CoffeeBear.net

Outside Observations

Posted by Mark | Filed under Life

Just a cou­ple things float­ing around inside my head, longer than 140 char­ac­ters but less than full-fledged blog posts.

The Smile Experiment

I don’t think peo­ple are unhappy so much as they’re effec­tively asleep behind the wheel. Peo­ple are crea­tures of habit but we also find rep­e­ti­tion bor­ing. So most peo­ple will drive the same roads to/from work every day. After hav­ing dri­ven it a few times, we start spac­ing off or at least think­ing about any­thing but what we’re doing. And since we’re men­tally liv­ing else­where, we let our faces go slack which tends to look like frown­ing most of the time. And it’s not just smil­ing in your car that can turn another person’s day around. I remem­ber once while hav­ing a less than won­der­ful day I went to the gro­cery store, I saw a woman turn around with a pleas­ant smile on her face. I have no idea who she was or what she really was smil­ing about, but I remem­ber see­ing that smile and feel­ing almost like the smile was for me. It rather made my day back then.

Fam­ily Gatherings

Is it just me or do many peo­ple actu­ally feel more com­fort­able around their in-laws than their own extended fam­ily? When I go to some sort of fam­ily func­tion for my wife’s fam­ily, I might feel a bit like an out­sider but it doesn’t bother me much. I guess I expect to feel like an out­sider there. But when I go to one of my fam­ily func­tions, I tend to get tense & annoyed over how much an out­sider it makes me feel. My best guess on that is it comes from hav­ing not grown up with these peo­ple who’ve obvi­ously lived most of their lives in close prox­imi­ity to each other. Whereas when I was a kid, my dad was in the USMC for 20 & 1/2 years; we seemed to move about every 5 years and we didn’t live near my rel­a­tives. Sure we’d visit dur­ing the sum­mer and did even­tu­ally move back to the same gen­eral area, but I already felt like an out­sider then (prob­a­bly didn’t help there weren’t any rel­a­tives around my age when we visited).

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