Questionnaire 1

Oh, Debbie sent me a book about Al-Anon, which has a two-page list of intake questions.  She asked me to think about the questions seriously: then if they mostly apply, maybe I should join an Al-Anon group; if not, maybe not.  I told her I would think them through seriously.

There are twenty questions in all.  So whenever I don't really know what to write about, I'll take the next one in line and tackle it.  Here's the first:  

When difficulties occur, do you need someone to blame, even if it is yourself?

No.  Sometimes shit just happens.  I don't remember how I would have answered that question thirty years ago.  But after thirty years of having to pull Wife down off her high horse when she started blaming every Tom, Dick, and especially Harry for whatever bad luck she was having just then, I have certainly been cured of any tendency I might ever hypothetically have had in that direction.  That one's easy.    

Conversations after sangha

So I went to my UU sangha last night.  I realized that I was fairly distracted -- not all that "present" -- by just stuff that's going on.  Son 1 has decided where he wants to go to college, and (sure enough) it's not the one I was rooting for.  Wife claims she can't get to her e-mail and therefore can't find any of the asset proposals I've sent her, so now I have to send them all by snail-mail.  We have a big audit coming up soon at work.  You know, ... that kind of stuff.  Superficial stuff that makes me distracted and not really there.

During our dharma study we read an article from a recent issue of Shambhala Sun.  (The article is linked here, but that seems to be only a stub and not the whole thing.)  What interested me was that during the discussion it became apparent we had each gotten something very different out of it.

One woman had been profoundly stirred by the call to gratitude -- deep, immeasurable gratitude towards one's parents, in particular.  Another answered sharply, "Gratitude? For what? Giving me life? It's just an accident whether this sperm and that egg ever meet up. Sacrificing for me? We all sacrifice things, why make a big deal out of it? Besides it wasn't just me ... they had other children. And I'd never want my children to think they had to trudge through life shouldering some huge burden of unpayable debt to me. What a horrible way to live! I guess I can understand the general idea of being grateful to your ancestors collectively ... but honestly I'd rather start a couple of generations back."

Afterwards I told her that I completely agreed, at least as far as what I want for my own children is concerned.  I've talked here (at least a bit) about how frustrated I get at my father, and so I don't really know what level of gratitude I feel on that front ... or could cultivate.  My mother, naturally, is a saint: the proof is that she's been married to my father for 55 years.

What struck me about the article was the description of different flavors of anger in the very first paragraph.  I remember years ago, when I used to get a lot more angry than I do now -- and a lot oftener.  My anger had a very specific flavor of its own, too: it would come on all of a sudden, course through me like a wave rushing to shore, then crash and recede, leaving me to puzzle, "What was all that about?"  And then it was gone.  Wife never understood this, because for her anger is something permanent.  So she always panicked when I got angry because she assumed it was forever, never seeing that once I was over it I was really over it.  I think I've talked about this before, but I'm not sure how to find the right posts to link them.  (My indexing on this blog could use some improvement.)

I also wish I could give some kind of helpful advice on how I got to the stage where I am now, where I'm not subject to the same kinds of sudden spells.  [Knock wood.]  I don't know what drove the change ... just that it happened.  I did relate in sangha that I realized it was time to back down when I heard the boys -- who were quite young at that point -- coin a couple of phrases as descriptive superlatives: "As sad as Mommy" (because of Wife's chronic depression) and "As mad as Daddy."  Slow down, Hosea.  Bad example to set.  I'm grateful that I don't seem to be afflicted the same way these days.

And then I had a long conversation in the parking lot afterwards with a woman in the sangha whose son graduated from the same college that Son 1 wants to attend.  She told me a lot about his experience, but also about the school in general.  Actually his experience wasn't so good: his grades tanked after his sophomore year, he took a long time to finish his degree, his parents ended up massively in debt, and he's now unemployed.  But she pointed out that there were some special features of his experience and it wouldn't have to be the same with Son 1 ... also, that a lot of points about the school are really exciting.  So she persuaded me that on the whole it will be fine -- a conclusion I had already reasoned my way to, but I was glad for the boost.      

No snappy conclusion, but maybe that's all I have to say about that. 

Four days

Four days without writing anything.  Sheesh.  Well, the advice always seems to be, Never mind that you fell off -- just dust yourself off and get back on.  Right?

Where have I been the last four days?

For one things, my evenings have been busy.  Friday at lunchtime I figured I could wait till evening to write because I'd posted two pieces the day before; then Friday evening, kind of on impulse, I went to the opera.  It was a modern opera (well, 20th century) and in English, and in retrospect none of the tunes was all that catchy.  But hey -- it was something different, so why not?

Saturday and the first half of Sunday was a big parents-and-alumni event at Durmstrang, Son 2's high school.  So I drove to that (an hour each way): attended some of Son 2's classes, watched a sports event in the afternoon, and saw the school play that night.  The play was John Cariani's "Almost, Maine."  The show is really a string of independent scenes one after the other, all on the subject of romantic love: falling in, falling out, and some of the bumps in between.  Son 2 had two parts: as he never tired of telling me, one of his characters was gay and the other (while straight) was in the scene with the most kissing of the whole play.  He seemed to have fun, and he did a fine job.  That is to say, it was a high school play which means the bar is set pretty low to begin with; with few exceptions, teenagers are notoriously bad actors.  But Son 2's performance was enthusiastic, he stayed in character, and you could hear him ... all positives.  It seems like everyone in the school came up after to congratulate him.  Naturally that warmed my heart as a proud papa, but it may also have confirmed that the bar is set pretty low for high school drama.  Anyway ....

The first half of Sunday I spent back at Durmstrang.  Then I came home, paid some bills, and spent an hour on the phone with Son 1 talking over his college choices.  He's been admitted to five schools, but he has scarcely looked at three of them.  In his eyes they must all have been backups, though none of them is shabby.  Of the two that he is taking seriously, he is leaning towards one and (predictably I suppose) I am leaning towards the other.  Not that it's my decision, of course.  Yes, I'll be paying for most of it, but after financial aid the schools are only about $2000 a year apart ... it's scary to think that when I went to college, that was a lot.  Anyway, one of them has a much sexier program -- this is the one Son 1 likes better -- but it's also a lot narrower.  The other has a basic liberal arts program, which doesn't look as exciting to Son 1 but which I like because I figure in the long run it's more marketable.  Plus, if Son 1 ever changes his mind about what he wants to do in life, a basic liberal arts background is a sturdier place to fall back on.

So we talked.  In many ways it was a very refreshing conversation.  Son 1 understood all the points I wanted to make and -- more importantly -- had anticipated them and thought them over already.  His responses were reasoned and reasonable.  To the extent that our opinions differ (and I think they still do), they differ by judgement calls of how this or that is likely to play out in the long run.  And nobody sees the long run very clearly ... I've learned that by now, if nothing else.  My biggest fear is that he will spend four years in an expensive but sexy program and then not find a job, and he agreed to haunt the career office starting in the fall of his freshman year so that he can get summer jobs or internships in his field ... thus building up a background of work experience and contacts.  So I told him that, based on that agreement, I could accept either decision.  He's still got one day to decide for sure, but I'm pretty sure I know which way he'll go.  (Of course, upsets are possible. When I applied to college, both my parents were certain I was going to go to Harvard, and then I didn't. But I also hadn't talked to them at all about my thinking as it matured.)

I said my evenings have been busy.  Sunday evening I decided to go out to the movies.

Last night I stayed late at work and then dropped in on a meditation group I normally don't join and found myself nearly dozing off a dozen times during a forty-five minute sit.  By the time I got home I was wiped out.

Lunch is over and I have to take a leak, so I think I'll quit here for now.  I could probably think of more to say with a couple minutes thought -- the more you look, the more you see -- but maybe I'll do that later.

None of the above

After all that cogitation, my counselor and I didn't discuss any of the things I thought we would.  She asked how my month had gone.  I told her that I'd been writing as if in a journal every day this month (or almost).  I mentioned that I had thought about some of the issues related to Debbie, but that I had also come to the conclusion that yes, right now is not the time for me to be involved with someone romantically.  Then I started talking about the boys, and about how Son 1 is in the last stages of choosing a college to attend ... and we spent the bulk of the session talking about my relationship with them.

She asked if the boys know I love them and am there for them.  I said I'm sure they know I love them and I hope they know I'm there for them ... but there are certain questions I would never expect them to ask.  Relationship questions, for example.  Really? she asked.  Why not?  The sarcastic answer would be "Because obviously you've done such a piss-poor job in your relationship with Wife!"  But what I said was that I just kind of assumed they wouldn't want to ask those questions because I would never have wanted to ask my own father ... and that's largely because he pries so pruriently and incessantly that I had to build a wall of privacy to have any space of my own at all.

Before we finished, my counselor suggested one thing.  She said, You can always admit to your boys that you are still learning the job of father; and so you can always ask them, "Twenty years from now when you are looking back at today, is there anything you are going to wish I had done that I'm not doing? Or that you're going to wish I hadn't done, that I am doing?"  She added, You can even go so far as to say that there are a lot of questions you don't ask because you've been hypersensitized by your own Dad, but it doesn't mean you aren't interested or don't care.  And of course you don't have to say any of this if you don't want to.  But just remember that you can ... if you want ... and sometimes you learn things that way.

Good to know.

What to talk about?

I've arranged it with my counselor that I see her once a month, at this point.  That doesn't sound like a lot, and it's not.  On the other hand, what exactly am I working on?  Relationship issues, I think ... with Debbie (but she's out of the picture) or with the boys (who are away at boarding school) or with some hypothetical future romantic partner (but she, if she exists, is still pretty hypothetical).  In other words, none of these areas is one where I'm going to get a lot of feedback, and it's not clear what progress I can make in a vacuum.  On the other hand I didn't want to drop her completely.  So we're checking in with each other once a month.

Tonight's the night for April.  What do I want to talk about with her?

One great advantage I have in figuring this out -- I think -- is that I've been doing all this writing in April.  So what is it that has been on my mind?

Looking over my list of posts in April, I see a few recurring themes:

• There is the breakup with Debbie: here, here, here, here, and here.
• There are the wider-ranging posts where I try to analyze my thoughts, feelings, or behaviors in relationships past, inspired by the breakup with Debbie or other events in my past: here, here, here, and here. 
• There are stories about my past with Wife: here, here, here, here, and I suppose I can include this one about the present day.
• There are snapshots of what I'm doing or thinking about concretely that minute: I was going to include links, but I suppose if you take this topic generally enough it includes all the others, so why bother?

But which of these would be useful?

Probably the most useful ones are these:

• Reply to Debbie, part 2
• Bad habits

So those are what I'll lead with.  And we'll see where the conversation goes from there .... 

Asset negotiations

Gosh, here I thought I was going to get to bed early.  I'd finished eating, put away the food, left the dishes to soak, brushed my teeth, gotten undressed, turned off all the lights in the apartment except a candle by the bed, and was just settling down to doze off when I heard myself say, You haven't written anything today. For your blog. Nothing.

Well, OK fine, but I posted something today. Doesn't that count?

You wrote it last night. You told me – that is, you told yourself (but that's me) – that you would write something every day. You haven't written today.

But I wrote two posts yesterday. No, wait – three!

That's very nice. Congratulations. But you said you would write something every day. And you haven't yet, today. 

All right, all right, I get the picture. Let me fire up my computer. But no more than half an hour. After that, I'm going straight to bed, even if I'm in mid-sentence!

That's fine.

Which is how I find myself here sitting on the floor with my laptop perched on my bed, typing.  For no more than another twenty-one minutes, please note.

Actually it's not quite true to say that I wrote "nothing" today ... it was just nothing that I posted here.  Some years ago I had the fantasy that I would keep you up to date on the progress of my separation by posting everything I wrote to Wife in the process of negotiating terms, and so forth.  But I think in reality that wouldn't be too interesting to read.  For one thing, it would be even more drearily repetitive than I am already, because I wouldn't occasionally just summarize.  Anyway, the point is that Wife and I are currently negotiating how to divide up the assets, and I wrote her a long e-mail today containing a second proposal.  My first proposal ... well, it had some things in there that I expected her to complain about, where I valued at their purchase prices various pieces of furniture and jewelry that she had bought over the years that I had never wanted us to own.  An independent appraiser would no doubt have knocked off a certain percentage for age; but my thought was, "If you hadn't bought that crazy-assed thing in the first place we would still have had the cash, so yes we should consider it worth the amount of cash we exchanged for it."

But the only thing she objected to was that I offered to split the premiums on her life insurance in a way that she thought left her payments higher than she could afford.  So I looked at it to see if there was some other way of handling it.

One way would be to cash the policy out.  It's a whole life policy so it has some cash value.  And she got it when my previous company shut down and laid us all off, and we were all given the chance to sign up for group insurance without a medical test.  (Wife has so many lethal medical conditions that no insurance agent in his right mind would write her an individual policy.)  At the time she figured she'd be dead in five years, and this would give me a nice big chunk of cash to use raising the boys.  But that was in 2003 (we were on rather better terms back then) and in fact she hasn't died yet.  So is it still worth keeping?  I don't know.  Some people convert their insurance policies into annuities when they get old enough; maybe she wants to do that.  Or maybe she wants to take the cash and invest it in Google, or go to Vegas.  I have no idea.  Neither does she, really.  One thought that worries her is that she won't have enough cash for when she reaches retirement age ... or, more exactly, for when I reach retirement age and stop paying alimony.  It's hard to say how much she's going to need, of course, and I'm already planning to give her the 401K I built up from ten years at my last company.  That should help.  But I think in fact the whole topic of money shows up for her as a big cloud of anxiety, in which she really can't see her way.

Anyway, without going into all the dollars-and-cents details, I made a proposal that would allow her either to keep the policy or to cash it out, and that would involve my paying her another couple hundred dollars a month for the next five years (to make all the other assets balance).  I suspect by her reckoning that won't really be enough to pay the insurance premiums for her, so she may decide to cash it out.  On the other hand she might take it and then strive really hard to find a way to get some more income some time in the next five ....  [Time for bed. Nighty-night, all.]

Bad habits, 2

God, but I love the world's timing!

So there I sat in the early evening – this evening, though you won't read this post till tomorrow – writing about how I react when I feel ashamed of myself, how I grit my teeth silently and spend the day working hard to prove I'm better than that, how what I ought to do (at any rate if I'm in a romantic relationship, at any rate if I'm spending the day with my partner) is at least communicate what the hell is going on with me.  I wrote and wrote and then had to bundle my stuff up quickly to get to the UU Sangha that I attend every Tuesday.  So I get there and we meditate and then it turns out that for Dharma study we are reading a chapter from Pema Chödrön's recent book, Living Beautifully With Uncertainty and Change.  And in that very chapter, smack at the bottom of page 11, she writes:

In My Stroke of Insight, the brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor's book about her recovery from a massive stroke, she explains the physiological mechanism behind emotion: an emotion like anger that's an automatic response lasts just ninety seconds from the moment it's triggered until it runs its course.  One and a half minutes, that's all.  When it lasts any longer, which it usually does, it's because we've chosen to rekindle it.

The fact of the shifting, changing nature of our emotions is something we could take advantage of.  But do we?  No.  Instead, when an emotion comes up, we fuel it with our thoughts, and what should last one and a half minutes may be drawn out for ten or twenty years.  We just keep recycling the story line.  We keep strengthening our old habits....

We can counter this response by training in being present.  A woman who was familiar with Jill Bolte Taylor's observation about the duration of emotion sent me a letter describing what she does when an uneasy feeling comes up.  "I just do the one-and-a-half-minute thing," she wrote.

So, that's a good practice instruction: When you contact groundlessness, one way to deal with that edgy, queasy feeling is to "do the one-and-a-half-minute thing."

So there.

There's more.  You remember a few days ago, in my post about why I drink, I mentioned a subtle, baseline level of anxiety in the back of my skull?  A little farther on (page 13 by now) Pema Chödrön is talking about a set of difficult emotions that she refers to cumulatively as "the fundamental ambiguity of being human."  After talking about them for a bit she goes on to write:

If the way to deal with those feelings is to stay present with them without fueling the story line, then it [raises] the question: How do we get in touch with the fundamental ambiguity of being human in the first place?  In fact, it's not difficult, because underlying uneasiness is usually present in our lives.  It's pretty easy to recognize but not so easy to interrupt.  We may experience this uneasiness as anything from slight edginess to sheer terror....  We may feel off balance, as if we don't know what's going on, don't have a handle on things.  We may feel lonely or depressed or angry.  Most of us want to avoid emotions that make us feel vulnerable, so we'll do almost anything to get away from them.

But if, instead of thinking of these feelings as bad, we could think of them as road signs or barometers that tell us we're in touch with groundlessness, then we would see the feelings for what they really are: the gateway to liberation, an open doorway to freedom from suffering, the path to our deepest well-being and joy.  We have a choice.  We can spend our whole life suffering because we can't relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.

So the challenge is to notice the emotional tug ... when it arises and to stay with it for one and a half minutes without the story line.  Can you do this once a day, or many times throughout the day, as the feeling arises?  This is the challenge.  This is the process of unmasking, letting go, opening the mind and heart.

Bad habits

You remember that one of the things Debbie said she thought I should work on, or spend time in therapy to understand, or whatever .... was the question what emotional habits I got into while married to Wife.  The thought was that if I learned to see some of these habits, then I could learn to break free of them.

You probably also remember (unless it counted as "TL;DR") that my first-pass assessment of the things she said was that yes, I really do have some of those habits but they mostly pre-date Wife.  Rather than forcing me to develop them, my marriage to Wife simply called them out as tools that I already had.  There were times I actually thought "It's a good thing that Wife married me and not somebody else, because at least I have the skills to deal with her ...."  OK, I was young and foolish when I was saying that, but still.

But last night I found myself thinking about this briefly, and realized what should have been obvious.  It doesn't matter where I got my bad habits.  A bad habit is a bad habit.  Simple as that.  So there is something to be said for doing an inventory of myself, to figure out what bad habits are lurking there before I let myself get into another romantic relationship.

I must have given the matter a full five minutes of thought last night, after a couple of glasses of rum, and this is what I came up with:

• Idealizing my partner.  I definitely did this with Wife when we first got together, hard as it may be to believe it from this distance.  You were witnesses to my doing it with D; you would have seen it with Debbie too except I wasn't posting as often then.  It used to drive Debbie nuts.  I would say something doting about how specially wonderful she was, and she would get uncomfortable and have to dispute the point.  OK, maybe she could have benefitted from accepting it graciously; but the bigger question is, why the hell did I insist on idealizing her in the first place?  Why do I assume, when I start to fall in love with a woman, that she is just naturally better, wiser, more self-actualized, more interesting, ... more whatever ... than I am?  Why do I automatically assume that she is greater and I am lesser?
• Along with this comes my tendency to set my priorities aside for her.  From the time I moved into my apartment last May until after Debbie left me, I never unpacked my boxes of books.  Really?  Was it that hard to do?  No, but I just didn't think about it: Debbie would want to do something this weekend, or we were on the phone for hours that weekend, or something came up somehow.  But whatever happened, the thing I didn't do was to say, "Look Debbie, I love you and of course it's always great to spend time together, but I've got books to unpack. Why don't we give the other plans a rest until I can get caught up with the basic processes of moving in?"  Probably would have been a good thing to do, though, because honestly how unreasonable can that possibly be?
• As I explained already at far too great a length here, I don't say anything when I am ashamed of my own behavior.  Instead, I just beat myself up in silence, which looks from the outside like I am fuming mad.  Not a big help to communicating clearly.
• And I'm reluctant to call my partner on it when she is being unworthy of herself.  I posted any number of arguments with D (often about money, for example) where I was hopping mad with her but cushioned it with elegant phrasing because I couldn't let myself just get mad.  Debbie never pushed me to that point, but there were times that she would be grousing about some petty thing or other and I really wanted to say, "Gosh, it's great to see how Buddhism has stopped you from clinging at little things that are too trivial to deserve it!"  But I never did.  This is partly a virtue -- politeness -- but there has to be a middle ground that lets me express what is truly in my heart at times like that without being a thoughtless boor about it. 

I have to be somewhere in about three minutes, so I'm going to sign off now.  But I want to think about this some more.
 
 
 

Coworkers

Hosea (e-mails employee): Hey Fred, how is that project coming?

Fred (e-mails back): Well, I haven't been able to find a current org chart, and I can't make any progress without one.

Hosea (immediately e-mails Al, copying Fred): Hey Al, didn't you tell me you'd found a current org chart? Can you send it please?

Al replies in about one minute to both Hosea and Fred with an org chart.

Half an hour later, Fred sticks his head into Hosea's office to say, "By the way, Hosea, you remember when I asked you for an org chart? Turns out you don't have to worry about it, because I just found in my e-mail Inbox where Al sent me one ...."

Is pain really all that bad?

I wrote one more post Sunday night after the five you see below, but put it on my other blog.  It's an idea that I had about a week ago, actually, ... about the relationship between pleasure and pain, and whether it's as obvious as it looks that pain is really all that bad.  You can find it here:

Pleasures, pure and mixed

For your benefit, I should add that it has a lot in common with the argument I make (at somewhat greater length) in my post three years ago on "Pornography and erotic madness".  Maybe I should cross-post that article to the public, philosophical blog as well, or maybe I want to tidy it up first, ... just a bit, ... before I do.

"Le Week-End"

Friday evening I went to see "Le Week-End", a recent movie about an elderly English couple who spend a weekend in Paris and ... things happen.  I'll try not to spoil it, in case any of you wants to go see it.

I decided to go on the spur of the moment: the review in our local paper was mixed, and I wasn't completely sure I felt like watching a movie about an elderly couple – whether it turned out to be bitter or heartwarming, I figured it might go down wrong just now.  But the theater was directly on my way home from work, and I happened to pass it just in time for the next showing, and so I thought "What the hell? How far wrong can I go?"

During the first half hour of the movie I found myself re-evaluating that cavalier question, and I nearly walked out at least three times.  This couple had been married thirty years (same as Wife and I), and they bickered in a way that was painfully familiar.  Several times I just couldn't watch the screen because the characters were passing through an interchange or snatch of dialogue that I had lived through too many times to be able to tolerate it again.  Those were the times I nearly walked out.  But I told myself that I'd paid for the ticket and that it's only a movie, and so I stayed in my seat. 

Finally the characters started going in directions that weren't so familiar, directions that Wife and I could probably never have gone.  I think it won't spoil anything to tell you that they find that they value enough in each other to see a way out of the dead-end they had backed themselves into.  And certainly the denouement of the movie was a complete surprise to me, although it was based rigorously on situations set up right at the beginning and fleshed out all the way through.  In other words, the movie doesn't cheat – everything happens for reasons that make perfect sense – but I would never have guessed it ahead of time.

And in a way they end up, this couple, in a mental space that has a lot more room in it for failure than they allowed themselves at the beginning.  They are willing to do things and accept things that would have been non-starters before.  In that sense, even though it's easy to say "Well I'd never want that to happen to me," the ending is oddly hopeful. 

I'm not sure I would want to see it again (cutting as it does just a little too close to the bone) but it wasn't a bad way to spend a couple of hours.  I guess I'm glad I didn't walk out.

Happy Easter, part 2

I just looked at the clock.  At this point there is no way that I will get either my cooking or my laundry done tonight ... I got started writing too late and went on too long.  Oh well, no harm done.  So maybe I'll crank out another post before getting something faster to eat, then ....

Maybe I'm a girl?

The lead article in the May issue of the Atlantic Monthly is called "The Confidence Gap."  It's by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, two journalists I'd never heard of before, and it's about why women don't excel in the work world in the numbers that we'd like to see.  In a nutshell, the argument is that men overestimate their abilities and women underestimate theirs; also, that self-confidence is more important than raw ability in getting ahead.  So men are more likely to apply for promotions for which they are even marginally qualified, more likely to angle for raises, more likely to keep pushing their way up.  Guess who ends up rising farther faster?

There is a lot of analysis behind this, and a lot of speculation about causes.  But one page really caught my eye.  Allow me to quote at some length:

For some clues about the role that nurture plays in the confidence gap, let's look to a few formative places: the elementary-school classroom, the playground, and the sports field.  School is where many girls are first rewarded for being good, instead of energetic, rambunctious, or even pushy.  But while being a "good girl" may pay off in the classroom, it doesn't prepare us very well for the real world....

It's easier for young girls than for young boys to behave: ....  They have longer attention spans, more-advanced verbal and fine-motor skills, and greater social adeptness....  Soon they learn that they are most valuable, and most in favor, when they do things the right way: neatly and quietly.  "Girls seem to be more easily socialized," [Stanford's Carol] Dweck says.  "They get a lot of praise for being perfect."  In turn, they begin to crave the approval they get for being good....

And yet the result is that many girls learn to avoid taking risks and making mistakes.  This is to their detriment: many psychologists now believe that risk-taking, failure, and perseverance are essential to confidence-building.  Boys, meanwhile, tend to absorb more scolding and punishment, and in the process they learn to take failure in stride....

[Then after paragraphs on the playground and on sports, the authors wind up this section with ...] What a vicious circle: girls lose confidence, so they quit competing, thereby depriving themselves of one of the best ways to regain it.  They leave school crammed full of interesting historical facts and elegant Spanish subjunctives, proud of their ability to study hard and get the best grades, and determined to please.  But somewhere between the classroom and the cubicle, the rules change and they don't realize it.  They slam into a work world that doesn't reward them for perfect spelling and exquisite manners.  The requirements for adult success are different, and their confidence takes a beating.

Do I even have to write anything else, or can I close this post right here?  Those paragraphs are, with minor exceptions, written about me.  I'm pretty sure I'm a guy.  [Just a minute – reaches hand in pants – checks for testicles – yup, they're still there! – yes, I'm a guy.]  But so much of this, from the advanced verbal skills through the praise for being perfect, to the fear of mistakes and the bewilderment at a work world that doesn't give a damn about sentence fragments or split infinitives ... so much of this is deeply, personally familiar that I can't help but think about it.  So maybe this explains why I never have anything to brag about to my alumni bulletin, no visible leadership in anything even though my high school prides itself on training leaders.  Maybe in some respects I'm really a girl, or at any rate a virtual girl.

Of course, even the girls who graduate from that school seem to have a lot to brag about, so that might not be the whole story.  Another option is that I should go back to gently wooing Sister Failure.  Still, it was an interesting idea.

Funny that I should find myself writing two posts in a row about this subject, when it's not something I've been [aware of] thinking about lately.  I wonder why that is ...?

"That thing"

As I mentioned in a couple of previous posts, I'm currently reading Dorothy Bryant's Confessions of Madame Psyche, a novel set largely in the San Francisco area in the first half of the twentieth century about a young girl who stumbles into an early career as a fraudulent psychic but who then runs away from that life and ... things happen to her.  I suppose in a sense it is a modern Bildungsroman, except it covers her whole life and not just her childhood.  But hey – education (Bildung) is supposed to be lifelong if you do it right, isn't it?

Anyway, one of the things that happens to Mei-Li Murrow, the half-Chinese protagonist, is a totally unexpected mystical experience as she sits on the beach one day, an experience in which the daylight suddenly seems to shoot through her and suffuse her in orgasmic waves of energy, and in which everything she sees on the beach – the dog playing in the surf and then shaking his fur dry when he comes back to the shore, the fisherman standing there casting and reeling and casting and reeling over and over, the children intently building a sand castle – all suddenly appear intensely beautiful and deeply meaningful.  And then it passes, of course, and the world goes back to being the world.  Except it doesn't, quite, because the memory of that event sticks with her ever after, and starts affecting everything else she does (such as prompting her to bail out of the psychic racket even though she has just then reached the point where she is about to make serious money at it).

If you know any of Dorothy Bryant's other work, this scene won't surprise you.  I think she has used that kind of experience in only one other book – The Kin of Ata Are Waiting For You – but if you know any of Dorothy Bryant's work you probably know Kin of Ata.  And if you know Kin of Ata it will be no surprise to you that this experience doesn't suddenly make everything in Mei-Li's life all better.  She sees it, she knows it is there, she knows it is possible ... and she goes right on making the same ham-fisted choices in her life that she made before, with the same kinds of unexpected (and mostly unwelcome) consequences.  She even needles herself about it – "Why did I do or say this or that mean / petty / bitter / spiteful thing, when I should know better ... when I should remember that there is a glory in the world that makes all meanness and pettiness unnecessary?"  But knowing better doesn't stop her.

The same way it doesn't for most of us, come to that.

It's an interesting idea to see pursued in a story: How does this kind of experience (which any number of people must have had from time to time) get incorporated into one's life?  And it is refreshing to see Bryant not handle it simplistically, as if having the heavens open for you suddenly makes all your problems go away.  Because I assume that it never does, at any rate outside of didactic propaganda or moralizing hagiography.  So, ... what then?  Does it help you to live any better at all, or does it just help you to be dissatisfied with yourself without helping you to change?

I haven't finished the book, so I don't know Mei-Li's answer.  (Well, I've skimmed ahead the way I do impatiently in all books; but I won't say anything here because I'm sure I haven't picked up the whole picture.)  And I've never had that kind of mystical revelation myself, so I can't speak from personal experience.  I suppose the closest I've come to experiencing "that thing" (Mei-Li's name for it) is maybe two different things.  One is what I called "the Voice" in a post a couple years ago, when I talked about the quiet that I would hear in my head after I had finished shouting at God for Wife's most recent damned-foolish short-sighted betrayal (whatever it was that time), and the quiet would almost be shaped like words, or like an answer.  The other is the experience I used to have in Full Moon circles, back when Wife was a practising Wiccan priestess, when the officiating priest would call a god or goddess (usually goddess) into her body and she would go around the circle speaking to each of us in turn ... only it was plainly not Wife looking out through her eyes or speaking with her voice.  Other than those two experiences, I think my life has been pretty mundane – certainly I've felt nothing like Mei-Li's orgasmic waves of light – but it's true that those have been enough for me to trust that there's Something More to the world than it looks like at first.

In fairness, I should add also that I would never have listened for the first of those if I hadn't already experienced the second.  That is, I would never have thought to yell at God over Wife's latest outrage – much less listen to the silence that came afterwards, when I finally stopped yelling – had I not earlier had the experience of speaking viva voce to Demeter or Hestia or Cerridwen (usually Cerridwen) in my living room or back yard, through the mechanism of the Wiccan ritual that allowed Her to use Wife's body.  In that respect, I owe to Wife my knowledge that the world is larger than it looks.  Like Sara Teasdale says in the poem on my sidebar, for some things you should "count many a year of strife well-lost."  Teasdale's "white shining hour of peace" is probably closer to Mei-Li's orgasmic waves of light than to anything I've experienced, but I'll take what I can get.  And therefore, for all my snotty-nosed whining, my marriage to Wife may still turn out – in a very odd calculation – to have been a net positive.  Sorry, this whole paragraph has been one long parenthesis.  Where was I?

I was saying that I haven't experienced the kind of vision Mei-Li say, but I've seen something; and I was about to ask if it made any difference in my life.  The short answer is: not enough, but maybe some.  By "not enough" I mean mostly that I'm still far from wise; and wouldn't it be nice if the awareness of a reality beyond surface appearances made us all wise?  On the other hand, for one example, I think I owe to this awareness my comparative nonchalance over the concept of failure.  I wasn't always able to be relaxed about failure.  You can read plenty of posts in this blog where I've whined about failure of one kind or another.  But finally I began to think about it differently.  After all, if there is a whole layer of reality behind the one that we see every day, and if there's anything valuable about that layer (which I can tell that there is just by feeling it, when I see it), then at any rate that means that the ordinary scale of values that we are used to in the workaday world isn't the only scale.  It also makes it look a little bit more like the things we do every day are a kind of game, or a play, in which I just happen to have been assigned this role and you just happen to have been assigned that one.  Well OK then, if there are multiple scales of value I don't have to feel too bad when I get my high school alumni bulletin and hear that guys I went to school with – guys I thought I was smarter than – have just been appointed to the state superior court after many years as partner in a firm that does extensive pro bono work for the poor, or own a technology startup whose market capitalization just hit forty-nine gazillion dollars, or just sailed alone around the world.  (I made up that last one, but not the other two.)  Yes, these achievements demonstrate virtues it would be nice to have; no, I don't begrudge them their congratulations.  But one way or another it just so happens that I was dealt one hand and they were dealt others.  I got one role and they got others.  It happens.

Sorry, I realize on re-reading that last paragraph that it drips with envy.  That wasn't how I meant to write it.  That it came out so makes me think there is still a level in which my emotions haven't moved beyond envying my classmates, beyond thinking that I "really shoulda done something better with my life."  Fair enough, but my emotions can be stupid.  My mind understands that my classmates and I really were carrying around different virtues from the get-go.  I got a lot of praise in high school for being smart and doing well in my classes.  But success in the real world requires other virtues far more than it requires intelligence – virtues like energy, determination, vision, and a knack for making good decisions.  Me?  Sure, I'm smart.  But depression saps my energy (even when the depression is medicated, which it long wasn't), I dither over things, and I have (like one of our ex-Presidents) trouble with "the vision thing".  As for good decisions, ... well, I married Wife didn't I?  You tell me.

This post has evolved in a direction totally different from anywhere I thought it was going to go when I started writing it.  And actually, it is starting to bleed into another one that I got the idea for Friday night, as I read the latest Atlantic Monthly over dinner.  So maybe it's time to end this one and start that one.  Then I'd better get dinner going, if I expect to eat it tonight, because it's going to take a couple of hours.  Either that or go do my laundry ....

Happy Easter!

It's been a beautiful Sunday of doing very little.  The day has been clear and blue and warm, and I was careful to get all my bill-paying and apartment-cleaning and grocery-shopping done yesterday – didn't get to the laundry, but that can wait.  So this morning I got up, put together an Easter pie for breakfast, popped it in the overn to bake, meditated for half an hour or so, made some coffee, ... and then ate pie and drank coffee in a lazy way while reading and watching the sun and breeze play with the trees outside my window. 

After a couple of hours I changed books, picked up a hat and a walking stick, and ventured out.  A short walk brought me to a little blink-and-you-miss-it enclave of urban woodland, an enclave I discovered only within the last year on one of my walks around my new neighborhood.  The spot is so well hidden that I never knew it before, even though for the first four years we lived in this city Wife and I had an apartment no more than a mile away.  But we never had any idea.

So I sat reading in the shade of a couple large trees, for – oh gosh, I suppose it must have been another couple of hours – feeling the breeze and waving once when a young family strolled past.  When I came to the end of a major section in my book – I'm reading Dorothy Bryant's Confessions of Madame Psyche and just got to the point in 1930 where she is evicted from the campground in the woods where she had tried to establish a commune – I picked up my book and my stick and went walking some more, down past some of the better-known scenic spots in town where I sat and contentedly watched the day go past.  Then I strolled back to my apartment, rested some more, and finally decided it was time to write a couple of posts for the blog.  But I'll break off in another hour and a half or so to make dinner ... I've found a recipie that looks tasty on the page so I want to see how it comes off in reality.  

Actually after a few weeks of eating very simply – I was trying to savce money in the aftermath of my trip to Peru – I've been cooking a lot lately.  I probably could have gotten by this week on leftovers and salad without needing to cook still more.  But hell – it's Easter, right?  I'll cook some more, for the sheer fun of it as much as for the food, and then I'll have lots to hold me for the week without having to allocate time in the evenings to do anything more than re-heat.  It would be nice to have somebody to cook for, but even if it's just me I'd rather cook than not cook.  Not every night, perhaps, because my love of cooking vies with my laziness or poor planning to see who will win out on any given night.  But it's a gift I give myself on hplidays.

Happy Easter, all.

Other times Wife lost it

In digging out the last few stories I posted recently (here and here and here) I found some others as well.  I'll post a few of them here just to get them out and online; some of the others might take a bit more time to put in readable form.  And in some cases I start to wonder if these are stories I have already told: after six years and some of posts, it's easy to lose track.
__________

Hosea's log. Stardate January 13, 2005.  Wife had an attack that I described in an e-mail to Boyfriend 4 as follows:

…. Wife had an attack where she started snarling like an animal, making not-very-veiled threats to damage herself and/or the children, and insisting that nobody loved her or would care if anything happened to her; when I tried to hold her to tell her this wasn't true she began to struggle violently with me. I held her still on the bed by holding her wrists and pinning her legs, because I was at this point genuinely concerned about the consequences (to herself or others) if I let her go. Her response was to shriek as if possessed.

Actually that's not a bad image, because her voice got deeper and huskier and the look in her eyes was not anything she normally has. Her reason also left her; I told her more than once that if she stopped fighting with me I wouldn't pin her down, but her response to that was to fight harder ... the way an animal might. (The sounds coming out of her mouth were feral and inarticulate as well.) I don't know if she was actually bruised, but her skin is so sensitive that she bruises if she bumps into a table. So I bet she was….

She finally settled down, after shrieking incoherently for many minutes. (…I think it helped that the boys came in the room to see what was going on.) When she stopped fighting and snarling, she settled down into sobbing, at which point I concluded that there was no further danger and let her go. I think this has been building for a while. I believe it is the depression coming to a peak. ….

I tried calling you but got your answering machine. Anyway, here is the story of the evening. I have left out all the story building up to it, because I still need to feed the boys and get them to bed; but there was a long trail of anger and frustration leading to this moment….

Oh, she did ask me to call Boyfriend 3. … I gave him basically the same description. He said that one of his ex-wives used to experience the same thing on rare occasions; also that he would pray for her and put her on his church's prayer line, but then after a few minutes Wife was willing to talk to him. That seems to have helped her collect herself, too.

__________

Hosea's log.  Stardate spring 2002.

During the spring of 2002, Wife had an extended bad spell. One Sunday in March, I took the boys down to visit my parents; I worked on taxes with my mother, while the boys played. Later that evening we had dinner and a small birthday party for my father. Wife stayed home because she wasn’t feeling well; also, at that point, she and my father got on badly and I thought they would each be happier without the other. But the next day, while Son 1 was at baseball practice, she became very angry with me. She began to accuse me of trying to take the children away from her permanently, and nothing I could say would shake this belief from her – even though there was no rational connection between anything I had done and that conclusion.

In early May of that year, she called me at the office one afternoon and insisted I come home immediately. She had just gotten off the phone with the hospital trying to arrange something about her upcoming gastric bypass surgery, and something had gone wrong. As a result she threw a tantrum, barricading herself in the bedroom and throwing clocks and other things into the bathroom and out the window. Her niece was staying with us at that time, and so she shepherded the kids into another room and tried to look after Wife. When I got home, I tried to calm Wife down; when that didn’t work, I held her wrists and held her down onto the bed to restrain her forcibly from doing more damage. She snarled and fought and shouted, but finally the fit passed and I let her up. Later I called the hospital and worked out whatever the problem was. I also cleaned up the mess.

__________

Hosea's log.  Stardate spring 1996.

 

She went into a similar downward spiral while pregnant with Son 1, our oldest. She had been taken off her medication (then Prozac) because of her pregnancy, and one evening I came home from work to find the kitchen a complete disaster. She had thrown food and dishes across it, smashing glass jars and spilling molasses, soy sauce, and many other foods all across the floor. She was sitting on the floor surrounded by broken glass and all this other stuff, playing with the broken glass by tracing it along her arms. When I asked her what had happened, her voice sounded almost serene (but crazy); she said that she was fine and that she was just playing with broken glass. I got her out of there and cleaned up; I cleaned up the kitchen; I called her OB/GYN to say that if she couldn’t get her Prozac she was going to have to have an abortion so that she could have her medicines again; and finally I got a hold of a psychiatrist who had seen her years before (when she was hospitalized for psychiatric reasons). I made an appointment, and at that appointment he told her that after the first trimester Prozac is completely safe for pregnant mothers. She went back on her medicines and things got better.

Lessons learned

Yesterday I posted some fragments of a journal that I kept very briefly back in 1987, and I paged through a lot more of it figuring out what to post.  When I decided to drag it out, I remembered it as mostly an itemization of the things Wife did that made me so frustrated; and I figured it would be interesting to see how many of them continued into more recent times.  What I found is that I spent a lot more time talking about myself (too bad blogging technology hadn't been invented yet!) and trying to sort through my own thoughts and feelings.  But this meant I had an opportunity to compare how I thought then to how I think now.  Have I learned anything?  Do I do anything different?  Or has the time just been one long dreary round of repetition, a maze where I never find the cheese?

I think I see a few things I've learned.  There may be more.  And of course there are probably things I should have learned but haven't ... but that's a different post.  So, in no particular order, here's a list:

• Back then I tried to guess what Wife meant and what she wanted by listening to her tone of voice and interpolating ... reading between the lines.  Now I'm more likely to ask.
• Back then I tried to give the answer I thought she wanted to hear, which of course made it important to read between the lines so I could figure out what she wanted but wasn't saying.  Now I'm less likely to do that and more likely to give a straight-up answer.
• Back then I would not -- seemingly could not! -- talk openly about sensitive emotional issues.  Or sex.  All I could do was hint at what I meant in elegant, roundabout ways.  It's no surprise that the other person (typically Wife) never understood what I meant.  I've gotten better about this, but not what I would call good.  That is to say, I'm blunt enough with you, and that's a benefit because it gives me practice saying what I mean so that I can say it to other people ... people I talk to in person.  But a few days ago I looked back at some e-mails I exchanged with Debbie back in September -- maybe half a year ago -- where she was bringing up some of the very same issues she brought up when she broke it off.  And my replies had the same brittle elegance about them.  I got to the point after a while, but I should have rewritten them before hitting "Send" to take out the first few paragraphs and go straight to the meat of the subject.  And in four years with D, I never told her most of what I thought about the things she did and said.
• Back then I tried to solve Wife's problems, rather than letting her solve them herself.  I am a lot better at this now.  I realize that I have enough trouble solving my own problems [wan smile] that the last thing I need is to take on others as well.
• Back then I was tied up in knots from not knowing what I wanted in even simple, mundane situations.  Wife used to needle me by saying, "Chocolate or vanilla, Hosea, pick one."  I look at the very same dilemmas now, or ones just like them, and I think "How is it even possible not to know what you want here? How is it possible not to know what you like and value?"  To me nowadays, making those kinds of decisions seems a lot easier ... something like breathing.  The explanation is that back then I was afraid of what I wanted.  Part of the reason I dithered for so many years about Wife's infidelities is that one part of me wanted her to be a free-loving free spirit, because I felt my own life to be too pinched, narrow, and constrained.  I wanted her to be a breath of fresh air.  But at the same time I knew from experience (She started fucking Boyfriend 1 a scant two years after we were married.) that dealing with the emotional turbulence of an affair was painful, and I knew I was too shy and fearful to reciprocate by finding a girlfriend of my own.  (I had been married twenty-four years before I started the affair with D.)  Anyway, the point is that I knew what I wanted but I was afraid of getting it, and afraid even of admitting it to myself.  So I took refuge in telling myself that these situations were "complicated" (they weren't) and in hiding behind a wall of words.
            There's one irony in my bringing up the whole question of not knowing what I want ... namely that in career-planning I still have the same basic problem.  I believe the root cause to be different, however.  I believe that in the case of career-planning the issue is that I can identify things I like doing and things I don't like doing, but I can't figure out how to piece together a dream job that's any different from the lackluster job I have now.  Also I figure that if I were actually to change careers, it would mean making a lot less money, which in turn means I should wait another six years until Son 2 is out of college.  And by then I'll be 59 years old.  Hmmm.  Maybe the problem is partly a lack of courage, but I'm going to keep telling myself it's a lack of imagination.  You remember that line I quoted recently from the movie The Big Chill?  "Rationalizations are more important than sex ...." 
• Back then I spent a lot of energy worrying about Who I Was.  You know ... my identity, my Self, my True Will, my destiny ... all that happy horseshit.  I wrote, several times, of working hard to kill off my Old Self (the Identity I had developed growing up, and deployed all through college and graduate school); and I fretted over what New Self would take his place.  This is related to the point I just made above, about wanting Wife precisely because she was so different from me, so that by being married to her I could be forced to change instead of settling into a rut.  I don't spend my energy on that kind of worry any more, or not much.  I suppose I haven't completely gotten over it -- I'm thinking of deeply embarrassing posts like this two-part one here and here.  But I think these days that's the exception and not the rule.  At least consciously I think I'm more likely to say that it's not very helpful to think about my Identity or Destiny, ... maybe it's more practical just to think about the choices I happen to make today, and later on the choices I happen to make tomorrow.  (Compare the argument here.)  In my more metaphysical moods, I can even argue that the Self or the Identity don't exist at all.  But I sure did worry about this sort of thing years ago.
• Back then I thought it really mattered what perfect strangers thought about me.  I had forgotten all about it, but apparently Wife had talked about going to Pagan Spirit Gathering some time around then, and had suggested I come with her.  (You remember that back then she was Wiccan, right?)  And it seems I had a huge amount of anxiety about this.  Part of it was related to the free-love atmosphere of the place: it had been at an earlier Pagan Spirit gathering that she met Boyfriend 1.  But part of it was wrapped around mental pictures of myself there, feeling that I had to explain to everyone that I wasn't really a Pagan but I was there because my wife was, and at the same time realizing perfectly well how really dorky that would have sounded.  And honestly, in real life, who the hell could possibly have cared?  Last year I joined Debbie on at least three Buddhist retreats without ever once feeling I had to explain to anybody that I'm not a Buddhist.  (And in reality I'm not sure I can tell whether I'm a Buddhist or not.)  So maybe I've made a little progress on that front.         

Time to sign off.  Maybe I'll think of more later. 

Blast from the past -- Back in 1987

Posting stories from the past got me thinking about one that's really old, but that may date from the first time I ever wrote down any account of my troubled marriage with Wife.  So I rummaged around a bit and dug out the journal that I started keeping back then ... and kept up for three weeks before abandoning it.  (sigh)  Still, there's a lot in there reflecting about me and my marriage, about how things went and why I reacted in a certain way.  I don't know how much of this I'll end up posting, but at any rate some of it ....
__________

Hosea's log, star date October 23, 1987.
Location: a city we haven't lived in for a quarter century now.  The time is a full twenty years before I started this blog.  Dear God but that's a long stretch of time ....
What follows is what I wrote then, with minor edits for readability, etc.  Every so often I intrude editorial comments in a different type face, between square brackets. 

I tried to hit Wife last night.  We tussled for a minute and then I broke off and went back into the bedroom.  The issue was seemingly immaterial, but managed to be more frustrating than I could handle ... apparently.  Wife's friend Laguna was working late, at a company a few blocks away from here; and Wife was going to take her some of our leftovers to microwave for dinner.  A simple question: should she take some of this or some of that?  I didn't much care which, but she kept pursuing the question; worse, each time she said or asked something, I thought she was suggesting the other option from the one she had suggested a minute before.  I suppose I was involved at all because I was in the kitchen at the time and she wanted me to put something on a plastic plate and wrap it up.  But I got frustrated enough with her rapid-fire changes of tack that I left the kitchen, went to sit down, kibbitzed briefly, and let her do it.  A lot of our decisions seem to go like this.  I don't even remember -- after she had that mostly taken care of -- what she said that made me so mad.  I think she said something about not understanding why I was making such a big deal over something so tiny.  My impression was precisely the opposite -- that she was the one making it difficult by constantly sending mixed signals about what she wanted to do.  [Let me break in from today to point out what should be obvious -- viz., that another problem is I was trying to read her mind instead of just asking her, "I dunno Babe, what do you want?"]  As usual the real problem was that we weren't understanding each other; but this particular accusation -- that the problem was my doing -- infuriated me.  It's similar to the last time I tried to hit her, when we were trying to go somewhere and I kept waiting for her before we could, and she later bitched about our late start and about her having to wait for me.  Of course we were waiting for each other.  I wouldn't have gotten so angry that time either, except that (a) this is another longstanding problem, and (b) I was accused of being -- all by myself -- the party at fault.  This feeling, compounded with the sense that this was part of an endless cycle (since it has happened so many times between us) resulted in a combination of pain and despair that distilled briefly into murderous fury.  I say this with only minimal exaggeration: for a brief moment -- both times -- I really wanted to kill her.

[It goes on for several more paragraphs, as I talk about my depression, about my fanatical need to be clearly understood (I hope I've eased up a little on that in the interim), and so on.  Several days later I pick up the story, after Wife and I made time to "talk about the incident."  I relate that she said I must have a lot of repressed, pent-up anger in me towards her, to be able to explode like that. Mulling this, I write ...]

It is true that I can get awfully angry at her, and that in many ways she is quite a burden.  The simple fact that my time at home is not my own is painful enough for someone like me who cherishes privacy and solitude.  I would happily do less housework and fix less elaborate and less regular meals, and so forth, to have time to read or think or write or enjoy the silence.  But if Wife is home too there is none of that -- I feel that I should be busy doing something domestic, or else I will hear later about the problems when it is not done.

Then there are the ways in which she is dependent on me.  Weekdays I fix three meals a day.  She says that she prefers homemade lunches to school lunches [in those days, Wife was a schoolteacher], but if I don't have time to make her a lunch she certainly won't do it.  In fact she lies abed late enough that if I didn't make breakfast and iron her clothes I doubt she would ever get to work on time -- or at any rate fed and pressed.  If she needs to go somewhere new, I have to write out directions for her and go over them as with a child -- she found her way around well enough when job hunting the last time we were apart, but if she can palm the job off on me so much the better.  [The invention of the GPS was one of the high points of our marriage. No joke.]  Ditto with finding her keys when they get lost.  Ditto with balancing the bank statement.  I see why her mother drags her feet about sewing for Wife -- she wants Wife to learn to do it herself.  But she won't learn while her mother is alive, if ever: this I can guarantee.

Then there are the things she does that are irritating in themselves, like leaving her clothes and shoes strewn about the house.  Like preaching doom to herself so convincingly that she concludes nothing can improve her situation ... and then telling me at great length all about how hopeless everything is, in tones that suggest she wants my advice on how -- miraculously -- to make everything all better.  Like the sheer complexity and busy-ness that attends life with Wife: the constant scheduling around doctor's appointments, the train of friends calling or showing up, the fact that into every block of free time she schedules three or four mutually conflicting projects and then gets upset when she is perpetually behind....  It's all very draining, which is why it would be such a relief if she did leave me.  [Wife always said she would leave me if I ever struck her, so part of the "talk" a couple days before was about whether my almost striking her "counted" or not.] 

[Then the next day I picked it up again right where I left off, with ...]

On the other hand, I would also be crushed by it.  First of course would be the recurrence of all the loneliness and depression that I felt as a bachelor, the sense of permanent exclusion from the world of social relationships....  The cold, abandoned loneliness that I used to feel so often is not something I have felt since meeting Wife and it would surely return.  Plus there is enormous comfort in living with someone.  I need solitude too, but to be totally cut off from others is vertiginous and disorienting, and life too easily loses its beauty or meaning....  In a real sense, Wife is my hearth.  It is her presence that makes my dwelling a Home, ... that gives the place warmth and light.  Then there is sex .... [And so it goes, on and on, at very great length.]      

Blast from the past -- The weekend that Wife was arrested

So after much promising, I have finally posted this story ... as a separate page linked to this blog, because it is so damned long.  You can find it here:

http://hoseasblog.blogspot.com/p/the-weekend-that-wife-was-arrested.html

Any sane person would ask, after reading all this, "Hosea why in God's name did you spring her from jail? Why did you pay thousands of dollars in bail? If you'd played your cards right you could have kept her in jail for a long time after a weekend like this, and think how much pain and heartache you would have saved yourself!"

I've thought about it over and over, and I can come up with only one plausible answer to the question why I acted as I did.  That's how abused spouses act.  Over and over, that's how they act.

Which means I have to identify myself as an abused spouse.  Although, all things considered, the identification might not be that far off.  Read for yourself and decide what you think.

Romance or community?

I'm starting to slip on this "Post once a day" goal I set myself, but maybe I can catch up.  I was thinking of posting my last dream of last night, just before I woke up this morning, but that seemed just a bit too desperate.  Surely I can think of more material than that.  Well I have thought of a couple other topics, actually, but I think they'll take a while to flesh out and I'm trying to write this on my lunch hour.  So I'll have to try for something shorter.

One thing I have mulled over recently, though, is a comment Debbie made to me last fall, in an e-mail where she was (even then) feeling her way through some of her mixed feelings about our relationship.  She said that on the whole she preferred to meet her own social needs "in community" rather than in a romantic relationship, because in her experience intense personal relationships were always unsafe.  She instanced, for example, her relationship with her parents when she was growing up: her mother was emotionally unavailable, and her father (by the time she was an adolescent) was drinking and violent.  And at the time she used this as a springboard for talking some more about us.

What I have been mulling, though, is this distinction: romance or "community"?  What does it really mean, and what are the differences between the two?  I take "community" in this case to refer to a circle of friends.  Certainly Debbie talked often about belonging to several interlocking communities: a couple of sanghas, her church community, her coworkers, ... maybe some others.  Now that she is enrolled in a chaplaincy program and has moved to another city, she's got a new church, a new sangha (or two), her fellow students, an Al-Anon group ... in short, multiple interlocking communities.  And this is how she most enjoys meeting her needs for sociability, for companionship.

It's a bit of a foreign concept for me, because I don't plunge myself into communities in the same way.  I get along comfortably with all the people at work, but there is maybe only one with whom I am partway down the path of making him a friend in the sense that we talk about our private lives.  I have been a steady member of the UU sangha for close to a year now -- maybe even a little more -- and I guess I'm settling into that.  I helped out at an event last weekend where the sangha volunteered to do something nice for the UU church that hosts us, and I was able to ask a member of the sangha to drive me home after my colonoscopy a couple months ago.  But I see the people there at sangha, and not outside of it.  So I don't really have anything like the extended network of friends that Debbie has, and that she makes a point of having around her at all times.

Probably I shouldn't even try to speculate about the differences between these two ways of being sociable, when I don't have the experience of her way.  But I can't help wondering about it.  Somehow it seems to me that it is easier to put on an act for the members of a "community" than for a romantic partner, to pretend to be a better person than you are.  Somehow it seems to me that, for good or ill, you have to be more honestly yourself in a romantic relationship -- at any rate, once the rose-colored fog burns off -- because you get closer to each other and (try to) tear down all the barriers in between.  I might be wrong.  Maybe if you live "in community" the way Debbie does you get so close to people that you can't hide behind niceness.  Maybe what I'm really thinking of is that it's easier to put on an act with strangers.  And she's not talking about strangers.  But my coworkers aren't exactly strangers to me.  They aren't strangers, but I'll wager they don't know most of my faults.

I guess I don't really know how to compare these two ways of being sociable.  Maybe I should mull them some more.  But I've told you my first thought.    

Why do I have no Internet connection?

In a roundabout way, this topic is linked with the last one.  It's still Sunday night as I type this, and I hope I have less to say because the last post (about drinking) took me an hour or more.  But let me try to crank this out quickly.  [For whatever it's worth, I didn't finish it until Monday night. Oh well.]

When I took possession of my apartment, almost a year ago by now, I made appointments to turn on the gas and the electricity.  Water and trash are included in the rent.  I decided not to install a phone line because I've got a cell phone, and why exactly do I need two phones?  (Wife has a land line as well as her cell phone, but I've never once claimed that Wife's spending makes any logical sense.)  I don't own a television, so I didn't bother to connect cable.  And I did not set up Internet service.  To this day I haven't.

This irritates the boys no end, when they come to stay with me.  I often have to go to work during the day, leaving them to entertain themselves until I can get away and come home.  For Son 2 this usually means reading.  But Son 1 owns a laptop (Son 2 doesn't), so his idea of entertainment is to surf the Web.  Bad news dude – Dad doesn't have an Internet connection.  Can't do that.  So he plays downloaded games instead; if both of them are here at the same time, they may entertain each other or go for a walk around town or something.  (At least once last year Son 1 went out to the movies.)  But I never fail to hear from them that "At least Mom has an Internet connection – unlike some people!"  It has almost become a running joke.  I think they chalk it up to my being stingy.  (Wife has long told anyone who will sit still to listen how stingy I am. For my part I think she spends at delusional levels. Maybe we're both right.)

But really, why don't I have an Internet connection in my apartment?

I've thought about it.  In some ways it would be convenient: for example, I could post these blog entries when I write them instead of having to queue them for later.  I could check movie times without having to get a newspaper.  Maybe I'd finally get my photos from Peru posted online where the family can see them – or at any rate I could do a lot of other things without having to pack up my computer and walk to the public library where the wifi is free.  I could check my e-mail from the comfort of my own apartment ....

But wait.  Check my e-mail?  Do I want to be able to do that all the time?  If I can then pretty soon I'm expected to; pretty soon I have to.  If I'm plugged in all the time, then I'll have to be plugged in all the time.  Work will be able to find me.  Friends and family will be able to find me.  Human contact is great, of course; I'm not knocking it.  But there's a reason we don't live at the office.  And there's a reason it's nice to have "a place of your own" ... even if it's not much, or even if (like me) you don't want it to be much because you don't want to have to take care of it.  Sometimes you just gotta get away, and not having Internet at home is a great excuse.

There's more.  I know how seductive the Intnernet can be.  More times than I could count have I gone online to look up one little fact, then seen an interesting link and followed it up, ... and by the time I come to myself three or four hours have passed.  My eyes are a little glazed, my mind is a little dazed, my soul is not a bit refreshed ... and yet somehow a large chunk of my day has slipped through my fingers never to return.  Thich Nhat Hanh is right to refer to the Internet under the aspect of alcohol or a drug: it induces the same forgetfulness, it nudges with the same compulsiveness, and it gives nothing back in return.  It buys your life and pays with ashes.  You'd think that with this opinion I'd never use the Internet except for a defininte purpose, that I'd be as vigilant about Internet usage as I try to be about alcohol, ... that I could make it not be a problem.  But I'm not so sure.  At the very least, I don't trust myself to do this.  (You notice I haven't given up drinking either.)  So instead I just make it difficult to access.  Yes, I can connect to the Internet over the weekend, but to do it I have to drive into the office, or walk to the Library, or at least find a Starbucks somewhere.  I have to take conscious, deliberate steps.  And that slows me down.  It makes it less likely that I will piss away my weekend and not even get the delicious feeling of laziness in return.

This means I'm depriving myself of one of the drugs that could distract me from anxiety, but I find myself of two minds about this.  One side says, "Good. If you're anxious then deal with the anxiety rather than covering it up by surfing the Web."  Interestingly the other side agrees about the prescription (no Internet) but for the opposite reason: it says, "Internet browsing may distract you from your anxiety; but unlike booze or food or sex, it does not alleviate it."  When I'm done, I am just as anxious as I was before ... maybe a little more so.  This is what I mean by saying that I'm not refreshed.  It's kind of like eating cardboard – it keeps the jaws busy, but when I stop to pay attention I realize there's no flavor and it doesn't really make me feel any better.  If I'm going to feel the low-level chronic anxiety anyway, I'd rather live in the real world while I'm doing it ... surrounded by real, tangible objects with real colors and textures, and feeling real honest-to-God boredom rather than some cheap ersatz  imitation of interest.

Of course not everybody feels this way.  But if you've ever read Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

And I suppose I should add that this is a general comment about the medium.  If some of you start writing again, I promise to make an exception for you.  I'll still have to do it from the Library on weekends, though.