buter's BABY blog

So I'm still hanging around on Facebook and yes it's eating my life. Sad really. But if you know me and know me on FB then you've read my apology and so now you can all stop gloating and instead laugh over D™'s lack of resistance to it.

So anyway one of the time-wasting joys on FB is the "Are you like me" application where you rank 10 items from most true to least true, and see how well your choices match to your friends' choices. Sometimes it's eerie - the number of matches I have with Hiren is just uncanny. But I've just been sent a link to the "Your wildest dreams" quiz and I'm stuck.

If the choices are these:


.. and others in the same vein, then I have no idea. I honestly don't want any of these because each one has a significant downside, in my opinion. So maybe I should rank them in order of least- rather than most- wantedness ... but what really concerns me is that I don't think I have any "wildest dreams" - not that I have identified recently anyway. Have I really become so content with my lot? Or rather, does it just mean that I've lost my imagination and got stuck in the practical realities of day to day life with the peanut? What a sad thought.

I do have some dreams, but I wouldn't call them wild. I don't think FB has a quiz that has these answers, so I might as well blog about them :)

• See Peanut grow into a lovely adult;
• Go back to work and move ahead in my project management career;
• Find some new books to read;
• Have a long and happy life with D™, Peanut, and maybe a sibling for her;
• Travel to France and spend maybe a month there;
• Go skiing in Colorado, no, wait - just go skiing again, anywhere!!

These things aren't all that wild and most of them I have some control over and so I will be able to pretty much achieve them. Does that make me into a more boring person because I don't want to be a sports star or win a million dollars?

Sigh.

It's an interesting thing, to think about how you learn something. I'd go so far as to say, the way that you learn influences how you deal with unfamiliar situations. If you're a person who learns best by reading or by listening to someone else talking to you, it's possible that you handle new situations differently from someone who learns by doing. Even more than that, I bet it influences career choices too. If you learn by reading/listening you may be more likely to feel comfortable learning in an academic environment, i.e. university, than a vocational environment, so you're more likely to end up with a desk job than a trade. Maybe?

Anyway Lifehacker posed the question: find out how you learn. So I did the survey and discovered I'm a visual learner, but balanced verbal and non-verbal - I learn best from visual materials whether it's text or images, compared to learning by doing or by listening. Well, I knew that already! Anyone who's tried to give me directions will know that. I basically can't find my way there again if someone else has driven me there, or if they tell me the directions over the phone. If, however, they write them down (or I do) then I'm fine with it - ditto for map reading. That's what they're for after all!!

Since I'm not currently pursuing any academic learning, what does it matter what my learning style is, I hear you ask. Well, it's a funny thing but I think surveys that tell me about myself are more useful for telling me how to deal with other people than anything else. So, if I'm a visual learner and I write someone some instructions, I get frustrated when they don't seem to get it. After all, if it's written down that should be enough shouldn't it? But for many people, I guess it isn't really. So instead, maybe I need to figure out what *their* style is, and present the information accordingly. Or, to be brutally honest, the person receiving the information should know what their style is, and request the information accordingly. As in, I know I learn best by reading, so I ask for written information. Simple, eh?

... on rereading I realise there's some pent up bitterness in that last few sentences, you can tell that I may have had trouble training people in the past. Maybe I'm not such a good teacher as I am a learner :)

...

I'm not working at the moment.

I don't realise how little I've done each day until about noon - at which point I have some lunch, and then ponder going out, during another couple of games of solitaire, so sometimes it's about 3pm before I manage to even go outside.

I used to be such an organised, busy person. This time wasting thing is really weird and yet strangely comforting. There's just nothing that needs doing more than sitting here on the lounge with my feet up. Time enough to have things to worry about later.

... and it's back to the game.

The other day, listening to parent radio, they played a snippet of a song that had the lyric "pour myself a cup of ambition" and I thought, what a great blog post title (and I don't think I'm the only one). But then realising that I was on my way home from my last day of paid employment for a while I figured that I probably wasn't in the best place to be writing about ambitions.

But hey, after a few days bumming around I figure maybe I should use the time constructively and instead actually put some words down about my ambitions. I mean, just coz I'm not being paid right now doesn't mean that I don't have any ambitions, right?

So thinking about it, what kind of thing makes up an "ambition" instead of just a "I wanna do that thing" concept? Is it just that you want to have no regrets? No, because that falls under "I wanna do that" and in my book includes things like bungy jumping and skiing in the Northern Hemisphere. So maybe it's stuff like "I will feel more fulfilled as a person if I do that" .... but then that implies that I'm not satisfied with who I am, and that's not really true either.

Back to the start then, and google for ambition. You get career consultants. articles from TIME, other stuff all pointing to ambition being involved with your paid for employment. Does that mean that those of us who are bumming around at home have no ambition? Is that a bad thing? It seems like it should be a bad thing, seems vaguely negative in connotation.

Merriam-Webster says

1 a : an ardent desire for rank, fame, or power
b : desire to achieve a particular end

Hmm. So maybe it's usually all tied up with corporate or commercial achievements, but doesn't have to be. And it is all tied up with "I wanna do that" after all.

Well, I guess I will keep pondering it for a while.

Or more specifically, what rhymes with laugh and also ends in - augh?

Girraugh.

Caugh.

Umm.

So, nothing much then.

Maybe a better question is what makes you laugh (and does it end in -augh) ?

Goethe said "Men show their characters in nothing more clearly than in what they think laughable." So I wonder what you can infer from my list ...?

Ten things that make buter laugh:

1. I often find funny things when reading other peoples' blogs. If so, they tend to make it onto my bloglines. Like, say, bash.org.


2. Dilbert comics, some of the time. A wry "That's uncomfortably true" kind of laugh.


3. The rhyming scene from The Princess Bride. "No more rhymes now, I mean it!" "Anybody want a peanut?" Every time - gets a giggle or at least a grin. And that's a lot of times.


4. That time when Buffy says "You have but face" in Season 4. Or that time when Willow says "How come the sudden calisthenics, aren't you sort of naturally buff, Buff? Hee - buff, Buff". Or the time when Willow says "I'm Cletus, the slack-jawed yokel" Or .... bugger it. Just about any episode of Buffy has me sniggering, chortling, or holding my sides.


5. When Garion says Push. I know the link is in Finnish or Swedish or something but there is a complete quote in English there. Giggleworthy.


6. The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy (the book and radio series), for the most part. More like my brain is amused and I'll smile than a real belly laugh but it consistently happens. The only scene in the movie where I laughed was when they all turned to wool and someone barfed. Hey! Baugh! Hee.


7. When people say inconsistent or wrong things and the newspaper prints it as if it was normal. Like when Bazza O'Fazza said that thing about the Easter Bunny, implying that it was the point of Easter.


8. Microfortnights, and other strange units of measurement.


9. In fact in line with that last one, I find lots of word games amusing. Here's another one.


10. And finally ... myself, when I do something silly, especially if D™ starts laughing at me, then I start laughing at me, then I can't stop laughing at me until I collapse with exhaustion and breathlessness. That's a belly grabbing laugh

So. I await your analysis .....

Post inspired by the happiness project .... sometimes it's fun thinking about what makes you happy!