Foxx

So I’m taking this intro to psychology class for school, and in the final week of the semester, we learned about the concept of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the term that describes how we deal with the natural conflict between our beliefs and our actions, or between two conflicting attitudes. I would go as far to say that it is how we cope with the difference with how we think we ought to behave compared with how we actually behave. These conflicts can arise internally but can often be induced through forced compliance – situations where we feel compelled to act in a certain way regardless of our own personal attitude or preference. The theory suggests that when we experience this kind of dissonance, it causes discomfort, stress and anxiety within. Because of this uncomfortable situation, we do whatever we can to reduce that kind of pain.

There’s a few ways people do this, of course. First, you can change the conflicting attitude. Second, you can gain more information that supports the original attitude. Third, you can trivialize your own attitude, convincing yourself that it is not important. In most cases, people choose the solution that requires the least amount of effort.

Part of the week’s assignment was to write about a situation where you had felt cognitive dissonance at work. As I thought about it, the more I realized that the strongest cognitive dissonance I ever experienced had first to do with my sexuality, second to do with religion, and third to do with my desire for peace and harmony. I chose to write about the religion part, since there was one specific experience where this occurred very plainly to me.

I was a missionary. If you haven’t followed my blog, I was still so much in denial of my own sexuality that I wasn’t even conscious that it existed any differently than it should for a God-fearing Mormon boy. I was entirely convinced during this time of my life that I would go home, find a woman, and start a family. Because of this, I had no experience at this point that fostered feelings of doubt about the truth of the Mormon Plan of Salvation. I was on the last leg of my mission, but I was still struggling with Fast and Testimony meeting. On this particular day, I was reminded of something we had learned at our latest Zone conference: that a testimony can be found in the bearing of it. I kept feeling my heart pounding inside and something telling me to just get up and do it. “You should be bearing your testimony. Why aren’t you bearing your testimony? You have one, right?”

So I stood up and bore my testimony. I don’t remember now what I said or anything else about it, but when I sat back down, I felt so good about what I had done. I started to get that warm, peaceful feeling that people talk about when they feel the Spirit, and I calmed down. And then I felt this strong feeling that what I was doing was right and that what I had said was true. This had to be a spiritual confirmation.

In the context of psychology, this effect is exactly what cognitive dissonance is about. I never got up to bear my testimony because deep down I wasn’t sure I believed in it. This wasn’t conscious, of course, but what other reasons would you have to hesitate when only positive reinforcement awaits you for participating in the meeting? When I finally did, and when it was my own choice and there were no external forces sitting next to me, I felt the dissonance melting away. I began either trivializing whatever doubts I had and changed my attitude toward faith. This was a positive experience because I knew that it would be better for me if I did believe more strongly.

Looking back, now that I have left the church, I look at the oft-quoted phrase about gaining a testimony in the bearing of it, and I realize that it’s another cog in the machine of manipulation to convince you to believe — and more importantly, convince you to stay. When you declare something publicly (whether you believe in it or not!), rather than be called a liar you convince yourself even more deeply that what you said was not a lie. This reduces the discomfort of dissonance, and it makes you feel better about yourself. So, in a way, the phrase is true: when you say something to someone else, you believe it even more. On another level, you realize that it’s a way to erase doubt without presenting any additional facts.

Normally on this day, I see people coming out and talking about all the good reasons to come out. I would like to focus on how coming out gay has not been a highlight of my life. The only aspect of coming out that did not improve my life was how my relationship changed with my family. Actually, when I think of my coming out experience, it was rather rough.

It was first in October of 2004 that I awoke to the fact that I was attracted to men. In fact, it was in the middle of my first earnest attempt to start a relationship with a dear friend of mine of the opposite gender when the scaffolding came crashing down. You see, I was a devout LDS kid, and while I had met several gay people in my life (do theater for a while and they add up fast), I always had believed in the Church’s plan for salvation. If you don’t know, the plan pretty much lays out all the specific and general things you have to do to get to the best heaven. That includes, but is not limited to, heterosexual celestial eternal marriage in the temple. I was, in a way, gunning for the highest prize, but never could bring myself to be serious about a relationship. Well, when the thought that I might be homosexual really took hold in my mind, you can imagine that my entire world seemed to verge on collapse.

I spent the next couple months really trying to deal with this…thing. I read all the talks and lessons given by the leaders and really tried to explore the reasons that they gave for this plague that had suddenly afflicted me. In about December, I came to the prayerful conclusion that not only would my temporal happiness be jeopardized if I were to ignore it and keep it in a closet, the happiness of whatever spouse I chose could seriously be affected as well. I remember that, while walking around BYU campus to a class, it just hit me that I always had been and always would feel this way. That I had been able to block it out until now had actually been a blessing, that I could focus on being the best person I could be. I had been able to develop a moral code and really trust my internal compass. I felt like it was up to me to explore the happiness that could be found.

New Year’s Eve, I celebrated it with my friend Clark. We kissed when the ball dropped, a quick peck, and that night I posted it on a message board where I knew I would be supported. I was still unsure about where I was going to stand religiously speaking, but I had committed to myself that whatever happened, it would not include sex until marriage. At some point during the next year, I made a goal to come out to my parents when I had come to a full acceptance and understanding about myself, and I romanticized how it would be – I would say something cliche like, “There’s something I need to tell you,” and they would respond in an unconditionally loving way, and everything would be cool.

I was horribly wrong. Someone spied on my posting online and told my parents that I had kissed a guy. January of 2005 I felt the most betrayed and strung along I have ever felt from my parents. My mom called me one day and told me to cancel all my plans and come home by a certain time so we could talk about something. The thing about it was she wouldn’t even give me a clue as to what it was about. Only that we had to wait for Dad to be home to start. So, I dropped my plans and headed home. At the appointed time, Dad wasn’t home, he was running late. I attempted to press Mom for some more information, but I only got “we’ll talk about it when your father gets home,” and I just felt so weird about the whole thing. I knew they were worried about my staying out late, but it never amounted to a full-blown meeting before.

They ripped me out of the closet. Being the kind of guy who believes in honesty, when they asked about it, I responded in the affirmative and told them that I hadn’t done anything more than a New Year’s kiss and I wasn’t planning on it either. Long story short, my parents cried, and to this day I have a lingering sense of anger and betrayal over how it was handled that day and how it has been addressed (or not addressed) ever since. The next couple weeks were filled with conference talks left on my pillow and impassioned requests for me to forget this whole gay nonsense, not just from my parents but from my siblings as well. Everybody seemed so concerned for my eternal welfare, but nobody wanted to get down to how I felt. I felt like nobody looked at me or talked to me the same, like there was some fear about what I might do or say. Since then, along with the betrayal, I can’t bring myself to believe that they even want to understand. And that has broken down the trust that we used to have together.

That was nearly five years ago, and I’m still sad about the outcome. I hope someday I can love and trust them, but I find myself going through the motions so they don’t think I’m a lost cause, or that I want nothing to do with them. In fact, I just wish I could feel like they treat me like a well-educated, intelligent adult rather than the 14 year-old boy I was when I was perfect and on my way to great things.

Okay, I work for Verizon Wireless. As such, I deal with customers on a regular basis who feel they have been cheated out of their money by the big red corporation. Of course they haven’t, they’re just lazy and don’t pay attention to what may cost them money or what they may have agreed to in the contract. To be honest, I’m kind of sick and tired of dealing with those kind of people.

Now, Verizon Wireless’ policy is not only fair, but more than fair. We have policies that allow for customers to make mistakes to a certain degree and not have to deal with the full consequences. There is a big however, though.

The business model of the wireless phone company must be revised. I don’t care if it’s Verizon Wireless or if it’s anybody else, but having been on the receiving end of a million complaints, I think there is one solution that can solve the wireless business model’s woes.

Currently, if any given customer exceeds their chosen plan allowance, they pay anywhere from $0.25 to $0.45 per minute, usually at the higher end. I spoke with two customers today who exceeded their allowance by over 300 minutes. That’s between $75 and $135 added to their regular monthly bill. Obviously, if one of your bills is over $150 more than you expected, you would be rightfully upset. Well, that’s when they fault the company for overcharging them on their bill. Inevitably, they either threaten to leave for another carrier or they deny that they made those calls. The fact of the matter is that they exceeded the allowance they agreed to and therefore are paying the agreed upon overage rate. Right? Okay. So Verizon Wireless says that if you change your plan to avoid these overages in the future, we forgive at least 25% of the overage. So in the above example, $34 or more. This generates thousands of calls and walk-ins every day.

What if you could never go over? Well there’s the unlimited options – $139.99 for everything including the Navigator. That’s per month, per line, buddy. More and more carriers are moving to an unlimited focus because people don’t want to have to watch their minutes or pay the excessive overage costs when they forget.

But what if, instead of committing to unlimited just for peace of mind, your plan automatically adjusted based on your usage? It’s not like it would be a difficult thing to program into the billing process. The programming is already done in other places, you would only have to copy and paste and adjust some variables and create some conditional code to execute if the plan needed changing.

So instead of $135 for 300 minutes over, generating a call or walk-in, which costs the company in payroll, and then adjusting the balance due, which affects the company’s bottom line, have the plan change at the end of the cycle. I mean, sure, there would be some legal disclosures like, “Your plan may change by itself, but only if it saves you money, so don’t freak out,” but even if the auto-adjusting plan cost a premium of double the cost of the difference, the customer would only pay $40 instead of $101, nor would it end up costing an additional $10 for the company to pay a representative to sit there and wait for 10,000 calls about the same issue every single day.

Besides, if I had a plan that shifted my monthly cost based on my usage and not on what I THOUGHT my usage was going to be, there would be a lot less variance in my bill if I were to be dumb and not choose the right plan or underestimate my kids’ usage when school starts back up again.

Seriously.

I’m just tossing this idea out there, and using the only wireless company I know as an example, but I don’t care who takes this idea and runs with it. It will only be to everybody’s benefit, and it won’t seem like the wireless corporations are hoping the customer goes over to increase their profit margin. Instead it will seem like they have the customer’s interests at heart – even though they will still be making profit from those who overuse.

The community I’m referring to hear is not the GLBT community. It’s the theater community. Specifically, the community theater community.

Okay, so in just a few days we open Into the Woods at the SCERA playhouse. Yay. Last night was our first rehearsal with lighting, costumes, and makeup. Yay. Oh, and before I go on, here’s a $3 coupon:

I don’t know that I’ve ever felt so stressed out about a show. And interestingly enough, I’m not stressed about the performances. I think this will be a fantastic show. I’m getting stressed about the production elements, none of which are complete, and most of which were introduced just days before opening. Listen to the tomes of experience: TECH MUST BEGIN AT LEAST 1 WEEK BEFORE OPENING. Not 3 days.

So, while last night was not a disaster necessarily, there are some frustrations going on. Mine had to do with the fact that my first pair of shoes were too small by about two sizes, so I asked for bigger shoes. When I saw new shoes I was really happy until I tried them on and they were about two sizes too large. Other people had concerns with their costumes as well. And when theater people have concerns, they talk about them. At the end of the night, I caught the tail end of what might have been a confrontation where one of the costumer’s husbands was telling an actor that his wife had been up until midnight several times working on these costumes and that not only has made her angry, but as a result has made him angry and he didn’t like the way we were talking about the costumes. Seriously.

So in addition to everybody being stressed out, or perhaps as a result of it, now there have been words, and because this is community, and people do this kind of thing because they like it, there may be resentments that compromise the integrity of the production. Bleck.

I think Laura put it best when she made the point that while we aren’t being paid to be here, the costumers are. And you know, if the costumes aren’t ready until three days before, fine. But they should be ready. Another point for avoiding community theater again, and another point for never doing a show at SCERA again. It’s just too much stress to deal with.

On the other hand, after they told me I could nix the wig, I actually started having a good time. That was a part of the process I had been missing. We were so busy working on getting the words right and the blocking right that I realized that I hadn’t been enjoying the music to one of my favorite shows. I hope it continues to get more and more enjoyable from here on out.

The problem with the community theater is that if something goes wrong, nobody loses their job or gets their pay docked, so nobody tries extra hard. It just seems like it’s all done at their convenience – even the actors – because it’s not lucrative enough to motivate. They do it because they want to, not because they have to. So nobody is at their best because it’s more like a hobby than a job. Even though it is a job for most of the production elements.

Whatever. It will be good in the end, but again, I’m going to say don’t come opening night because the show can’t be ready when we’ve never done it as a complete production before opening night.