class today was partially about flirting, which was especially interesting to me because i love flirting and think it might even be an essential part of who i am, not to be hyperbolic or anything. evidently it's very quantifiable, to the extent where it's totally trivial to tell, or even to program a computer to tell, within 2-3 seconds whether people are flirting or not. this makes total sense -- there are eye contact things, body language, reaction to physical contact or motion, and things i hadn't thought of (like apparently higher-frequency speaking is strongly correlated to romantic interest.)
i find this curious because for the first 19 or so years of my life, i never had any idea when someone was flirting with me. that's not entirely true of course, but it's certainly true that probably a lot of people were interested in me and i didn't realize it (or do i flatter myself here?), which i think is partly due to the fact that growing up as a scrawny nerd, it never occurred to me that people could be interested in me.
i'm not sure what changed -- it was gradual -- but these days i do notice people flirting with me, and of course i'm always attuned to my natural flirtatious tendencies. however, i certainly have friends who are often oblivious to people flirting with them and/or assume that no one does, and i'm still not sure whether someone is interested in me or not at least sometimes. and yet if you showed anyone these 2-3 second clips, from a third-person perspective, they would be able to tell instantly whether there was flirting or not. i guess it's one of these things where when they are happening to us, our emotions and concept of self tend to override our objectivity. those damn emotions.
for no apparent reason, i started thinking 10 minutes ago about my decision-making process. specifically, it's very bad -- i always make a decision based on the most important factor involved, even if all of the other factors are on the other side and really do add up to greater than the most important factor. i never conceived of it in this way before, but it's definitely true; the scenario where the love of my life wants to go to dinner but i have plans i'm really psyched about is illustrative, in the sense that i would definitely drop those plans. i suppose that's not really quite the same setup, but i definitely think of my priorities as each being an order of magnitude greater than the next one.
but this may not actually be true. i think the best example of this (which also involves the subjectivity problem i started this entry with) is long-distance relationships. long-distance relationships suck and i could easily list 10 reasons not to do them, and yet i keep doing them or at least wanting to do them, because i don't want to lose the most important person to me. and the very small chance that this time the long-distance relationship will work is enough, because 1% times the priority value of relationships is still bigger than everything else in my life put together.
and it goes on down the line. i would at any point abandon all of my friends for the love of my life, if she were actually the love of my life. i would at any point move to atlanta if a close friend really, really needed me. i would at any point give up my career to stay in san francisco. i would at any point give up all my money to be able to have my job forever (okay, there are obvious sketchy problems with the last comparison.)
so my priorities are not on a linear scale. it's soulmate >>> friends >>> location >>> career >>> materialism in my instincts. now, i trust my instincts and intuition a lot, and it's certainly true that the one time i made a decision knowing it was going against them it was awful (namely moving to minneapolis.) but this just can't be what's actually best for my happiness function, can it? i don't know -- i don't really see how this is going to change, and i don't know that it's necessarily inherently screwed up. but it's obviously associated with a lot of the pain i feel sometimes (when priority #1 is not going well), and the same instincts probably apply to "emotional decisions" (by which i mean the unconscious decisions i make about how to feel) as well.
anyway, it strikes me that this is essentially how i make all my decisions, and that i don't think most people do this, and it may be at least on the periphery of whatever this giant tragic flaw / inhuman attribute i may have is. or maybe i'm just a bad human; maybe this melodrama is ridculous.
work in progress.