“There are times, out here at Cerberus, when I think I’m the only man in the universe. Earth was a fever dream. The people I remember were just creations of my own mind.

There are times, out here, when I want someone to talk to so badly that I scream, and start pounding on the walls. There are times when the boredom crawls under my skin and all but drives me mad.

But there are other times, too. When the ringships come. When I go outside to make repairs. Or when I just sit in the control chair, imaging myself out into the darkness to watch the stars.

Lonely? Yes. But a solemn, brooding, tragic loneliness that a man hates with a passion– and yet loves so much he craves for more.

And then there is the second kind of loneliness.

You don’t need the Cerberus Star Ring for that kind. You can find it anywhere on Earth. I know. I did. I found it everywhere I went, in everything I did.

It’s the loneliness of people trapped within themselves. The loneliness of people who have said the wrong thing so often that they don’t have the courage to say anything anymore.

The loneliness, not of distance, but of fear.

The loneliness of people who sit alone in furnished rooms in crowded cities, because they’ve got nowhere to go and no one to talk to. The loneliness of guys who go to bars to meet someone, only to discover they don’t know how to strike up a conversation, and wouldn’t have the courage to do so if they did.

There’s no grandeur to that kind of loneliness. No purpose and no poetry. It’s loneliness without meaning. It’s sad and squalid and pathetic, and it stinks of self-pity.

Oh yes, it hurts at times to be alone among the stars.

But it hurts a lot more to be alone at a party. A lot more.”

The above was an excerpt from the short story “The Second Kind of Loneliness” by George RR Martin who is by far my favorite living author and I who I believe to be one of the greatest published authors in living memory. I read this story in the anthology Dreamsongs volume 1.

I found this particular story to be…. unique.

It seemed worth sharing.

This comes from various “deals” forums. What you need:

1.  A printer with sufficient black ink
2.  An internet connection
3. One of the following:
      a.) A CVS in close vicinity that has an automatic check out lane, or

      b.) 3 CVS’s in close vicinity to you, or
      c.) A CVS with cashiers who aren’t very argumentative
4. One or more CVS extra care accounts

OK, here’s how it goes:

Download
and print from the CVS website the $5.00 off energizer batteries coupon
(print three copies!). Also print the $4.00 of $20.00 purchase coupon,
and the $2.00 off $10.00 purchase coupon plus any other coupons you
want.  Search the web for the $5.00 off $15.00 purchase coupon for cvs
and print it too. (I will abbreviate these last three coupons as the
5/4/2 coupons for the remainder of this email) Lastly download and
print two coupons for free tissues from CVS. They have different codes
on them. One is on the website now the other you can find in various
forums.

First go to a CVS, buy Energizer Max batteries on sale for 
$5.29. Use coupon on CVS website for $5.00 off energizer batteries
(they may be labeled incorrectly but the price for all of the ones
listed on the coupon is $5.29 right now, don’t know how long it will
last). This part always works. You get batteries for $0.29 + tax, for
me it was $0.31.  Try to buy the ones that have a little sticker on
them that say $1.00 off. Remove and SAVE the sticker. Please dispose of
your batteries properly!

Now here’s where it gets a little shady. It works, but it feels a little fishy. 

Do
the exact same thing again! You can go to a different CVS (what I did)
or just start a second transaction with a different cashier or if the
cashier lets you the very same cashier (they might if they want to do
the very same thing after work, if you’re a good talker you can
probably convince them). If you have an automatic check out lane just
do it yourself.  In the latter two cases (if you have a receptive
cashier or use an automatic check out lane) you can also do this all as
one transaction so you don’t have to spend any cash at all.

Now do it a third time! But this time stop and do a little
more too.  Gather together at least $20 worth of stuff you want to buy
including the $5.29 worth of the third pack of batteries and two boxes
of CVS tissues. You should use all the deals you can when picking out
this $21.00 worth of stuff. There are lots of CVS and manufacturer
coupons available for various products plus CVS has a lot of regular
deals this week. 

Now apply the $4.00 off $20.00 coupon. Then apply the $5.00
off $15.00 coupon. Then the $2.00 off $10.00 coupon.  Then the $5.00
battery coupon. Then all 3 of the $1.00 battery coupons you’ve been
saving.  And apply the two free tissues coupons which are about $1.00
off each.  Again this part depends a lot on the cashier. They may argue
with you or not apply them all saying you can only use one of the 4/5/2
coupons. In that case just use the 5.00 one and get $15.00 worth of
stuff, it’s still a decent deal. They may only let you get one box of
tissues too. Automatic check out makes it all go smoothly though.

End
result:  4 + 5 + 2 + 5 + 3×1 + 2×1 = 21. So $21.00 worth of stuff for
basically nothing. In addition since you have $15.00 worth of energizer
battery purchases you will get $5.00 back in ECB that can be spent at
CVS. Since you sepnt $0.58 + tax before, your end profit is about $4.42
+ a bunch of junk.

Now you can if you want repeat the entire process with another
CVS extra care account from somebody you know (or a fake name/address
if you want to really go to the dark side). Make $4.42 more. And again
and again and again….

And of course if you are clever you can make this more
abusive. No reason not to make $20.00 worth of purchases for all three
transactions for every extra care account really and just use ALL of
those coupons over and over and over again. You might pay a little
more  (unless you use other coupons) but overall you’d get much more
junk.  I’ve only used each of the 5/4/2 coupons once on each Extra Care
account but I would not be surprised if you could use them more than
once like the batteries coupons. The $5.00 off batteries coupons can
definitely be reused. But the $5.00 ECB that you get back only happens
once per Extra Care account, so that’s why you use multiple accounts.

I didn’t actually do ALL of this personally, partly because
when I started doing it I wasn’t aware of all of the tricks that were
available. I just wanted $0.31 batteries for my Wii remotes and xbox360
controllers. But I did a lot of it and got a lot of junk. After a while
though it started to feel kinda bad. 

So here’s my question to all of you. At what point does
manipulating the offers made by various companies like this become
immoral? Is doing all of this wrong? Is it right?  What’s your opinion?

Surely
CVS should monitor these forums right? And why wouldn’t they program
their system so that it doesn’t accept ALL of these coupons at once? Is
that too hard to do? It gets a little silly. Or are they just trying to
empty out their inventory and don’t care? Is the quantity of people who
take advantage of a trick like this so small that it really doesn’t
impact them enough for them to care?

Do you work at or know someone who works at a company like
this? Do you
know what they do to try and prevent things like this? I’m really
curious. Each time I do one of these deals I’m just amazed that it
works. It just seems like somebody must not be paying attention.

Anyways feel free to share this.  Or tattle too if you want. I don’t care. I’ve already got my junk.

Links to relevant threads with links to coupons:
http://www.fatwallet.com/t/18/790010

http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?sduid=0&t=682172

http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?sduid=0&t=679854
http://www.fatwallet.com/t/18/788981
http://www.fatwallet.com/t/18/788691

http://www.fatwallet.com/t/18/788160
http://www.fatwallet.com/t/18/790100

My friends and I had an interesting conversation in which it came to past that they started asking me about my preferences. And you know I was really surprised at how little I had to say on the matter. I really haven’t thought very much about what I personally prefer. I think a lot about what I think is right or wrong or good or bad or true or false and I have strong opinions about those things.  I even have strong opinions about what things seem beautiful or wondrous or interesting in a sort of objective sense. Similarly with things that are repulsive and disturbing. But in the subjective sense, the idea that X or Y is more appealing to me personally, or matters more to me personally, or that I want more personally, for some reason I just have never given it much thought. I wonder why that is?

I gave some answers as part of that conversation but in retrospect I’m not sure how true my answers were. I didn’t really go back and think about all of my interactions in the past and really examine myself to figure out what my preferences really look like. I didn’t give it much thought. Those things I said were just what popped into my head then and there. I’m sure there’s some truth to what I said but I’m sure it isn’t the whole story by a long shot. Ah well, I’m not gonna analyze those preferences right now either. But I will try to remember to think about them more in the future. It seems like an important thing to understand about oneself.

Someone showed me an application the other day in which you compare two people you know with regards to certain characteristics and say that one is more that characteristic than another. So for example a question might be “who is smarter?” or “who is more organized?” etc. etc. It was sort of a kind of a face off kind of a thing in which you assert your opinion about one being more characteristic X than the other. That person who wins the faceoff gets a ‘point’ and then the app stores the overall point totals.

It was a fascinating application to waste your time on if you are bored and curious about what people’s opinions are about one another and I thought it was kinda cool.

Until I installed it and started to try and use it.  Then I found out something quite disturbing. There’s another side to stating a preference. A darker side.

So I started using the program and it would start throwing people up before me and I’d have to make a judgment about whether I personally thought one of my friends was more of characteristic X than another. And you know, I found that incredibly difficult to do. I just couldn’t answer any of them! It bothered me to put down an answer. 

Even in cases where I had a true opinion that one person is more X than another I felt bad about saying it. It seemed like a good thing to compliment the one friend. In a sense you are telling them that they are X and usually X’s are positive characteristics. But on the other hand every time you tell someone that they are X you are in a sense giving a back handed insult to the compared to person. You are giving a signal to that person that they are not X or not as much X. It’s that other half that disturbed me. It’s that part that made it impossible for me to make these judgments about the people I know.

And you know I could imagine someone who wanted to communicate a negative message through that program going through and purposefully putting someone on the losing end of all of a certain set of comparisons. If you really hated someone you could go through and mark them as losing every single competition just out of spite. I could even see someone doing it unintentionally. That is over time just marking someone lower in some category which they just subconsciously see the person as lacking in even though if you asked them they might never say so.You might even come to realize it after a while and feel bad about it and start marking someone higher than others out of a desire to ‘balance’ it out. Of course that means the whole thing becomes just total BS, since your assessments no longer have anything to do with your actual opinions. Then again, I’m sure it’s always been total BS anyways since people are always like that. I’m sure people only make assessments that they see as minimally harmful or as most praising and try to balance everything out so that everyone they care about a lot gets to win in some category or another, regardless of the real truth of matter. Anyway, I digress.

It’s like this for generic preferences too. To say that I care about characteristic X sort of feels like I am also saying that I am condemning those who lack characteristic X. They are less preferable in a sense. Inadequate. Incomplete. And even though I know I never mean it that way, it still feels bad to think that it is very easy for someone to take it that way and be offended. I never want to offend anyone but people really do get offended by this kind of a thing. I’ve seen it. It may be wholly natural to be so offended.

You can do a little test if you want. Go to some social gathering and start pouring on the compliments to certain people while ignoring others. See how quickly the other people start to feel uncomfortable about it. They will naturally wonder what it is about themselves that makes them unworthy of that praise. It will bother them a great deal even if they won’t say anything. They’ll try not to take it too seriously of course, but you can bet that they will naturally cool to you in many situations. There are exceptions of course. If the observer agrees strongly with the praise being levied or cares a great deal about the person being praised they are less likely to take offense of course. But all else being equal, I think it’s really common to feel this way.

Not that I’ve ever done anything like that test of course, but I have had one experience that reminded me of it. In a class once we had to split up into groups and read each others papers and evaluate them and give them feedback. In my group I read both papers and I thought both were well written and met the requirements of the course. But the one paper just seemed way more alive than the other. The one person’s voice was vibrant and active and the person made the paper’s subject matter feel more interesting to you. You could tell this person was a skilled writer. The other person’s writing was much more static and systematic. Clear and concise and to the point, but nothing special.

Now you can’t judge anyone’s writing ability or overall talent or knowledge or anything at all from reading one stupid essay. I knew that. It could well be that the person whose essay was worse was actually the better writer but just didn’t give a damn about this particular assignment or didn’t have enough time to work on it or just didn’t find the inspiration or motivation they needed to put their all into this particular assignment or there could have been a hundred other reasons why that particular paper didn’t appeal to me. It may even just be me, entirely. That is, my preference for a certain style of writing influenced my opinion about the two pieces. It may well be that objectively speaking in terms of which essay better fulfilled the needs of the assignment, the essay that I thought was ‘worse’ might have been better. I may have been blinded by the colorfulness and cleverness of the one essay.

Well anyway, I was young and stupid back then (not that I’ve improved much) so I wanted to tell people what I really felt. So during that meeting I was heaping on the praise to the person whose essay I liked and I was luke warm at first to the essay that I didn’t fancy as much. And you could sort of feel the awkwardness of the interaction. There was an uncomfortable feeling in the air, like the sense that you get when someone makes a social blunder. And indeed that’s pretty much what happened. I was the one making the blunder.

And of course midway through I started to try and correct myself, to pull back and not be quite as praising of the one essay I like and a little more praising of the essay I didn’t like. But it was clearly forced and that just made the situation more awkward.

Weirdly I think I felt as if both people I interacted with cooled to me substantially during the course of that interaction. The reason why the person whose essay I wasn’t praising would potentially be offended is quite obvious. Why the other person? Perhaps it was that this person perceived my mistake and felt embarrassed for the other person and perhaps for me as well.  And perhaps this person also saw me as trying too hard to praise their writing. Maybe they thought my opinions weren’t genuine so much as an attempt to get into the good graces of the person of whom I was praising. And you know, in retrospect, I wonder if that wasn’t a little bit true too. Not that I wasn’t really and truly impressed with her writing of course. I would never lie about something like that. But that I was perhaps a little giving more praise than I knew was appropriate in the context of that situation in the hopes that this person whose writing impressed me so would look more favorably upon me.

Anyway, I’ve traveled far and wide but what I am saying isn’t that complicated. Every time someone says that person A is more X than person B, they are also saying that person B is less X than person A. Every time someone praises person C for having characteristic Y they are also notably choosing to single out person C while leaving persons D, E, and F’s degree of having characteristic Y unremarked upon and ignored.  And when you say you prefer persons having characteristic Z you are suggesting that persons who lack characteristic Z don’t measure up or are unworthy of your regard.

I’m not saying of course that you should avoid praise or comparisons or try to oppress one’s opinions and not develop preferences. We can’t help developing preferences. And it is really essential to our long term happiness to understand what those preferences are and where they come from.  However, I do think that that other side of preferences can be a delicate and dangerous thing to wield.  We have to be careful with it lest we hurt or offend when we never meant to do so.

My backspac key isstarting too actup.. I. neveer relalized how much irelied on it unti now

The mind is an extraordinary thing. With it you can overcome fear and doubt and anger. You can act when you are in pain and you can fight your way through sickness and you can push your body to feats beyond what you would have thought it was capable of. The mind and the mind alone overcomes weaknesses and solves problems and enables us to be so much more than we otherwise could be. If you were to ever show me that the mind could be used to move through time or or turn iron into gold I wouldn’t bat an eyelash because the things that I have seen that the mind can already do already seem so much more extraordinary than that.

But the one question I have always had. The one thing I’ve never been entirely sure of is this. Can the mind be used to change the way in which you really feel about something?  I don’t mean simply controlling your emotions. It’s clear that people can choose to act in a manner that is not in line with how they feel about something should the need arise or choose not to demonstrate or reveal their feelings about something if they so choose. In those cases it’s easy to see how your mind can govern your emotions. But can you change the emotions themselves, I wonder? Can you change what it is that you are actually feeling?

It’s obvious that feelings do change over time but the patterns of emotional change seem to be in my observation driven by experience, not will. In effect some event or events triggers a different emotional reaction in you which causes you to know longer feel the way you did about something. It isn’t a conscious choice. You don’t generally decide something like “I’m no longer going to feel X” and then simply make yourself no longer feel X. Or do you? That’s the question I have. I wonder if it is possible.

Take as a trivial case in point. I’ve been reading or rather trying to read this book. I’ve had it for months. I got it because it was well reviewed and seemed like it would be beneficial to me. It is one of those sheerly  practical books designed to teach you or benefit you in the process of learning how to sell yourself or at least present an aspect of yourself in a way that will be favorable to you under certain contexts. It’s one of the plethora of books out there designed to provide data and advice in order to give people more confidence when seeking to succeed in the competitive arena we call life..

The thing is, whenever I read this book, even for a short time, it makes me feel miserable. Not just bad, but absolutely miserable. I feel this strange mixture of repulsion and anger and dread and disgust and aversion and sadness that I just don’t want to look at it. I get this feeling like I would rather be doing anything else in the world than be reading this book no matter how beneficial it might prove to be. I just feel sick when I read this. If I read for long I feel like I want to scream or to hurt someone.  I don’t know why. I just react that way.

I’m not even a third of the way through this book despite having been trying to read it for months. That I got this far I attest only to my willpower to act in spite of my visceral negative emotional reaction to the words.  Even so it’s so hard. It seemed to take forever for me to even get past the first page.  To get further I read a little and then do something more pleasant to get my mind off of it, then read a little more. It is a slow and tedious process, but I am making progress through the book. And as I suspected, much of it looks like it could actually be quite useful to me if I choose to make use of it and even if I don’t, it is useful to know about it all.

So the thing is I don’t get this emotional response. It serves no purpose and I don’t know where it is coming from. I can see where I might have rational objections to some of the content in the book and I understand those, but I don’t understand this wholly irrational inexplicable aversion.

And my question is, can I get rid of it? Can I change this feeling?  Can I make it so that reading these words no longer invokes those sensations within me? Or is that simply impossible? Is the best I can do is become strong enough to simple experience the feelings and choose to read the book and get what I can out of it anyway? To just suffer through it? Is that the best that we can hope for? 

It’s not just that damned book of course. There’s lots of things. Lots of endeavors I seek to engage in that seem important and valuable to me but which once I start to engage in them invoke in me a similar intense emotional aversion. And it makes just so many things so damned hard to do. So I usually end up just not doing them. Why put myself through it? Of course I can overcome these feelings. I’ve done it before. Through force of will I can act anyway, despite the discomfort. But it doesn’t make me happy to do so. And the ill feelings never go away.  It just seems like a lot of wasted effort. The real problem is the feelings themselves. Unless I can change those then I think I am ever stuck in a never ending battle against myself a battle in which every time I relax my mental focus for just a moment I lose.

So that’s the question. Is there such a thing as mind over emotions?