worldmegan

It’s time for the Usual Error Intensive, week five! Are you excited?? Omg are you excited?? I’m excited! It is time for my Usual Error liveblogging extravaganza! Keep reloading, friends and neighbors! Can I get a few more exclamation points, please?!

If you’d like to see my previous posts on Positivity, I’ll list them here:

• Positivity (Preview)
• Positivity (Part One!)
• Positivity (Part Two!)
• Positivity (Part Three!)
• Positivity and the Usual Error

Our One Bullet Point For the Evening! (9:25 PM)

• Is…. ???

(We’re going to talk about Positivity now, or Pace will explode. – K)

...That makes me really happy!! (9:32 PM)

• Try saying this on purpose. Just try it. “It’s the amygdala counter-balance!” – P
• The amygdala is the “Oh shit oh shit oh shit!” part of the brain. (I think my mother uses her amygdala a lot. Also? I bet YOU use your amygdala a lot!)
• However, there are no longer tigers in our grocery stores. (Er?) We’re a bit over-balanced in that sense, Oh shit oh shit oh shit! Pointing out the positive balances us out!
• Subversive Happiness (Marty): Your close friends mimic your communication style and if you say “That makes me really happy!” all the time, they might pick it up without even realizing it—and it will help them without really realizing it! (Megan)

Rephrasing things positively—omg, second bullet point. What!? (9:43 PM)

• Pace is so awesome covering this topic, she gets so excited! I love it!
• Our words may be used for good or eeeeevil, and this all started with the word ‘should’.
• (I actually wrote a huge post on obligation that touched on this a lot.)
• We create obligations where none are necessary, or even useful! (P)
• Slaying words slays concepts. Ha! This is a dangerous undertaking. I know I’ve thought about that before, but it really hit me just now. We have incredible power in this sense. 1984, for heaven’s sake! But used with awareness and sensitivity, it can be an amazing tool.
• We discussed for awhile the way we often feel obligated to lie in culturally acceptable ways (“I have plans, or I can’t” versus “I don’t really feel like it”)—but it doesn’t serve us, it isn’t actually as useful as we might think. Some “obligations” are very questionable.
• Holy cow I am sniffly tonight. Mrr!
• In response to my “dangerous undertaking” comment, Nathan is talking about how Buddhism emphasizes “right thought” and “right speech” deliberately to groom your speech and the world around you. THIS is really interesting!
• When you are doing this, you are changing the world. (S, via P)
• If we eliminate a word from our vocabulary, it may lead to the elimination of that concept which actually has the potential of changing the world. (More S via P, I think.)
• “This function should return an integer.” (P) This is SO funny.
• You want the end result so you choose to go through the awful middle—re: disconnect between “wanting to do” something and “having to do” something.
• In a way—this is so weird—we are simplifying the food chain of personal motivations, almost in the same way I am starting to want to simplify the food chain of the nutrition I consume. This feels better, it feels more honest, it feels more real, it feels less buried… to me.

We have discussed the victim mentality, as a result of some things we talked about in check-in, and as a result of some of the obligation explanations—for instance, I “should” feel this way, etc. This is very interesting to me (especially since I spent all day feeling like the universe was sitting on my head, squish).

Kyeli: “They are society and they are allowed to tell us how we should feel.”
Megan: “Blah blah blah blah blah!”

Let’s talk about the future! (10:06 PM)

• We want to go ahead and have tonight be the last of this run. This has been a very interesting experiment in that we did not strictly cover our material but covered incredible permutations of the material. We are talking about possibly continuing Usual Error runs after the New Year, in order to give us time for holidays, etc.
• The next thing we’ll do is a Usual Error run that does not include check-ins, that will cover (more or less strictly) the material we meant to cover this run. (I think that is awesome and really
• The first rule of Check-In Club is that you don’t talk about Check-In Club except during your check-in. (Nathan, hahahaha!)