Commedia dell' arte

The last couple of days there have been many events but two of them made me think of Commedia dell' Arte and made me wonder why people need to fool each other as if wearing masks. It saddens me! Both events involved women and one of them was my wife! What a puzzle women are!

The first event was a meeting of my management team. There are some perky, young women with ambition in my department that  balance the abundance of grumpy, old men. They had made a beautiful presentation using Presio that blew we away with pizazz. Their proposal was to box the department in groups depending on character, using three archetypal characters. This is where I got apprehensive. One of my key beliefs is freedom of choice. It is deeply seated in my childhood trauma of being in a Kennedy like family (see previous Blog). I dislike labelling people and the effect group perception can have on the development of the individual. So I volunteered  to participate. One of them said: "I was just hoping that you would be the one to participate!". I thought: "I bet you say that to all the guys." but, being vain, I let myself be tricked into thinking "all was for the best, in the best of possible worlds". Not unnatural with all the pizazz and the fact I just scored success with a new investment ranking system.

So, you might think, why did this upset me so? Nothing much, accept for a remark that one of the managers made after the girls had gone. My one had complained of experiencing energy drain from keeping up good spirits when faced with all these gloomy Gusses. I felt both sorry for her and abhorred, was I in fact one of those energy drains? It like Candide, incredibly naive. (If you want to know how that works and how it ended look it up on wiki.).
Later I spoke to her remarking on her need to label people made me feel apprehensive. She immediately agreed that she herself was against but the other girl had made her. Smart thinking, it wasn't a very good typology. I proposed we devise a method of using group dynamics to get feed-back from the group and using that to construct new, shared and logical group rules. (I do want to prevent the negative effects of labelling).

The true deception on my part came later: When searching the Internet for the girls' archetypes I could not find them. They had made up an ill fitting set of labels themselves! As is having scientific ones is not bad enough! Women!

The second event was this morning. I had taken a day of from work to be with my wife and we were having breakfast in a bistro. I was relating work stories to her. Telling her my success with the new report that had gotten acclaim in  the executive committee and the girls' story among them. After concluding I was doing better than my direct competitor she started uhuh-ing me. When I confronted her she went perky on me. Tonight, when we reviewed our day she said she was tired but satisfied for she had achieved her goals and even got me activated. When I asked how that could be since we had such an energising breakfast she said that was one of the things that had tired her out! QED! Women!!

So, what can I take away from this other than that Voltaire was right and Leibnitz was wrong? Much! And the first step is to view the situation from a woman's perspective! But alas, it is late and I need my sleep.

To be continued,


Brandon