thedwick

In a word, it was beautiful. We had a fantastic time, especially on the island of Vis. I’ll have to come back to this post later to describe some more…

…ok, I’m back. So my impression of Croatia is almost entirely limited to the island of Vis on the “Dalmatian Coast”, but as I said it was absolutely beautiful. Everything was so clear and warm and inviting. The buildings had real history to them. I mean 1000+ year history, not the wimpy 100 year history we have here in California. The people who live there were all friendly and beautiful and helpful.

One day we rented scooters and scooted to the opposite side of the island. The center of the island is all vineyards, just as it had been for hundreds of years. We scooted through that and out to the other side where we had great pizza in smallish village and then scooted back, stopping at a little beach to swim on the way back.

We also spent some time in Split, the center of which is a 1000 year old castle/palace/walled city. Everything there is stone; stone that’s worn in just the right amount that it has a soft, lived-in feeling but not so much that it all looks like it’s crumbling down.

One of the nicest things might have been the general lack of Americans (except those who came for the wedding we also went for). I love Americans, but it does feel that much more like a vacation if I’m not surrounded by my fellow countrymen. That’s not to say the place wasn’t bulging with tourists, it’s just that they were all German, Italian, other Croatians, and a smattering of Brits.

We’re going to Croatia today for a week. I have absolutely no idea what to expect but I’m sure I’ll have something to post when I get back…

So I grew up loving the Babar the Elephant stories. We just checked Babar the King out of the library for our son and he loves it, too. The thing is, as I was reading it I was struck by how subtly it sounded like Marxist propaganda: all about the workers and a celebration of collective labor, overseen by a benevolent dictator and an intellectual ‘old lady’…

I suppose it would make sense. The story was written in 1933, during the first serious stirrings of what would become communism. I figured I couldn’t possibly be the first person to have this impression, so I hit Google trying to find others who have had the same impression and came up with…nothing! That’s the first time that’s happened.

The best I could do was the book Should we Burn Babar?
that actually has the opposite opinion saying Babar was a colonialist and actually arguing that the Babar books are the opposite of leftist, and in fact are evidence that there needs to be more of a leftist bent to children’s literature. The closest I came was a user review of that book on Amazon saying basically that Kohl (the author) had it all wrong.

Humph. So there you go I guess. Finally I’m the first on the Internet to have an opinion about something.

So I took a different position in my same company today that will mean me going back to development instead of managing people. It’s on a system that’s going to see a lot more growth and is closer to a business group (trading) and is planning to completely re-architect itself over the next couple of years. I’m really excited about it.

I feel like if I’d gone 6 more months in a management job, my skills would be so rusty I’d have no hope of going back. As it is, I’m a little afraid they’re pretty rusty now. My hope is that I can find my way through one way or another until I actually know what I’m doing again .

First, I need to go back to relearning how EJBs work….

Miles,

I have a confession to make. Today, when you saw me eating chocolate chips and wanted me to share them with you, I tricked you into thinking they were Cherrios instead and gave you those. I’m not proud of it, but I think future-you will understand. What was I going to do? Give a 2 year old chocolate chips? Stop eating chocolate chips myself? You seemed perfectly happy eating the Cherrios. I think you just wanted to be eating what I was eating; you’ve never in your life eaten a chocolate chip so you didn’t know the difference….

Love,

Dad.

So I was reflecting just now on happiness and satisfaction and I think a truly unique thought just hit me:
Life is set up so people are fundamentally unsatisfiable.
That sounds more pessimistic than it is. And I’m not trying to say that life sucks, or everything’s pointless or anything angsty like that, just that if you think about it, we’re all really unsatisfiable.

Consider the happy-go-lucky person who really is capable of being satisfied. If he had a certain level of wealth, security and basic position in life, he probably would be satisfied. The problem is that in order to attain those things, he needs to compete with other people to get them and to keep them.

The problem is that some of the people he has to compete with are unsatisfiable, hyper-competitive types. No matter how much they have, they won’t be satisfied if someone else has more. In any contest for resource or position, the unsatisfiable people are likely to win because they have just a little bit more edge in them.

So there you have the paradox. The people who could potentially be satisfied don’t have the stuff. The people who have the stuff can’t be satisfied. Maybe it’s possible, with this revelation in hand, to create a split in your mind. To have the competitive person only come out when necessary and have them go away when not. I suppose that remains to be seen.

Now obviously these are sweeping generalizations. There’s always the humble little grandma who wins the lottery, or the oil tycoon who sees the light and retires to run an orphanage. But those are the exception.

I’m also not talking about happiness, necessarily. It’s possible for both those people to be happy, especially if they tend to be optimistic kinds of people. It’s just that they’ll never be satisfied.

This whole question is especially interesting to me because I feel like at one point in my life I was the easily satisfied person without an edge, and now I’m the unsatisfiable person with an edge. As soon as I got that edge to me I became much more successful, but no more satisfied. At every point, though, I’ve been equally happy.