I don’t have time to watch all of this right now, but maybe you will.
I’ve watched the beginning, and didn’t hear much because I was having fun watching his wife. She, and at least one of her daughters, kept doing that thing that some ladies do — I mean that thing where they apparently see a friend in the crowd, and they throw their mouths WAY open and their eyes pop really big, with the brows way up, displaying the very essence of almost maniacally delighted surprise, sending the pantomime message that it’s SO awesome to see you, but I can’t talk right now…
She must have had a lot of friends in the crowd…
As for my observation that “some ladies” do this — I guess some guys, particularly politicians, do something like that, but the smile isn’t as big. They’re more like, well, the son in the picture below, sort of smiling at someone out there but not about to act like he’s thrilled by any of this.
Anyway, I enjoyed her.
Here you have wife and daughter doing that thing simultaneously, in opposite directions, while Chris soldiers on with his speech, saying something I’m missing…
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And yeah, I know that at the opposite extreme, if women DON’T do this, they might get accused of having Resting Bitch Face.
But some ladies do it a lot bigger than others, and in this case I just had fun watching it. I enjoy people who enjoy other people SO much…
I don’t want to waste 30 minutes of my life watching the video. What are the times that I can skip to in the video?
I could turn off audio and move the video to another monitor and continue to do stuff.
[sigh] smh
… whatever you mean by that…
shaking my head
Yeah, I know. But I don’t know why…
“Ladies” be doin’ cute stuff. Dudes also do stuff but not so cute.
True enough. Unless the dude is my grandson.
But back to my point… what must it be like to have that kind of positive energy, that kind of response to people (people who are not your grandchildren, I mean)? Does it make a person happier? Or is it a lot of work?
I suspect it makes people happier. It feeds off itself.
Inspired by this video, I’ve been trying to be more upbeat in my human interactions. I’ve been putting exclamation points in emails to people and saying encouraging things.
My hope is it will cheer ME up, since I’ve been feeling unusually surly today. No results yet…
You may think I’m kidding, but I’m not. Two actual emails I’ve sent in the past 15 minutes:
“Well, God bless you! I hope you get better fast…”
and
“Oh my gosh! Everybody OK?”
The contexts were a) someone who is going to miss a meeting because she’s recovering from being in a wreck last week, and b) a tree fell on someone’s sister’s house during a storm last night.
Dang! Another friend — and yeah, it’s a woman friend — just outdid me on the first of those email threads:
“Oh no!
“Lots of prayers coming your way!!!
Love,” etc.
Note to self: MULTIPLE exclamation points…
Brad – you’re doing great at faking sincerity!!!!!
Thanks, man.
I’m still really dragging today, though. Don’t know why. I’m trying right now listening to Katrina and the Waves, and it’s not working…
The National Weather Service says that the “haze” is smoke from fires in Alaska!?!?! That may account for your (and my) dragging. Stay inside!
I am not at all sure the response is genuine. I believe you are closer the mark when you talk about the alternative–“bitch face”—think of the heat Cindy McCain took.
We like our “ladies” to be cheery, and ever so glad to see us.
I know this b/c I have been acculturated to do just this.
And when a lady leaves off exclamation points in casual communication, it is deemed that she is angry. It also means that when she puts them there, she is discounted as frivolous.
Ladies be not winning.
One of my daughters has had a terrible time with this her whole life. When she was just a toddler, people would say, “What’s wrong, little girl?” And nothing was wrong. All the way through school, teachers would peg her as having an attitude when she was just minding her own business.
Now she’s in Thailand, where everyone smiles all the time. (My wife and daughter had to remind me not to look surly a couple of times, because it can really come across as hostile over there. Especially if you’re a visitor, you’re expected to look like you really LIKE everything and are really enjoying your visit — fortunately, I really DID enjoy my visit.)
As you can tell from pictures I’ve posted, she’s gotten the hang of it pretty well. When in Rome… Of course, it really helps that she likes Thailand.
Christie’s wife smiles too much? What a silly observation. Brad, you were (correctly) all over John Edwards for being phony. From what I’m hearing Christie makes him look like an amateur in that department.
Really? Oh, I’d say Christie is quite the opposite of that smiley charmer. Christie is far more WYSIWYG; he wears his feelings on his sleeve — hence the sobriquet “Human Opera.”
If anything, THAT will be Christie’s undoing, not phoniness.
I don’t see Christie as a phony at all. I’m sure he’s got plenty of baggage having to navigate the political world of New Jersey but he seems far more genuine on the stump than Lindsey Graham.
Christie has a shot if he can survive the first few primaries and make the top four coming into South Carolina. He won’t win here because, well, South Carolinians are parochial fools… but if he can hang on til Florida with all the NY/NJ transplants and make it to Illinois, NY, NJ, PA, he’s going to have a shot. Maybe enough to team up as a VP choice with Rubio/Walker.
Doug you’re completely wrong about Christie. He’s a phony, a narcissist and a bully. His temperament is downright scary. The whole bridge thing is very much in keeping with his bullying approach to issues. Maybe he didn’t know about the bridge closing but his staff sure knew how he felt and no down conveyed his of take-no-prisoners style of leadership. Besides, if he didn’t know what his staff was up to doesn’t that demonstrate an incredibly lax understanding of what his staff doing behind his back? That defines cluelessness, a trait we had way too much of with George W. Bush.
There are two things I love, and they will seem contradictory. I don’t have the time to fully explain them, but I’ll describe them briefly here.
I love it when someone defies expectations, especially if they do it in a good way. My favorite example of that is when a Democrat says something nice about a Republican, or vice versa. When you hear something like that, it MEANS something, and we don’t hear it nearly enough. Like when GOP Chairman Matt Moore and Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison stood together on the flag, and Harrison said, “I have nothing but respect for Gov. Haley. She’s doing the right thing, and she’s doing it for the right reasons.” For that matter, I found it awesome that Haley was doing what she was doing, which totally ran against expectations.
Yeah, I know everybody likes unexpected good news, but I’m trying to say something else here and not saying it well. Basically, there’s this special counter-stereotype neural receptor in my brain that REALLY releases the endorphins or something when something like that happens, beyond just the normal delight in good news.
Then, I also find it sort of delightful when you don’t expect someone to do something stereotypical, but they DO. (So it’s kind of the same thing — I love the unexpectedness — but in one case I’m delighting in someone acting against stereotype, and in the other case I’m bowled over that they are so stereotypical).
In this case, I didn’t expect the wife of Chris Christie, who is an investment banker, to get up there and mug and smile and enthuse like that. I might, on account of the stereotype, expect a sorority girl from the MIssissippi University for Women (which they call “the W” in the Delta) to act like that, enthusing over her man’s big moment. But not this woman, based on the almost nothing I knew about her.
So it just made me smile to see her so INTO it. It made her the most delightful investment banker I’d seen all day…
It’s hard to explain.
And I learned something from it: Investment bankers are people, too! 🙂
Having known a lot of investment bankers in a previous existence, they are quite personable. They do deals.
They should call it something else, then. “Investment” makes My Eyes Glaze Over, and “banker” puts me into a coma.
Obviously, I know NOTHING about them…
Doing deals means closing. Closing means relating and problem solving with people – even if, like investment bankers, one likely framed the problem to begin with which must be overcome. That’s negotiating.
Actually, I felt his whole announcement was a sales job on his faithful followers for being there – at this his Waterloo. Rah rah huzzah!
I think his wife knew this was the last high point. Maybe she is really happy he is coming home soon?
There are two reasons why I found it hard to pay attention to the governor’s speech while his wife did all that stuff in the background:
1. I may be the most easily distracted creature on this planet. OK, maybe I’m building myself up too much. Put it this way: If there were a league for competitions to see who can be the most easily distracted, and South Carolina had a team, I would certainly make All-American. Ah, the glory I’m missing out on! This society rewards all the wrong things…
2. There is so much more INTENSITY to the interactions in which New Jersey’s first lady is engaged, and the governor’s interaction with his audience simply can’t compete with it…