Get your mind out of the gutter: I’m talking about solitaire.
I want to thank Wes Cherry. It used to be that the zeitgeist of America was its mobility. The one thing that everyone had in common with everyone else was that they had moved from someplace else to where they were and were probably going to move again, then the two World Wars established a commonality of experience and understanding.
Television came along and the collective unconscious was forever affected by Lassie’s bark, warnings to Will Robinson, the bark of M16s in Vietnam and those funky bass solo riffs that began Seinfeld. But now, thanks to Wes Cherry and his transformational programming skills, we have a commonality that transcends all national borders, a new international zeitgeist: computer solitaire. Everyone plays it, and everyone plays the same game by the same rules, even inlcuding the one-card cheat on the deal-three option.
The thing I like about Mr. Cherry’s computer solitaire is that it lends itself to so many analogies to life.
Like life, if you make a bad, uninformed or simply unfortunate choice you cannot go back and change it. No mulligans, no do-overs.
Also like life (but unlike analogue solitaire (real cards)) once the game is over you can not turn the unexposed cards over and figure out what might have been: if on the last play you could move either of the red fives onto a black six you get to chose one and if it reveals an unplayable card you are done. No peeking into what might have been.
Also like life, so many decisions have to be made upon inadequate information, inadequate often times because it’s simply not available, often times because you weren’t paying attention… (Is the other eight in the discard pile?) And like life you are inexorably bound by those decisions.
In my book, How To Save Your Marriage by Becoming a Better Man, I talk a bit about decision making paradigms, and I focused there on how important it is to make decisions that take you somewhere rather than decisions that protect you or are fear based, but Mr. Cherry’s program affords an excellent platform for expanding that analysis.
Consider this scenario: you’ve about halfway through the deck, and you play a red seven off the deck onto a black eight, revealing the prior discard, a red three. You move your black six off the five pile to your newly played red seven and uncover the other red three, and as fate would have it, you have a black four showing on the two pile. What do you do? Play the three from the discard pile or from the five-pile?
Or worse, you move the last card in a pile over to another, but you have two kings already in play, one on the six pile and one on the four. Which one do you move to the vacant spot?
And like life, you can ponder and dither and worry over these decisions for minutes or even hours and come no closer to a rational plan of action.
Perhaps a card counter and master mathematician could make an informed decision in either case based upon the cards already discarded and the order they were in when taken in conjunction with the cards then showing and the number of concealed cards remaining in each pile. Likewise in life a trained psychologist who is as wise as the Dalai Lama and as logical as Star Trek’s Spock might be able, under the proper circumstances, to make the right choice in a relationship: Should I move on? Have I done all I can do? Should I be angry? Should she apologize?
All of these are, at times, as unknowable as “Should I move the red king from pile two or the black king from pile six?”
Thus in Mr. Cherry’s solitaire I made some policy decisions, I established some protocols for how I would deal with unknowing choices. For example, if I have a choice of moving either of two cards from piles to a new pile, all things being equal, I move the one furthest away. I have two exceptions to that rule, the first being to work the “mine that’s producing”: if I turn up a double choice as I am running through a pile, I’ll move that card. The second caveat to the rule is if moving one of the two cards will create an open spot and I have a king to play.
Now here’s the thing you need to remember: my rules are pretty arbitrary. Sure, I did a little thinking about how to bring as many cards into play before I decided to add the exceptions, but the rule about the moving the furthest card is purely arbitrary. I have to move one of them and in order to avoid the unpleasant dithering, second guessing and worry, not to mention moving the game along, I have simply chosen to move the furthest card.
There always remains the possibility that had I moved the other card I might win, or I might not, but as I have no way of knowing it’s truly immaterial. As the saying goes, “You pays your money and you takes your chances.”
So too in life, you have to set some arbitrary guidelines for how you are going to make your decisions. In my experience most people kind of go on an ad hoc gut feeling approach about things which leads often to widely varied responses to similar circumstances.
Take the situation where perhaps you suspect your beloved may not have been truthful about some little thing. Early in your relationship you’ll probably let it slide and forget about it, but later in the relationship, when perhaps you are not as trusting, it becomes an issue and a question that worries and nags at you. Further on, when your impression of your beloved is tainted by your growing resentment it becomes not only of tantamount importance but yet another example of betrayal, demonstrative evidence that you should either pack your bags or kick her out.
In all three instances you come to different conclusions about how to react based upon no discernable facts, but rather about how you feel about your partner at the moment. It is the functional equivalent of moving one king over the other because you “feel lucky” or “it seems right.”
Thus, one rule I have made about my relationships is that I construe everything in the light most favorable to my beloved. If she says while doing something else “Will you take out the garbage” I could construe it to mean “why haven’t you taken out the garbage” “didn’t I tell you to take out the garbage” “you never take out the garbage” “stop that unimportant shit and do what I want” “the least you can do is take out the garbage” “I hate you and the horse you rode in on” and with each of those constructions I will generate an antipathy towards her that is, in all likely hood, completely spurious and unfounded. Alternatively, I can take it as meaning “please take out the garbage” which is a reasonable enough request for me to make of her should the situation be reversed.
But what about the lie? What about the exceptions and caveats to the decision making process?
In law we have different standards of proof. For a criminal conviction the jury must find beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the crime. That comes out to about ninety-five percent sure. In a civil case the jury has to find by a preponderance of the evidence that the defendant committed the tortuous act or breached the contract. That means it is more likely than not that it happened, or say fifty-one percent. In some instances it has to be clear and convincing evidence, figure seventy-five percent, but in no case does a jury have to find absolutely, one-hundred percent sure that something happened.
In relationships, we generally don’t bother placing any kind of standard on our decisions. If we are angry were generally one hundred percent sure of whatever fact serves our interest best, and if we are worried we wonder if we shouldn’t be one hundred percent sure before we do anything about the thing that scares us most. Some people simply believe what they want without regard as to whether there is a ten or a ninety percent chance they are right. If you were to take this approach playing solitaire you would never play the game consistently and you would spend a lot of time blaming yourself afterwards for your poor choices. “See? I should have moved the red king!” you might say, but you would be saying it because you had no foundation for the decision in the first place. When everything is hit or miss, there is no responsibility.
So, long story short, decide what your standard of proof will be: fifty percent, sixty percent, seventy… it is your call, you just need to define it and apply it consistently. If you have set a boundary and you suspect it has been crossed and your burden of proof is met then you say, “Honey, we gotta talk” and you act upon your convictions, accepting the consequence of being wrong with the same grace as if you’d been right. You don’t get do overs or mulligans… but you do get to move on with your life.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Manning Up: How the rise of women has turned men into boys by Kay Hymowitz presumes that the meme of adult male as perpetual child, the lad generation, the male incarnate as any juvenile Adam Sandler character, which she describes as the “preadult”, is the result of the socioeconomic rise of women in modern culture.
The jacket design is the best thing about the book. It’s a great graphic, and it is what will sell the book, but after that, like Neil Young said in his intro to “Don’t let it bring you down” the book “sort of starts off slow and then fizzles out all together.” It is the literary equivalent of news channel infotainment, nothing more than a sensational premise supported by opinion and convoluted presumptions designed only to generate controversy, and more importantly, sales.
I’m going to take specific exception to the title, because it presumes the one thing that is possibly the most toxic concept in any relationship and that is that someone else, or some set of circumstances that are beyond your control, are responsible for how you behave and think.
No one can make you mad, belittle you or denigrate you: we do that on our own. I have a wise friend who’s said time and again, “It doesn’t matter what I’m called, it matters what I answer to.” And in our relationships, in our lives, we are responsible for the choices we make and the consequences they bring.
It may be that as the title suggests that men are living lives of extended “preadult”-hood, or as Ms. Hymowitz tries to caveat with a “some men” in an interview with Dr. Helen Smith, (at approx 4:20) but if men are, in fact, choosing computer games over relationships, if men are choosing to be Chester Riley rather than Ward Cleaver, then understand this one thing: it is a choice. The rise of women, the conflict of who gets the check, the distinction of alpha or beta or even theta male has nothing to do with it. It is a choice. To say that men make this choice, if in fact they are making it, because of women’s relative success is simplistic at best and it does disservice to both sexes.
While the book is copiously footnoted, most of the references are anecdotal and tautological, and many of the core premises of her argument go unsubstantiated: three spring to mind easily.
On page 3 she states that “preadults are a different matter: they are a major demographic event.”
Notwithstanding that she has self-admittedly created the new concept of “preadult” without bothering to define “adult”, demographics are by definition documented numbers. A city is 23% black, 54% high school graduates, 10% LGBT: these numbers come from the census, from statistical analysis, from any number of sources public and private but they are at their core demonstrable and factual: to state that “preadults” are a “demographic event”, major or otherwise, is meaningless and pure sophistry without citation to authority.
And on page 15 she states “By the 2000s, young men were tuning in to such cable channels as Comedy Central, the Cartoon Network, and Spike, whose shows reflected the adolescent male preferences of its targeted male audiences.” It might be a commonsensical claim, notwithstanding that the Cartoon Network is the home of “The Powerpuff Girls” yet I have no doubt that Ms. Hymowitz could have contacted someone at Nielson or Tivo to document the exact demographic of these channels, but she doesn’t, and like the dog that didn’t bark in Doyle’s Silver Blaze the fact that she doesn’t is telling: like the Sandleresque slackers she derides, she gives at best a “preadult” effort at documenting her claims.
Writing of the latter part of the nineteenth century she further opines “Still, with the limited number of respectable women hanging around in billiard halls and, in any case, fairly strict rules against sex unless you put a ring on a finger, the vast majority of men - 90 percent – would soon enough become husbands” pg 129
I’d like a little authority for the presumption that social rules against premarital sex were any more effective in 1890 than they were in 1960 or 2010, and some explanation of why charities supported “lying in” hospitals where generally poor and unmarried women, seduced, no doubt by the functional equivalent of “preadult” man-boys of their time, could both safely birth their unexpected child and find moral salvation if the youth of the time were deferring sexual activity until marriage.
The truth is we are sexual creatures and the hormones that propel that drive are at their most rampant in our fertile years. Young men and women fuck around. Always have, always will, and sadly my only authority for that is my personal experience, yet even that limited authority is more than Ms. Hymowitz can muster for her claim that somehow social prescriptions against premarital sex once forced men into marriage and the absence of those social prescriptions allows today’s man-boy to live in an extended adolescence.
I will grant you if there is a phenomenon of “preadult”-hood among some men and further assuming arguendo that it has evolved over the last thirty years that there is a correlation between “preadult”-hood and the advances women have made in their economic and educational participation in society, but there is also the same correlation to be made with the decline in interest rates in the same period. Correlation is not causation.
But one of the major problems with Ms. Hymowitz’s theory is that she posits this behavior is some how new, as if Henry Fieldings Tom Jones wasn’t the eighteenth century iteration of a paradigm that has been around for all time.
As I understand one of her arguments, women’s lib, the pill, and greater education has allowed beautiful intelligent girls to “play the field” and to put off their child rearing years so that they can pursue alpha males to the detriment of poor beta males, who then slide inexorably into the perpetual childhood that is “preadult”.
This is passed off as new and interesting despite the fact that we all were in junior high school at one time or another and learned there that beautiful intelligent girls play the field and seek out alpha males. As Charlie Sheen, the paragon of extended adolescence would say, “duh… winning.”
Distilled to its core, the sum and substance of Ms. Hymowitz’s monograph is simply that some people make bad choices and choose immaturity over growth, self-gratification over introspection and behave childishly even after their personal chronology suggests they are “adults”, and she takes almost 190 pages to put lipstick on that particular pig.
The hope is that somehow, as a species, we evolve past junior high school. It seems iffy, but it could happen. Ms. Hymowitz doesn’t address how her “preadults”can grow to be more than a cruel society has forced them to be, but I can.
It requires some work, and the assiduous application of the principles in How To Save Your Marriage, but we can all, men, women, “preadults”, adolescents, senior citizens and baby boomers alike, let go of the bad behaviors that destroy our relationships and our lives.
The jacket design is the best thing about the book. It’s a great graphic, and it is what will sell the book, but after that, like Neil Young said in his intro to “Don’t let it bring you down” the book “sort of starts off slow and then fizzles out all together.” It is the literary equivalent of news channel infotainment, nothing more than a sensational premise supported by opinion and convoluted presumptions designed only to generate controversy, and more importantly, sales.
I’m going to take specific exception to the title, because it presumes the one thing that is possibly the most toxic concept in any relationship and that is that someone else, or some set of circumstances that are beyond your control, are responsible for how you behave and think.
No one can make you mad, belittle you or denigrate you: we do that on our own. I have a wise friend who’s said time and again, “It doesn’t matter what I’m called, it matters what I answer to.” And in our relationships, in our lives, we are responsible for the choices we make and the consequences they bring.
It may be that as the title suggests that men are living lives of extended “preadult”-hood, or as Ms. Hymowitz tries to caveat with a “some men” in an interview with Dr. Helen Smith, (at approx 4:20) but if men are, in fact, choosing computer games over relationships, if men are choosing to be Chester Riley rather than Ward Cleaver, then understand this one thing: it is a choice. The rise of women, the conflict of who gets the check, the distinction of alpha or beta or even theta male has nothing to do with it. It is a choice. To say that men make this choice, if in fact they are making it, because of women’s relative success is simplistic at best and it does disservice to both sexes.
While the book is copiously footnoted, most of the references are anecdotal and tautological, and many of the core premises of her argument go unsubstantiated: three spring to mind easily.
On page 3 she states that “preadults are a different matter: they are a major demographic event.”
Notwithstanding that she has self-admittedly created the new concept of “preadult” without bothering to define “adult”, demographics are by definition documented numbers. A city is 23% black, 54% high school graduates, 10% LGBT: these numbers come from the census, from statistical analysis, from any number of sources public and private but they are at their core demonstrable and factual: to state that “preadults” are a “demographic event”, major or otherwise, is meaningless and pure sophistry without citation to authority.
And on page 15 she states “By the 2000s, young men were tuning in to such cable channels as Comedy Central, the Cartoon Network, and Spike, whose shows reflected the adolescent male preferences of its targeted male audiences.” It might be a commonsensical claim, notwithstanding that the Cartoon Network is the home of “The Powerpuff Girls” yet I have no doubt that Ms. Hymowitz could have contacted someone at Nielson or Tivo to document the exact demographic of these channels, but she doesn’t, and like the dog that didn’t bark in Doyle’s Silver Blaze the fact that she doesn’t is telling: like the Sandleresque slackers she derides, she gives at best a “preadult” effort at documenting her claims.
Writing of the latter part of the nineteenth century she further opines “Still, with the limited number of respectable women hanging around in billiard halls and, in any case, fairly strict rules against sex unless you put a ring on a finger, the vast majority of men - 90 percent – would soon enough become husbands” pg 129
I’d like a little authority for the presumption that social rules against premarital sex were any more effective in 1890 than they were in 1960 or 2010, and some explanation of why charities supported “lying in” hospitals where generally poor and unmarried women, seduced, no doubt by the functional equivalent of “preadult” man-boys of their time, could both safely birth their unexpected child and find moral salvation if the youth of the time were deferring sexual activity until marriage.
The truth is we are sexual creatures and the hormones that propel that drive are at their most rampant in our fertile years. Young men and women fuck around. Always have, always will, and sadly my only authority for that is my personal experience, yet even that limited authority is more than Ms. Hymowitz can muster for her claim that somehow social prescriptions against premarital sex once forced men into marriage and the absence of those social prescriptions allows today’s man-boy to live in an extended adolescence.
I will grant you if there is a phenomenon of “preadult”-hood among some men and further assuming arguendo that it has evolved over the last thirty years that there is a correlation between “preadult”-hood and the advances women have made in their economic and educational participation in society, but there is also the same correlation to be made with the decline in interest rates in the same period. Correlation is not causation.
But one of the major problems with Ms. Hymowitz’s theory is that she posits this behavior is some how new, as if Henry Fieldings Tom Jones wasn’t the eighteenth century iteration of a paradigm that has been around for all time.
As I understand one of her arguments, women’s lib, the pill, and greater education has allowed beautiful intelligent girls to “play the field” and to put off their child rearing years so that they can pursue alpha males to the detriment of poor beta males, who then slide inexorably into the perpetual childhood that is “preadult”.
This is passed off as new and interesting despite the fact that we all were in junior high school at one time or another and learned there that beautiful intelligent girls play the field and seek out alpha males. As Charlie Sheen, the paragon of extended adolescence would say, “duh… winning.”
Distilled to its core, the sum and substance of Ms. Hymowitz’s monograph is simply that some people make bad choices and choose immaturity over growth, self-gratification over introspection and behave childishly even after their personal chronology suggests they are “adults”, and she takes almost 190 pages to put lipstick on that particular pig.
The hope is that somehow, as a species, we evolve past junior high school. It seems iffy, but it could happen. Ms. Hymowitz doesn’t address how her “preadults”can grow to be more than a cruel society has forced them to be, but I can.
It requires some work, and the assiduous application of the principles in How To Save Your Marriage, but we can all, men, women, “preadults”, adolescents, senior citizens and baby boomers alike, let go of the bad behaviors that destroy our relationships and our lives.
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