Epimetheus

The Pool Incident: Why is everyone laughing?

*Sigh* I remember the laughter like it was yesterday. There I stood on the edge of the pool ready to dive in. Suddenly, _all_ the adults started laughing in my general direction. No, laughing at _me_. I dove in. After the dive, I had only one question for my mom, “Why were they laughing at me?” She answered, “There was this big, beautiful butterfly on your head.”

Her explanation could not undo the damage that had already been done by my brain/ego, “We have to make sure no one ever laughs at us again.” The event from that day and the resulting decision, “…to make sure no one ever laughs at us again,” has influenced my decision making process for years. It’s time for it to go.

Identifying the Process. YMMV.

Something happens which evokes a feeling, data is collected about the event; stored; and assigned a priority, a decision is then made to either avoid or seek out the conditions or event again, and finally the criteria for this event are appended or prepended to whatever thought process the brain runs before action can be taken. There are all sorts of problems with this system.

Borked.

In extreme cases, the priority gets set to, “Avoid at all costs” and results in a complete system override. Or the opposite, “Gotta have more of that goooood feeling!” which leads to addiction. Everything in between is luggage/emotional baggage and interferes with your day-to-day activity. /me points up at Pool Incident. Now that the process has been identified, we need a fix.

Fix/Patch/Update. Take Your Pick.

This is a three-part fix - yes, it is time for a list. I couldn’t resist:

• Anything asking to get stored has to get approval from me.
• Anything that sneaks past, does not get assigned a priority at all. So, even if an event sneaks in some random criteria, they will be ignored.
• All current criteria and events are under review and will be purged or have all priorities and criteria deleted.

That should just about do it.

Movie Link with Ties to Post.

Check out The Final Cut (2004) for an example of what can go wrong if erroneous data makes it into your system.