Me and groups

Over the last couple of days, I've been thinking about how I relate to groups or organizations.

There's a story I tell myself that makes the answer sound easy: I'm a consummate outsider. I suffer from social anxiety. I'm shy, or an introvert. These are all stories I have told myself for years.

Of course this story is partly true, or I would never have concocted it in the first place. But it is not the whole truth. A number of recent experiences have made this clear to me.

Case One

Two nights ago (Thursday), I joined an online meeting of the leadership for the local Region of the professional society that I belong to. There are plenty of reasons I needn't have bothered. In the first place, I'm not even working any more. I joined the professional society two or three years before my local office closed. As you recall, I never found another job after that. I've been volunteering with this society as a way to keep busy, more than anything else. 

Also, I'm only in leadership in the most tenuous way. I was Chair of the local section for four-and-a-half years. (There's a rule in the society that limits you to two years, but, well, stuff happened.) But I was able to resign my Chair-ship at the end of last year. Fawn, whom I recruited to join our leadership committee as Program Chair, took over as the new Chair on January 1 of this year. I accepted a minimal role in the leadership committee because Fawn asked me to be available, to give her advice. And that minimal role means that I am invited to the monthly meeting of all the Regional leadership, because they want to make sure that there is at least one representative from each section. In case the Chair can't make it, someone else should still be there to report.

Fawn has made it to these meetings very reliably, all year. But still I show up whenever I don't have a conflict.

That's the first interesting question: Why do I bother?

The second interesting point—and this is what started me ruminating on the subject—is how other people in the meeting treat me. Of course they are used to seeing me. I showed up for these meetings for four-and-a-half years as Chair of my local section. My attendance at these meetings has now overlapped with the tenure of three different Regional Directors. I also notice that—despite the term limits—there are a few names that I keep seeing, year after year. I guess they must have rotated into new roles or job titles (as have I). But they keep representing their sections in these meetings. It's interesting.

But the moment that struck me, in the meeting two evenings ago, was when one of the long-time representatives (used to be Chair of his section, I think now he is Treasurer) started joking with me in a very obvious way, the way two old veterans might kid each other over long shared experience. Of course in the moment I responded by rocking back in my chair and laughing—we were on Zoom, after all, and I had my camera on so people could see my reaction. But in the back of my mind I wondered: If I am genuinely shy and introverted, how did I get into this position? I keep trying to avoid having to do hard work for this society, so how did I become a veteran that this man feels comfortable joking with?

That started me mulling. Then the next afternoon I acquired more data.

And now a summer cough?

I shouldn't be so shocked. Although I tried to reassure friends and family this winter (see here and here) that my cough was just a winter phenomenon (based on last year's experience, for example here and here), in reality I've written in this venue about the damned thing showing up in other seasons too. (See for example here, or here, or here.)

But it's always annoying. And here we are again. I wish I knew what causes it.

I made a note on my calendar back on July 26, "started to notice a cough the last couple of days." Shortly after that it took off. A week ago on September 10, I noted "seems like less coughing the last couple days." And today I jotted down "cough much better but not gone." Hmm. From July 26 till next Sunday (the day after tomorrow) is eight weeks. Does that mean anything? Or is it all just random?

In reality I don't think it's quite random, though neither would I go to the other extreme and call it controllable. But there do appear to be correlations. 

• If I eat a handful of salted peanuts, I cough immediately.
• If the air gets damp, I cough more frequently, though this is a probabilistic relationship. (Some day I'll test the correlation by moving to the Atacama Desert.)
• If I start talking excitedly, I cough.
• If I listen to a piece of music that makes me emotional, I cough.

I don't understand the connection with salted peanuts. But in general, it seems like I cough when I engage with being fully awake and alive. If I just sit motionless, browsing Twitter and letting my mind rot, I can go for extended periods without coughing.

Should I just sit and do nothing, and rot into my chair? Well, maybe.

     

"Because I'm just fed up"

I was talking with Debbie this evening. We usually talk for about an hour every Friday evening; tonight it stretched for nearly two-and-a-half. Then, just as we were winding up, she added, "Oh, one more thing. I've deleted my ActBlue account, and I'm going to reregister as an Independent."

Wait, Debbie?

I asked why, and she said, "For two reasons. First, I want to see if re-registering makes me feel differently about some issues. And second, because I'm just fed up."

As usual when someone raises a sensitive topic, I responded by talking too much. What I wanted to do was to ask her "fed up with what?" But I didn't ask. Maybe I can ask that next week. I babbled about how there was research that suggested she's onto something ... that identifying with a group can change how you feel about issues where that group has already staked out an opinion. And of course I said I'd be really interested to learn how the experiment turns out. What will she end up feeling about the contentious political issues of the day. I mentioned that I have never in all my years registered with any political party, because I figure that anybody will go crazy if you give them enough rope. ("Are you trying to say, Power corrupts?" "Yes, but more clumsily. Also sometimes when you give a party power they don't really start to do evil ... sometimes they just get goofy.")

So we talked in an unproductive way for another five minutes, most of which was spent with me babbling because I was nervous. I'd like to become more self-aware, so that I know ahead of time that I'm likely to overreact this way to a potentially sensitive topic and can shut myself down in advance. And I want to ask for pointedly what exactly she is fed up about.

In retrospect it feels a little bit like this conversation with my aunt, three years ago. And I wonder: when public intellectuals like John Michael Greer say that the Democratic Party and the Professional-Managerial Class are losing control over the hegemonic narrative that has kept them in power for decades ... is this what that looks like?

               

Hard to write

It's the middle of September, and this will be my twenty-eighth post in 2026.

Twenty-eight is an important number. In the years since I started this blog (not counting 2007, as I started in December), my worst year for posting has been 2016. In 2016, I posted twenty-eight times. So reaching that number means, At least this year won't be worse than 2016. At least I won't have reached a new low!

Nice to know.

But it's also September. The year is almost 3/4 over. How have I written so little?

I don't know. For a while, towards the beginning of the year, it just seemed like nothing was happening to me—like there was nothing to write about. Then I committed to finishing my book this year. Then I went to the Ecosophian convention. Then other stuff started to happen, and I realized that Lack-of-Material isn't really my problem. (Besides, there's always more to say. Remember the time that Robert Pirsig assigned a rhetoric student to write about the front of the Bozeman Opera House, starting with the upper left-hand brick!)

Are my habits getting in the way? Probably. I get up in the morning, fiddle around for a while, finally get a shower and have breakfast, check my email for a while, ... and then go take a nap! After that, it's mid-afternoon and I'm ready to spend a couple hours on the day's work before it's dinner time. I usually don't accomplish anything after dinner.

It's not like I'm "too busy" in a conventional sense. I scarcely go out. I talk to very few people. That may be part of the problem, in fact: that I use food and drink and Twitter to replace the human company that I miss. But then, why not spend the time writing? That's a kind of conversation, after all?

I don't know the answer. It just seems too hard, somehow. Even for the regular writing that I have to do to support the two columns I post online every week, I've been writing quick-'n'-easy pieces because I can't bend my mind around how much work it would take to write something more substantive.

Maybe I need to fall in love. Maybe the NRE would drive me to get my ass in gear. Too bad I'm way too old for any of the equipment to work any more.

Maybe if I got out more, the rest might follow. Meanwhile, does it ever seem to you that I'm repeating myself a lot?

           

An unsatisfactory visit, part 2

[Continued from Part 1.]

The next morning, after breakfast, I asked her what she was worried about. She settled into a comfortable chair and started to explain.

Where did her money go?

In the first place, it's not that all of Mother's money is gone. Or at least that's not what she ended up saying. It took her a while to explain this, because she wandered elliptically around the subject. But the way I understand it, this is what happened.

1. Ever since Father died, she has kept most of her liquid assets in two big bank accounts: one savings, and one checking.
2. Mother still works part time. She doesn't make a lot, but she said she always hoped that her earnings would more or less cover her day-to-day expenses.
3. But she doesn't know if they do. She doesn't really know what her day-to-day expenses add up to. All she ever did was to look at the overall balance of her two big accounts: as long as they didn't move much, she figured she was OK.
4. Some time back in the past, she (or maybe "they," if Father was still alive) took out a home equity line of credit (HELOC), because of some reason. It was no longer needed, but for too long she had just placidly paid the interest on it.
5. Finally at the beginning of this year she decided it was stupid to keep paying interest on a loan she didn't need. (Yes, that's true.) So she paid it back in a lump. That meant something like $30-35,000.
6. Then Brother and SIL came to her, asking for a loan. They have done this before, for smaller sums. This time they wanted to borrow $66,000 in cash.
7. Their explanation was that their credit cards had gotten away from them, and they needed to clear them out. Mother said they did not tell her how their credit cards had gotten away from them, and she said she did not ask. But she also said that she was very worried, because what's to stop the same thing from happening all over again? I agreed with her. 
8. She added that for the past few months they have been paying her back a thousand dollars a month. She did get them to sign a note for the full amount, but she did not ask for any interest. She is also aware that, at the rate of a thousand dollars a month, it will take five and a half years to pay back $66,000.
9. Anyway, what with paying off the HELOC and then lending so much money to Brother and SIL, her bank accounts are down something like $100,000. And yes, that arithmetic sounds about right.
10. So when she sees that her overall balance is so much lower than it used to be, she's afraid.   

Is this truly something to worry about? Who can tell? There's no way to know without more information.

"Why don't you ...?" "Yes, but ...!"

So I started to ask more questions, and to suggest things she could do to address her fears. Turns out this was not a good idea.

For every idea I had, she had a reason that it wasn't practical. It began to feel like we were playing "Why don't you ...?" "Yes, but ...!" In fact at one point I even referenced that game a little obliquely, reminding her that Father used to accuse Wife of playing it all the time (Mother remembered this part very well) and saying "But of course that's not what is going on here! You are just identifying parameters that any solution has to meet."

Translation: Yeah, that's exactly what we were playing.  

I admit that some of the things I suggested might be a lot of work. Mother has no idea how much she spends for her day-to-day expenses, so maybe she'd like to go through the last year's utility bills and credit card receipts? Then she could come up with a rough number, and she'd know whether her part-time salary covers it or not. Of course that's a lot of work, but is it worth it to buy the peace of mind that she would get from a definite answer? Maybe to some people. Maybe not to her.

There were other suggestions. None of them was trivial. And even if one of them were trivial, that doesn't mean she would do it. How hard can it be, after all, to fill out a Medical Power of Attorney form?

In earlier years, I was inclined to think my mother was something of a saint. (See for example here and here.) But in retrospect, that was largely because she was quieter than Father, so it was easy to assign all good qualities to her by default. I have already remarked elsewhere that the stories we (as a family) normally told about Father and Mother weren't really true.

Speaking of synchronicity

Mother has many fine qualities. But if she doesn't feel like doing something, she's not going to do it—even if "doing it" would solve some other problem that bothers her a lot!

In a sense that's self-defeating, just the same way all my failed conversations with her all weekend long were self-defeating.

And gosh, wasn't I recently writing something else about self-defeat? Indeed I was. That's why I started Part 1 of this story by talking about synchronicity ... because the topic of self-defeat seems to be haunting me these days.

Maybe I should pay attention. 

           

An unsatisfactory visit, part 1

Sometimes it seems like a topic shows up on my radar and then just won't let go. I think the technical term is synchronicity. The way I understand the theory of synchronicity, I should pay attention when it happens. I don't recall whether the theory says what to do in case I don't want to pay attention.

Not Mother's house or pool, but you get the idea.

A couple of weekends ago, I drove to Big City to visit Mother. The most immediate motivation was purely sybaritic: it has been very hot lately, and Mother has a swimming pool. And in the end I got to use it a couple of times, in the mornings before Mother got up. Not that she would have stopped me using it any other time, but we were talking.

So much talking

These days, when I visit with Mother we spend a lot of time talking. Back when Father was still alive, that was less true.

I'm sure I've discussed this in an earlier post, but I just spent over an hour looking for it and I can't find it. The indexing that I have set up for this blog isn't nearly good enough. Anyway, the point I wanted to reference is that as long as Father was alive, Mother never seemed to talk very much. Father always dominated the conversations, whether in public or among friends or just at home among family. Always. On the other hand, once he was dead I noticed a major change in Mother whenever I visited her ... at any rate, if it was just the two of us. Suddenly she talked a lot. Sure, some of it was practical. But a lot of it was just talk. I finally asked her about what was responsible for the difference. She said, more or less, that when Father was alive she let him dominate the conversations because she knew it mattered to him. No other reason. (At a certain topological level, her reasons maybe aren't that different from what Marie told me here.) Anyway, now that he was gone and there was no longer any reason to worry about his preferences, she was reverting to "normal." The result is that when I visit over a weekend, I often drive there on Saturday; then we spend all of Sunday morning talking, and much of the rest of Sunday too. Finally we wrap it up Monday so I can go home and she can go to work. Of course, this weekend Monday was Labor Day, which gave us an extra day.

Anyway, we spent a lot of time talking. But this time, honestly, the talking was very unsatis­factory. I kept feeling like I said something to piss her off. I kept feeling like she was mad at me. 

An example

At this point it has been a week and a half, and I didn't take notes at the time, so I can't remember all of the discussions. But for example, she asked me how it was possible for anybody (meaning the people she sees on the news) to distrust vaccines?

I tried to explain that the world has changed since she was a girl. I said nobody distrusts the polio vaccine or the smallpox vaccine. But now there are far more of them out there, and legally the manufacturers shielded from liability for vaccine injuries. This shielding creates an opportunity for moral hazard, the circumstance where the benefits of an action (profits from selling vaccines) flow in one direction (to the parmaceutical companies who make the vaccines) while the risks (in case of injury or death) flow in another direction (to the patients who cannot sue for compensation). And I suggested that some people think the pharmaceutical companies might be tempted to cut corners in their development or safety testing, since they can't be punished if something goes wrong. So it's natural for people who think that way to be distrustful. I tried to suggest that this was very different from simply being "anti-science."

She nodded along with my whole explanation, and then asked (almost belligerently) "What about the measles vaccine?"

I don't know. What about it? Was she asking me for a complete list of which vaccines are safe and which aren't? (I can't supply that.) Or was she accusing me of being "anti-science"? I don't know what she meant, and I didn't answer her very effectively.

And then she said ....

There was more. As I say, I've forgotten most of our topics. But mostly they were as unsatisfying as the discussion of vaccines.

And then in a side comment just by the way, Mother said she was worried about running out of money. This was unexpected. Between the time Father died and this conversation, Mother always gave the impression that she was in comfortable circumstances. In the moment she went on to talk about something else totally different. But the next morning after breakfast, I asked her about it.

[See Part 2.]        

           

On self-defeat, part 2

I just wrote about how Wife's whole life—so it seems—has been one long exercise in self-defeat. This is a line of thought I started after looking at the journals she left behind when she vacated Son1's apartment.

But my reflections didn't stop there. Oh no.

Father undercut himself the same way. I've talked here and here about how he undermined his own authority as a businessman. I don't know the details of his stint as a university professor, except that he failed his first tenure review (after three years) so his contract was not renewed. Decades later he found a letter he had written to the Dean after his contract was canceled, and read it to us over the dinner table. As a piece of rhetoric or invective—as a letter that burst into flame upon reading—it was a remarkable piece of work. But by that time I was already an adult, and in fact I was a manager with employees of my own. And what I thought privately (though I never said it aloud) was, "Gosh, if that's where your head was at the time, I'd have fired you too." The letter was all about him, and never mentioned the needs or strategies of the university. And even if he didn't care about the university, anyone who wanted to play the employment game should know enough to pretend to care. Not Father. 

After he retired from business, he tried to make a living as an actor. There he was dogged by a special kind of bad luck that repeated over and over. Time and again, he would get a part in something very small whose schedule neatly prevented him from auditioning for something large and rewarding. To hear him tell it, this happened so often that he could almost count on it. Now was this self-defeat? I have no idea. All I know is what I heard from him, and he made it sound like random bad luck each and every time.

On the other hand, we've all heard the saying: Once is chance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. I just don't know which "enemy."

In other words, the topic of self-defeat is one I probably need to spend some time with, because I've lived around it much of my life. First Father, then Wife. That's definitely why I need to think about it. Right?

Ha. I should be so lucky.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have discussed my own self-defeating behaviors many times. Good luck seems to be wasted on me. And I never had the skill to advance up the corporate ladder. I hide myself, and I seem to court failure. You can multiply other references throughout the blog without breaking a sweat.

I think this is why Kimberly Steele told me (three years ago!) that publishing my book "is going to be an act of will that will act as one of your major tests in your life." I have spent too much of my life trying actively to fail. I have worked at defeating myself, and I have surrounded myself with masters at self-defeat. So the challenge is, Can I pull out of such a dramatic dive? Can I get my ass in gear and make it happen?

The questions about Wife matter to her therapist, but I'm not her therapist. The questions about Father are of biographical interest, but after all he's dead. The questions that have to matter to me are about me. 

I have achieved two long-term goals in my life. The first was my marriage (and children). The second was my separation. What comes next? Now that I'm a senior citizen, what long-term goals can I still accomplish? And can I do them without ruining myself in the process?

Those are the questions that matter now. I suppose I should be grateful to Wife's old journals for making me think of them.