Artificial Cheese

Following up on the wild success of my other blog series ‘Sunday Night Showdown’ and ‘So I Was Wrong’, which I haven’t written in months, I decided to start a new one. Mining Minds will analyze people’s seemingly unpredictable behaviors and reactions. Examples include why people get mad at seemingly irrelevant things, or why people throw subtle and unnecessary insults into normal conversations. I’m no psychologist or psychiatrist, nor do I know the difference between the two, but I firmly believe that every time a person reacts unpredictably there is no randomness involved; its an unrelated attribute or event that gets repressed, deflected, and misunderstood into a completely new behavior. These new behaviors create the same unpredictability in others, which perpetuates into a web of seemingly unintelligible web of cause and effect that becomes linear when you step back and take the personal aspect out of the analysis.

The risk here is that people don’t like to be analyzed. People want to think that they are uninfluenced by anything but their conscious, rational thoughts. But thats not the case; people react carelessly on shallow instincts that don’t take the entire situation under consideration. When these people are told that they aren’t seeing the big picture, they immediately take a defensive stance. The defensive stance is, ironically, also one of those behaviors that warrants analysis.

So what better subject to start with than my sister. She’s quite aware of her instinctual behavior and always accepts the fact that she’s being irrational and there is more to a situation than she initally considers.

Case in point, last night at the bowling alley. The Get-Along Gang decided to celebrate my birthday. For those who are unaware, the Get-Along Gang is a spicy asian mix of friends with a raging tetris addiction. We had dinner at Vietnam Palace in Chinatown, Philadelphia. Afterwards we all decided to hit the bowling alley for some adventures in cosmic bowling. We were assigned lane 8, and there were a group of South Indian kids in lane 7. Looking at their scores on their television screen would reveal that the kids elected to use their first names as their identifiers on the scoreboard. Umesh, Raj, etc. The Get-Along Gang don’t roll like that, we use our god given nicknames. Uncle DDD, Boola, Monkey/Stumpy. So our ambiguous tetris-inspired names were proudly displayed on the television screen next to the South Indian kids’ names.

A half hour goes by, and we realized that the South Indian scoreboard changed between games to use their own nicknames. Uninspiring nicknames, like ‘boobs’, but still had some playful charm. The majority of the Get-Along Gang was not affected by the South Indian movement to nicknames. However one member of the gang, the hero of this analysis, was distressed by the change.

“They want to be like us” was my sister’s warcry for the rest of the night. She gave them the old Stumpy-stare; mouth slightly agape, brows slightly furled, feet shoulder width apart to maintain balance if an altercation should occur. Her only respite came in the form of a slurp of drool dripping from her mouth due to enraged concentration.

This is a perfect opportunity to exercise a little restraint. Step back, analyze the situation, and come to the conclusion that no one meant any harm and everyone was just trying to have fun. But as I mentioned before, my sister acts on instincts. She chose to repeat herself for the rest of the night and take her discomfort with her as we left the bowling alley.

The first step that I like to take when thinking through these sorts of problems is to clean it up a bit, clear out the riff-raff so we can isolate the problem. Lets start with what we know to be true. First we can acknowledge that there are two core possibilities. Either those kids changed their display names because of our influence, or they changed their display names because of other influences. You might be wondering, “Why couldn’t they have changed their name without influence?” My answer to that is, things don’t happen without influence. NOTHING happens without being influenced by something.

The sequence of events is also known. South Indian All-Stars set their proper names and started to bowl, Get-Along Gang sets their unusual names and started to bowl, South Indian Gangstas changed their names to be equally unusual to ours. The first two events are isolated from one another. The third event is the one in question.

Lets start with the first possibility and try to identify causes for the three events. This is also my sister’s assumption and will allow us to analyze her reaction later on.

First, the Sri Lanky Turned Yankees team came in and entered their proper names. I’d like to make the assumption that these were the kids of an IT specialist from India who move over the pond for a new job 5 years ago and braught the kids with them. These names reflected their innocent ‘foreigner in a new land’ mentality of trying to be as unassuming as possible. Second, the Get-Along Gang crashed the scene and dropped some dope nameage on the screen. We did this because we bring the flavor wherever we go, there is no guessing involved here. Now comes the kicker, the Tandoori Furys change their names to be playful. Since we are stuck in the first possibility and are assuming that they changed names because of us, we can easily say that this was also caused by their cautious foreigner mentality. The Dark Warriors of the Asian Subcontinent saw some familiar non-white people expressing themselves freely and became comfortable enough to do the same.

Now lets take the other possiblity and identify causes for each event. When analyzing the second possibility, we must assume that the Get-Along Gang had nothing to do with the mid-game name changes. This won’t help us understand my sister’s anger but will provide an alternate point of view. The first and second events remain the same as they did with the first possibility. So why would they change their names on their own? Up until now, we assumed that the Kerala Impostas were well acquainted and they were all comfortable with each other. What if they weren’t friends, and just awkward bowling partners that weren’t comfortable with each other until the second game? When the second game started, the social process of friendship was far along enough as to expose their creative wills to one another, and thus the more personalized names. That provides an explaination for the third event without factoring in the Get-Along Gang’s influence.

Now that we’ve analyzed the Dravidian Villain League lets turn the microscope on my sister, the other side of the anger equation. The fourth event that was not mentioned above was ‘Sister gets angry’. She was convinced that the Get-Along Gang was ‘imitated’. What kind of people get angry when they are imitated? People who value what is being taken, namely their individuality. My sister takes pride in being unique, and she likes when other people acknowledge that, and she even likes it when people imitate that. What she hates is when she doesn’t get credit for being the source of the imitation. If the Dhosa Rolling Bowling Patrol approached my sister and verbally appreciated the use of nicknames before using their own nicknames, I can assure you that my sister would not have been upset.

There we have it. We have thouroughly analyzed my sister’s unexpected annoyance during the adventures in cosmic bowling. In reality, the conclusions that we get when trying to analyze behaviors are all factors of varing degrees. Very rarely does something that requires analysis happen for one reason alone. Hopefully the goal of all this writing has been attained, and we all try to take a step back and analyze situations before getting angry. Rise above the hate, and put yourself in everyone else’s shoes before relying on instincts to judge your position and make sure you use your anger only when necessary.