May 31, 2005
minors fee
One of the things that I find to be most interesting is people-watching. I can make up stories for people based on nothing but, well, what I assume about them based on about ten seconds of ogling. Watching people interact with each other is interesting took, but in a much different way. It's amazing how various attributes affect how people approach others. Attractiveness probably ranks up there as the most influential variable. I can try to deny superficiality, but I'd much rather embrace it and move on. In my experience, people treat people best if they feel they can empathize with them. Whether they actually can or not is almost impossible to tell and really is irrelevant. I see this as one of those things where the first impression is really important. I'm not talking at all about friends or even people that know each other at all. I mean that to total strangers, the perceived ability to empathize is an unreasonably significant factor in their interactions. The other big one is whether one individual wants to get into another's pants, but let's just let that sit in the corner by itself for a minute.
Whether a person empathizes with someone else, I think, is not a conscious decision. It seems almost instantaneous. No one can decide anything that quickly.
Based on this thinking I have erected a theory: Men with longer hair are considered approachable and easy to relate to. Here's the thing. I've been growing my hair out now for, well, about a year. Maybe a little longer. It's something I always wanted to do and have done a have-assed job of in the past. This time, I stuck with it. I started off with a variation of what I think is a fairly standard men's haircut. What I have now certainly doesn't qualify as that: it's down below my chin all the way around now. It's not a big floppy mess or anything and I think all the J. Crew that I wear negates any premonition that I might be a hippy-type. It took almost a whole year for it to get this long.
During the growing-out process, I didn't really take much note of how people interacted with me. About a week ago, I started to get the itch to cut it off. My goal was to get it so that it would stay in a pony tail. Not for any reason, mind you, other than to check it off my list, so to speak. What better time to grow locks than during graduate school? So now that I've started to think about cutting it, I think I might be able to conduct a marginally interesting sociological experiment with myself as the subject. With the longer hair, I've noticed that people I don't know talk to me a lot. That didn't happen to me much before, at least not that I remember. People seem to want to do me favors, too, which I find to be a bit odd. Like when I was renting a car a few weeks back, I had to pay an under-25 fee, which I might add made me feel like I was about 17 years old since they call it a "minors fee". Anyway, without any sort of prompting at all, the guy behind the counter decided to use my minors fee to upgrade my car. I paid for an economy-class Dodge Neon or whatever it is they give you, and I ended up with a full-size brand new Pontiac G6 with XM satellite radio and fully automatic everything. It was a bit of a head-scratcher. My sister thinks the guy had a crush on me. I highly doubt it. Maybe she's right. In order to have a good grasp on it, I'd have to fly out to Hartford again and get a car from the same guy after I get my hair cut. Not likely.
So, sometime in the next few weeks, I'm going to get it cut. We'll see if anything changes.
Posted by ben at 3:44 PM | Comments (0)
May 30, 2005
worth a gander
I added a link over on the right of the page to Hunter S. Thompson's ESPN archive. It's entertaining stuff.
Posted by ben at 12:23 PM | Comments (0)
May 28, 2005
an excess of spare time
And so yet another of us has succumb to the digital revolution. Who exactly 'us' might be is a curious question for another time. Nevertheless, I appear to be sticking my toe into the proverbial pool of internet journaling, ranting, and general information sharing. The only problem is that I lack something truly interesting to share, but clearly that hasn't stopped many folks before me.
I find the line between opinion-sharing and ranting to be a difficult one to tread, especially in a scenario such as this. Blogging (I must mention that the spell-check on this thing just told me that 'blogging' isn't a word) is a word that was not in my vocabulary a not-so-long time ago. It's a different kind of discussion. This is a place, so to speak, in which meaningful dialogue does not take place online, ironically, but instead at a slower, more deliberate pace. One that requires depth of thought in presentation and response.
I don't have any trade-related knowledge to share. Nor am I in need of a place to vent about a world turned on its head. Personally, I'd like to know the original orientation of world's head and how anyone can tell when it's backwards. I have pondered recently the notion of 'on its head'. At the gym, there is an older man, probably in his late fifties, who, it appears, uses head-stands as a form of exercise. For 2 minutes straight, he stands erect, adjacent to the wall, holds his feet straight up, and balances uneasily on the top of his head using his palms for balance. To this man, upside-down may be a way to get fit. Or maybe it's a way for him to achieve a sense of normalcy and unity with the world for three periods of two minutes each day.
I simply have an excess of spare time.
Posted by ben at 12:38 PM | Comments (0)