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Around Thanksgiving of this year my company, BitMethod, released an iPhone App into the iTunes Store that takes a completely different approach to weight loss tracking and logging than any other tool I've used. I stumbled onto this idea completely by accident and I wanted to outline the history of how it happened since I find it interesting and I figure others might as well. Lite Weight is the child of a lot of different ideas and philosophies that I've enjoyed learning about over the course of my weight loss journey.
My first discovery, as I remember it, was The Hacker's Diet. Though I now believe that the idea of nutrition as a "Rubber Bag" is a limited view of nutrition, I really enjoyed the authors insights into weight tracking. To quickly summarize: even if you enter your weight in wearing the same clothes, at the same time every day, your weight can change a substantial amount. Dehydration and exercise can cause weight to fall, a big meal can leave extra weight in your belly, and both salt and carbohydrate intake can cause water retention. The author proposes that weight should be tracked using a moving average so that your actual weight can be approximated amid all those changes in the amount of water in your body. Many approaches are proposed in the book to do this weight charting, but I used the excellent site, Physics Diet, to use as my weight loss journal.
Quite a while after this, I stumbled over the book, The Overfed Head, though I'm going to skip over this for now, since it didn't play a part in Lite Weight until near the very end of development.
But the idea that really led to Lite Weight was gleaned from an article on how the web and weblog have changed writing. A professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT proposed that all one needs to do to lose weight is to draw a line from your current weight to a goal weight and plot your weight each day. If your weight is over the line, eat less and if your weight is under the line, eat as normal. This professor's name is Steve Ward and his diet is known as The Steve Ward Diet or The Bang-Bang Diet (bang-bang because of a type of controller that is either on or off based on some input)
Lite Weight didn't immediately pop into my head as soon as I had learned all of these ideas. Really, I don't know what ultimately led to the idea. It was probably while walking around downtown Des Moines or raking leaves in my yard. But I think the thought at the time was along the lines of "why can't I write a program that tells me how I should behave based on my weight loss history".
My early attempts at putting together some tool didn't make me very happy. I was still buying into the view of Steve Ward that some goal weight should be set to be reached at some goal date. It was great in terms of development because the math is really easy, but it sucked in a few ways:
Realizing this caused the solution to emerge somewhat organically. The math would be much more complicated, but I decided that I can safely assume that if a user chose to use this tool that he or she wanted to lose weight. Without the goal weights, the App struck a chord in its simplicity. I was able to develop a tool that had a single input and could suggest a clear course of action.
You might be thinking that suggesting a clear course of action is just guesswork. When I started out, I had felt the same way. But my earlier decision to assume the user is trying to lose weight allows for some math that creates some very clear separation between the four states that I eventually adopted: Relax, Over, Under, and Gaining.
In terms of programming, the rest of the story is pretty boring. I decided to add a maintenance mode and came up with some more fun math for that, I made it pretty, I tweaked the code so that it acted as you would expect after Thanksgiving weekend, for example, and any other situations that can lead to odd weight fluctuations.
But back to The Overfed Head. One of the central ideas of the book is expressed in the term thintuition, coined by the author to explain the behavior that naturally thin people exhibit. Basically, some people stop and listen to their body to determine whether they're full or hungry, and lots of us don't. At this point, the application was almost done and running on my iPhone. I had been using it regularly and was beginning to notice how it was affecting me. By having a simple, clear explanation of what my body was doing, I couldn't make excuses for the decisions I had made. If I got feedback explaining that my weight was above what was expected, I usually knew why and it was typically related to my behavior the day before. Almost without thinking, I would eat less, giving myself a smaller serving of something, or not finishing food I wasn't hungry for. It wasn't until I was helping to write the text for the iTunes Store that I realized that the application was giving me that thintuition I had read about in The Overfed Head.
I'm really happy with the final product, which is available for the iPhone and iPod Touch in the iTunes Store for 99 cents. The ideas and contributions of a collection of people helped me hone my product and actually simplify it the more of them I used. Stop by the Lite Weight App Site to check out videos of our iPhone weight loss tracking app.
friend: "hows ur finacee?"
Me:.....
"that statement is odd
"as I am sure I told you she leveled up to my wife"
One of the things I've been talking/thinking about for a while now is what role absolute truth plays in our lives. I've definitely grown accustomed to thinking more in shades of gray than black and white, while still holding the belief that there are many things that are absolutely true. In that spirit, one of the problems I've been seeing lately is people taking positions on extreme ends of this particular idea, and it's really made me lose a good deal of respect for them.
Here's the situation as I see it. On one end of this belief are people who see that we're becoming more tolerant and accepting of beliefs and ideas. As a reaction, they analyze their own personal beliefs and ideas, and decide that they should be making many of them more rigid, applying the idea of absolute truth to them. On the other end are people who see that we're closing our minds off from differing perspectives. As a reaction, they analyze their own personal beliefs and ideas, and decide they should be making many of them more fluid, even if many of these beliefs don't warrant it.
I got in an argument this last weekend that I probably shouldn't have gotten in. A series of mostly harmless statements ended up in someone telling me, in a tone I took to be extremely patronizing (though I guess some people will never understand that you're an adult), that you should always be early for everything. I don't disagree that in his experience being early has always been beneficial, but in my experience, I've seen people that didn't get hired for jobs because they came to their interview too early. My personal opinion is that you should be right on time.
Disclaimer: Part of the argument was that you can't always be "on time" for everything. An example would be going to the airport to catch a flight. I'm not an idiot, I understand that there are some things that require early attendance. The thing is, if you're "on time" in an extremely nit-picky, technical sense, you're going to miss your plane. So obviously "on time" for a plane, in order to catch that plane, involves adding padding to that time. It's why the airlines explicitly state the duration of time before your flight leaves you should be at the airport. The time your flight leaves, minus this duration, is "on time". If you're in a culture where being 10 minutes early is expected, then your appointment time, minus 10 minutes, is "on time".
Trying to parse this over the last week, one of the only ways I've figured out how to make sense of his viewpoint is how often in the past he's asserted absolute truth about ideas and beliefs that didn't deserve them (for example, that listening to music with a beat makes you want to have sex). I've heard him express distaste about how my generation plays fast and loose with how we think and act. At this point, I view his way of evaluating his beliefs to be on that one end of the extreme, where someone has taken a pretty trivial belief and declared it absolute truth because they're afraid of giving in to the "chaos" that they see in the grey areas.
All that it's done is made me more careful about deciding what I declare to be absolutely true. Congratulations to him if his worry was that I was too lax in my beliefs. He's managed to make me consider making many of my beliefs even less rigid, and he's lost a good deal of respect from me at the same time, all because he wants to believe that you should always be early.
According to email forwards and facebook, this "Gas Out" scheduled for May 15th is brewing across America.
The plan, if you haven't heard, is to have everybody strike against buying gas that one day, so that gas stations, nationwide, will be withheld from the billions of dollars in income that they would typically receive in a day. This would be a big enough cut in income to send the message that America is sick of the $3.00 gallon of gas (though, ofcourse, not sick of our Escalades and Excursions built for two - two times as much gas, two parking spaces to fit one, and two person households that own them.)
Now, chances are, since I only fill up my tank every week and a half to two weeks, I wouldn't buy gas on May 15th anyway. I might even go out of my way to fill up on the 14th, if I see that I am running low, so I can give credit to the good intentions of the protesters.
Two fallacies though: First, it's not as if less gas is going to be purchased. I bet gas stations will double their income on the 14th from all the customers who want to make a statement the next day.
Second, their main validation for this protest and their argument for its effectiveness is that in 1997 this same method led to a 30 cent drop in gas prices overnight. Who remembers the gas strike last year? And probably the year before? How come those aren't used as examples? How come the only example of this working that can be conjured took place 10 years ago?
Hmm, something to think about..
I'm not trying to be a party-pooper here. Like I said, I am 99% sure I won't buy gas on the 15th. But I'm also not going way out of my way. Maybe I just don't have a vast enough understanding of economics, it just seems like there are better ways to protest, if that's really what you are intending to do. Like, maaaybe, protests that involve actual sacrifices and that have a cost to show how sincere you are about your statement.
Just a suggestion though...
I don't like rising gas prices, but neither do I have to pay $75 a tank, twice a week, to carry my little tikes to their yoga classes..
I just got done reading To Kill a Mockingbird. In case you haven't read it, it's mostly about the ugliness of overt racism all the way down to simple prejudice through innocence. At the same time, I began reading Don't Believe Everything You Think. Not a lot of it, mind you, but I got through the chapters on how we turn anecdotal evidence into proof. It's crazy how stuff in your life can suddenly tie together to help you figure stuff out.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I have issues with reddit. I stopped in today again after a long break and read through a few pages of comments on various articles. This was the comment that inspired this post. Please take the time to read it, it's very short. It's unfortunate that the author didn't link to the studies he mentioned, but I've seen them first hand doing research for my Civil War class in college.
I think we need to remember that when we hear something that supports what we already believe (or want to believe), it's worth pausing and checking to see if it's really true or just the author(s) trying to massage unreliable data into something that seems true. You either hold an opinion on something, or you know the truth about it. You might get upset that you can't always definitively back up what you believe, but holding an opinion is much less dangerous than believing you know the truth.
Think about the racism surrounding the civil war. Those who held the opinion that blacks were inferior were ugly as it were, but those that claimed to prove it were even worse. The things I think are true or that you think are true, in just a few years from now, might prove how ugly we are as well.
At one time, I read Digg, then I started reading Reddit, now I read neither. I stopped reading Digg because the content getting filtered up didn't suit my tastes and I was lured into the recommendation feature of Reddit. I abandoned Reddit because it's overrun by hateful atheists.
Reddit has basically become a gathering of people dedicated to a single goal: pointing out how stupid and backwards everyone that doesn't read their site is (particularly the religious right). The following topics show up frequently:
So, as quick gut check: everything that the users of Reddit condemn the "religious right" for spending so much time discussing, they do in almost exactly the same fashion. The only difference is that they have opposite viewpoints. It's this judgment fest about how they're right and their opponents are wrong. It's about how their education and knowledge makes them right.
What they're faulting the "simple people" (I'll use that term from now on) for is that their method for searching for truth is wrong, and theirs is right. It implies somehow that they've discovered the ultimate method for knowing what is true. I would guess that their source of ultimate truth is science? And yet science, by definition, makes no claim to absolute truth. Maybe it's math that's their source? Or logic? No matter. What I want to get at is that they feel the simple people of the world (I include myself) either don't know how to discover what is true, or have the wrong method for discovering what is true. And for the Christian, the source of truth is God.
And I need to take a tangent here. It's one of the reasons I believe in God, so it's a big one. I cannot see, in this world, a legitimate source of truth. There's no science, teacher, or form of logic that I can look toward and know that it is a source of truth. There is, to me, a giant gap. A source of truth has to speak to me, has to be somehow active in my life. Science can't do that, another human can't do that. I see all sorts of indicators that there is a source, but I don't see the source itself. It's why my source of truth is truth itself (in Godly form). And to claim that truth itself just exists, as just truth, cold and inanimate, is to take away its ability to influence anything else. It's why I used the word "source". It's why I believe there's a God.
Where it gets bad is for either side of the argument to believe that they know the ultimate method for discovering what is true. Neither side, regardless of their source of truth, should be able to claim that. And for one to look down on the other seems to be a matter of arrogance. If you understand that your method for discovering what is true is flawed (even if your source isn't) then you won't rag on each other so much.
But what's so bad about Reddit is that they should know better. They have a reference, they have source materials. They can see that there is a broken society of people who think they have it all figured out and are frequently totally wrong. It's reactionary, it's a mirror of what they see as being wrong. It's upsetting that a group of people who view themselves as very intelligent (and likely are very intelligent) can't see that.
Due to popular demand, some of the photos from the monkey portion of the trip are up here, even though it's out of order. I will try to get some of the videos up too. Oh wait, here I got it to work. If you only click on one monkey video, make it this one. These are all okay too, I guess, but not as great as that one, in my opinion. Yep. The photos are going up slow due to a combination of 1 day weekends from Shift Swapping, Disgaea, and me finally enrolling in some Japanese lessons. Also, today, I finally got to play in those big Gundam pods. I went with a coworker, and got myself a GUndam card with my rank and score on it. Us and six other people at the arcade played together with people from other pods, presumably orbiting in space, on two teams, with headset voice chat. Although that was pretty much just used by the two of us for english. In other news, the other day I got on the train and sat down next to a girl with a sketchbook, who opened it up revealing tons of awesome drawings, then proceeded, in the 10 minutes that we on the train, to make another awesome drawing from scratch. It was really awesome. One of my particularly energetic kids in my kids classes last week for some reason decided to thoroughly coat his hand in saliva by licking it, for some reason, and of course looked super proud while doing it. He got less high fives after that. Hopefully I'll put up more pictures soon.
I'm in love with Sarah Goldberg
Edit: Haha, I posted that halfway through her audition. Now that I'm all the way through, I love her even more.
I created another hero yesterday, I rather like him. His name is ryan and part of a game design that hopefully will be my third year project. Back in October I was approach to write a short story for a friend to do a comic book I kept asking him how many pages is short his response was20 is the max. I produced 14, this was not a correct number either as it was apperently too long as well. He is promosing to still create it when he has time. However i have already label him a liar and thus cannot believe the tale or ord will be told.
Never the less it has set forth the montion that perhaps I can write comic book stories so long as there is an artist. I am finding this "when i have time" thing effecting me as well. I have plan a epic three part or trilogy story to tell. A tale about a man named Dan. I had thought about how to over come this whole time management and perhaps i can do weekly publications online. If my artist friend agrees.
The downside to that is I would want it hosted on my own site which is money especially if it gets slashdotted or somthing. www.rice-boy.com is an example of a site i would want.
www.entervoid.com is cool, i might have told you(xenon) about it, people create characters and battle each other characters. The users then vote who wins, if the battle is in a void city tournament and the losere was killed in the comic the creater can never submit the character to battle again. They can use them in flashback or ghost form as a means for character development and as a plot devise.
Enter void allows for writers to ask for artist but i cant see that as a fruitful method to get attention. I was tempted to join the creative writing soceity but they were all lame.
Just got in tonight, spent the last few hours sorting thought the 560+ pictures I took, got it down to a mere 200 something you can see here, in eight simple to use days. I also put up some in the Nova and Nagoya sections that I hadn't posted yet. Tokyo was awesome, I stayed with my friend Brian from Messiah in ISogo near Yokohama. He started Nova about the same time as me. It's late so I may add to this later, but most of the pictures speak for themselves. Well, their captions do at least. I had to take down some other pictures , including my trip to the robot museum, so I may rotate them through or something. I still have them all here, plus tons more. Happy Belated New years!
<Super-Update> I put the albums I took down on facebook for now, and they can be accessed by clicking hopefully. An Izakaya, Wii, Christmas in Japan, Burkina Faso, And My Trip to Sakae, now in Two Parts. Unfortunately, they don't have the captions there, unless I feel like copying them all over to Facebooks format, one by one.
*Update* (most of the inofrmation is in the captions for the pictures, but here's an overview)
SO pretty much it was awesome. When I got in from the 6 hour train ride, the first thing we did was stop by Brian's place to drop off my stuff and pack up the Wii for transport to a Christmas party we got invited to by his coworker. This is the second Christmas party I got invited to by a coworker named Emily, and at both it was another person who was the host, and both times he made chili, and both were great. We had KFC, a traditional Christmas food in Japan (seriously), and the Wii was source of much shouting and moving. Despite this, I was able to finally get some Smash Bros in when we found a Japanese copy of Melee laying around, and tested out the Wii's backwards compatibility. This was cut short by everyone except the two Smash Bros./ Pokemon fans in the room. We both played Pikachu. In bringing the Wii, I forgot to bring my Secret Santa gift, which kind of evened out, but I was able to finally deliver it later in the week at a New Years party at their apartment. Anyway the next day I slept in way too late, which became a source of amusement as Brian would test just how long I could sleep in. The answer is very much. Anyway, that day we were able to get around to a few big spots such as Shibuya and Akihabara. We even met up with the people who we would eventually spend (almost up to) New Years Eve with, the same people whose Secret Santa I still hadn't delivered, and one of which plays Smash Bros. On New Years, we were treated to some home made soup which we later properly realised was called Ozoni, and yakisoba. I attempted to make some Johnny cakes to bring, but was foiled by my nemesis, Japanese language and it's twin, my inability to visually discern between salt and sugar. I brought Pokemon bread instead, which probably went over better anyway. While the Wii was invited, I was more occupied with my DS as our host just opened Pokemon Diamond, so we had to tackle the more important matters, such as trading. For New Years Day, we went to the church in Yokohama that Brian had helped out at last summer, had a service in Japanese (I could kinda sing along at least), and had an awesome New Years brunch with traditional Japanese New Years foods, and different configurations of the ingredients to my favourite food, daifuku (rice dough and sweet red beans), which I have since made myself just tonight. This time Brian had to nap in from coming down with something, so I used the opportunity to try to catch up in Zelda. Anyway the next few days I kinda wandered off by myself around Tokyo since Brian was still a bit under the weather. I ended up at a few parks, a temple, Tokyo Tower, AKihabara, Shinjuku and other places during these days. On the last full day, I attempted Johnny cake again, this time possibly using too much baking powder, since it's never supposed to be that fluffy... Well we went out to eat anyway, to a yakiniku (fried meat) all you can order 2 hour deal, which was awesome. And finally, I returned. SO it was really super fantastic, my only regret is not going to Harajuku early enough to see hordes of crazy dressed fashion people. But I got to meet someone else with pretty much exactly the same interests in video games and stuff with me, see a dancing monkey, eat okonomiyaki, home cooked and fair variety, go on top of Tokyo, and play with fire, so it's okay.
And here's proof. Besides that, after ranking food I have eaten recently, I have decided today that one of my goals is to eat one thing each day which I have no idea what it is. In that vein, I give you this. Some notable excerpts from classes today include, "People may escape from Japan" as a possible negative effect of the increasing crime rate, and a mispronunciation of "$45" as "Fourty five hundred years." Still waiting for anyone to beat somegirls high score on my last post.
My roommate, Ed, my best friend from high school, Oliver, and I went to Disney World last weekend. It was a really great time, it was relaxing, we had some great food, people were all nice to each other, and the rides are always great. But, the second day we were there, we realized there was something seriously wrong.
Our second day was at the Magic Kingdom. I don't know who has been there and who hasn't, but they used to have this system of aerial gondolas called The Skyway. When we got to the one place I knew there was an entrance (nearby It's a Small World), right here, we found a "Stroller Parking Lot".
Now, at the time, I didn't think to take a picture, but I got some great ones at MGM the next day:
Bear in mind that MGM is tiny compared to The Magic Kingdom. So this sea of strollers is tiny compared to what we were originally greeted with. Now you know what, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with pushing a four year old in a stroller. What Disney has done is not just make stroller parking lots, they introduced a new, giant, stroller. We're talking huge. Some of them contained three children.
Even then, you know what, you've got triplets that can't walk yet. Put them in the stroller, that's cool. But that's not what we saw. Over and over again, we saw children whose heads literally touched the roof of the stroller, whose legs dangled over the front, their grubby hands covered in ice cream.
By the end of our day at Magic Kingdom, as we awaited the fireworks show, Oliver and I had come up with a game which will now be known as "Too Old, Not Too Old". We played this game quite loudly for the rest of the trip.
I've been trying to figure out the motivations at work here. Why would you let your 7-12 year old child, who at one time used to be on a leash they were so full of energy, intro a stroller? Oliver, Ed, and I never came to a conclusion, but I'll tell you my philosophy. I think we're at a point where parents want to relive their childhood, and they're bringing their kids along for the ride. What was once an experience for the kids is now an experience for the adults. And it's not cool when your parents just bring you along for a vacation. Growing up, I knew that Disney was the one vacation that was mine. Our visit to the national parks, to the Grand Canyon, to visit family. My parents made it fun for us, sure, but they were in complete control.
But now, the kids understand that they're along for the ride. Disney isn't fun for them the same way it was for their parents. So they start complaining about the heat, about walking so much, about not having their Nintendo. Things that were never on my mind when I was at Disney. Instead of their parents understanding that the only thing kids should be complaining about at Disney is how "unfair" their parents are being by not letting them ride Pirates of the Caribbean fifteen times (as I did), parents think that the only way to do what they want to do is by pulling their kids along in a stroller.
Just some thoughts
Bonus Points: Double-wide stroller, stroller owned by the parents, stroller with suspension, and kids eating in stroller.
Wish xenon a good one
Well, i've always wanted to try a blog thing. But i was always afraid that i wouldn't have enough to write, or no one would read it. I mean, is my life thaaaaaaaat interesting that people would wanna read abt it everyday?? dunno.
So let's see, i have h.w that, despite my encouragement and prodding, wouldn't do itself. And i am really home sick and wanna go home. I think after all these years aof moving country and moving house and moving school, i think i am ready to settle down. But where? Where can i call home? I was born in one country, raised in another and live in yet another! Where will i be buried when i die???
Cheer me up.
I saw a sentence like this the other day:
Did he really say "Run away!"?
And then no one can decide whether something like this:
John said "Hello".
should have the period on the inside or outside of the quotes. Why not put it in both places? It makes sense to point out where a sentence in a quote ends.
Thoughts?
This weekend, I heard someone state that creation is true and evolution is false.
I tried to raise several points that I'll try to point out on here.
First, science isn't truth. I tried to discuss the theories concerning how gravity works. For those of you not in the know, there are two competing theories concerning gravity. Neither of them completely explain gravity, but both of them are widely accepted as being truthful for the situations they were created to address. What this means is that our theories of gravity aren't "true" or absolutely provable. They're very accurate, but they're not true. This isn't limited to gravity, there are a ton of things that are explained as much as they can be based on our current knowledge. Just because our theories of gravity aren't absolutely perfect doesn't explain away gravity. Gravity still exists, exactly how it works is sometimes outside of our explanations. This is the perspective that people that believe in evolution have. It's not perfect, but it explains some stuff.
Secondly, even if evolution is an unprovable truth, that doesn't make creation a provable truth. All you've done is say "my unprovable truth is more correct than your unprovable truth". As a Christian, arguing like that is just unloving. You're not trying to educate or inform, you're trying to uphold your opinion as more correct than theirs.
Third, a non-Christian won't decide that if evolution is unprovable, then they should seriously look at Christianity. The knowledge that you have isn't a knowledge that they have. And asking someone to launch into the Christian faith in this way is not only defeatist (Christianity isn't based on believing in creation) but you're judging them for their ignorance. If they don't see God, why would they see that God created everything?
Lastly, science has no place in Christianity. It's reductionist at best. We take these writings about the power of God (he spoke things into existence), about the human condition (we consciously choose to do bad things and like to blame them on other people), and turn it into a science lesson. I wish this wasn't the only reductionist theology out there. Christianity is full of them, I fear that Catholicism is even worse. Turning ideas expressed in the Bible to a set of rules, services, and creeds strips away the power of the original writing.
I put up a smattering of pictures in the Nova folder (more supermarket and bakery pictures of the awesome Japanese food, and some shots around the office), and some in Nagoya (A few of my attempts at cooking, and new shots of Tommy Lee Jones and Bic Camera), and this great example of some notes from a lesson. We take in a sheet of paper to write out sentances the students say which need grammar corrections, or draw pictures to explain new words. SOmetimes it works better than others. Feel free to add comments to the photos. I remembered when I was walking with the Japanese staff to the izakaya, I took a shot at explaining potcakes to them, and I think I got closest with "homeless dogs". Better than when I tried talking about the food potcakes, resulting in the outburst, "You eat dogs?!?!"
I finally started putting effort into my Kanji studies. Just learned the kanji for 'gallbladder' Gonna try and keep an eye out for it tomorrow.
We all have people in our lives who have gotten over the need to be a certain type of person in order to please those around them. They present themselves just as they are to their friends, parents, teachers, and coworkers alike. It doesn't always make people happy, but there's a certain strength of character that people see in it. You respect that this person is willing to stand up for what he or she is.
I don't like most of these people. I think there's something worthwhile about knowing who you are and standing by it, but here's where it breaks down: Once you have decided that you're going to be yourself at all costs, it stops being about the big things. By the big things I mean your faith, your politics, your country, your family. Honestly, how many people are willing to change who they are in these areas? What it means is to truly assert yourself as an individual, to prove that you don't need to please anyone, you have to start standing up for the little things. Whereas offending someone over the big things is understandable, offending someone over the little things is just dumb.
Situation: a guy decides that he isn't the type of person to dress up for anyone. He goes to that fancy restaurant downtown dressed in jeans. When he arrives, he's told that he can't wear jeans into a fancy restaurant. So he makes a big stink about it all, "well that's who I am".
If you're saying that this is a bad example, you're missing the point. You've got to pick your poison. In that example, he decided that being true to himself involved how he dresses. I don't know what your thing is, but we all have insignificant stuff that we believe is "who I am" that we need to get over.
You can act differently for different people without changing who you are. Presenting yourself in a way that makes someone else happy shows care and grace. You're the only person who needs to know that you don't need to please anyone. If you're proving it to everyone else, you're betraying the very thing you were trying to carry out in the first place.
Everything above I say because a lot of my friends, lately, have adopted this philosophy. And it's not so much that they fit everything I mentioned above, it's something new and unrelated. It seems that if you "stick by your guns", you become "that guy" or "that girl". By trying to be unique, you've become a stereotype.
I couldn't explain it at first, until I thought through this whole "not changing who you are." And even then, it wasn't until I flushed out the need to let others know that you won't change who you are, that it all came together. Even the people who have developed a very strong sense of self still misunderstand their reasons and motivations for things they believe and do. What seems to happen is that people take these misunderstandings and just throw them out for the world to see.
The frat guy, the punk, the aloof girl. I think they're all showing the world the things they think they are. The frat guy is unapologetic for his womanizing and drinking, the punk in unapologetic for his apathy and clothing, and the aloof girl is unapologetic for her indifference and rudeness. When you say, "this is who I am", you're changing who you are.
What's the solution? It seems to be that we should just live our lives, and pay attention to what people think of us. We need to figure out if what someone says is actually valid, if adopting it really changes something about us that matters. But, if we are worried so much about changing ourselves for other people, we may actually end up changing ourselves for ourself.
Okay, first off, some of the big things. Cameron Diaz is the Verizon "Can you hear me now?" Guy of Japan. Meaning, she is a spokesperson for a big cell company "Softbank, formerly Vodafone", and is in tons of ads everywhere, although I did not recognise her for a while. It's funny though, as you can tell she didn't even bother going to Japan to film the commercials for this huge marketing campaign she's in, because all the extras are American and it's all english in the background. Tommy Lee Jones is on half the vending machines, since he looks like the logo for BOSS coffee I guess. There is also this weird series of commercials and ads for some fiber optic phone/internet provider with a japanese woman in a 'caribbean' theme dress as the main person. But in the commercials she'll start dancing on a billboard, or inside a phone. And she has two "Rastas" as backup dancers, and then their dreads turn into big glowing fiber optics fibres and then swing out and grab the person watching (in the commercial) and pull them into the internet I guess? Also, there's some cartoon squid in there too. "Remembering the Kanji" By James Heisig seems to be the book to get to learn the kanji. Already I've been reccomended it twice, and have two copies of it in my room (One I borrowed from a library, and another that I had asked to borrow from a coworker at his suggestion before I realised it was at the library). I could have gotten three if I didn't stop my neighbor downstairs after he reccomended it and offered to lend it to me. Apparently the author even lives in NAgoya, so maybe I could hit him up for another copy.