Some Blog Site

Somewhere along the way, the idea caught on (whether via romance novels or Hollywood or other) that there is one person in this world whom you were meant to marry. It does make for a good romance story – finding your one true love.

But I disagree that’s how the world works.

And I think that idea is bad for marriage.

First of all, if your chance of finding the right spouse was really 1 in a few billion, just about no one would ever have a good marriage. Those are horrible odds.

Second of all, throughout 99.2% of history, people have not had the luxury of searching the world for their one true love. So their search for love was confined to their local area. Again, what are the odds that your one true love would happen to be from your town, or the next town over? Yet people have successful marriages in this situation.

You may say “well, they had to make those marriages work, because they didn’t really have much of a choice.” And that’s the point, whether you have much of a choice or not, you have to make your marriage work. The problem with spouse-finding today is that people are not so much contrained by geography, so the wider-cast net brings so many choices, and that brings anxiety about making the right choice, and easy regret about making the wrong choice. Look up “the paradox of choice” for more on that effect.

And lastly, the reason it is bad – it puts people in the wrong mindset about marriage. If someone is looking for his one true love, let’s assume he finds someone and marries her. Then, because they are two different people and nothing is ever perfect, they start to have a disagreement after a little while. Things get rocky, and because he is of the understanding that his soulmate is supposed to be out there, he gets to thinking that this woman he married must not really be his soulmate. Therefore, he thinks he must have married the wrong person, and then the marriage really falls apart.

If he’s expecting there is one person meant for him, what will he do when the relationship starts to get rocky? Lament that “I thought she was the one…” Well, if you married her, then she was the one. Is the one. Make it work.

Successful marriage isn’t about finding the perfect match, but about being a good spouse. Most people throughout history didn’t get too much of a choice of a spouse, but still had good marriages because they got out of it what they put into it. And they didn’t expect to be a perfect match.

Don’t get me wrong – I still think you could make a wrong choice about someone. Just because there is not a 1:1 soulmate ratio out there doesn’t mean that just anyone would be a good spouse for you.

Think of it like the lesson from Ratatouille: not that everyone can be a good spouse for you, but that a good spouse can be from anywhere. Or maybe not exactly like that, but you get the idea.

Here is a guest post I wrote for SCL back in the day (2011 in case you’re wondering). It wasn’t run because I didn’t actually write a full blog post for Jon, I just sent him an outline of ideas. But I decided to fill it out and present it to you today.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to a church that fills out pew-by-pew attendance forms, but a decade or two ago it was not uncommon for certain churches to keep an attedance registry in each pew.

In part of the service (usually during the announcements), the congregation would be instructed to have the person on the end of the pew take the attendance sheet, fill out their info, and pass it to the next person. Then the ushers would collect them all and in theory someone would look at them later. Usually that person would be the church secretary.

On some occasions, I would visit my brother’s church. No, he didn’t own it, it was the church he attended. I had to make sure I sat upstream of him so I got the attendance form first. Because if he got it first, he would fill out his information correctly but then also fill out my information.

Now if you can’t picture the church attendance registry form in your head, you need to picture that there is a line for name and address and phone number, and then there are checkboxes for things like “I am a visitor” and “I would like more information about the church” and “Please contact me about church membership” and various other options. All of which my brother would mark for me.

In this case, we both knew the church secretary (one of my other brothers), so I knew it would go nowhere. But he would also do the same thing in other churches, so I had to be on my guard – check the pew for an attendance book, grab it first or sit between him and the book.

Other times, if relatives weren’t visiting the church, my brother would make up names for the people in his pew. He’d get the number right, so the church attendance figures would not be off, but instead of his name he’d put Clark Kent, or Ronald Reagan, or Barry Sanders, or whatever. Just to provide some amusement to the church secretary during a probably otherwise dreary task.

What was fun was when my one brother forgot to tell my other brother that he wouldn’t be working in the church office that week. Then the backup secretary would have to sort through the attendance records and have to figure out why they didn’t notice Clint Eastwood was in the congregation that week.

Due to some recent snowfalls, we have nice wintry scenery around here. I wandered around the yard and took some photos to share with everyone. No commentary, just photos.

I’ve seen the internet grow and change, almost from the beginning (read the whole post for context). And it continues to grow and change.

I’ve also seen my kids grow and change, from the beginning. And they continue to grow and change.

With humans, there is a known growth and development process. Imma gonna list the typical stages of growth of a person, and then compare it to the internet.

Human developmental stages, according to Erik Erikson

• Infancy : Birth to 18 months – A strong, positive and loving connection is established between a mother and her infant during this period.
• Early Childhood : 18 months to 3 years – Children learn to become more independent and develop a sense of personal control.
• Play Stage : 3 to 5 years – children become more observant of their environment and the people surrounding them.
• School Age : 5 to 12 years – Children begin to expand their world to include more people. Children at this stage have a need to be productive and experience a sense of accomplishment.
• Adolescence : 12 to 18 years – Adolescence is a complex stage as individuals search for a sense of identity. Acts of rebellion and withdrawal may occur.
• Young Adulthood : 18 to 35 years – Young adults actively seek out love and companionship in this socially active stage. Some young adults may wish to start a family, others may wish to embark on adventures.
• Middle Adulthood : 35 to 65 years – Significant importance is placed on work and family matters. Significant life changes can develop during this time.
• Maturity : 65 years to death – Individuals tend to reflect upon their lives at this stage. Some adults may look back with a sense of fulfillment and happiness. Others at this stage may feel regret, despair and a sense of failure.

Ok, that was for a human. Now let’s move to the internet, which is really just interactions of people remotely.

Internet developmental stages, according to Some Guy

• Infancy : 1965-1982. ARPA – Network users learn to interact remotely, proving out technical concepts
• Early Childhood : 1982-1993. BBS – Users learn to interact socially
• Play Stage : 1993-1998. WWW – Users experiment with presenting information to the world
• School Age : 1998-2008. Search Engines – Users find ways to organize information
• Adolescence : 2008-2014. Mobile – A new frontier opens up, with new freedoms and little responsibility.
• Young Adulthood : 2014-2020. Social media – Users present and are presented with round-the-clock updates, banding together sometimes, othertimes isolating themselves.
• Middle Adulthood : 2020-???. Whatever now is – People decide to focus on either real life or online life.
• Maturity : ???-x. Whatever the future is. Not sure how long it will be, but it’s the final stage, so whatever was birthed in the previous stage or two should be in adulthood by this time.

There, that’s my 5-minute delve into that topic. For more in-depth analysis, find someone who needs a thesis topic on societal development. Or read the Foundation series by Asimov.

I just watched Encanto last weekend, so I have that going through my head. And one thing that popped into my head during the movie was something like this:

Not that I ever saw that other movie, but I heard enough references and saw enough memes to figure it out.

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these is a tweet.

• There is the phrase “standing water”. But to me it looks like the water is sitting. How can you tell if water is sitting or standing?
• All store-label chocolate milk around here seems to be made with skim milk, and it’s the cheapest chocolate milk, but you get what you pay for. If you want stuff that actually tastes good, check that’s it’s whole-milk chocolate milk. We buy the stuff from local dairy, which our grocery store is kind enough to stock on their shelves.
• What did Water do to get kicked out of the band Earth Wind and Fire?
• When I’m not drinking milk – or water, or orange juice – I like iced tea. But the flavors vary with the brands. For instance, I prefer Pure Leaf raspberry tea but their peach tea is not so good. And Snapple has good peach tea but not so good raspberry tea.
• With animal testing not so popular anymore, what is the modern equivalent of a guinea pig? Like what do kids these days call someone who is the test subject?

I wish I would have started working on cars earlier in life – it would have saved me a bunch of money. Here are some things I’ve learned over the last few years of working on my own cars.

• When replacing suspension components that involve removing sway bar links, plan ahead and get new sway bar links. This tip does not apply to places where cars don’t get rusty. But around here, sway bar links are considered single-use. They are designed to be able to be removed and re-installed, but that’s only in a perfect world. They’re cheap enough that it’s not worth my time to try to save them. I’ll give it one attempt to undo them, but if they don’t cooperate I just get out the angle grinder and off they go.
• Speaking of sway bar links (and other stubborn rusty connectors), a good tool to have is an impact wrench. It doesn’t loosen everything, but it has helped. And it helps tighten those sway bar links. I got a cheap electric one from Harbor Freight. I went with corded electric because I don’t have shop air and I don’t use it enough to make it worth managing batteries.
• The steering wheel on the van was wobbling. Slowly at low speeds and faster at higher speeds. That seemed like an easy diagnosis – one of the front tires broke a belt and is now out of round. So I swapped out the front tires (normal to winter or vice-versa) but the problem continued. I took it to the shop and told them what happened. It didn’t take them long looking at it to find it was a rear tire with the broken belt. Moral of the story: just because the symptom is in the steering wheel doesn’t mean the problem is in the front end.