What you deserve

A few days ago I saw a short video on Twitter. It never uses the word deserve. But somehow that's the way I remember it. As if it had been about What you think you deserve in life.

Here's the YouTube version:

So naturally I started thinking: Is it true? Could someone judge—based solely on seeing that I married Wife—how much I love myself? Could someone assess what I think I deserve in life?

Yeah, probably. It's not a good look.

The next day, I got an email from Debbie inviting me to join some software tool called Giftster. Apparently it's a tool that lets you publish wish lists for all sorts of holiday gifts. She invited me to join a group that includes her and her family. 

Well, I haven't done it yet. Partly I hate the idea of having to set up yet another user ID and password for yet another tool that I'll probably never use. Or rather, I guess I'll use it twice a year: a few weeks before Debbie's birthday, and a few weeks before Christmas. But of course there's no way I would ever put any preferences of my own into such a tool! I've written about that before: Dorophobia!

And then suddenly all kinds of connections started to cascade down around my head. I've written about this topic before, in different flavors and through different lenses, all too many times.

With respect to romantic relationships: "Harems" and "Encouraging non-exclusivity? Why?" and "Punishment for my sins?" Also this post about a quote from Tolstoy applies too, if you think about D's principle (elucidated here) that (on the whole) spouses are of comparable attractiveness. Why should they be? Well if each spouse is competing with a large pool of others for the most attractive possible partner, that's just how it sorts out: those with the greatest drawing power (the most attractive) will get the most attractive mates, and likewise down the ladder. But if someone (like me) doesn't look for the most attractive mates—either because he doesn't think he deserves them, or for some more idiotic reason—then the pattern breaks down.

With respect to family: "My apartment" and "The empty table."  

At work: "On being the boss."  

And just at the level of general discussion: "Seventeenth date 3, Depression, dignity, arrogance" and "You don't count" and "What is money for?, 2: fear of beauty."

 

And there are probably more, that I didn't think to look for.

It's not a good look. Maybe I need to think about it, or take it seriously.

   

The romaine lettuce incident

OK, this story is from long, long ago. I don't really remember when it happened, but I think it was before Wife and I were even married—back when we were just "dating". (This means I was living in her apartment and we were regularly fucking, but the whole thing hadn't been formalized yet by a ceremony.) Call it ... well, maybe early-to-mid 1984. All our big turmoil was still in the future. I was still baffled when things went wrong, instead of cynically resigned to it. But the interesting thing is that I'm telling you the story now, not to tell you anything about Wife but actually to talk about me.

What happened?

I remember we were visiting my grandfather. Also, my parents were both there. Maybe we were helping him sort through the immense stacks of useless clutter that he and my grnadmother had accumulated over something close to fifty years of marriage. But it wasn't a holiday, because nobody had done any advanced planning for meals.

In the middle of the afternoon, Father (my dad) realized that the refrigerator had basically no food in it, because my grandfather was very old and lived alone. So he went shopping only when he absolutely had to, and he shopped for one person with a small appetite. I don't know whether he had known in advance that we were coming out to see him, but in any event he hadn't bothered to lay in any supplies. My grnadfather never really thought about other people except when he was forced to, and for many decades he had been able to rely on my grandmother to do all that for him.

So Father realized we were all going to need something for dinner, and he began making a shopping list. (He also planned to do the cooking.) So he asked for suggestions. 

What would we like for dinner?

Someone made a suggestion, and he wrote down the ingredients.

How about a salad? Would everyone like a salad too?

Sure, that sounds great.

What kind of lettuce should I get? 

At this point, Wife—who of course was just a Girlfriend back then, but you all know her as Wife—said, "Pretty much any kind would be fine, except please don't get romaine lettuce. I hate romaine lettuce."

My heart sank. Maybe it's too grandiose or self-important to say that I had a premonition of what was going to happen. But at some level that's exactly what I had. From that moment, I knew the whole evening was going to turn out badly.

And I say that because of course—maybe this doesn't sound like an "of-course" situation to you, but to me it was absolutely predictable!—when Father got back from the store we discovered that he had bought romaine lettuce for our salad!

So the arguing began.

Wife: Why did you buy romaine lettuce when that's the one and only kind of lettuce I told you I don't like?

Father: Well why the hell do you have to be so fussy?

Wife: But you asked for suggestions! Nobody expressed any different preferences, besides me! So why would you buy this? It wasn't to satisfy anyone else's preferences, because nobody else expressed any. Is this just a deliberate slap in the face because you hate me?

Father: My God, you think the world revolves around you! Jesus H. Christ, I bought what I bought. Leave me alone and don't give me so much shit over it. If you don't want to eat any salad, you don't have to!

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.