(note: this was taken out of the context, therefore some things may seem a bit... out of the context ;-)

I always trust myself regarding my decisions to blacklist someone. I can forget about the cause of that, since time passes by, and I should focus on other activities. However, if a person is in my blacklist, I am sure it is there for a good reason (because it takes a committee and 5 triple-check operations before somebody is officially blacklisted).

So it is important that you learn to trust your previously made decisions. Of course, sometimes decisions need to be reviewed, because things change with time. However, the need to review decisions can be minimized if you put more thought in the process of taking the decisions in the first place. Know wa I'm sayin'? :-)

I think this was error#1.

Second, people are emotional creatures, so when you see someone make the face of the cat from Shrek2 (you've seen it, da? and you know which moment I refer to), you are of course going to soften yourself - because we're humans. The enemy knows that, and uses this strategy to take advantage of error#1.

Allow me to go on. I am sure that a random and distant person in a chatroom can become a true friend. There are intelligent people all over the place, therefore you should never fallback to the "but we used to be good friends!" argument. I know it sounds rough, but... friends can be replaced. I mean, 'friends' who ended up in a blacklist. Had they been real friends, they wouldn't have gotten blacklisted, right? Simple logic :-)

This brings us back to the starting point - learn to trust yourself and your earlier decisions. I know you can embrace this strategy, because you ARE smart enough to be able to make right decisions. Many cannot adapt this strategy, nor understand it, because they don't have what it takes to be able to make good decisions. Which is why people do stupid things and protect themselves with 'super metaphors' a la "eu traiesc cu ziua de azi", or "traieste repede, savureaza viata", or "if you're slow, you'll miss the show" (I just made this one up :-)

Bla bla bla.. I can't remember the 'best' aphorism which places slow decision-makers in a bad light... but I'm sure you know what I mean.

As we discussed in one of the earlier messages, sometimes we criticize some things, other times we turn them into aphorisms which 'intelligent' people stick to the context every now and then, to show how smart they are :-)

I say we screw them, and do things our way?. However, I have some counter arguments too. Someone has to be the devil's advocate, I'll switch to this later.

Anyway, there's no way to live a prosperous life without making 'slow' decisions, unless you are:

- a 'lucky sanavabici' who is lucky all the time (probabilities tell us this is unlikely)

- always on your parents' neck

- a leech that uses others' resources, fame, connections, means of production, goods, etc

Note: by 'slow' decision I do not mean one that takes long to take; a better way to explain it is via contrast - a fast decision is one made without thinking.

With time, you get the qualification that allows you to make fast and correct decisions :-) (reminds me of "computers make very fast and very accurate errors")

***

> and I realized that I have never been truly happy.... How sad is that?

Well, allow me to join the club.

I have recently thought about this too. What makes things as they are? The fact that we are not too stupid (so that we don't notice existing issues)? The fact that we are too intelligent (so that we see too many problems and try to resolve them all)?

I don't know if you've read the book - Camil Petrescu - "Ultima noapte de dragoste, intiia noapte de razboi". No, I haven't read it :-) But I've read a lot of reviews of it in high-school and followed the discussions in class. It covers "problema intelectualului inadaptat". The world is a cruel place, and if you keep trying to do the right thing all the time - you bump into a great number of barriers, bad people, problems, backstabbers, etc. In a few words - if your intelligence exceeds a certain threshold - you're not going to easily accept all the shit that keeps happening in the world (maybe, fail to accept it at all, and live a difficult life, thinking about how unhappy you are). One solution is to become stupid, but this is a sub-optimal solution, to say the least... Then there's the obvious - change the world to a better place, or die trying (what I am sort of trying to accomplish). As for the other solutions - I am still looking for them :-)

The above paragraph is based on the assumption that I am in the club of those whose intelligence is above the specified threshold. How modest :-) I cannot judge this, this can only be done by an outsider.

Speaking of outsiders, it is possible that we may never find out where the universe came from, nor we will find answers to some of the questions that bother us; because the answers require us to measure some quantities - but when we measure something - we change it. The change may be small, but it's there. So, it is only possible to discover everything, unless you get the chance to 'measure' the universe from the outside. Which is impossible, because 'uni' in the 'universe' implies there's only one. Parallel words and yada yada are a part of the same UNIverse. There are no 'multiple universes', it sounds like 'sportsmenka' :-)

That was the "offtopic break" of today's show.

Let me introduce a new concept I thought of in the past, and today I gave it some more thought. I don't have a name for it yet, but it's something like "Anti future-shock" (similar to 'culture-shock', but this time the cause of the shock is the future). I am too prepared for the future, and I am permanently working on pushing the bound forward, "to infinity, and beyond!"?; i.e. become prepared for the distant future too.

One simple example - my income. No clue how much of it I have, I don't use it. All I need is "enough to get me to the uni and back, and a little bit extra, for emergencies".

Somehow I always have spare empty discs (if someone asks), somehow I always have this, that, etc. Is it a bad thing to be prepared? I don't get it... Is this what they refer to with their mega-metaphoric "if you prepare too long, you'll miss the party"?

Hmm, I have deviated a bit. The topic was relationships. Let me plug in the Anti future-shock concept into this context - I expect a relationship to be very stable and very pleasant and very <insert list of features>. Which is why I am preparing myself for this, by studying and improving myself, by working, by reading books, by analyzing movies, friends' problems, families of friends, families of foes, etc. All this makes me a better partner for someone. I can also state that the process of self-improvement is endless. When do I know that I am 'good enough' to start a relationship? Is it possible that my preparations for the future will actually lead to my missing the 'big party'?

You know, I'd be pretty pissed off if it turns out those fools were right. Of course, they weren't right because they were, but because it was a coincidence, it's just that their model is more suitable for an imperfect world, such as ours (not that they?ve come to this conclusion after analyzing the problem).

So, maybe the cause of the problem is the eternal search for perfection? When you can be anybody, it's pretty difficult to be somebody :-) There you go, another one I made up just now.