advice

The people in this picture may or may not have anything to do with the context of the story.

How good are the advices we give? Since our knowledge and opinions are depending on our frames of reference, our advices must depend on the same thing. How often are we egoistic and when do we try to see the bigger picture? I know that power of friends is a strong force. At least for women. Not sure how it is with men. The song “when a man loves a woman” points in the other direction: that what the friends say doesn’t matter at all. Is that true? Well it doesn’t matter. I’ll just ramble on regarding things within my frames of reference anyway.

I do my darndest to give advice that I think will be the best for my friend – even if it means not being to my advantage. The thing is though, just because I think it’s the best for her/him, it might not be. But asking for advice is asking to get someone else’s morals and believes imputed upon you. It’s a dangerous thing! To “advertise” this – that the advices are on basis of my experience – I try to find actual examples from my life, or the lives of people I know. Come to think of it, that’s also how you are supposed to do if you are a supervisor and want to rag on an employee: use actual examples, don’t just ramble on about how you “feel”. Not a very charming parallel hu!

The power of friends should not be taken lightly. When one of my friends went back to Sweden after living next to me in Tahoe for a year, I called her everyday and told her how much fun we where having, how nice the weather was, how good looking the guys where etc. Until she decided to come back. She did the same thing to me when I moved back to Sweden. After three months I moved back to Tahoe again. Sound silly? Maybe. But it might not have been only the phone calls determining the decision. And I have more examples of this phenomenon which I might share at another time. Or it’s just a proof of how easily influenced me and my friends are? Don’t know.

So if I aim for giving unbiased advice, I have managed to do the exact opposite when I just make casual comments. Since apparently I am born with a foot in my mouth I can say things that are so hurtful to the other person that one might think I have a total lack of compassion! And this without thinking or meaning anything by it. Like this one guy I said something to in sixth grade, about him probably not needing another piece of candy. Why you say something like that to anyone I don’t know. But how you can say it to a chubby person like my classmate is unbelievable! And it was just because I didn’t want to give any of my candy away. He confronted me like five years later and I hadn’t even thought about it as an incident. I’m a bad bad person. I could tell so many more examples of this, but I’m too ashamed and I bow to repent my evil words every day. For being a heathen I really do believe in doing upon others like you wish they would do upon you. That all the bad stuff I have done is being punished and each day I live: I pay. What comes around goes around.

Well some bad stuff I do is like in Faulty Towers (John Cleese) when the Germans are there. The staff is told: “Don’t mention the war!”. They keep repeating this so much that the only thing John Cleese’s character is doing is making references to Hitler and World War II. It’s hilarious! And sometimes that’s how I am as well. Not with Germans per say, but like when my sweet, dear, strong and pregnant friend is having coffee (decaf of course) with me I tell her how tired I am of my new co-workers talking about nothing but their children. That I feel like I work in a seed-factory considering the pregnancy rate at that office. And this knowing that I will probably want to talk more about her baby than she will! I’m a bad bad person.

So now it’s time for me to go out and do some good deeds to compensate!