Archive for May, 2010
This is a response I’ve found myself giving a lot in my life lately, not so much because I’m not smart or educated (Cal State Education, yea!), but because I’ve found my friends asking me a lot of unanswerable questions recently. I’m guessing these questions just tend to come with age because life becomes more complex. I remember typically having the answers when I was younger, but looking back I’m sure questions like “what do you want for lunch” or “did you see that cute guy over there” are pretty answerable.
No, at this age people are typically going through big life changes daily. I have a friend the other day who is getting married ask me if he should get one of those benchmark wedding bands or just stick with a standard gold one? “I have no idea”, I responded, because frankly I don’t know. I told him to just try and think about what her fiancée would like. The look on his face seemed to imply that he would of rather of had me give an answer, you know, that pained half smile like “Well, it would have been easier if you just gave me point-on-point instructions on what to do”. I feel for him, I really do, but I have my own things to worry about. Plus, it really is easy if you just think about what your significant other likes in her regular jewelry.
By the way, just an aside, I’ve always thought that the phrase “I have no idea” is a lot nicer then the phrase “I don’t know”. The ladder phrase makes it sound like your just being lazy while “I have no idea” makes it sound like you at least scanned your brain before giving the answer. Since most of the questions people ask me seem to be unanswerable or deeply personal (“Do you think I should have another kid”) anyway I don’t feel bad about not giving an answer.
Also, I feel like a lot of the questions that I’m asked to answer also put me in the line of blame. Take the wedding band question for instance: if I were to give an answer and it turns out the fiancée hated the ring then I would, at least partly, be on the hook for as long as the ring existed. It’s better that he gives the answer and can either live with the glory or blame. I know, I know, but c’mon, you know I’m right?
Kimberly Green advocates talking with your fiancee when selecting benchmark wedding bands.
What’s that phrase from that superhero movie, “With great power comes great responsibility?” I think I quoted it wrong the other day and in doing so might have created a quote that I like equally well: “With great choices come great responsibility”. I don’t mean “great” as in “wonderful” I mean great as in “a lot” (whether or not this is grammatically correct I’m not sure but just roll with me on this for the next three-hundred words or so, ok?).
Life is full of choices more so now than at any time in human history. While I don’t have time to cite any study quoting this, all you need to do is take a look around you. Remember when it was just chicken or beef? Well, now you have your choice of chicken, beef, steak, organic beef, kobe style beef, free range chicken, fish, etc. Want a wedding ring? You can choose palladium wedding bands, gold ones, silver ones, titanium, tungsten, etc. And we won’t even mention pizza toppings. Technology has given us more options and corporations are tripping over themselves to give them to their customers.
And I believe this is a good thing. I know there is a movement now-a-days to say that “Choices are bad and things were easier back then”. And while choices might make ordering a burger a bit harder than it was ten years ago, these choices have also given consumers an upper hand. Competition is good for a marketplace as it drives down prices because customers have so many choices. If you don’t like the way a place cuts your hair you can always go to the one down the street. This means that quality improves and so does customer care.
Also, lets face it, choices are nice even if they can lead to some confusion. The great responsibility comes from knowing what you are choosing and being educated enough to make that decision. Having thirty types of washers to choose thing is a good thing, it just means that you have to do a little more research.
It’s true that there are tradeoffs. Some choices cost more (ever seen how much it is to buy organic beef at the store, geez), but you can always choose not to buy them. If you’re not comfortable buying a palladium wedding ring because you’re not familiar with it, you can always buy the gold one. It’s all the customer’s choice.
As technology evolves more choices will come with it. It’s time to get on the bus and embrace the responsibility that these new choices give us. Of course, you have your choice of what bus you can take and whether you want coach or first class, and for an extra $10 you can get unlimited snacks. Your choice.
Kimberly Green is sometimes in awe of the beautiful palladium wedding bands available for men today.
There was a joke I heard the other day from this comic named Patton Oswalt. Without repeating the naughty parts, the jist of the joke was that flying is in a plane is going in the face of everything that humans were meant to do. You’re essentially flying a building at 30,000 feet hoping that psychics will keep you airborne. Heck if we know what aircraft engine parts do, we just know that it keeps us up in the air.
When something has become part of our lives we tend to take it for granted. Flying is definitely one of those things. We were not, as human beings, meant to fly. We are earth dwellers. We had to invent something to put us in the air. Now we view it as more of an annoyance then a spectacle. We spend our time in the air trying to waste it with bad magazines and watered down drinks instead of thinking about how magical our journey is.
I remember in high school a teacher asked me what I thought that most astounding thing humans have ever done in our short history. I didn’t have to think about it for more than two seconds: go into space. Or, more so, go into space so much it isn’t a big deal anymore. What used to be a spectacle that was met with ticker tape parades and commemorative coins are now nothing more than a small blurb on the news. Oh, Discovery went up again? What else is on? The fact that we are launching a giant rocket with thousands of intricate parts seems to not impress anyone anymore. Let’s not forget about the fact that we are also strapping thousands of pounds of highly explosive rocket fuel to the machine.
You can tell that we take something for granted when we view it as a negative more than a positive. We HAVE to take a plane. We HAVE to go to the airport. The fact that hundreds of people work to keep you from dying in the air and on the ground seem to not matter, it’s nothing more than an inconvenience to us (especially when they lose our luggage, I’ll admit that is super annoying). I guess you could make the same argument about the car, or really any complex machine. Do people not understand how much of a miracle something like a microwave is? We are cooking something with light for heaven’s sake.
Of course I’m guilty of this too. I’m typing on a computer right now just trying to pound out the last few words instead of marveling at what’s it’s done for me. Self contained intelligence? Puff… I just made it to five hundred words…
Kim Green is often in awe of what aircraft engine parts are capable of doing.
It seems that nearly three years after my own wedding I’ve officially become a wedding expert. Mind you, this has nothing to do with my own wedding. As the first one from my group to get married I was like the weird “wedding litmus” test that was used to figure out how it should be done. In a way it was unfair but at the same time necessary. With no prior experience I was left thinking “how the heck do you plan a wedding anyway?” Well, thanks to my wedding now everyone knows what to do and what not to do.
I got married early, but now that everyone else seems to be getting married around the same time I’ve become the go-to friend for planning a wedding. I’m currently in three wedding parties (one best woman or whatever that’s called) and have taken an integral part in planning all three weddings. Because of this I currently know everything you would ever want to know about the wedding process. Want to know what Jewelers in Newport Beach to get your wedding rings from? Just ask me, I know that. Want to not only know where the best place to have your reception is but also the best time of day to call and negotiate a price? I know that too. I should open my own wedding service I know so much darn information. Since the average person only uses 8% of their brain I’m sure that it’s forced out some useful information that I need on a daily basis (where are my keys?).
How did I learn this information, you might ask? Good ol’ fashion research. And I’m talking more than just going on Google and putting in “how to do a wedding” I’m talking reading books, researching articles, tons of phone calls, etc. Looking back at my wedding I can say one mistake I made was that I trusted uninformed friends and family members too much. As a bride or groom you need to trust your own instincts. I know that that makes you seem like bridezilla or a groomzilla, but sometimes you have to just go with your heart. Look, I didn’t have a bad wedding or anything, but there was too much drama and broken promises leading up to it. What I tried to give my friends was an easy lead up filled with good thoughts and few arguments.
The key to this, I found, was to just think though every decision in order and not try and get too far ahead of yourself. Don’t start thinking about the flowers until you’ve decided on the reception hall and have the booking in stone. Don’t decide on a ring until you know what you want. It’s easier to plan someone else’s wedding then your own, but you have to make sure the soon to be husband and wife are in every decision. It’s easy to plan a good wedding you just have to use your brain more than your heart.
Author Kimberly Green often searches jewelers newport beach looking for bargains for her friends.
What’s the trick to looking like you know what you’re doing? Well, just looking like you know what you’re doing. It’s a trick I discovered at school a few years ago and something that I have put into effect ever since. It’s simple, probably so simple that you would never think of it. Just look busy, with a purpose. As long as you look busy, even if you’re completely lost and need to think through a few things, you can buy yourself some precious time by just looking like your furiously working towards a conclusion. Work’s every time. I should patent this stuff.
For as long as I remember it’s taken me a little extra time to get stuff done. This is not from a lack of trying, or because I’m slow moving or anything like that, it’s simply that I like to think things out. I use to get in trouble at school for “day dreaming” even though I was just thinking about my assignment. I learned at that point that people want you to just look busy even if you’re not doing anything in particular. Whether you’re trying to find the perfect baby shower decorations for a baby shower (which I recently had to do), or have to get in an important report at work (which I also had to do recently), people seem to feel a whole lot better about the whole situation if they see you feverishly working, even if it’s all just an act.
Take this for example: As I mentioned before I was recently put in charge of getting baby shower decorations for a friends baby shower. Finding the perfect baby shower decorations was tough. There was a lot to sift through and none of it seemed to exactly fit what my friend wanted. After a few weeks, my friend began to get nervous and asked me, crying (she was under a lot of pressure at the time), why I wasn’t searching and taking it seriously. Instead of yelling at her and telling her how much work I had done I decided I was going to begin to include her in the process to show her how much I was working. So from then on, every couple of days I sent her links to baby shower pages to see what she thought. I was actually doing less work then before but since I was showing her what I was doing I looked busier.
And that is the key: as long as you look busy people will think you know what you’re doing. Once I started including her she felt better about the whole thing and apologized to me. Try it sometimes, I guarantee if you look busy people will give you the benefit of the doubt, even if your still trying to figure out what you’re going to do.
Author Kim Green takes her tasks, such as finding baby shower decorations very seriously.
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