Hotel Rwanda

I went and listened to Paul Rusesabagina speak yesterday for the University Forum. He has an incredible story, and I was actually slightly surprised to hear that the movie, "Hotel Rwanda", was a very accurate depiction of the events. Not surprised expecting the movie to have portrayed it to be worse than it was, just surprised because movies tend to take liberties about real life.

At the end of his address he gave the strong admonition that if we want to see change in the world we need to stand up and make it happen. As I was listening I thought about the kinds of emotions he must have about his ordeal. He made it out alive and we herald him as a hero. But I would bet that part of him feels something along the lines of: "I didn't want to be a hero, I'm only a hero because no one in the entire world would help me. Not even this U.S. government which bestows awards upon me for what I did." He was abandoned by the world, and when he happened to make it out alive with a thousand people we call him a hero. I would bet he would much rather be a nobody and have several million more people be alive as a result of U.S. intervention.

I know (because I've heard people here in Utah say it in the past) that some of you are probably thinking, "Yah, Clinton really should have done something". But guess what? Your high and mighty Bush is just as culpable because the genocides have been occurring in Africa constantly over the last 20 years. Yet we spend billions of dollars a day sitting in Iraq and Afghanistan for no acceptable reason. Simply imagine the amount of lives that could have been spared had we sent our military to the troubled regions of Rwanda, Burundi, Darfur, Congo, etc. Places were people go to sleep wondering if they'll wake up in the morning. Iraq was actually a stable country where people went about their lives with food, water, electricity, and an expectation of safety--- We destroyed that stability. Millions have been killed by senseless violence in Africa, killed brutally: man, woman and child. Our country could have stopped, could still stop it; but we don't.

The more I learn about the world and about US politics the more ashamed I become to call myself an American. Please elect somebody that will bring about positive change in the world rather than creating more instability and hatred.

The sigh

I hate irrationality. It is very near to the top of my (non-existent) list of things that I really can't stand. What bothers me even more, though, is when I am acting irrationally. I want to be able to delve into my brain and flip the switches that need to be flipped so that I can act rationally. Why can't I just be happy with a good thing. Not just a good thing, a really good thing, for which there was no reason to be unhappy. Mind you it's not that I was unhappy; but I wasn't ecstatic, there was no reason not to be ecstatic, there was plenty of reason to be very happy, but I couldn't feel it, it wasn't there in my chest, I needed to feel love and I didn't. It wouldn't have been fair to keep going like that. I waited, desperately wishing for the emotions to come which would make the tears unnecessary. The emotions never came, how I wish they would have. Why couldn't I just convince my heart that it was being stupid, my brain knew it, but my heart wouldn't listen. And if there's something I hate even more than acting irrationally, it's making a girl cry. I absolutely despise myself when it happens. I've always had a really soft spot for emotionally distressed females. There is very little that I would not do to help a crying girl. Yet here I sit, having caused such distress to someone completely undeserving of it. Sitting at my desk listening to my "sleep" mix, not feeling like sleeping. Oddly enough the rational part of my mind that functions in some detached manner from the irrational part knows that what I feel is depression. Not clinical depression, just normal life depression. I know the symptoms, I can recognize them in myself, but still succumb to the effects. I wish there were switches in my brain that I could flip as needed. But I suppose that would make me a computer, programmable to obtain the desired behavior. It would still be really convenient at times.

Sorry for the ramblings, as I said, I don't feel much like sleeping.

To Alishka: Again, I'm sorry. I know that you will find a guy who is completely crazy about you. I wish it could have been me, but, alas, my emotions do not cooperate with logic.

Fighting with Fargo

Wells Fargo that is. At this very moment I am on hold waiting for someone with authority to reverse a charge on my account. Here's the whole "fun" story:

Back in 2007 I was really busy from the end of October to the end of December. So busy that I neglected to see that Wells Fargo had decided to start charging me service fees for their Bill Pay service. Ridiculous as: 1. I wasn't using Bill Pay for anything. and 2. Bill Pay is supposed to be free for college accounts, which my account was supposed to be. Since the Bill Pay had been active on my account since July, without any fees, I assumed this to be the case. So when I noticed the fees in December I had my roommate, who worked at WF at the time, reverse the charges and update my student status so it wouldn't be a problem again. I looked at my account today to find a brand new Bill Pay charge for January.

So I called WF Customer Service and spoke to some (thankfully English speaking) girl who transferred me to the online banking / Bill Pay people. This person lets me remove Bill Pay (which I wanted since I wasn't using it anyways), but told me she couldn't reverse the January charge because Customer Relations had already reversed charges for December and November. I was sitting thinking, "What?" Let's go through this again. Your company screwed up, and can't fixed it because you screwed up a few months ago and fixed that screw up? So I said something along the lines of, "Isn't there someone that can authorize this charge reversal, because I was told everything was taken care of in December, so this isn't my fault." She says, "Let me transfer you, can I put you on hold for a moment?" So that was where I was when I started this post. About halfway through this post I got "accidentally disconnected" apparently.

So now I'm talking to someone else, who is supposedly asking her supervisor to authorize the reversal. Now she's telling me that it can't be done because of the "courtesy reversals" already done in November and December. So now I'm arguing with her about it. And now I'm on hold again.

[sigh]

It's one charge of $6.95. It shouldn't be that big of a deal to them. I'm getting ready to tell them off and hope they like their seven dollars because that's just what they got for losing a customer.

Finally, she "spoke to her supervisor" again and now they'll reverse the charge, after adding some notes into their system. Which (having worked Tech Support) I know means making notes on my account saying I'm a difficult customer and probably a liar.

Supposedly it's done now. Hopefully Lisa (I asked for her name again) actually did it and my issues will be gone now. My transaction reference number for this is FR1886083.

Thanks for playing another game of "Fighting Corporate BS!"

Our next episodes will be: "Why didn't management get my rent check?" and "Health Insurance: The answer is 'No'."

Catch up time

So, time for some catch up on life.

Christmas has come and gone, along with New Year's. Christmas was good, I finally got a Wii and have had many hours of fun with it since. New Year's was spent hanging out with friends from high school. Somewhat odd since everyone is now 21 and 22 so they enjoyed alcoholic beverages while I imbibed Cherry Coke. It was odd mostly because it was different for me to be hanging around with such a group as, obviously, that's not a common occurrence in Utah. It wasn't a big deal though, as most had one or two drinks over the course of the evening and champagne at midnight so it wasn't like anyone was going overboard.

Most of my free time has been spent either playing Wii games (Wii Sports, Guitar Hero III, and Super Mario Galaxy) and reading.

My latest two books were "The Paradox of Choice" and "Stumbling on Happiness". Both actually discuss a lot of similar studies and ideas. So reading them back to back instilled some strong feelings of deja vu. I'd suggest splitting up the books a little bit if you plan to read them both. They contain a lot of interesting ideas about decision making and why we're so bad at it much of the time. We are terrible at predicting emotional responses, and terrible at remembering emotional responses. We mostly remember only two parts of an experience, the strongest (best/worst) and the end. So if we have a good day with one really bad moment (say getting a paper cut) which also ends well, after some time we'll remember the paper cut and believe the day overall was pretty crappy. Our mind does a lot of this type of information compression. We'll remember a few details of an event and then when we "remember" the event, our mind will fabricate the event using the pieces we actually stored and making up the rest. This is why eye-witnesses are notoriously unreliable, but we all think we remember more accurately which is why eye-witnesses are so effective in court (This eye-witness stuff isn't in either book, but I'm extrapolating to things I've learned in Psychology.).

I'd recommend either book to someone looking to get some insight into the human mind. If you have read and enjoyed Blink, you'll enjoy this as well.