This post will self-destruct in . . .
Well, actually, probably it won’t. But a post at Cindy’s made me think about advice, and about being self-destructive, and about the odd interfaces sometimes between the two.
As everyone who’s ever met me in winter will attest to, I regularly do not zip my jacket in the winter. Yes, it’s cold. Yes, I stand there shivering. Yes, this irritates everyone I know to no end. No, I don’t ask inane advice like “How can I warm up?”, but it’s no less irritating to other people. I know this. And I’m cold, too, when I do this.
This is almost certainly some sort of subtle self-destructive stuff. But it doesn’t feel quite like it. It lacks the crucial (to me) element of control. It’s also in many ways unconscious, not deliberate. Still: it is something I have done for years.
I am sure I sometimes ask advice, knowing I intend to do the wrong thing, hoping both that someone will talk me out of it and that no one will — that someone will agree with this course of action, bad though it may be. (Sometimes I just ask for advice hoping people will tell me to buy things for myself.)
As I said at Cindy’s:
Depends what the question is, really. But usually it’s that they need someone to tell them what they’ve already decided on is ok, or to otherwise balance off what they want and what they know.
Sometimes they’ve decided on something good and sometimes something self-destructive, though.
I can’t always tease apart what I want when I’m asking for advice until after I get it: sometimes, advice is good for just that — figuring out what you want by your response to different suggestions. (Flipping a coin also works, sometimes.) But I can be looking for so many different sorts of things that it becomes difficult — and perhaps silly — to try to figure it out beforehand: the advice is crucially part of this process.
January 27th, 2005 at 7:24 pm
I’m confused. You stand around with unzipped jacket in the cold — but you don’t complain about how cold it is and threaten to move somewhere warmer? Then what’s the point of freezing? If you don’t complain why do you bother?
I understand the part about advice though. If you don’t want to ask your friends you can use the Tarot or the I Ching.
January 28th, 2005 at 8:15 pm
It was -10 F here today and people kept saying to me, “Zip up your coat!” But I can’t be bothered to zip up my coat if I’m just on a short walk between buildings. If I zip it up, I’ll just have to unzip it again. All that wasted energy. I only zip it up if I am going to be out for hours, like skiing or something like that. I don’t think of myself as lazy, just efficient.
January 30th, 2005 at 2:24 am
I generally don’t zip up my coat either, but then I live in a pretty mild weather region.
In high school I would occasionally let myself get drenched in the rain for no apparent reason. I remember once spending almost the whole break between classes standing outside in a downpour in the space between the building I was coming from and the one I was going to. By the time I ran upstairs to my next class I was absolutely soaked.
When I opened my backpack to take out my notebook one of the students sitting next to me saw that I was carrying an umbrella. She asked me why I hadn’t used it.
To which I replied, with a shrug: I didn’t want to get it wet.