Honey Bees and Projection Screens.

Bee Love (redbud tree)

Hubby and I went to Grand Junction for Easter weekend and it was pretty awesome to be out of town.  The weather was beautiful (it was also beautiful in Denver) and we spent some time driving around doing various things.  On Saturday the honey bees found the tree in the front of my parents yard.  Their tree is very similar to the one pictured, but has slightly darker blossoms.  The honey bees love it; they were working from late morning to early evening collecting goodies to take back to their hive.  There were so many of them!  Almost the entire top of the tree was covered in honey bees with about three to four blossoms between each of them.  And the sound.  The sound they made was amazing.  All of those bees working on a single tree created a fantastic hum.  You could hear it form inside the screen door, but if you walked outside it was much louder, and much cooler.  It was an experience, to say the least.

At any rate, today I'm writing about projecting yourself onto others: what I was supposed to write about yesterday, had I not been up at three in the morning.

How many times have you caught yourself expecting others to behave the way you behave?  If you're a parent, your answer is most likely higher than those of us without children.
I catch myself doing this a lot.  I mean, a lot.  I slip into the foolish expectation that someone else will treat me the way I would treat them, or have habits similar to mine.  This is easy to do with a lot of things.  I forget that world view is different for everyone.  Sometimes I think, "well it was easy for me, it'll be easy for you."
I feel like this is an error that a lot of people make.  And I do try to correct myself, though sometimes it's quite a long time after the fact that I realize that's what I was doing.
The mistake of projecting something onto another person is simple to make, and it's hard to understand that this is what's happening in a multitude of situations.  The problem is the difficulty level of thinking like someone else.  Thinking like someone else is next to impossible for most people because you can't turn off the you in your brain (at least I can't).  It's extremely difficult not to perceive something with your own special bias (I'm not using this word negatively here).  Because of this we come upon the fallacy of Relativism. In some respects this theory is true, and in some respects it is false; like anything else, it cannot be blanketed over everything the way people seem to want to use it.

People also project onto animals.
This is why you see dogs that are ill-trained, or animal hoarders.  Someone has projected their emotional distress in some form onto the animal present, and the result is sometimes disastrous.  This is true of projecting onto other people as well.

I'm not saying projecting yourself onto someone else is particularly a terrible thing; what I'm saying is that it can cause problems.

The most frequent example I have of this in myself is my lack of understanding for others misunderstanding.  It is so clear to me why I joined Catholicism and why I'm preparing to embark upon the journey into WAPF, it should also be clear to you, the person I am speaking with.
But it is not always so clear to everyone else.  And in my limitations I get frustrated with those who refuse to even acknowledge that perhaps my choices are right, though different from theirs (I am also guilty of not understanding someone's choice, but I try to be nice about it).  In my frustration I find my articulation suffers and I become somewhat stubborn, sometimes very stubborn.  In the end (if the discussion is particularly irritating) I wonder, "why can't they just see my side of things?"  But who's to say they're not thinking the exact same thing about me?
I have my reasons and I try to explain them, but I rely a lot on the assumption that since they were logical to me, they will be logical to someone else.
The common error of projecting my logic process onto the person I'm speaking with.

It's also irritating to realize that someone else has been making assumptions about you based on their own emotional baggage.  The kind of assumptions that are totally out of left field and really don't make any sense if they actually knew you (or were actually observant).
The "up" side is called rose colored glasses and is a term applied to people who are blindly in love with someone, or just intentionally ignoring their faults.  The "down" side doesn't have a name to the best of my knowledge - I might call it seeing red or something similar - and is the opposite end of the spectrum where someone refuses to see any good qualities in someone.

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I'm sorry for the lack of activity last week.  I'm trying to write when possible, but this eye strain is really kicking my ass.  I should make an eye appointment but I can't do that until after September, when I'm not a pregnant lady any more.  At least that's what they tell me.
Until then I'm going to make my best effort to obtain Hubby's glasses so I can sit and stare at the screen for a while.  The difficult part is he doesn't get home from work until around 7:30 p.m., then we eat dinner, then I'm tired and I want to go to bed so I can get up at 5:30 a.m. the next day to work for 9 hours.  It's a viscous cycle, but I don't think I'd change it.  I'll just have to try and work around it.
And try I shall!
I apologize for the potentially sporadic updates that may follow.

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I leave you with this.  Enjoy.