Monday’s Meandering Mind

Be Positive

It is hard to stay positive when one has to deal with a negative person. It makes one dream of the days when things will come to an end and the obligation of service is no longer there. For the time being, it is what it is and one has to endure it.

For example, this person is just whining, complaining, and sulking most of the time. It is a kind of passive-aggressive politeness of pretending to participate but not really participating. One can’t bounce any idea off her even if one wants to help her. And one has to suggest all kinds of ideas for her, and she is annoyed when she hears ideas she doesn’t like.

I have witnessed more than a few people who experienced cultural shock and language problem many years prior. The trauma of this shock seemed to have passed long ago, but it actually has lingered, hidden in the corner of the mind somewhere. If this trauma is experienced as a child, the frequency of the lingering is much higher.

Later on, when they face an unfamiliar obstacle, they may treat it in a strange manner, as if they are overwhelmed. Their emotions have a shortcut to the previous shock when they were very helpless in facing insurmountable odds of adapting to a new environment. It’s an emotional hijack. Their rational brain cannot convince them to think rationally since their emotion has already taken over.

I really have to be a more positive person than I really am so that I can overcome this person’s negativity. And I have designed several strategies to help myself, like thinking of positive thoughts, reading positive poems (not many but I need to search for them and compile a list), watching easy Spanish videos of an old movie I really liked.

Actually everything has been happening in the best social manner, but the underlying strain is unmistakable. For a while, I have tried to brush it aside and ignore its presence. However last night I reflected on what had happened and realized that this little thorn had been pricking me for a while.

Actually she told me about her cultural shock when she started to attend primary school here–everything was so new and so unfamiliar; the language was incomprehensible; nobody knew how to help her; her parents were having their own adaptation to go through and could help her little.

I sympathize with her, but that doesn’t mean that she is not annoying from time to time. She seems to want a quick solution and dislikes the process of solving a problem; she likes to whine and sulk whenever something is not going smoothly, which casts a gloom everywhere; she doesn’t enjoy bouncing ideas or building something up on each other’s strength.

Well…I don’t want to be negative. I want to inspire her, but I don’t know how. To tell the truth, I am not a very positive person myself. I think she needs to crawl out of her shell and exert herself. It is something for me to think about–how to inspire somebody.

The Monsoon Like Weather

The weather this year is so weird–it rains and rains nonstop. It is almost like a tropical monsoon going wild. I have tried to find information about Raritan River, which flows past here about 200 feet (61 meters) away, to see if the water level is very high, but I don’t know where to look for the information. I guess if there’s no hurricane coming or no further rain, it will be fine.

Yesterday the rain was pouring and pouring. After one storm was over, another came in an hour, which was even more fierce.

We will survive no matter what the warming globe tries to do to us–drowning us with storms or scorching us with heat or smashing us with tornadoes.

Humans Fight AI

More than ten years ago, I met a person who’s a small business owner, with a store in Woodbridge Township not far from here. He told me that before he met his current business partner, who persuaded him to come to Maryland and then New Jersey to do business, he was working on all kinds of odd jobs in Los Angeles. Whenever he was between jobs, he would go to be an extra (a background actor) in a movie. And there were about a dozen Asians there, just like him. In the morning, he would go to the waiting area and a producer’s assistant would come to choose one or two or several Asian extras for their movie shoot (or TV shoot). If he was selected, he would stay for the whole day and got paid for several hours of work in minimum wages. A lunch box was provided to him for free. There were several different extras and he was the lowest kind. He said there were higher level extra who can earn $100 a day.

It seems that this kind of job will go extinct very soon since in the age of AI, a movie studio can hire an assortment of extras once and shoot their likeness once. Then they can use AI to insert the faces on all the movies where they need background actors. There are no need to hire extras anymore. Just hire once and use forever. No wonder Hollywood writers and actors are on strike right now. It is said it is the first major battle between humans and AI. I wonder what will happen next. AI is on the brink of taking over Hollywood and most of the writers and actors might be out of job soon.

I can imagine a future where there will be billionaires hiring a team of engineers who controls robots to complete all the work. The rest of us will be superfluous and jobless and venting frustrations on social media and swallowing anti-depressants.

Actually I don’t really believe such a gloomy picture will really materialize. I believe our future will be brighter than this…

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Image by John Hain from Pixabay