Here’s the deal. There are two things going on right now.. There’s:

a) What’s happening, and

b) How you feel about what’s happening.

If you’re not able to separate the two, you’re screwed, because your perception doesn’t necessarily match up with anyone else’s reality.

Facts

For instance.. Let’s say I tell you the grass is green, and you don’t like the fact that the grass is green… Your NOT LIKING the fact that the grass is green doesn’t change the color of the grass.

This is what I detest so much about a lot of conversations I have with people. They’re not able to separate how they feel from actual fact.

The only possible rebuttals to “The grass is green” are “No, The grass is red” or “There *IS* no grass”.

You either have facts that disprove what I’m saying, or you don’t.

Nobody cares what you think or feel about the facts.

If you feel like this is Mars, nobody cares, because this is Earth.

I hate being sidetracked into babysitting grown-ass people’s feelings when they feel hurt about something and it brings our previously intellectual discussion to a grinding halt.

Politics

If you’re a fan of a politician or a political party, and the fact of the matter is that your candidate will say *ANYTHING* he or she has to say in order to try to get elected, the rebuttal to “Your candidate has no moral core beliefs” is not “You’re hating, because you’re not a member of our political party”.

How you feel about your candidate doesn’t change the facts. Especially if they’re on videotape and youtube and can be accessed any day at any time.

Either say “You’re wrong because [provable facts]“, or give up the ghost that I’m right, so we can move on.

Don’t go haywire and start talking about irrelevant stuff that has nothing to do with how wack your candidate is.

I’d rather not talk to you at all than waste my time doing mechanic work on your malfunctioning brain.

Dating

If a woman says she’s not giving it up to someone she’s supposedly “dating”, and then I say “If he’s not getting it from you, he either doesn’t require it in his life, or he’s getting it from another chick”, it’s in her best interests to absorb that information and add it to her set of possibilities.

There’s a reason why Monica was under the desk, Capisce? >:D

If your boyfriend’s saying he wants to do XYZ and you’re like “Nah”, good for you… *AND* recognize that he’s not waiting for you to achieve some sort of epiphany and decide that you suddenly like doggy-style or whatever… He’s gonna “Get in where he fit in”.

How you feel about that doesn’t matter.

The facts don’t change because you don’t like them.

The grass is still green, and the sky is still blue, regardless of how you feel.

Business

If you pursue a career in an industry, you have to be realistic about your chances, opportunities, and skills.

It’s easy to paint yourself into a corner, thinking that you’re better than you are at something, and then finding out down the line that you had inadequately assessed the situation.

On the other hand, it’s also easy to psych yourself out, thinking that you *CAN’T* do something that you actually could have done if you would have diligently applied yourself to learning your craft, networking, and making people aware of what you’re bringing to the table, and why they should hire you.

In both situations, how you feel doesn’t matter.

You can use how you feel to fuel you past what you ordinarily would have done, but how you feel won’t actually make you a better guitarist, singer, dancer, or accountant.

Also, if you get poor reviews for something you’re doing, strive to not let that take you out of the game, if your goal is to excel in that area of your life.

Learn to separate facts from your feelings about the facts, so you can make an educated decision about whether to continue on the same path or deviate.

Focus

The point is.. Even though how you feel matters to you, you’re a fool if you believe it matters to anyone else.

It’s POSSIBLE that it matters to them, but it isn’t DEFINITE.

Even if it matters to them or they care what you think or feel, that doesn’t mean that how either of you feels is going to override reality.

It doesn’t matter that you believe you can hit a 95 mph fastball.. if you can’t.

It doesn’t matter that the pitcher believes you can’t hit it… if you can.
–
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Tiger Woods spoke in a press conference just now. Here’s what I got out of it:

Tiger looks good. It doesn’t look like he went through plastic surgery.

According to the written speech, he’s deeply sorry for his selfish and irresponsible behavior.

He’s not as good at reading as he is at golf.

He did better than Chris Brown did, at least.

He sounds rather robotic, like “YABBA. DABBA. DOO”.

Tiger Woods does a lot for the children of the world, and he’s dedicated to making sure that continues.

He’s reading off of a paper to express that he didn’t get jacked up by his wife, Elin.

Tiger was taught to believe in core values, but he convinced himself that normal rules didn’t apply. He never thought about who he was hurting. He thought only about himself. He thought he could get away with anything he wanted to.

He felt entitled to the chicks he hooked up with, because he worked hard to be successful.

Jesus.. Could he have REHEARSED THIS? Come on, man. :/

He seemed to genuinely apologize to the families who held him up as a role model to their kids. I actually believe he’s upset that he jacked that up.

Tiger spent 45 days in inpatient therapy, receiving guidance for the issues he’s facing.

Tiger finally told these jackasses that this situation is between him AND his wife. Thank you. Finally.

Here we go. Now he’s upset! :D The only passion we heard the whole time was when Tiger was saying mind your ******* business, leave my family out of this and stop chasing them around trying to take pictures of them. Unfortunately, his passionate section highlighted how little passion was involved in the rest of the speech he read.

Tiger is a Buddhist. Starting tomorrow, he will leave for more treatment and more therapy.

He plans to return to golf someday. He doesn’t know when that will be. He’s not ruling out a return this year. He says he needs to make his behavior more respectful of the game.

He asks the people who believed in him to help him by finding room in their hearts to one day believe in him again.

Tiger then proceeded to get dap from the entire front row, including his mother.

Thoughts

I don’t know what else he could have done. \o/ I think the speech was well-written, by whomever wrote it. I believe he’s going to get more therapy for whatever he thinks is wrong with him, or maybe I should say I believe he’s going to do whatever he needs to do to get back on the golf course, make more money, get more endorsements and not get caught hooking up ever again.

Similar to his abilities to keep his woman from accessing his cell phone, his abilities to read speeches isn’t good at all. Hopefully, this will get the crying-ass pundits to move along and talk about something else, now that he’s admitted what we already knew, that he hooked up with a lot of chicks and he felt entitled to do that because he’s a rich and famous sports player.

Here’s a short video clip from the Associated Press:

Good Luck to Tiger. Had he not been married, none of this would have happened and he wouldn’t be considered a sex addict. Period.

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A friend told me a few weeks ago that she felt my blog posts were cynical. I wasn’t sure I agreed with her, so I looked up the actual definition, and I think she was exactly spot-on with her assessment.

I had taken cynical to mean “negative”, when, in fact, it actually means “aware of the possibilities and potential in a situation”. I’m definitely aware of these and I definitely apply my past experiences and the experiences that have been relayed to me by people whose word and judgement I trust to every situation I become involved in or aware of.

Cynical

1: captious, peevish
2: having or showing the attitude or temper of a cynic: as a: contemptuously distrustful of human nature and motives b: based on or reflecting a belief that human conduct is motivated primarily by self-interest.

I think the opposite of this would be to retardedly ignore what you learned from past experiences and go forward into your next relationship as if none of your prior experiences ever happened to you. Perhaps they were all flukes, and this time’s going to be that fairytale relationship that you were brainwashed to believe you were ever going to be a part of.

That’s all well and good, and I’m sure people that do this feel FANTASTIC until reality falls on them like the proverbial ton of bricks out of nowhere and then they say stuff like “How could he have cheated on me?” when she wasn’t giving it up on a regular basis. “How could she dump me?” when he was taking her for granted and treating her more like a maid than a girlfriend. So.. Yes.. The application of cynicism to dating is useful and intelligent, though sobering and potentially depressing.

A LOT OF PEOPLE would insist that cynicism has no place in dating, because how can you date someone you don’t trust? Um…. Because she’s FOYINE??? :D

Anyway… Here’s how it goes down for the cynic…

They’re Lying

Being that you naturally distrust people, there’s no reason to suspend this when you enter the dating scene. The foolish and oft-utilized technique is to suddenly apply trustworthiness to a person that declares to you “We’re going out now” or “We’re together now”. In fact, that person is no more trustworthy AFTER telling you that than they were BEFORE telling you that. This is especially true because you know they have ulterior motives in wanting to date you in the first place… you just haven’t figured out what those motives ARE yet.

If you don’t trust someone, you can’t take their word for…. well…… ANYTHING! :D This is going to seem weird at first, as you struggle to believe your so-called “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” merely because of principle. Get over it. What feels strange to you about taking their word for stuff is that you just plain don’t believe them anyway and you’re trying to convince YOURSELF that you do. Just stop it.

If they told you the truth, it wasn’t the WHOLE truth

It’s not like people think it’s fun to lie to other people.. They just feel like it’s advantageous for them in the short-term. I think it’s actually more accurate for me to say not that your SO is LYING to you so much as they’re IGNORING THE TRUTH in order to tell you whatever you need to hear to do what they want you to do. This is why the practicing cynic accepts what they say as an indicator of something that might be *NEAR* the truth, and then play the percentages.

For example.. Your SO tells you that he’s playing poker every Tuesday night. This is true. It’s also true that he plays poker alone with his other girlfriend every Tuesday night. This is the part he left out. So, when your nosey, can’t-mind-her-own-business girlfriend tells you she saw your man kiss some chick goodnight at such and such an address last Tuesday, the cynic isn’t limited by the thought “That’s impossible… He plays poker on Tuesdays”. The cynic’s mind remains open to the possibilities and potential of a situation.

Same thing happens when you ask your girl how many guys she messed with before you. It doesn’t matter and it’s none of your business, so you’re most likely to receive a direct lie or a doctored (falsified) number. She’s going to tell you whatever she wants you to hear so that she doesn’t seem like a liar for too few and she doesn’t seem like a “slut” for too many. This is called, sadly enough.. “Applying Social Lubricant”, because she’s making it easier for you to continue to date her by strategically lying to you or at least only telling you the part of the truth that makes her look good and furthers her current agenda.

Oh.. I get it now.

Cynics are extremely good at recognizing patterns and deviations from those patterns. This is because the cynic is ALWAYS looking for the REAL thing that’s going on, as opposed to what this untrustworthy-yet-insanely-attractive person they’re dating is trying to sell them. This is actually to the other person’s benefit in situations such as sex, where the cynic isn’t likely to believe you enjoyed it, even though you SAID you did… so they do it to you all over again, just to make sure! ;)

Lots of people overdo it with the cynicism though. They think they know more than they actually do and end up making up elaborate, unlikely scenarios in their minds. They get used to you coming home from work @ 5:45 every day, and then when you arrive at 6pm, they figure that you spent that MYSTERIOUS 15 MINUTES cheating on them. :/ Struggle against this pathetic scenario. Try to focus on *useful* patterns like how he only smokes after sex and when you first arrived at the party tonight… he was smoking.

Cynics on Cynics?

Should cynics date cynics? Absolutely! :D There’s a certain camaraderie to be found between two social mercenaries that don’t trust anybody, including each other or themselves. “What’d you do last night?” “Nothing. How about you?” “I was just chillin.” “Yeah, Right.” “Yeah, Right.” “See you next week!” “Have a good one! Don’t do anything *I* wouldn’t do!” “Whatever!”

It’s a lot of fun, because you get to guess what they actually did and you know they’re lying to you, at least by omission, and you’re doing the same thing to them, except it’s by agreement. It’s like two warring countries sitting down at a table to talk about peace, which is never going to happen, but you still admire each other’s abilities on the battlefield and you can relate to each other as people on opposite sides of the game, but that do the same things and utilize the same tactics.

Strangely enough, the cynic can derive a form of trust in his or her fellow cynic that can’t be found in an average person. The only thing you can trust about people is that they’re going to do what they want to do when they want to do it. Through consistent interaction with people who bend the rules in their favor, the cynic begins to understand the pattern of the boundaries of what you can expect from someone. This person would never cheat in a game of chess, because that defeats the purpose of attempting to defeat his opponent mentally and strategically… however, if you leave your girl laying around, it’s a wrap. Therefore, you never trust the other cynic COMPLETELY, but you learn what you CAN trust about them.

This is way better than dealing with most people, who don’t really understand who they are because they play the game by the rules and do what other people tell them to do instead of figuring out what they REALLY want to do with their lives. Middle-of-the-road people should be trusted THE LEAST, because when put in extreme situations, they don’t know how to handle them and end up doing things that even THEY consider “out of character”, when their character was never tested and assessed in the first place.

Cynics know who they are and they’re fighting to win for themselves and get what they can get out of you. There’s something honorable in their up-frontness about that, regardless of how devious they actually are.

Do Opposites Attract?

Should non-cynics date cynics? Nope. :) It’s gonna be a tough row to hoe, unless you’re an impeccably above-board person. Even when you DIDN’T do anything wrong, the cynic’s going to be looking for it. Even when you’re telling the truth, the cynic is only going to absorb a small percentage of it as “truth” and most of it as “possibility”.

The cynic will never hand over any form of control in the relationship to you, because they obviously know better than you do about things, because you’re not a cynic and therefore not as discerning and calculating as they are. The cynic will let you BELIEVE you have power, so long as your decisions remain within the boundaries of what they would have suggested anyway.

Just about the only good thing for you about dating a cynic is that once they’ve judged you and judged you and judged you and judged you and judged you and they determine that you’re A-OK, the cynic will really be there for you. So many people have been tested and failed MISERABLY, that once you pass, you will receive the perks reserved for the people who made the grade.

The only question becomes whether you’ll want to stick around that long to see if you qualify or whether you will have bounced a long time ago to date someone that’s willing to accept you as-is, at face value, and assume that you’re innocent until proven guilty, instead of the other way around.

~Bill

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