One of the subjects that has been at the top of my list of issues-to-think-about, continues to be parenthood. I don’t have a clue how it might feel to be a parent, but I can form a logical perception as to what’s involved in parenthood -as I’ve been observing a lot of parents including my own.

On the one hand, children go through a cagey phase with their parents while growing up. By cagey I don’t necessarily mean deceptive (though that could be the case too), I mean guarded, incremental, clever to maneuver one’s vulnerabilities. They balances positions to mollify opposition forces of the outside world, and surely, the unknown.

On the other hand, parents don’t fundamentally change personalities while raising children. However, different aspects of their character raise at different times. The first few years are the protective phase, helping the children with the basic natural functions all at once. But then comes the supportive phase, where parents let children do things on their own, grow up, and learn about the wonders of the outside world.

Nowadays, there is no doubt that the number of solo-dwellers is increasing. There are many academic or speculative discussions as to why that’s the case, but no one argues that that’s the case. I think one of the main reasons for people going solo relies on our inability to hold a human relationship together. Human beings need each other less and less every day, and sadly, the gap between mutual expectations and fulfillments widen.

Parents keep giving without asking for much in return. We can argue around some exceptions here and there, but the trend still stands to support the claim. I strongly believe the relationship between parents and their children and the one-way flow of love and care haven’t been impacted as much as other forms of relationships in transforming societies. And, that’s something to look forward to and desire.

I think I just said it. Yes, I’d love to be a father one day.

Using the word crazy about someone, is certainly a double-edge sword. I don’t know of any other word that could equally be both offensive and flattering. On the one hand ‘crazy’ is indicative of certain behavioral and social abnormalities. On the other hand, if you’re crazy the question that comes up is: who defines those behavioral and social norms. Unpredictability draws attention and poses questions. Lack of continuity in social behaviors portrays mysteriousness, entertains, and makes one fascinating. These notions are crazy, because conformists passionately find the dynamic nature of such attributes against the security of consensus.

The other day after lunch and an Irish goodbye, she walked away looking pensive. I sat in the car and looked back and it seemed she was walking indecisively -as if she wasn’t sure where she was headed. Then, she pulled a cigarette out of her loud black bag and started smoking. She was looking up every now and then while smoking. She then turned left at the intersection without looking back or sideways. She was only looking up or down. Her steps were telling something that I couldn’t quite put into words. I sat there for a few minutes thinking … I couldn’t even guess what she was thinking, or if she was thinking about anything.

Pearl is a person I know for such long time. I don’t even know what it means to not have her around. She’s one of a few friends who can sit down and talk in length about things like the symbolic character in Oblomov. She claims to read books and articles very quickly by scanning the key words in each page and then making a logical connection between each page and segment of the write-up. We’ve had ups and downs in our friendship mainly because we talk directly and say it the way it is. If there was ever a third person who was listening to our conversation, s/he could conclude that we’re both rude or brash. But that’s not how we feel. To the contrary, we think our straight forward approach to our conversations makes our friendship unique and never-ending.

I should confess that I find crazy people to be fun and interesting. If you’re a normal person, that’s my weakness I guess. My friendship with Pearl entails no dull moment because she is never distracted by quotidian concerns. Every second of her life is laser-focused on something, or another. Yes, she disappears for months and then comes back and drops a bomb on me, but also she continually talks to me about me in the most explicit way.

Crazy friends change your life into a sort of lurid technicolor format. You get good attention and you get bad attention, but you get attention. It’s like you’re in a theatre and the lights go down making you wait for the beginning of the show. I prefer to be in a theatre as oppose to watching a lame black-and-white movie on the couch.

Mr. Kelt was a well-honed historian. As his family hails from Scandinavia, he was very familiar with the Norwegian aquavit which has its maturation at sea. The maturation process includes: transported in aged oak casks from Norway to the Equator and then back again. The idea began to form that this was a method which should be tried to see if it works. The idea was to recreate a quality given by the sea, this could be beneficial and a further step on the road to perfection. With assistance from special container, the decision was that the best way to effectuate the sea voyage would be to let the container stay on a ship that did a continuous world round-trip taking 90-110 days depending on weather.

Further trials were made to optimize the effects. Smaller barrels proved to be most efficient. Traditional oak barrels are used which must be extensively research. The barrels must only be filled to 70% capacity so that there is ample room for the cognac to wash around inside the barrel which facilitates contact and extraction from the wood as well as exchange of oxygen.

The process takes an easterly direction. It has been experienced that there is a considerable difference between going east or west. For some unexplained reason a westbound, does not produce as good an effect as going eastbound. After leaving France, the direction takes cognac to a few Northern European ports, then heads south into the Mediterranean, through the Suez canal into the Arabian Sea and from there on to Sri Lanka, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and across the Pacific to the United States and Los Angeles. From Los Angeles we turn south for the Panama Canal and then north again following the east coast of the US to New York before the return across the Atlantic Ocean back to France. After returning, the cognacs are allowed a period of rest before bottling. This period varies between 3-5months.

All of the above takes place to make the best cognacs in the world and it is natural to find perfection through studying history and traditional methods rather than looking to the future and technology.

Is tennis ball yellow or green? How’s that for a short topic of discussion between several senior corporate dudes? I suggested the color of tennis ball is both because color technically is about wavelength and frequency intervals, and despite categorically-defined notion of yellow and green red, there are infinite combinations of the two characteristics that could fall in both yellow and green color buckets. I asserted there is a spectrum that’s continuous, and we shouldn’t think about it categorically.

Albeit, I was thinking about the question in its technical context … a few minutes later, her is the response from a colleague whom I highly respect: [What Kamran’s asking about is a construct referred to in the cognitive science literature as “categorical perception.”  Categorical perception of entities that otherwise exist on a continuum (whether speech phoneme categories, musical notes, or in this case, colors) is closely related to the individual perceiver’s previous experience with similar examples (“exemplars”) of the category, which drives activation of those examples in memory, followed by resulting categorization as appropriate. Hence at a very high level, in the context of being exposed to an ambiguous stimulus to be categorized (a la the TENNIS BALL), if your cognitive system contains a stronger
representation/activation of yellow category exemplars, then you’re more likely to perceive YELLOW.  If the green category is stronger in your cognitive system, then you’re more likely to perceive GREEN].

Well, thinking about these notions in their conceptual context, I think there is also a spectrum around mental-models and our approach to resolution. At the one end stands attributes such as simplistic, certain, and disconnected. At the other end of the spectrum there is a mindset that attributes to complicated, gray, and jointed. It goes without saying that there are many combinations in between of course, but beneath, it all falls into one’s tolerance for higher degree of conviction or doubt –in the mental process.

Some of us start our mental process by convictions by default, because it’s a more certain place and it brings more sense of comfort while casting opinions. If there was any representation of one’s mindset who starts by conviction, it’d probably look like a matrix or a well-organized bookshelf. On the other hand, some of us start the process of thinking from the place of doubt by default, because we get high on the sense of open-exploration and journeying.

There are trends in the way of thinking that almost always distort facts and specifics to the detriment of the entire thought process. Not to say that facts and specifics are the only important details of our mental models, but they are important. Here are some of those trends:

–Filtering: taking the negative details and magnifying them.

–Polarized: tending to perceive everything at the extremes, with very little room for a middle ground.

–Overgeneralization: coming to a general conclusion based on a single incident or piece of evidence.

–Mind Reading: without their saying so, you know what people are feeling and why they act the way they do.

–Catastrophizing: continuously expecting disaster.

–Personalization: the tendency to relate everything around you, to yourself.

–Blaming: holding other people responsible for your pain.

–Necessitating: having a list of ironclad rules about how you and other people should act.

–Emotional Reasoning: believing that what you feel must be true-automatically.

–Labeling: generalizing one or two qualities into a negative global judgment.

–Rewarding: expect all your sacrifice and self-denial to pay off.

Often, these trends of thinking come with flavors of care and love. But that doesn’t defeat the fact that the capacity of these thinking models is limited to the time required for their discovery by others. At the end, no intellectual model betters tolerance for doubt, curiosity, and reasonable discourse.