s mentioned in certain circles as a driving force in our social development years and beyond–the shifting of allegiance from our parents to our peer group, the overwhelming desire to fit in<\/i>, i.e. to be accepted. And it pushes past that–think about your own social motivations. I’d wager much of what you do (and I do) can be traced back to the root desire for acceptance; add whatever trappings you will on top.<\/p>\n
So I had these two core social desires, understanding and acceptance. I started to think about the two, and this is where Elizabeth and I hashed over the subject on Saturday evening in the car. We talked about the relative importance of the two, and decided that acceptance is certainly a more universally-recognized desire, but for those of us familiar with the concept of a deep understanding, the latter becomes almost equally important, certainly in a romantic relationship. Could a relationship exist without one or the other? I can certainly think of instances in which acceptance was present without a fundamental understanding. Many heterogeneous friend groups are like that. We recognize each others’ backgrounds but push through those to accept one another. The unconditional love of a parent is like that too. My father doesn’t understand me in lots of ways but I know he loves and accepts me. But can understanding exist without acceptance? Can you understand someone’s drives and desires and not welcome them into your social circle? That’s a fair question and one much harder to procure an example for. Any thoughts?<\/p>\n
5. My car really, really<\/i> really needs a bath. And a tuneup. It’s disgusting. Both. Equally.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
1. The unspeakably pleasant weather outside must be putting everyone in a good mood. Today at Panera the cashier spontaneously decided she’d give me the cookie I was buying for free. It was quite the munificent gesture. 2. I think I’m going to start using my Gmail account as my primary e-mail service. Lycos has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1050"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1050\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}