DISC-world

*sigh* Myers Briggs, move aside. Apparently, there's a new quadrant available that more aptly describes personality traits, the DISC: Drive - Influence - Steadiness - Compliance.

Notice how they put my personality type last? ... Jerks.

I've known about this new assessment for a couple of years now, because every year, a few times a year, Amway (now called Amway again, thank God, and not Quixtar) sends in some trainers to Mike and Pinky Malovic's organization to help us improve. Our sponsoring rates are among the highest in the world — Mike and Pinky are very good disciples of their mentor, Rex Renfrow, who has the largest autonomous organization within Amway — but are sales rates are among the lowest in the world.

So, Amway comes in to teach us balance. For free. And then a week later calls up each participant, and interviews them for 1-2 hours to improve the course. And then they do.

Please read that last paragraph again and tell me of any other organization in the world that does the sum of those things.

One of their improvements is that brought in a successful sales distributor, Giove ("Joe") Pici, to talk about people. I like Joe; Joe is a very D direct person. If I'm going to be trained in something, it had better be somebody who is better than me in the subject matter, and they had better get to the point expeditiously. Joe does that, with confidence and with the surety of authority. Not many people get past first base with me in the "knowing the subject matter" department; Joe does. Did I mention that I like Joe?

So, I show up to the meeting at 8:55 am (breakfast starts at 9 am) with Gödel's Proof (studying the enumerable property of categories, don't you know). So, after Joe set up, he sauntered over to me in a friendly fashion and asked what I was reading. Getting to know his audience (of one, so far), as any friendly instructor would, you see. I handed him the book and explained:

Gödel's proof is a discourse about using the laws of the Principia Mathematica to show that it itself, and any system than claims completeness, is inconsistent.

As I explained, I watched his face and his jaw fall. I could read his thoughts — This is not what us eyetalian from Neu Joysy talk about over pasta on Wednesday nights... — so, instead he lied very politely by stating a fact made obvious to him: "You're really smart, aren't you."

I didn't see any point with equivocating with this guy. "Yes," was my answer. But then he did something I didn't like. He said, "Hey, Mic," calling over the conference organizer, "come over here. Doug, explain to Mic what your reading."

I sighed (I catch myself sighing often; I guess Nana was correct to call me her "Charlie Brown." God, I miss Nana. You had better be taking good care of her, please) and explained. Mic nodded, indulgently. Joe then went out to chat with Mike and Pinky, I later found out, because Mike relayed the conversation. Joe said: "There's this guy in the conference room reading a book that I didn't even understand the explanation of!" Mike's immediate answer was, "Oh, that must be Doug."

I hate that. I don't mind being recognized or praised, if my actions are worthy of such attention. But "Wow! a kid's reading a book to learn something; that's amazing!" I mean, shouldn't everybody be doing that? What's so laudatory about self-improvement. Isn't that what the purpose of this seminar was, at base, anyway?

Sandy Frazier came in with Sandy Foster (I'm still grieving; I miss Joel). Sandy (Foster) went out for some breakfast; that's when I noticed something about Sandy (Frazier). "You look happy," I told her, and she thanked me. No, that wasn't correct, so I tried again, "You seem to be radiating inner peace." She didn't flinch away, as people normally do from my weirdness. "Thank you," she said, "I got to spend some time with God this morning." Ah. I mentioned that we're told that special time is so vital, but that so few people make the effort to do that. "Yes," she responded, "of course, I read the Bible, but I've found that journalling has helped me listen more." Diane would be please with her confession: she, too, has been journalling, and I've seen the improvement to her equanimity. I agreed: "Hm. It can be easy, reading the Bible, to be an inactive participant, but journalling requires your effort." Sandy (Foster) returned, and we chatted amicably, about our plans to go to the Pink Bicycle for Isabel's birthday Tea. Sandy (Foster) asked what she should get for Isabel on her birthday, so I recommended a few books on mathematics that would help her down the road (because they would help me now). Others had arrived by then, Gene and Donna Dwyer, and Donna interrupted my monologue and Sandy' blank stare with a whispered: "Ask Diane instead!"

What I did learn at this conference was that polar opposites in the DISC types can, in fact, work together to achieve so much more than if they worked separately. Michael (the definition of a D) and Faye (the textbook of an S) Edmonson are the strongest organization in the Malovic team. Just like Bill Britt storms the castle walls, busting right through them, and Peggy follows right along, smiling at her Bill, making sure everyone's okay, Mike and Faye stormed and cruised right up to and past their level of success. Amway has taken note of this couple, and for good reason. It happened to be their anniversary, and I happened to know, because it happened to be my anniversary. So I thought it would be nice for the team to wish them well on this special day. I purchased a greeting card, and handed it off to more capable hands: Gene Dwyer's and Pinky's, both strong I's, both polar opposites to me. It took them three hours to work the crowd, discreetly avoiding Michael and Faye, but they loved every minute of it, because they like people, and they got everybody in the conference to sign the card.

That result was a vast improvement over anything I would have accomplished. They like people; my feelings about people, qua people, are the dual. I have a Comonadic relation with liking people. On the other hand, I types are impulsive — they had no idea about their anniversary, after 15 years of associating with them; calendar? planner? What's that? — whereas C types are always calculating, always sizing up the situation. Working together, we made a very nice gift for them. Mike Malovic led the singing of "Happy Anniversary" (he's a professional opera singer) for them. And then, of course, Sandy Foster, in on the game ("Doug, how did you know it's their anniversary?" "Because it's ours.") signalled for Mike's attention.

Um, no. I would not allow a well-meaning, but spur of the moment, action cheapen the gift to Michael and Faye. Sandy was going to have everyone recognize my own occasion, but I wasn't having any of that. I hsst her into silence.

But Sandy, another Über-I, is always in my good graces (I hope I could say the same for the contrapositive case). She had earlier asked Joe a question, in her inimitably I-style, about selling to an AVON™ lady; Joe's answer: "Products do not have politics."

Huh! Just simply seeing an AVON™ sticker on the back of a car gets my back up, for no other primordial reason than enemy! I just learnt something from Sandy. I leaned over to her and soto voced "Good question!" She looked pleased.

Pinky interviewed me after the conference. "Did you learn anything here, Doug? Not that I'm pushing you to build your business more. No, really, I'm not, but I was curious if you got something from today." *sigh* It seems that more than of the few people close to me are I types. I smiled at her and turned the question around, as I didn't think my answer would be helpful, having a near-perfect memory and having had this material at least three times before from these special Amway conferences. "Oh, yes," she answered me breezily, but knowingly. She's known me long enough to read my hesitancies, "I learned a lot about TINs, 30-day B2B deferred payments and sales!" So, I challenged her, "But don't you have those already set up in your business?" She smiled in return. It appears two could play the circumspection game. But, of course, my business wouldn't exist without Mike and Pinky's guidance. It was Mike who introduced me to Joel who got me my first job in software. It was Pinky who goaded me with my one successful sale, "You should order ten more and sell those." They were model train sets, deeply discounted post-Christmas from $150 to $20. I didn't sell ten more; I sold seventeen more. That's when I learnt that I am the greatest salesman in the world. And I used that learning to help me break into the field of artificial intelligence and helped me to help the company for which I'm currently working close a contract that could become a multi-year multi-million dollar. C's and I's working together. There is a God.

The happy postlude to my silence about our anniversary is that Diane was the lector for the Filipino Mass, she read from Isaiah in clear Tagalog, and then, the offertory prayers included the following:

That Douglas and Diane Auclair have a blessed wedding anniversary. Let us pray to the Lord.

As many Filipinas know us from Paaralang Pinoy, we had half the congregation wish us a happy anniversary, and then we celebrated with some bing soo at Le Matin de Paris (that is French), and so it was indeed a happy one.

Happy Anniversary

Today is my wife's parent's anniversary ... if you are in the neighbourhood and reading this entry, please wish them a "Happy Anniversary". I happen to know this date well: my parents'-in-law anniversary date, because it coincides with several other occasions: Mike and Faye's wedding anniversary, Marshal Law Day (Proclamation No. 1081), ... and my own wedding anniversary. This is the day that my cara spoza took me as her man.

So, as I greet them on their anniversary, it is actually they who gave me the best gift: my dear sweetheart. Thank you for the present.

My Scientist Husband

Recently there was an article in the Washington Post about the Large Hadron Collider. Of course the report delighted in interviewing the staff. Who wouldn't, when one could get as juicy quotes as the following?

"A completely novel engineering material," is how Lyn Evans, the project manager of the collider, describes supercold helium. "For example, if you were to put it into a beaker? It could crawl out."

This is how they talk at CERN. If you stop them, and say, "What do you mean, crawl out?" The may go to a blackboard and begin with the math. You do not want them to do this.

I read this passage to my cara spoza and asked her, blankly, "is that how you feel about me?"

She choked, because she couldn't decide whether to snort or to burst out laughing, so she did both simultaneously.

Gratitude

During our last sweetie time, little Isabel passed us a picture of three little girls in a house: her até (Elena Marie), herself, and her little sister to be. Our girls desire a sibling. We all do.

Diane, my cara spoza, takes delight in this. When Isabel was reorganizing the house, adding a new bed for her new sister, Diane explained to her that the baby would be sleeping with her parents for the first couple of years of her life (attachment parenting). She warmed to the subject, as she always is looking forward to being a new M.O.M.: "When we have twins," she enthused, "Papa will need to sleep downstairs!" She cackled with that expected pleasure.

If you haven't caught on by now, then I'm happy to inform you that I'm all for it. After I reflected for awhile on her last comment, I let my dear wife know that it'd be my pleasure to become a full troll-basement denizen. I was the happiest man on earth when Diane uttered "I do." But how could I know that happiness would multiply with her continued company, and then with the addition with each of our children. I don't know how much happier I can become, but I am ready, willing, and able to find out.

But, then again, God has already given us much more than we deserve, I've been blessed time and again by the joy of my family, and if the blessing of children stopped here, I'm much more than grateful. It was a miracle that we could have even one living child, and what a miracle Elena Marie has been, and now that we have two, with little Isabel a blessing so different than her sister, but so perfectly matched with her sister, how can we ask for more than that?

Easy. When one climbs a hill, one can better see the mountain. When one reaches the mountain-top, the stars are so much clearer. Thank you for what we have. Now, more. Please.

Sweetie Time is SILLY!

My dear children are at that tender age where affection shown by their parents is either craved or "ewwwww"ed. Well, the special time my cara spoza and I share has been dubbed "sweetie time" by Elena Marie much to her delight and chagrin.

What is sweetie time? Well, one day when Diane and I finally had a date (we went to see a movie) and we shuttled the kids off to an obliging neighbor, we were having sweetie time. When I came home from work and captured some private time from my cara spoza to discuss the happenings of the day, we were having sweetie time.

That sweetie time was silly, see, because our girls, perfectly happy to be involved in their own activities, once made aware that something was off-limits (our closed bedroom door), were consumed with curiosity. As I described my day to Diane, and as she laughed at my stories, the girls, beyond the closed door screamed with delight. They composed notes to us which they slid under our door:

"Sweetie time is SILLY!"

*sigh* Silly me. Silly sweetie time.

My perfect video game

... 'cause I think my steppin's pretty hawt, too. Oh, and when is it ever going to enter any rhythm game maker's head to create "Keyboard Hero"? Imagine all the whinings of pre-teens — "But I don't wanna take piano lessons anymore!" — being replaced by the queue: "Hey, it's my turn to play Freeze Pop!"

Bonus: learning French and the Moog all in one go!

Well, okay, maybe Freeze Pop is not to everyone's taste, but then one can include Chopin's Berceuse as one of the tracks. Image that: learning to play classical music becomes cred for k-radness with your B's!

"Vampires were people, too!"

Finally, something has displaced our vicarious attention from the young wizard, Harry Potter. What is the new hawtness? you ask. Apparently, it's Casper (actually, Edward) the Friendly Vampire. Sales of one of the books in the Twilight series uprooted the current Harry Potter sequel, and the latest release sold 1.3 million copies in its first day. The soon-to-be-released movie (caution: scary movie at link) is supposedly based very closely on the source material from the book.

Apparently, also, HBO is airing a new series on vampires as ordinary folks (leading to this entry's eponymous title), that is also based very closely on the books by the author.

Both these efforts are serious undertakings: top-of-the-line actors and directors and high production values, with a media blitz to garner as much mind-share as possible.

So, it's the good news/bad news situation — the good: people are reading again, so much so that it affects how the TV/movie medium decides to portray these stories; the bad: ...

The bad news is this, not that evil is alluring, because evil has been glamorous, and always will be so (it's called temptation for a reason).

First of all, what is evil? The romantic view is that evil has some kind of reality to it, that it has a draw of its own. And the success of the romantic era is that it has given evil this: it's cool to be bad. But this, in the history of history, is only a very recent development, which has more recently been overturned by a newer judgment-free position: "it's all good", which isn't far from the mark, but first let's pause for a moment to review the development of morality to see why I'm alarmed at the thought of there being friendly vampires — at why something so unreal as mythical creatures should be a cause for alarm.

History can be roughly divided into four stages: primitive, classic, romantic, and post-modern (Milan Kundera used the stages of a football ('merkan "soccor") game: pep rally, 1^st half, 2^nd half, and overtime). In the primitive stage, there isn't a concept or a distinction between good and evil: the gods reflect or explain natural or human behavior and have their own motives, people are left to their own devices to survive, and any interaction with the gods is arbitrary. During the classic stage, good and evil come into sharp focus: God is good and on the side of people, the enemy (Satan, or whomever is that personification) is bad and seeks to follow his own way, and people who are good are rewarded, people who aren't good are punished. The romantic stage is firmly entrenched in this duality, but, whereas before in the classic stage, where evil was simply a lack — a bad act is simply an imperfectly good one — evil now takes on its own reality, and particularly in this stage, its own persona. Whereas in the classic stage, God and His angels are the ones interacting with people (the serpent makes a cameo, but only once or twice), in the romantic stage, it's Nick, faeries, vampires, werewolves, what-have-you, making their presence known to mankind.

But take note, in the romantic stage, these creatures are not pretentious: their aim is evil, and relations with them are uniformly bad ("... and Tom's death shows us the moral of the story: don't mess with the undead!").

Why is it, then, in this post-modern era (after a very brief and self-absorbed modern stage) that these creatures come to represent good? The conflicted vampire, refusing to feed on people, in fact, protecting them, are what these tales tell nowadays is that it's thrilling and exciting and romantic to become involved in the supernatural.

Why?

Oh, vampires are romantic enough in and of themselves, I suppose, but this era has taken the vampire one step further: the vampire is now no longer a supernatural creature, created by an unknowable angel of darkness. No, vampires now-a-days are human creations, and the media reflects this. All the features of the vampire — brilliance, charm, cunning, ruthlessness — are now fully realized in the cylon skin-jobs, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, Dexter, or the ballerina terminator. All excellently produced shows; all have resonated with (popular) culture.

Why?

I'll put forward my thesis: we, as a people, have abandoned all hope. We still need rescuing, but, since, as it is now believed, there is no God, the only good we can get is from the crumbs from the table offered by the bad. The vampires of today have something we don't have, they have their immortality and their cool lifestyles. The tagline from the movie Lost Boys sums it up pithily: "Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire." That was the romantic view, which still holds forth, given the rabid devotion of the fans around the world for the vampire genre (Why would Goth ever be in? Really! But it is). But, on our trip down D'spayre lane, having evil, incarnate, around at all is still too much to bear, to hope for, because having evil implies that there is hope for Good after all. Therefore, evil, personified, must go. The post-modern era has rid us of the hope of super-human evil, entirely supplanting it with purely human-created evils — with damnation out of the way, and with no hope of salvation, we've neatly slid into relativism, still clinging to the vague hope of resurrecting primitivistic simplicity and happiness.

But we cannot, and we do not, blind ourselves with false hopes: we cannot go back. Kundera shows us the exiled never truly return home (Testaments Betrayed: an Essay in Nine Parts), and Gaiman shows us the education of history will forever stain our attempts to return to simplicity (American Gods). Once tasted, the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge cannot be unbitten.

How, then, shall we live? If we can't go back, and if we can't live with the promises from false (or no) gods, what are we to do?

I answer that, the greatest of these is Hope. Love is freely, and always, given; Faith is something you have now or can choose now, but Hope ... Hope is the courage to soldier on in the face of all this that the world throws our way. Hope is the strength to believe (through Faith) in Love and then to accept it.

Yes, Hope takes courage and Hope requires strength: in short, Hope is hard work. But, for someone willing to open their eyes, Hope is the only way. You can't go back, you mustn't give in to despair, so there's only one direction left to us so that we may live: onward, and upward.