On not disappearing against the wallpaper

I don't know how to tag this post properly. The reference in the title is to a post from seventeen years ago (yes, really!) where I wrote, in part:

I always start new jobs as The Quiet Guy ... you know, the one who tries his best to disappear against the wallpaper? Despite this, it always happens -- at every job I have ever held -- that one day I am introduced to somebody who says, "Oh, so you're Hosea. I've heard so much about you."

This post isn't about a new job. It isn't about new circumstances, or being around strangers, or anything like that. It's just a rueful reflection on my relationship with leadership.

Sometime in the middle of 2021, right around the time my salary and benefits ended from my closed work, the elected Chair disappeared from our local section of the professional society I belong to. I don't think she "disappeared" in any sense requiring the police, but at any rate she stopped showing up to meetings or answering emails. And I was asked to step in: "Hosea, you're a nice guy and you come to all our meetings anyway ... can you take over as Chair?"

Be careful whom you help. I'm still the Chair of that section today, over four years later, notwithstanding a society rule that you can only be Chair for two consecutive one-year terms before you become ineligible. But nobody else wanted the job, and our Regional Director said it's better to overshoot the term limits than to have no Chair. Anyway I have been trying—this year in particular—to get someone else to take on the job for next year.

Fine, that's nice, but so what?

Pushing and pulling

Yesterday I was scrolling through Twitter and found the following gem. Someone had posted a picture than says: "I pushed you away because I needed you to pull me close."

It sounds crazy, and part of me wants to ask "Would anybody ever do something so backwards?" But in fact I know they do. Just over thirteen years ago, I asked Wife for a divorce. We talked for most of that day, although Wife's side of the conversation included a lot of weeping, shouting, and recrimination. But at one point I asked her why she was so unhappy with the idea? Leaving aside the financial practicalities for just a minute ... isn't this what she wanted? All through our long marriage she had threatened me with divorce more times than I could count. She regularly told me she hated me. She treated me with disdain. She actively undermined me with the boys. Looking at all that history, wouldn't she be eager to get rid of me?

For a moment she looked truly shocked. Then she shouted back, "Didn't you understand? All the times I did those things, I was asking you to love me more!!"

Umm ... no, Babe. I didn't understand. I guess once again we were bad at communication.

So yeah. Have a picture.

      

My cough is back, 3

This is not me, obviously. But sometimes it feels like it might as well be.

I'm writing and posting this today to put a mark on the calendar. I hope I'm wrong, but it feels like today is the beginning of Coughing Season for me. Yes, it's the same damned allergic cough that I've complained about regularly for years (and that I've lived with regularly since long before I started complaining in these pages). Look up the posts tagged "cough" and you'll see what I mean.

Based on my calculations last spring, I guess this season—if that's what it is—should last till the end of February. Four months. That gives me hope for an endpoint.

It's funny how sharp the dividing line can be between On and Off. Over the last couple weeks I've had moments where it feels like my allergies are building up, but they have passed immediately and not returned until days later. I'm pretty sure I haven't taken a single cough drop since last February. Today I took five of them, to calm and soothe my throat. 

Just in time for the holidays, I guess. And in other news, ... I visited with Wife this afternoon and we talked very civilly for a couple of hours.

Time out for signals

I've got a bunch of posts to write and publish. Mostly they will fill in the last couple of weeks, between this one and today. Most of them are going to be back-dated.

See, back on October 8 I flew out to visit Debbie for a week. While I was there, we went to a silent retreat for the weekend, put on by a local UU Buddhist organization in her area. The prolonged time in silence helped me think about a number of things, some of which resolved themselves into blog posts that I wrote out long-hand on the airplane as I came home (October 14).

Then the very next evening (October 15), Marie arrived here in Beautiful City to spend a week visiting me. She flew home yesterday, on October 22. From this visit, I think I extracted maybe two topics to blog about.

So over the next few days I expect to post all of these topics online. I'll fit them in more or less where they belong sequentially. And I may not bother to type up the earlier ones before the later ones. So if you are watching this blog and hoping for a chronological account, you should keep the last fortnight in view all as a whole, until I get done. In the end, there will probably be six more posts added, all told: four from the visit with Debbie, and two from the visit with Marie. Of course that might change.

UPDATE 2025-10-28: OK, I've caught up now. All the back posts that I wanted to fill in the gaps in the last couple weeks have been posted. Onwards!     

     

Bad at chess

I was talking with Marie today, and she mentioned in the course of the discussion that she had never learned to play chess very well, not past the most rudimentary level. Neither have I, and it was no big deal. But then she told me why not: she found that she had a very low tolerance for losing! And of course the only way to learn to play chess well is to play a lot of it even though you start off playing badly; and that, in turn, means accepting that you are going to lose an awful lot of the time.

She also acknowledged that this low tolerance for losing might have made her life harder in other ways, but we didn't pursue it too far. (I still remembered sitting up talking a few nights ago, and didn't want to push anything too hard.) But I did start to wonder—silently, in my own mind—how far this preference had affected her other choices in life? In a post last year, I toyed with the idea of picturing Marie as a kind of atheist nun; but is it possible that she chose that path simply in order to reduce the number of direct contests she would have to fight? After all, if you never enter the arena, you can't lose. (You can't win either, but it doesn't feel to me like winning is nearly so important to Marie as not-losing.) 

Or consider her fears for many years about my continued friendship with Debbie, fears that seem only to have been put to rest recently. Of course it is more or less typical for a girlfriend to worry if her boyfriend keeps in touch with one of his exes. So maybe what is interesting is all the things that Marie didn't do. She didn't force the issue, or give me any kind of ultimatum. She didn't ask a lot of questions about Debbie, though sometimes if the subject came up she would cautiously ask one or two things before dropping the subject. Only once do I remember her ever criticizing Debbie (when I told her about how Debbie contracted COVID-19 ... I guess I never told that story here); after that I was careful to say less about Debbie and for a while she was careful to ask less. And she never overtly tried to compete.

In other words, Marie lived in fear that she was going to lose to Debbie, but she never did any of the common things that would have forced the contest out into the open. And maybe this was because she was afraid she might lose, and couldn't handle losing.

So what about me? I have remarked before that Marie and I have a lot in common, and that one thing we share is that our accomplishments are far smaller than our talents would lead you to guess. Do I share her unwillingness to lose?

It's possible. And after my ruminations last year on the concept of the Jungian Shadow (see here and especially here), I want to be careful about dogmatically asserting that I don't have this or that unappealing trait. There's always the risk that I have it but don't want to admit it.

At the same time, I don't think the data support it. Am I fearful of other things? Heavens, yes. But maybe not losing, at least not per se. When I was in high school, for example, I joined the cross-country team because I wanted to get in shape. I always came in last in all our races, but I knew in advance I was going to. It wasn't a problem. And in my long marriage to Wife, I learned that when she worked herself into a towering rage, the best thing I could do was to lose the argument. When we separated, I lost the marriage. I have put myself in the position of losing things a number of times—not as often as it would take to learn to play good chess, maybe, but still. So it is at any rate not obvious to me that this specific liability is one of mine.

Of course I have plenty of others, so there's no risk I'll run out. But it was interesting to think about.  

 

Sexualized politics

Marie and I had the strangest argument tonight ... admittedly after both of us had had way too much to drink. On the one hand it gave me what I think are some useful insights into how she thinks about politics. On the other hand, it made me despair of ever reaching a common understanding with her on the subject. It's not just about correcting this or that factual misunderstanding that she might have picked up somewhere along the way. For her ever to understand the way I see American politics—or as an alternate goal, using the famous Straussian criterion, for her ever to understand her opponents as they understand themselves—will require a total demolition and reconstruction of the furniture in her mind related to politics. It would have to start with massive cognitive dissonance and proceed through total breakdown. I don't want to inflict that on her, and I don't foresee it. But this means she will be a prisoner of her peculiar delusions for the rest of her life.

It all started when I was talking about something else. I was describing how people interpret moral topics, and I said that people respond far more than they realize to the intuitive picture in their head. So when a Malefactor does something bad, you get some people who see him intuitively as a saber-toothed tiger or a cave bear—that is to say, as a lethal threat to their friends, neighbors, and children. Then there are other people who see him as an erring child who can learn better with a little education. These two groups argue with each other over what to do with the malefactor; they quote studies and statistics, and delve deeply into academic criminology to argue their cases. But all this sophistication is window dressing. What really motivates the two groups is their intuitive picture of what is going on. Is he a saber-toothed tiger, or an erring child? On that question hinges the pragmatic decision whether he should be killed straightaway, or rehabilitated.

That was the theoretical point I was trying to make. So far, so good.

Marie stopped me to say that sometimes the roles switch. She said that in cases of rape or sexual crimes, Liberals are more likely to condemn a Malefactor as irredeemable, and Conservatives are more likely to wink and let it pass on the grounds that "boys will be boys."

Now, I had never used the words "liberal" or "conservative" in my discussion. So what I should have said is. "OK fine, that's one more example of what I'm talking about." Perhaps I could have reminded her that I never used words like "liberal" or "conservative" because I was trying to talk about a general disjunction in how people treat Malefactors, and not to make a political point. Then I should have steered the discussion resolutely back to the most general level possible.

Depressed?

I wonder if I'm depressed?

Look over the last few posts. Not exactly upbeat, are they? Now look over the last several years. Count how many posts have complained that I am stuck, becalmed, going nowhere. Do you detect a theme?

Some time ago—I guess it was back when I was still working and had medical insurance (so in 2021 or before)—I stopped taking my daily wellbutrin because I couldn't tell that it made any difference. Also I read random voices on Twitter who suggested that SSRI's are useless or worse. And since I haven't had a lot of firm commitments since my work ended, it's been hard to tell whether I'm slowing down.

But yes, I'm slowing down. I eat and drink, I browse the Internet, I sleep a lot; but I don't exercise, and compared to the time I have available I'm not very productive. Maybe the wellbutrin is the relevant factor.

At any rate, it's likely one relevant factor. Another may be my comparative isolation. When I ask Google about the consequences of prolonged isolation, it gives me an answer that includes depression, obesity, and social skills deterioration. (I'm pretty sure I can detect that last one in myself, though self-diagnosis is always tricky). And the first two linked articles—by the CDC and the APA, respectively—give a spooky list of long-term outcomes.

I'll try taking the wellbutrin again, starting after Marie goes home from her impending visit. (I don't want to change anything before then, in case of unexpected results.) I suppose this means I have to find a doctor, since my last one retired back in 2023 and I'll need a prescription. Maybe Wife has a stockpile I can hit up. But experimentation has to be the key. I hope for the best.