July 16, 2023

Moved from emotional intelligence by request.

I think of emotional intelligence as very different from intellectual intelligence. There is a difference between educational level and intelligence as well. I know a quite brilliant mechanic who did very poorly in school and doesn't interact with people very well. He needs a go between, but once he has that, he is brilliant at his work.

Emotional intelligence is recognizing ones own and other people's emotions. The United States is pretty squirrelly about emotions, especially regarding gender. Who are the strong, silent, passionate types? For justice, liberty and all. What about all the other emotions, grief, sentiment, fear, jealousy, anxiety? It is thoroughly depressing to have them assigned to gender. No wonder the young are rebelling and refusing to accept birth gender. I don't like to be ordered to be a certain way either.

I think the pursuit of happiness is at fault as well. I don't want to pursue happiness. I would rather have it sneak up on me, jump out at me, show up when it feels like it. I know I won't catch it anyhow. I celebrate grief as part of love, anger as part of working for justice, fear as part of seeing the world and humans as they really are, rather than as a Barbies and Kens. I am fine with being happy when I am happy, sad when I am sad, confused and annoyed when someone tells me how I feel and they are wrong and not listening, and overjoyed when I am overjoyed. I don't have to act on anger. It's more like entertaining it: a temporary house guest that comes for tea and to tell me something. I listen. Sometimes I go to the subject/object and ask if I have interpreted something correctly. Mostly I haven't. Sometimes I just let anger go, once it gets done cursing. I let it have its' moment.

A gene has been put in a potato to tell us when the plant is thirsty. Maybe we could alter humans to be like squid, to light up different colors for different emotions. I would turn a warm rich pink when delighted to see you, my friend. And look, you are turning various colors, shy, embarrassed, and happy to see me!

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I am asked to share a definition of emotional intelligence: "Emotional intelligence (EI or EQ for "emotional quotient") is the ability to perceive, interpret, demonstrate, control, evaluate, and use emotions to communicate with and relate to others effectively and constructively." from here.

I experienced some genuine joy today. The little goblin pulling the levers in my brain sees my shiny beautiful new watch and releases little happy goblin feelings. It's nice, though. I think the last time I felt these goblin feelings is when I trapped a serpent in the video game Valheim (took me probably 14 hours), which was months ago.

I have spent the last several weeks shopping for a watch online. This has been torturous and not at all expedient. This was all emergent of my initial and rather impulsive decision to buy a mechanical watch "so I don't have to worry about it ever losing time, because it will never run out of battery." Found one on Amazon, thought it looked nice, bought it. It kept time great for like a week and then it started losing like two minutes a day. Thankfully it was within the return window so I got my money back, no problem. The return sparked in me an annoyance, such that I did some research before deciding to buy its replacement.

According to my friend Google and her friend Reddit, mechanical and automatic watches simply do not keep time as well as quartz movement watches. Also, cheap mechanical watches (the one I bought was $40) are almost invariably unreliable. That being said, well-constructed mechanical watches are still fairly "accurate".

So, naturally, I decided the charm of a mechanical watch was, to me, not worth the price of a well-constructed one. So I decided to get a quartz watch. I did some scrolling on Etsy, and found a bunch of really interesting looking ones for pretty cheap -- however, all these cheap watches said "returns not accepted", which left a bad taste in my mouth, so I opted not to risk buying them.

I was messaging in a Discord server about my watch troubles. A guy says to me, "I have a really cheap watch and it's held out okay and kept time well." Alright, perhaps I should just save my money. However, Google's friend Reddit says to me, "you get what you pay for and if a watch seems cheap it is simply too good to be true." Someone else on Reddit, though, says "any quartz watch will do."

Ultimately, I decided that the only way to know if a watch is correct is to compare it with another watch. But if I only get one extra watch, how will I know which one of the two is losing time? My solution — a third watch. Am I going to wear all three watches? No. I am going to wear four. I already have a smartwatch.

The obvious question is why I would want an analog watch when I have a smartwatch. My answer is that the smart watch runs out of battery all the time and I hate having to charge it in order to have a watch. Plus, there are times in which I just don't want to be bothered with technology -- I want to be able to go without my phone and take a break from devices if I want to.

So I bought a Fossil watch. They're a big brand, they seem to have an okay reputation. The watch in question is $130 on their website but on Amazon it was 40% off for whatever reason, so I got it for 80 buckaroonies. Hell yeah brother! The cheap watches I got with it are a $25 Timex and a $12 Casio. I bought a nylon watch band with the intention of having the Timex and Casio on the same band, with the Casio on the underside of my wrist.

The Fossil, I love it. I keep looking down at it, and the little goblin in my brain is like "ooooo shiny hehe". So my other three watches go on my right wrist, my Fossil on my left wrist. I synced their time with an atomic clock down to the second (I downloaded an app that shows atomic time in real time from a server) —  but they're like a half-second off. Every time I pull up on the knob I press it down a split second too quickly or slowly and then I have to wait another minute for the second hand of the atomic clock to sync with the watch. I could keep trying to get them perfect until they tick in perfect unison, with the atomic clock and each other, but do I want to spent 30 minutes on this? Every time I mess up I have to wait a full minute. Multiply that by three watches. Perfection is tedious.

But I spent so much fucking money on this shit, it all adds up. The Fossil, the other two watches, a protection plan for the Fossil, nylon watch straps, add it all up and it's nauseating. But it will be worth it in the end. If I can't charge my smartwatch and my phone for a while, I will still have three devices to tell the time with.

In other news, I've been working on a new fictional story, letting my third draft of my other one sit for a while so I can accumulate thoughts on it. I don't consider myself a good writer but I don't think I'm a bad one either, I just do it because it's fun. This one is about really gambling and drugs, I guess, but more specifically dogfighting and ketamine. I think a bajillion people have done casinoes and cocaine, but I don't know of any stories about dogfighting and ketamine. I'm not really trying to be original, the inspiration came mostly from listening to I Bet on Losing Dogs by Mitski and my own experience. I tried to find a video online of a real dog fight so that I can write the thing more realistically, but logically those videos are really just not possible to find. Probably for the better that I don't subject myself to that. Still, even if it would make me feel bilious and nauseated, if I could find it, I would watch it for research.

For some reason, right now I have the really horrendous feeling that I am forgetting something. Like I forgot to add a meeting to my calendar, or didn't reply to an email, or left the stove on. I must have forgotten something, I know that much, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what it is. I emailed the uni advisor Friday afternoon about the fall semester. I don't have any packages coming. I think I have all my meetings on my calendar. My bank account is fine. No subscriptions unpaid. I don't owe anyone money. Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh. I know that something horrible is going to happen and it will be my fault for not remembering. I need to remember and I just can't.