H: hemlock! why arent you married yet?
me: there are no guys around here, you got any in NY?
H: there’s plenty of guys in NY. what are you looking for?
me: find me someone who doesnt drink.
H:[pause] there are no guys in NY.

heh.

le sigh. have a good holiday my friend. seeing you happy makes me happy :)

Gerry
Don’t be merry
Because you’re so very
Ordinary
On the contrary
We can meet on the prairie
With pixie dust and fairies
But if he’s really hairy
You’ll have to go with Kerry
And i will stop rambling now

thank you. much appreciate.

i feel like having a limerick competition. who wants in?

“chai main dooba bisKUT ho gaya…”

i love it!!!

[eds' note: we fear hemlock may have lost it completely.]

countless hours are spent trying to piece it together, resulting in frustration, intrigue and resentment. yet once the picture is complete, it gets framed and hung on a wall, never to be played with again.

a new puzzle is acquired and the cycle repeated.

i’m glad some of my pieces are missing. makes for a far more interesting (albeit incomplete) picture.

Overacting. Over board. Overwhelming. All those stupid questions.

As I look back now, I’m embarrassed by my behaviour.
No one over-reacts. Their reaction is only based on their expectation of the issue.

My kid sister, who is currently doing a study abroad program in Melbourne, and I had a recent conflict which highlights my point well.
I wanted her to say goodbye to everyone before she took off, my oldest sister lives in Indianapolis and I, in Minneapolis. I arranged for her trip to be one week in Indianapolis and then concluding with another week in Minneapolis.

But plans didn’t go as expected, specifically she ended up spending both weeks in Indianapolis, in which she was pretty upset about; hoping to still salvage her trip to Minneapolis, it was expected that I pick her up in Chicago for the weekend. But since, it would only allow her just a few hours (far more hours than it would take to drive there and back) I opted not to do so.

In these events, as tempers were unnecessarily flaring, we only briefly spoke to each other; which is extremely counter productive, but I reckon it seemed better than actually arguing with each other, as none of our expectations were addressed. This only made matters worse though.

She, then returned to New York, and at that point,she “dramatically” deleted me out of her life.
Since, I live away from family, I rely heavily on “social media” applications to communicate and be updated about the happenings of my family.
The perils of this, is that it can easily, and perhaps sometimes irresponsibly, break without thoughts bout the ramifications.
I’ve been guilty of this, myself.

Though, as she was leaving for Australia, she decided to begin communications without addressing the issues we had at hand. As, we spoke, and as I read and replied to her emails, I couldn’t help but feel the ever growing presence of the white elephant in the room.
And so I waited for her to bring up the matter, because I didn’t want to be too aggressive about it.

Since, she didn’t – I finally, did. And we, then commenced with having another issue about that issue.

So, I’ll highlight some of my faults here and the many opportunities that I had to correct them.
1) Communicate (as obvious as it sounds) the best way to stop a conflict in it’s tracks, is to look for signs of when one is brewing.
Though, there were two main parties involved in this conflict, there were many others also; it’s best to get everyone connected and flesh out those assumptions so we do not make more errors in our judgment.

2) Underline expectations and flexibility
I expected to pay a very passive role in my sister’s trip. I’ve elaborated that by handing over payment information and allowing her the liberties of doing her flight for herself. It allowed her to play a more active part in the planning and an acknowledgement role on my part. But, as a conflict evolved, we needed to change roles more and at a rapid pace.

Also, in terms of expectations, I would not make a 14 hour trip for my sister to spend 5 hours in Minneapolis. I was exhausted from work and looked at it from that analysis.
What, I failed to also realize though, was the importance my sister placed on saying goodbyes (or perhaps I felt as if she did not place enough to miss her flight out) but she would not see me for a huge majority of the year.
The amount of time she spent in Minneapolis was irrelevant to the importance of seeing and saying goodbye.

And she “over-reacted” and I seemed underwhelmed by everything, because we seem to always have a problem where she seems too “over-reacting”, “too dramatic” and a lot of work to deal with.

This was perhaps the key to our problem – the ill placement of expectations and the behaviour that follows it.

As I move forward, I constantly think about meeting and understanding expectations, as well as expressing the importance I place on my expectations too.
Though, sometimes, this can seem as a lot of work (I still catch myself thinking it is so overwhelming dealing with people with behaviours that I coined “dramatic”) but it pays off in the end.

It is also a catch phase so things do not become too “dramatic”.

These were some of the lessons I’ve outlined in the past few weeks, and I wanted to share them with you.

Finally, you will always meet people who’s priorities of their expectations you may be unable to meet. At, that point you should look at the bigger picture and get the task at hand resolved rather than being caught in the web of details.

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

random person - Anse Lazio, Seychelles (31-Dec-11)