Children - The ultimate test in anger management

Having just spent two full holiday weeks with my kids, it occurred to me this morning that raising young children is the ultimate test in anger management.

You know the lines. Address the situation, not the other person. Bring change to yourself first, not to the other person. Easy on paper, very difficult in practice.

With adults, it is often easy to blame it on the other person. After all, he/she is a full-grown adult, why can't he/she be more mature, rational, have a good grounding in the facts etc.?

With children, you can't pin the blame on them anymore! They are what they are at this age. You can't expect them to be mature or rational! But we still lose our cool, and that's a perfect reflection of our own emotional management skills.

Therein lies the ultimate test in anger management. We have to change ourselves to address the situation, and that ain't always easy,  because being human means we resist change with all the might we could muster.

Failure to manage our anger eventually leads to child abuse. The male gender is more frequently associated with such behaviour, but it seems the female gender is sometimes not spare such emotional rampage too.

Our children grow up with us, but we grow up with our children too. Good luck to all the parents traveling on this amazing journey together!

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Sex and its irrationality

I am probably your average heterosexual male specimen. Having gone through a younger period where sex is at the top of my list of priorities, my hormones have calmed down somewhat and now it appears I can finally examine sex with more rationality.

Recently it is beginning to get to me that sex is not something that one can rationalize. It lies outside the realms of rationality. The fact that a heterosexual male gets aroused by the sight of breasts or the vagina is not something one can deconstruct. In fact, there is nothing inherently attractive about these things other than the fact that millions of years of evolution have built their sense of attractiveness into us, without which our species cannot survive. If an alien from another planet were to land on Earth, they will never understand why we find breasts or vagina sexy, much as we can understand how a peahen will find the large and bright tail of a peacock sexy.

And we have discovered for a long time that there is a large variety of sexuality outside of the standard male-female model. You have the asexual (not interested in sex), homosexual (interested in same sex), heterosexual (interested in opposite sex), bisexual (interested in both sexes), transgender (female persona trapped in a male body, and vice versa). Within a particular category, there are also huge variations i.e. interest in different sexual organs, or even symbolism of sex (eg. brassiere or panties).

It is probably unique to the human species that we have the mental capacity to tie ourselves in knots over variances in sexuality outside of the standard model. There have probably been more debates about the morality/immorality of sexual variances than how to rid our world of hunger. Heterosexuality, being the majority, has always occupied the moral high ground. Other forms of sexuality have always been the deviant form. In some countries, being homosexual or transgender can get you killed. In fact, I have encountered few people who even understand the difference between being homosexual and being transgender. Most people still associate being effeminate as being homosexual (for males), for example.

It puzzles me to no end how most people do not question the irrationality of heterosex itself, that finding sexual organs of the opposite sex attractive is just as illogical as finding sexuals organs of the same sex attractive. To most people, heterosex is just "natural", whereas other forms of sexuality are not. This is crazy, and how people can live with that conclusion is beyond me. It is probably the highest form of prejudice there ever is, that your irrationality is somehow more "natural" than some other irrationality. I mean, this is not some argument over whether one algorithm is better than another, because then you can use logic/numbers to justify your decision. This is a case of my preference is more "natural" than yours and 1) that's it, 2) end of discussion, 3) you are a deviant/outcast.

Is it just me, or does anyone else find this crazy as well?

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Life's a Bitch

When we are little, we master our physical self. Witness the toddler who can't seem to stop smearing his sleeves with food.

When we grow older, we master our emotional self. Witness the young adult who goes in and out of relationships. Witness the husband and wife who quarrels over little things every day.

When we are old, most of us (hopefully) would have discovered our true "self". We have achieved mastery of our inner nature.

Then it is time for us to leave the world.

Ain't life a bitch?

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