Offline

I'll be offline for a couple of days, probably till Monday at any rate.  Son 1 graduates from high school on Saturday.  Wife and I will head down there Friday to watch him get an award (the school won't tell us which one).  It's good.

The right direction?

I scribbled this note to myself three days ago.  I'll retype it here.

Jack Kornfield writes (in A Path With Heart, p. 263) that the way to tell if your spiritual path is headed in the right direction is: "With a loving heart we must ask: Am I becoming more isolated, obnoxious, lost, or addicted? Am I increasing my suffering? Are clarity and freedom growing in me? Is there a greater capacity to know what is true for myself, to be compassionate and tolerant?"

Fair enough.  Let me try a quick pass at these questions.

•  More isolated?  That's the only one that worries me, because I live alone and it's so easy for me to get that way.  (Pick almost any post at random, but for example this one.)  But I don't feel lonely.  I talk to people at work.  I talk to people at my UU Sangha.  I even talk to you all, though I suspect that at this point nobody is listening.  I don't know ... they are little things, but as I say I don't feel lonely.
• More obnoxious?  How would I know?  (smile)  Ask somebody else.
• More lost?  Again, I don't feel lost.  Even though I don't see far ahead (see for example my comments about career planning, like here; or more generically my comments about work, like this one), it doesn't feel to me like I am adrift ... the way it used to feel for many years with Wife.
• More addicted?  Notwithstanding my remarks yesterday here, I'm drinking a lot less than I used to when I lived at home with Wife.  And somehow even when I drink now I don't seem to enjoy it as much.
• Suffering?  I think I'm overall happier than I've been in a long time, but that may be just the separation and have nothing to do with (e.g.) the meditation.
• Clarity, freedom, a capacity to know what works for me?  Again, I think so .... 

Why am I so reluctant to admit that I'm headed in the right direction?  It sounds like bragging.  But maybe it's worth remembering a comment Debbie made to me many months ago.  I was taking a class on how to put the Dharma at the center of your life, and one week we read a chapter from Kornfield on spiritual maturity.  The assignment was to think about the ten facets of spiritual maturity that he describes -- ten virtues, in effect -- and then to identify: which ones do we already live today, and which ones do we still have to work on?  These are qualities like non-idealism, kindness, generosity, patience, inclusiveness, and so forth.  Anyway, I told Debbie that I was having trouble with the assignment, for exactly the same reason I mentioned just now: it seemed like I was bragging about how great I am for achieving these virtues, and that always makes me uncomfortable.

Her reply framed the whole thing very differently.  She said she found these virtues to be things she was grateful for, because they were qualities that she could relax into or take refuge in, and living that way made her life a lot more pleasant.  Not an achievement at all, but a blessing.

Wow.  Interesting.  I have to remember that ....

Hungry

I made a note a few days ago to write this post, and already I wonder if it is out of date.  Maybe not, but these things fluctuate and it's hard to be sure.  I'll pretend it is all current as I write it.

I've found myself somehow hungrier lately, especially in the evenings, at night, when I'm about to go to bed.  But when I say "hungry" I'm really talking about all appetites.  I want more food.  I want more alcohol ... so much for my stretch of not drinking any for a while.  I masturbate more.  And when I (rarely) get to the gym and weigh myself, I'm heavier.

I don't know what it's about.  I suppose that properly I should meditate, taking this feeling as my anchor ... try to discern what exactly is happening in my body ... understand it and be with it.  That's the healthy way to approach it.

Or maybe I'll just stay stupid, and keep doing what I'm doing.  Fress.  Guzzle.  Stumble blindly into bed.  Wank.  You knew that was how I was going to end this post, didn't you?  [Sometimes I think my written style is getting predictable.]

I really don't know what I'm going to do.  It actually would be kind of nice to understand what it's all about.
__________

[Added a week later:  Now that I think about it, you can cross-reference this post here from a month ago.]

Futility

So today I tried to get rid of Wife's handgun permanently.

My parents have been hiding it for me.  So I drove two and a half hours to their place.  Sat and talked for a few minutes.  Picked it up and drove to the police department.  Waited there for half an hour or so.  Finally talked to an officer ... who told me flatly that he couldn't accept the weapon from me if I'm not the owner, unless I could produce an actual court order forbidding Wife to own a gun.

Does it count that it was bought with community property assets?  Apparently not, ... not if it's registered to Wife.

Might it be registered to both of us?  He had never heard of a weapon registered to two people.

What if I just brought it in and said I found it somewhere?  They would trace the serial number and then telephone Wife and tell her, "We found your gun."

Oh.  Well I don't want that.  Hmmm.  Thank you very much for your time, officer, I guess I'll be going.

I drove back to my parents' house, gave it back to them, and drove to work, finally arriving in the middle of the afternoon.  Complete bloody waste of time.

But I learned a couple things.

1. Don't assume that everything I hear from Lawyer is perfectly true, until I check it out.
2. Ask more questions by phone before driving long distances.
3. Most important ... I probably have to give up the fantasy of doing anything in this separation unilaterally.  If I want the damn thing destroyed, I probably have to get Wife on board with that plan, by somehow making it worthwhile to her to go along.  Because if she asks the police to destroy the weapon, there's no problem.

Even in leaving her I have to cooperate with her.  It's ironic, but I'm sure there is a profound moral in here.  It's not one I want to hear, but that's beside the point ... how often is it ever?

Grief

Last night in my UU Sangha we talked about this recent shooting, and then did a meditation on grief which involved thinking of some serious loss and then feeling the sadness from it without "clinging" to the sadness ... just "letting it be."

During the first part, when we were talking, I mentioned that today (i.e., Wednesday, the day after sangha) I was planning to drive two hours to my parents' house to collect Wife's gun so I could turn it into the police and have them destroy it.  That was Lawyer's advice.  More on that in my next post.

Then during the meditation on grief, I found that I was contemplating the loss of my marriage.  It's funny.  In many ways I think -- at any rate I often think -- that I've lived with this for so long I've become blasé about it.  That's what I say here, for instance.  But when I'm asked to think of a loss that I feel grief for, that's what comes up.  Not, say, the death of a grandparent or a beloved teacher.  But the loss of my marriage to the most frustrating woman in the galaxy.

It's funny.  By which I mean sad.  By which I mean that I have no idea what I mean.  

What's wrong with bitter narcissists who have guns?

OK, posting this is a cheap shot because everybody within reach of the Internet or television or any other news medium already knows about it.  But I did stop and think about Wife wanting her gun back.  Of course you know I'm talking about this story here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/us/california-drive-by-shooting.html

Detachment

This will be quick. 

There's a story I think I have told you from when I was in third grade: I know I referenced it here, and maybe other places too.  I've told it in the past as symptomatic of my early bouts of depression, or of being a "consummate outsider".  But there's another way to read it as well, one that didn't occur to me before I started to meditate.

It's just to observe that even back then -- even when I was eight years old -- I had already developed the ability to look at myself from the outside, to detach from the emotions that I was feeling at the time and criticize them from a neutral perspective.  It didn't stop me from feeling them, heaven knows!  They surged through me all the same, like waves at high tide.  Especially when I was young and didn't have so many layers of cynical posing calcified over my raw feelings, my emotions could be very intense ... even the ones that I more or less knew I had manufactured for my own entertainment (as I discuss here).

But at the same time that I could feel my emotions for what they were, I knew they weren't the whole story.  I always knew that there was another perspective that would be available to me when the storm had passed and the tide had receded.  The same thing happened when I used to get angry at Wife.  (I'm pretty sure I've described the flavor of my anger more than any of you wants to hear, but right now I can't find a suitable post as an example. Lousy indexing. Let's try here and here just as starters.)  The thing is, my anger would come on all at once, in a rush, and it would sweep me away; but then a few minutes later it would be over and it was truly gone.  I could see clearly again.  Wife never understood this: she remembered the storm and assumed that was the reality, now and forever amen.  So she was afraid a lot more than she needed to be.

Anyway, I wasn't trying to talk about that a lot.  I just thought it was interesting that I had learned to detach and observe myself at such an early age.

Better

I took another carload of stuff from our storage unit to Wife's place today.  (You remember the last two times I did this, here and here.)  And it was better this time.

I had e-mailed her yesterday that I'd be coming up, so it wasn't a surprise.  (Shouldn't have been anyway, at this point.)  She invited me in to give me some paperwork to take care of ... bills to pay for some of her medications.  We talked a little bit about how to plan next weekend, when both Hogwarts and Durmstrang have their Commencement ceremonies, and when Son 1 graduates from high school.  And I asked to borrow a book.

The book was The Cloud of Unknowing, something she had acquired as a graduate student in medieval literature many years ago.  I was interested because the fellow who led the meditation retreat last Christmastime had mentioned it as being all about meditation ... though it is usually advertised as a classic of Christian mystical spirituality.  Anyway, she located the book and we talked about meditation for a few minutes.

Wife started by saying that people had tried to teach her to meditate in the past but she assumed that she had failed at it because she could never get her mind to go blank.  I replied, "Well of course it won't go blank. The brain is an organ, just like your heart or your adrenal gland. The job of the adrenal gland is to produce adrenalin and the job of the brain is to produce thoughts. The job of the heart is to pump blood and the job of the brain is to think. The only way any of these is going to stop is when you die."

I went on to explain that the idea behind meditation isn't to stop your thoughts but just to be aware or watch them as if from the outside.  Sit in the audience and watch your thoughts parade on stage, so you can see what it is that you are actually thinking about.  Then after a while maybe you'll get an insight into why you keep thinking about this or that. 

Wife remarked that she has been praying daily, and this is what she finds in prayer: her thoughts always meander.  That's fine, I said.  When you get to the point that you want to train your mind just a little more, the way to do it is to treat it like a highly energetic three-year-old.  Don't berate yourself or set impossible standards.  Just ask your mind, "Why don't you come over here and sit by me for a while?"  It will ... for maybe a few seconds ... and then will start racing around again.  OK fine, just smile at it and suggest softly, "Why don't you come over here and sit down with me again?"  Repeat as needed.  Your mind will never stay in one place very long, but over time it may become less frantic and agitated.  And as you watch yourself think, you may get some more insight into what kinds of things preoccupy you.  With luck this could, in turn, help you understand yourself a little bit more.

Wife said she was glad to hear this.  It made her not feel such a failure at meditating, and maybe she could put to use in prayer some of what I'd told her about meditation.  Sure, why not?

It was a short visit, but all in all a very calm, civilized, and grown-up one.  And I'm grateful.

"Why we go off sex"

Another fun article, this one about why sex gets tireder and less exciting as a relationship deepens.  This one ends with the paradoxical advice that, "To get back to the thrill of the early days, we need to learn the deepest and best lessons of breaking up, ideally without having to go through the very sad and painful process of actually doing so."  Or rather, it sounds paradoxical stated like that, but the case that the author makes isn't all that bad.

Here's the link: http://www.philosophersmail.com/relationships/why-we-go-off-sex-2/ 

"On the madness and charm of crushes"

This was fun: an article about crushes ... why we fall into them, and what they mean.  You can find it here:

http://www.philosophersmail.com/relationships/on-the-madness-and-charm-of-crushes/

As a special extra, the article comes with its very own dose of Romantic Pessimism:  "everyone has something very substantially wrong with them once their characters are fully known, something so wrong as to make an eventual mockery of the unlimited rapture unleashed by the crush."

Have fun!

Short-timer?

I've noticed something strange at work.  When I start to think about the more or less dysfunctional people who work for me -- and while it's not a big department, you can almost say that about each of them one way or another -- I feel a lot more relaxed than I think I "ought" to feel.  Aren't these people my responsibility?  Doesn't their performance reflect on mine?  Thoughts like these are part of what's involved in being a manager.  But instead what I find myself thinking is, ...

Well thank God I won't have to deal with any of this much longer.  And when I'm gone and the whole department goes to Hell, it'll be somebody else's headache to put it back together.

Wait, ... what??  Who said I was going anywhere?  Why do I feel like I'm going to change jobs soon, ... indeed, like it's already a sure thing, a done deal, so that I can afford to be complacent about leaving wreckage behind me?  I'm sure not consciously aware of any new job that's going to take over from this one.  And since I think I'm probably overpaid at this job, it's not likely I could afford to change.

Where does this idea come from?

I honestly don't know.  It's actually a little spooky when I think about it.  Only I don't think about it much ... but I find that it's a sentiment lurking quite often just  below the level of consciousness.  It's very strange.

Questionnaire 4

Another easy one.

Do you feel guilty or selfish whenever you say "no"?

No.

I'm trying to remember now whether that used to be true, or truer.  Sometimes I can still be wheedled into doing things I'd rather not do.  That was true when I was younger, and it's true now.  It might possible have happened more often then than now, though I'm not certain.  But "whenever" is surely false, because it is far too extreme.  Sometimes?  Yes.  Always?  No.  Certainly not.  Not even most of the time.

I don't have examples to hand, but somehow I think I've gotten better on this point.

Questionnaire 3

This one's easy.

Does a dark cloud of despair or a creeping depression sometimes seem to appear from nowhere to weigh you down?

No.

Used to, though.  Like clockwork every spring.  And other times, sometimes out of nowhere.  But it hasn't for years and years ... I don't know how many years.  I'm not even sure I recognized the transition when it happened, or as it was happening.

For a long time I thought I owed the change to finally growing up, so that I had some kind of accomplishments to lean on, something of substance: marriage, job, car, house, kids.  Sex.  Income.  Authority.  Respect.  Something more solid and nourishing than the non-nutritive activities that had substituted for achievement for so long in my life: brilliance, scholarship, good grades ... all shiny and showy, but thin and easy and pretty trivial stuff in the long run.

Then later it occurred to me that maybe I owe the change to wellbutrin.  If that's it, I'm very grateful and the stuff must really work.

It would help if I could figure out when it really started to change, so I could check if I had started taking wellbutrin by then.  Of course, maybe it's both ... and, rather than either ... or.

Am I too subtle?

You wouldn't think so, would you?  Still, sometimes I wonder.

We (the extended family) are trying to make plans for Son 1's graduation from Hogwarts.  Traditionally my parents have hosted any get-together related to Hogwarts, because they live so nearby.  But my father has been sick recently (I wrote about that a couple of weeks ago) and Heaven knows that I don't look forward to sleeping under the same roof with Wife if I can avoid it.  So I sent an e-mail to everybody Monday with a proposal for the logistics (further complicated because Durmstrang's Commencement is the very same day, three or four hours away), and I suggested that we none of us plan to stay with my parents on account of my dad's illness.  Since I was afraid he would reply-all immediately to contradict me, I sent him a private note saying that if he genuinely felt well enough to have guests then we should discuss it privately first.

So late Tuesday night he sent me a question as follows:

This is just for you. Before we make any hospitality offers or suggestions, I need to know: Are you and Wife willing to sleep under the same roof on the night of May 31st and share breakfast? How about the same room ... but different beds?

Dear God, do you hafta ask?  Apparently so, I guess, or he wouldn't have.  And yet when he lets his guard down and stops trying to play the role of the Perfect Host, he freely admits he can't stand her either.  So when I have handed him an excuse on a silver platter for not having to deal with her, why can't he accept it and leave well enough alone?

I also hate the word willing.  This is a word Wife uses all the time, and my problem with it is that it suggests there are two choices: Yes and No.  But the way Wife uses it (and Father is much like her, I think), "Yes I'm willing" means "That's great" while "No I'm not willing" means "Categorically not under any circumstances – I'd sooner die."  Isn't there a lot of middle ground between these two?  So here's how I replied:

"Willing" is a very vague adjective that often obscures more than it reveals.  Suppose someone were to ask me, Would I be willing to eat grubs?  Tribes in New Guinea consider them a delicacy.  For myself if I had a choice I'd probably prefer pizza; but if I were starving in New Guinea I suppose I'd rather eat grubs than perish.

I have not had a chance to investigate alternative accommodations yet, because my attention will be taken up full-time by [things at work] for at least another day.  But I meant the suggestion seriously and not frivolously, even though Brother assures me that you seem in better health than you did a few weeks ago when we both visited you.  If I can find something tolerable that's within driving distance, I'd really rather spare you the trouble of hosting company.  We might decide that we all want to get together for dinner or something, ... sure, fine, whatever.

I hoped this would be reasonably clear.  That is to say, I hoped that the shuffled side-step of an answer made it clear that what I meant was, "Would I be willing to sleep under the same roof with Wife? I'd just as soon eat grubs!"  Or in other words, I suppose I'd do it if the alternative was death or exposure (therefore not "No") but I'd rather not if I have a choice (therefore not "Yes").

But apparently it wasn't nearly clear enough because Father's next e-mail said:

I have made tentative reservations for a room with two queen-size beds at [a DoubleTree in town]. Forget about those others [a couple that I had mentioned as possibilities] that are closer to our neighborhood. One rents only by the week or month. The one next door rents rooms by the hour(!). [He then wrote a paragraph on the history of the hotel he had picked.]

BTW, are you a member of the Auto Club or AARP?

One room with two beds?  Who exactly did he think was going to stay there?  Me and Wife ... after I compared sleeping under the same roof with her to eating a bug?  Really?  He couldn't have meant just one of us, ... because then why two rooms?

I replied asking him to cancel the reservations, lest he end up paying for them.  He answered me:

Forgive me. Your mom and I thought of making your hotel stay our graduation gift to you and Wife for all the blood, sweat, tears, and cash you have put out toward making this event happen.

However, I shall do as you ask, and cancel the reservations -- although it is a nice place. [Then he talked about some of the other choices in the area.]

Actually, we will be perfectly happy if you and Wife choose to avail yourselves of our traditional accommodations. It won't be all that much extra work. Your mom agrees. Brother and his girlfriend will be going back to their place in the Big City after a celebratory supper, Son 1 will be at his all-night orgy [this means at a graduation party thrown by one of his friends], and Son 2 will be [unable to make it because his own Commencement is so far away]. So it's just you two, and you really are very considerate guests.

You can have the pick of the sofas, as usual, and we'll have a nice breakfast in the morning. I'll make up a big pot of Irish Oats which is what we have every day. And I'll cook an egg for anybody who wants one.

As you can see, I am feeling better. Today was a pretty normal day for me. I just have to take more frequent rest breaks. By next week I should be even better still, and we can forget all this nonsense about "alternative accommodations."

OK?

I haven't replied yet because I don't know what to say.  Do I say, "Yes, I'm sure Wife will be delighted at the chance to stay somewhere for free?"  Do I say, "What part of 'seriously and not frivolously' or 'I'd really rather' are unclear to you?"  Do I say, "Have you asked Mom what she thinks of this or are you running a one-man show?"  Or what?  I don't want to say anything rude.  I don't want to say anything that would be embarrassing if my dad, who can be pretty clueless about subtle social cues, were to forward the e-mail to Wife.

But maybe that's the only way to be clear?  I wish I knew.

Afraid of people

I figured out this morning over breakfast that my father is afraid of people.  Somehow I didn't realize this before.

It explains one of his persistently irritating habits, namely, looking for an explanation of everything you do – usually a reductive explanation, as if you were a simpleton or a machine.

• This person acts like this because he's religious ... and my dad makes a lot of noise when he finds someone who professes some religion but not the way my dad thinks he ought to.  My aunt is Catholic but taught her daughters to use birth control and said she had nothing in common with John Paul II or Benedict XVI.  That's not how my father learned that Catholics are supposed to behave, so he could never figure her out. 
• That person acts like that because of some unresolved childhood trauma.  It couldn't possibly be because he just felt like it ... there has to be something pushing him.  Unless he makes the same choices my father would make, of course.  Then that's normal. 
• And so on.  It's really kind of demeaning, when he asks you – in all sincerity – "Oh, do you think that because of ...?"  Even my mother doesn't like it.

The point is that we explain things we are afraid of.  We never bother explaining things we enjoy.  Nobody tries to "explain" a Beethoven symphony, or I hope they don't.  But people in the past worked hard to explain earthquakes and lightning and comets, so that they could reassure themselves that these natural disasters were not actually signs of divine anger.  Explanation lets us put a hedge around things, ... allows us to put them in a box.  So they aren't scary any more.  And that's what it feels like when my dad starts to try to "understand" you – like he's putting you in a box.  But if he's doing it out of fear, then maybe I can find room in my heart to feel sorry for him rather than angry at him.

This thought explains too why he always strives to dominate every conversation, to keep it lively, to keep people laughing, to avoid silence.  As long as people are chipper and laughing, they aren't a threat (I suppose).  As long as they are animated, they probably pose no danger.  But when they fall silent?  My father interprets silence as anger, and it makes him intensely uncomfortable.  I've never understood why silence should mean anger, but it surely means unpredictability.  Someone who is silent has time and space to reflect.  When he speaks, he might say something real.  You just don't know what's going to come next.  If you are afraid of what he might say, it could be scary.

I suppose it's possible I'm reaching too far, but I like the theory because it explains so much, so economically.  Maybe I should ask him some day?  It would surely rattle him if I did ....

"It's just not possible!"

How does that old saying go?  "From the sublime to the ...."?

So yes, this morning I finished reading Confessions of Madame Psyche.  (I'm writing this Sunday night, though I assume it will post on Monday.)  You've already seen two posts mulling over some of the thoughts that it sparked.  And then this afternoon I took a carload of stuff over to Wife's house.

The point (in case I've neglected to explain) is that for the past year, in addition to paying Wife's support, I've also been shelling out $300 a month for a storage unit that we first rented when we bought our house back in 1994.  Of course you remember that we sold the house last summer, but the storage unit remained ... packed with long-forgotten junk.  And I agreed to pay for it, because I'm a nice guy.  Also, at the time some of the stuff in there was mine and I didn't want Wife pre-emptively seizing it all.

In the ensuing months, I have nibbled away at it – not as energetically or as systematically as I wish I had, but enough that I think I've retrieved all the really big chunks of my stuff.  I'm sure there's more – when we emptied our garage we found the most unlikely things had been packed together, so there was a lot to sift out – but I'm comfortable in saying that I've moved out a first-order approximation of all the things that are mine ... or at least so far as I can reach.  I'm going to have to empty another layer of Wife's junk before I can see what's behind it.

What makes this urgent now is that a couple months ago I did some calculation to figure out how I'm going to pay tuition for the coming year: for Son 2 at Durmstrang, and for Son 1 at college.  Depending on whether I'm going to owe Wife some kind of cash payment to even out the distribution of assets, I either succeeded in planning a budget or I've got at most about $200 a month more to find somewhere.  But part of that plan involves not paying for this storage unit after the end of June.  So I want either to empty it or to let Wife take over the payments.  She will insist she can't possibly afford it (and that's probably even true), so that means emptying it.

Last weekend I took her a carload of stuff.  Today I took another carload of stuff.  If I keep at it this way until the boys are out of school, then I can use their help to get the heavy things (furniture and trunks).  It should be possible to get done by June 30 ....

... always assuming, of course, that there's some place to put the stuff when we pull it out of the storage unit.  Ay, there's the rub.  Where exactly might that be?

My short answer is that I'll take care of housing any of my stuff and the rest is Wife's problem.  She's the one who has wanted to keep all this stuff for so long, so she can have the headache of finding a place for it, or selling it, or putting it out for the trash.  But of course she's not so happy about having to pick up this responsibility.  When I first texted her yesterday that I'd be coming up today with a caroad of stuff she replied, "Bear in mind the amount of space I had last time. I need time to sort through stuff and liquidate some of it between more loads There simply isn't that much space and you've blocked off the one walkway to the left hand side of the garage."  I didn't bother to reply.  Besides, if I waited for her to "liquidate some of it" she would never get around to it.  I just drove up there this afternoon and started unloading boxes onto her front lawn.  She saw me, came out to say Hi, and then started in.

Wife:  There's nowhere for me to put any of this!

Hosea:  [I continued to unload boxes as I talked.]  OK.

Wife:  Well what do you want me to do with it?

Hosea:  I don't know.  It seems to me I remember there was a lot of space in your garage that was just inefficiently-used, so you could probably rearrange things to fit a lot more inside.  But I'm not going to tell you what to put where.

Wife:  Well are you just going to leave it here?  You know I can't leave things here over night!

Hosea:  OK. 

Wife:  If you think there's room in the garage, can you at least put them there?

Hosea:  No.  I did that last week but I put things in the wrong places.  So it's better if you put them away because I don't know where anything goes.

Wife:  That's just great!  You mean I'm going to have to spend all evening dealing with these boxes?

Hosea:  I don't think it's going to take you all evening.  Maybe more like twenty minutes.  Roll the bicycle over to there and see how much space that leaves?  And there's only about ten boxes.

Wife:  Well I can't put them there because I can't block that cabinet.

Hosea:  OK.

Wife:  Besides, I can't carry these boxes.  You know I'm not as strong as you are.

Hosea:  But these are banker's boxes, and they're only about half-full of fabric.  Or knitting needles.  They are light.  Five pounds?  Ten pounds?  You can handle that.

Wife:  I can't do that and all the asset planning you want me to do because I can't be in two places at the same time.

Hosea:  But you don't have to be.  This will only take you a few minutes and then you can get back to the other.  I won't be back again with more until next weekend.

Wife:  No!  You can't come back with more next weekend!  Don't you get it?  There's nowhere to put any of it!  It's just not possible!

Hosea:  OK.  But I don't know what you want me to do then.  At this point I've already paid the storage unit up through June.  Do you want to take over payments after that?

Wife:  You know I can't do that.

Hosea:  Then what do you want to do instead?

Wife:  Why?  Because you can't be bothered to keep paying for it just a little longer?

Hosea:  Because I can't afford to pay both that and tuition.  It's one or the other.

Wife:  Well maybe we could move to a smaller unit ....

Hosea:  Anything you want to do is fine, but I can't contribute to it if I'm also paying tuition.

Wife:  OK but look.  I can't clear out any more space in this garage until I can sell some of these things.  I can't sell them until I can post them on craigslist.  I can't sell anything on craigslist until I can post a photo, and I can't post a photo until I can find the cable for the camera, and I haven't been able to find that since I moved.  It's around here somewhere I'm sure, but it got lost in the move and I haven't found it.

Pause a minute and let me make sure ... did you follow that?  Wife is saying that she absolutely cannot fit anything more in her garage until she finds a camera accessory that was lost when she moved last September and that she hasn't replaced yet.  And that one piece is preventing any forward movement on any of this.

Really?  She's been stalled since last September and she hasn't done anything about it yet?  Really??  Call me crazy but I'd conclude from this that it's not a high priority for her.  I admit there are things I haven't done since I moved either, things that will tie up this or that loose end.  But I also freely admit that they are low priorities for me, and so far as I can tell none of them affects anybody else.  Nobody else is paying $300 a month on my account because of any of them.  So it may be self-serving but I see a difference.

Sorry, I'm griping.  And really I shouldn't have to comment at all.  Wife's marvelous ability to make anything impossible, to barricade herself mentally into a corner so that she is helpless to budge, is so remarkable that it should be enough for me to show it in action and then steal away silently into the night.  Maybe if I spent more time at it ... applied a little artistry instead of just banging these posts out as fast as I can.  Of course, then I'd have to spend still more time contemplating conversations that I find alternately ridiculous and frustrating.  Or frustrating because they are so ridiculous. 

Maybe I should get a bite to eat and go to bed.  There's a thought ....  

The lunatic and the mystic

Towards the end of Dorothy Bryant's Confessions of Madame Psyche, the narrator says she has come across "a psychologist named Boisson, who has spent much time in asylums, both as a patient and as a minister.  Boisson writes of the similarity between the mystic and the lunatic ....  The revelation, the crack in the walls of the mind is the same, he thinks.  The difference between the mystic and the lunatic is pride.  The lunatic refuses to 'walk humbly with thy God.'"

I don't know if there ever really was a psychologist named Boisson who wrote these things.  I spent five minutes on Google looking fruitlessly for him, but that proves nothing.  But the line made me wonder about my own attraction to crazy people.  Now, "attraction" may be a little too strong a word most of the time, and I'm skittish enough of danger that I prefer to meet my crazy people between the covers of a book.  But I know it's true.  Recently I even tried to come up with a list of crazy people that I find interesting -- that I come back to again and again.  My list was pretty short, but I think that's because I'm forgetting somebody, not because there isn't anybody there.

• Robert Pirsig
• William Blake
• Julie Powell (see also this post here)
• Wife

You didn't think I was going to forget that last one, did you?  Honestly I think the early traces of her mental illness may well have been part of what attracted me to her in the first place.  Be careful what you wish for.

There's probably more to flesh out here, but I'm not sure where to take it at the moment, so I'll leave this as a promissory note for later ....

Non, je ne regrette rien

I finished Confessions of Madame Psyche this morning.  Like all of Dorothy Bryant's fiction it is detailed, intelligent, ... and a kind of spiritual education without the pretension to call itself that.  On the last page, the main character reflects on all she has been through, with a calm and a self-possession that I would love -- some day -- to be able to imitate or approach:

A woman comes to sit by Lower Lake every day at exactly three o'clock.  She carries an old-fashioned windup record player and one record, Edith Piaf singing Non, je ne regrette rien....

I regret nothing.  It is a brave, wise song which I can now sing by heart and which I try to think of whenever I remember any part of my life as an injury or a deprivation.  I regret nothing.  Especially not the injuries, errors, and accidents which drove me to despair.

If I had not been pushed to the end of my rope, I don't know that I would have fallen, ever, into the reality that has given my life form and meaning....  If I had been rescued from even a little bit of that suffering, I might have been able to go on without changing, like a sleep-walker in a nightmare, wandering blindly, flailing in all directions with yearning and pain and fear.  I was saved from that life, but at a price.  The price was everything, and worth everything.

No, I regret nothing. 

 

Wife wants her gun back

I know, I know.  You're shocked.  Shocked.

I got an e-mail from Wife this evening in which she listed a bunch of things she didn't like about my asset proposal.  I guess she finally got around to reading it.  She didn't make any proposals for what she'd like to see instead, and I asked her to do so.

Then half an hour later she sent me a long e-mail asking for her gun back ... yet again.  She repeated – again – that she poses no threat to me.  (But then why does she want it? She says she lives in a "dangerous neighborhood" but – Christ! – it's not that god-damned dangerous.)  And then, as if this would end her e-mail with a triumphant flourish, she said that if I wouldn't return her gun then I could jolly well allocate her another $300 in assets to cover what she paid for it years ago.

We're debating how to slice up $500,000 and she's making a production out of $300?  Whatever ....

It's Wednesday evening and I haven't posted anything yet (though at lunchtime I got a few paragraphs into another essay for the Patio) ... so I was thinking of sending you her entire letter.  But you probably don't want to read it all.  I've summarized it all here.  And I've explained in earlier posts why I think that – of all people – Wife is not stable enough for me to want to trust her with firearms.  No need to go over it again.

Oh well.  One day it will all be over.

Questionnaire 2

Maybe I should come back to this questionnaire Debbie asked me to review, from her Al-Anon book, or I'll never get past the first question.  So here's a shot at the second one:

Do you feel uncomfortable or draw a blank when asked what it is you really want?

It used to be the answer was Yes in all sorts of venues.  I did not have the confidence to believe that I deserved to want what I wanted, so it was easier not to know what it was and to go along with whatever anybody else wanted to do instead.

It's less true now – in many respects a lot less true.  The only reason I don't just flat out say No is that I'm still lousy at career planning.  But I have come to believe (or at least I tell myself) that this is because my career isn't as important to me as ... well, as what?  As daily life?  What's that?  What does it mean to say that my career isn't all that important to me, now that I'm no longer married (except legally), nor in a romantic relationship, nor do I have children living at home (most of the time)?  If my career isn't important, just what the hell is?

Hmmm.  OK, so maybe I still have some issues to work out on this front.  But I'm better than I used to be.

I remember exactly how I started getting better, too.  I was working a job almost twenty years ago – the same company where I met Debbie, but a couple years later.  I had been promoted into my first managerial job, and it was time for annual reviews.  I had no idea what I wanted to say.  Now this company had a program that I liked very much, where new managers would be matched up with some existing manager as a mentor.  So I went to my mentor and tried to explain my problem.  I said that I knew what my people were actually doing, and I knew what I would have done if I held each of those jobs, but I didn't know what it was really fair to ask them to do and so I didn't know where the lines were.  What were the standards?

She was about my age but in a totally different department (engineering), and she said, "I don't know what you mean.  I don't have any trouble knowing what I want software engineers to do."

And it hit me.  All my hesitation about evaluating these people came from back when I was in school, when my grades were always so much better than everybody else's that I forced myself to refuse to compare other people to me.  I would find something nice to say about Fred or Sam or Max and then my evaluation would stop.  I would never let myself get anywhere near saying, "Of course he's dull as ditch water," because I told myself that it just wasn't fair to use myself as a standard.  It was towering arrogance disguised as cringing humility.

The thing is that this attitude makes no sense in the workplace.  First, I wasn't being asked to evaluate my employees on their merits as human beings.  The question was how well they met the requirements of the job.  And that's the second point: it's not a popularity contest or a contest of grades ... because there is an objective standard.  Each job requires that the person holding it actually do something.  So the process of writing employee reviews really requires two steps: (1) figure out exactly what the job requires – in other words, what size are the gears on this cog and which other cogs is it supposed to connect with? and then (2) measure how closely the employee's performance meets those requirements.  If I was as god-damned smart as I always pretended, I should have no problem doing this.

I sweated over those reviews.  I spent more time on them than I ever have on any employee reviews since then.  But I was satisfied with the results.  One woman objected, "Yeah, everything you say is true but are you really gonna say those things in my permanent record?"  (Yes I was.)  Another came back with a two-page, single-spaced rebuttal to my claim that people found it hard to work with her – which was exactly what I had heard from several people independently.  (She insisted that everyone loved her at her last company so they must love her here too.)  But because I had spent the time to think it through, I could answer her.  And the whole exercise gave me a tremendous confidence-boost.  After that, in time after time when I normally would have fallen back into saying I didn't know what I wanted, I asked myself instead, "Really?"  And if I waited just a minute, quietly, and listened to myself – if I reminded myself that there is actually nothing wrong with knowing what you want – I found that indeed I did have a preference and indeed I did really know what it was.  All I had to do is listen for it.

Maybe that's the problem I have with career-planning.  Whenever I ask myself what I really want out of a job, all I can hear is "I want a nap."  As I say, there's probably still some work to do there.  But I've gotten better.

Spiritual exercises?

We've all heard the term "spiritual exercises, but last night or the night before I suddenly had an idea that helped me understand what they really must be.  It's something I remembered from when I was a kid.

To back up, then ....  When I was young – eight, nine, ten, eleven, around there – every so often I would find myself thinking of very sad things as I fell asleep at night.  Hang on, that doesn't begin to explain what I'm trying to say.  Let me try again.  It's more like there were these story-lines that I would make up in my head, really elaborate fantasies that went on and on, and I would tell myself these stories as I went to sleep.  (To be strictly accurate, back then I was telling myself story-lines of this kind most of the day too.)  Some of them were melancholy – melodramatic – maudlin – to the point where I would quite literally cry myself to sleep.  And yet you have to remember I was living a safe, secure, middle-class life in the suburbs of a safe, secure city.  I didn't have any relatives die during that time, no catastrophes befell the family, there was nothing external to provoke such anguish.  It was more the sheer love of the story itself.  I would indulge in these stories the way some people love tragedy, or horror movies.  There was something pleasurable, in a lurid, squalid, debauched kind of way, in the heavily overdone tragic fantasies I would tell myself.  And of course they were all completely self-centered: one of them was about imagining myself having died, and then imagining how inconsolably wretched everyone else would (naturally!) be at my death.  The others were similar.  That is to say, they would have been terrible as literature and I could never have told them to anybody else.  But so long as fantasies aren't expected to be any more than a guilty pleasure that pander to deep and unspeakable desires, they filled the bill just fine.

In retrospect maybe this was all a symptom of my later depression, showing up early.  I didn't have a name for it then.  But in any event one of these story-lines was a fantasy that I had somehow been dragged before a tribunal of some kind and they were making public all the secrets I had tried to keep from the world all my life.  You know that privacy has always been a big deal for me.  See, for example, any of my posts about my relationship with my dad over the years.  So this particular story-line struck me hard, and was good for a whole night of weeping until I drifted off to sleep.

But over the years something interesting happened.  The story began to lose its hold on me.  Specifically, I began to fantasize myself standing up to the tribunal (heroically, of course) to tell them, in effect,

So what? You've collected all of these secrets of mine and you are publishing them to the world, somehow using them to accuse me of something. But there's nothing in here that you couldn't say about everybody else in the world, too. Here I was weak or unethical? There I was sexually aroused over the wrong person? Somewhere else I was cruel or petty or spiteful or just plain mean? I'm sure I was. And I'm sure that each of you judges have had times in your life when you were just as weak or unethical or spiteful or inappropriate. And the same goes for the audience, too, who are all listening and being shocked at how bad I am. It's all true of you too, or something just like it.

What's the result?  Well it didn't make my relationship with my chronically-prying father any better.  But over the very long haul – years and years – it helped me finally to desensitize myself to that stimulus, just a bit.  It helped me to relax and stop clinging to my privacy quite as compulsively.  And that has been a good thing.

At some level I suppose I knew this all along ... at any rate I lived through it so I probably had some awareness of the progress over time.  But it wasn't until just one or two nights ago that I realized: Those fantasies functioned like a spiritual exercise.  They weren't as focussed as a true exercise would have been, because I wasn't using them for a purpose.  I got way too much depraved pleasure out of them for that.  But even so, they moved me in a direction where something that had been a big deal became less of one.  It was progress.  And so I think in a sense they count.  It's an interesting thought.

I'm offline as I write this, or I'd look up my post about when Ender spoke the death of Marcão and link to it here.  I'm talking about the same kind of freedom.

Headache, 2

In line with the advice I've quoted earlier about paying attention to the body, I noticed last night that I was getting a headache.  I don't think it had anything to do with Wife losing her keys, although of course that would be the sarcastic explanation.  My operative theory is that I was hungry: what with one thing and another I didn't get around to having lunch, and by the time I finally had dinner it had been about 12 hours since breakfast.  I had a glass of really sweet juice while I was fixing dinner, hoping that would alleviate it quickly, but should have known better.  After drinking it I remembered (what I never remember before) that drinking a large glass of cold juice always makes my shoulders ache.  (I can't even begin to guess what the link is, and I realize it sounds bizarre: but the correlation is pretty steady.)  Anyway, I finally ate and then dumped myself into bed, figuring that the other possible cause could be tiredness.  I seem to get tired more often or sooner these days than I used to ... not sure what that's about.  Of course, I also used to be pretty cavalier about eating: I'd eat a lot if it was convenient, and then happily skipped meals when it wasn't.  Maybe that's changing too, along with my not staying up till all hours.  Or maybe I'm just more aware of it when my body is unhappy?  Naah, ... couldn't be anything like that.  I'm probably just getting old.

I still felt it a little bit when I woke up in the middle of the night to take a leak.  It was all gone by morning.

I went back to find the first post that used this title, and was amused to see what I wrote there.  Of course I was trying to be funny at the time, but ... did I really used to drink that much?  Wow.  At this point it's been something like a week since I had any, and it was another week before that as well.  No big point of principle, but I just haven't felt like it.  I have no idea how long this "not feeling like it" will last, of course, and I don't want to set myself up for failure by turning it into some kind of project.  I figure I'll just watch it and see.

Wife loses her keys ... again

Yesterday I drove a carful of stuff out to Wife's place.  We still own (jointly) a storage unit in town where I am, and I agreed last year to pay the rent on it.  At this point I'd like to empty it: I've got another (cheaper) one for my own stuff, Wife lives an hour away (so it's hardly convenient to her), and I would really rather be putting that $300 a month towards tuition rather than towards indefinitely storing what is now (mostly) Wife's stuff.  So I drove up one carload yesterday.  Maybe I can do this every weekend for another month or so and get it empty.

I arrived to find she had moved her car and her van out of the driveway.  Turns out this wasn't to be convenient for me, but because someone is coming today to do something to the driveway -- repair it, maybe? -- so it had to be clear.  But the very first thing she said to me as I climbed out of my own car was, "I just moved the van and now I can't find my keys."

Sorry, what?

"I just moved the van and dumped some stuff in the trash, and now I can't find my keys.  I've looked in the van itself.  I even went back in the house to look there, although I don't think I went inside between moving the van and dumping the trash.  I hope I don't have to dig through the trash can because there's broken glass and some really gross stuff there.  But I can't find my keys."

And all I could think was, ... God, how utterly typical.  Did you stage this for my benefit, knowing I was on my way up here?

Probably not, actually.  Losing her keys is something that Wife does pretty regularly -- it's almost part of her defined personality, along with her narcissism and her preference for chilled martinis made with Bombay Sapphire gin.  It would be impossible for me to count how many times over the years I have looked for her keys for her, starting well before we were married.  Easily dozens.  Probably hundreds.  In our first apartment I pounded a large nail into the jamb of the front door at eye level and gave her strict instructions that the very minute she walked through that door she was to hang her keys on the nail before she did anything else!  It didn't prevent her from losing them again, but it did reduce the incidence of the problem.  My only point, though, is that this behavior has a long and venerable history stretching back as long as she and I have known each other.  If you ever find yourself facing Wife and an exact double, and it's a matter of life and death to figure out which one is really her, ask both women to show you their car keys.  The one who can't find them is Wife.

In retrospect, I also have to wonder about her saying she didn't remember whether she went inside the house between parking the car and dumping an armload of trash.  Maybe this all happened hours ago, but it looked and sounded like it was just a couple of minutes.  And isn't that the kind of thing you'd remember?  Not to put in a plug for mindfulness practice, but how is it possible for anyone to be that unaware of what's going on around her?  Or does this actually explain some of my other experiences with her over the years?

I unloaded the boxes I had brought her, and put them in her garage (which is already full of a lot of other stuff).  Just as true to form, she told me I'd put them in the wrong place because I had blocked a pathway -- no, actually "the last pathway" -- through the stacks of stuff.  Whatever.  I'm pretty sure she would have said that regardless of where I'd put them.  (Or maybe I'm just consoling myself for thoughtlessness by blaming her.)  In any event, I hung around for a few minutes trying to suggest places she might have left her keys, and then I left.  Honestly, these days it ain't my problem.  I felt a little twinge of an expectation to help -- an internal expectation, let me clarify -- but it wasn't guilt so much as habit.  So I drove home.

Around 9:30 last night she texted me that she had finally found the duplicate set of keys to the van, so at least she could lock it.  She was worried that "in this area you can't leave a car unlocked" ... although it's impossible to tell from the outside whether the van is locked and there's nothing inside it worth stealing.  So I assume that in reality nobody would give it a second thought.  But yeah, it's good to have a set of keys so you can start it in the morning.

So far as I know she still has to find the original set though.

Being married to God

Hosea's log, stardate February 9, 2001.
Almost seven years before I started this blog.  I was thirty-nine years old.  So was Wife, or almost.  The boys were four and two.  This was also ... I think ... back when we were attending church regularly.

Earlier today I was poking around in some of the old files on this computer and found something I wrote thirteen years ago.  It was addressed to Wife, but -- as will become obvious -- I never, ever, EVER intended for her to see it.  Pretty clearly, I wrote it in an attempt to come to terms with the turmoil in my own mind, with my anxiety and chronic anger.  I was clearly trying to sublimate it, to make (if I could) something beautiful out of all the violent energy that was kicking around in my head because I found marriage to Wife so frustrating.

In the end, of course, it didn't work.  That's why I'm here now.  But it's interesting to look back and see where my head was.

Damned good thing this is an anonymous blog.  It's hard to imagine how any of you could look me in the face after reading this and seeing how over-the-top earnest I got.  And back then I still loved her too, or thought I did.  That's part of it, no doubt.

Without further ado: ....   

Being married to you is like being married to God.

At the most superficial level, God knows the future while ordinary men do not. But so do you. [This was a reference to Wife's seeming psychism.]  God can intervene in the world in ways that appear magical. But so do you. [Remember she was a Wiccan.]

God comes to light in all the stories as asking people to do things. But God doesn’t ask just any old thing. God demands the best, the ideal. Nothing half-baked or half-assed is acceptable or even considered. God expects and demands perfection of men; whether men can measure up is another question – and of course, as fallible creatures, we can’t – but none of that is God’s concern. God simply sets the standard of measurement and expects nothing less.

All this means that the relationship between God and men can sometimes be stormy. There are many stories of the Jews – for instance – quarrelling bitterly with God, arguing, remonstrating, reproaching. I do not say that being married to God is easy, or serene. Nor do I think it would even be easy for God – and in this one respect, you are more like the Hebrew God than like any of the Greek gods. The Greek gods are capable of serenity, and are fundamentally indifferent to men (though they have their favorites here and there). The Hebrew God cares way too much for that, and is way too involved with his creation. And so he is always struggling, always in turmoil, always in motion; struggling to create the world, struggling with other gods, and always – always – struggling with the stiff-necked, recalcitrant, stubbornly imperfect Children of Israel.

But why? What does he want out of them? Not just to make their lives harder, but – and this is the key – to make them better. And this is what I see in my own life. We struggle, we argue, we fight – but always you are a force for making me better. Always you are a reproach to my flaws and imperfections, a challenge to me to take myself in hand and work – hard – to be better. It’s not easy. It’s never easy for any mortal – flawed, weak, and pathetic as we are – to meet the challenge of a god. But the alternative is to stay forever merely mortal.

"Reality is a good mistress"

No special reason for these quotes just now, but I was thumbing through a book and chanced to find them.  They are overwritten in a magnificent way ... if you don't know the author search him out, because he's good at this sort of thing.

"We build our fantasies and surrender to them.  Auto-intoxication.  All inside our fucking heads.  A form of narcissism.  But I never jettison my long friendship with reality.  Reality is a good mistress.  She allows me infidelities because she knows I know the value of a cold shower and will come back shivering, but unscathed."

Or again:

"The past is not revered for truths it has revealed and tested at great cost, but is dragooned and corrupted to go bail for the crimes of an arrogant present."

-- Owen Ulph, The Leather Throne, p. 468-9

P.S.  If you actually want to take my advice on someone so crazy, start with The Fiddleback: Lore of the Line Camp.  It is shorter and therefore way more accessible than The Leather Throne.

"Ground"

It's Friday night (though I think this won't post till Monday) and I went out to see a community theater production of "Ground" ... a play from just  few years ago, set in New Mexico but written by a playwright from Chicago.  The story starts when Zelda (who is Anglo) comes back to town after her father dies and leaves her his farm.  Carlos, her old boyfriend (whose family is Mexican), has married Angela and gone to work for the Immigration and Naturalization Service as a uniformed officer patrolling the border.  And stuff happens.  The play looks at migration across that one stretch of border from all sides.  Some of the characters are sympathetic, but the play doesn't leave you sure that their opinions are right.  Some are irritating (I found the character of Angela particularly grating, possibly because she is "high-maintenance" in a way that I found depressingly familiar) but it's not obvious that their opinions are wrong.  (Angela, obnoxious as she is, makes a lot of sense ... at least to me.)  There are no actual villains.  One fellow is a self-important, self-centered jerk, but he's not a lot worse than being a jerk – and he's the one I found least sympathetic of all.  The program says that the playwright "lays out the uncomfortable position that both principles are right and both are wrong."  (I assume that the "principles" here mean the principles either to support the immigration laws by sealing the border, or to subvert them in support of friends and family by helping people sneak across.)

Well, ... como si, como no.  I suppose if those are the principles involved, then yes the play shows good and bad sides to both of them, and that's fine.  Only there's one principle that the play never bothers to show a good side of, possibly because it is taken for granted so implicitly that nobody thinks to question it: and yet it's clear that it is this silent, undiscussed principle that causes all the mischief in the play, and that sets up the tragic conflict among all the other principles involved.  What I mean is, ... Why exactly are there any restrictions about who can cross the damned border there in the first place?  God knows this country got along for plenty of years with no immigration laws at all.  If you wanted to come to America, you came to America.  Simple as that.  And God knows if we were concerned about protecting the border when we ended the Mexican War, we would never have allowed it to be drawn there, where it was, through so many miles of empty space.  But that border was fine with us because it never occurred to us to give a shit about defending it against immigration.  That whole worry came much later.

I don't pretend to any special expertise or knowledge of the future, but I confess to a weakness for suggesting extreme "solutions" to see where they go.  And so I have started to wonder, ... What would happen if we just abandoned the whole thing and let anybody walk across – either direction – whenever they wanted to?  Would it actually make that much difference in the total number of people who ended up crossing, as a percentage?  Or would it just mean that fewer people died in the process?

Sorry, this isn't a political blog and in any event I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.  Just wondering out loud, is all ....

The last thing I need, 2

It's interesting, the stories I tell myself if I listen.  Only a couple of months ago I was moping over having lost Debbie ... really moping, making myself very sad.  But now, when I stop to listen to the phrases and fantasies that drift through my head, the gist is much more in the vein of, "The last thing I need is a romance in my life."

It's odd, ... both the shift and how quick it is.  I've played this song for myself before -- notably here, but also (more recently) here and here.  Probably other places too.  (I never promised not to repeat myself in this blog.) 

So what's the deal?  Is it just sour grapes?  (Of course that's very likely.)  That is to say, do I reconcile myself to losing Debbie by telling myself, "Well thank God I don't have to deal with planning around another person all the time! No way I want to do that again!"?  Or is there more to it than that?

My guess is that it's several things at once.  Yes, no doubt sour grapes has something to do with it.  But also I think the points that I raised in some of my posts referenced above are valid too.  There is indeed something restful about not being in a romantic relationship.  And these days I'm finding myself busy enough that I can't really imagine when I would squeeze in time to devote to somebody else ... at any rate, if I still wanted to get any sleep.  So maybe it's "over-determined."

I don't suppose any of this is news, really.  I've talked about it before.  No stunning new insights.  It's just that I've overheard myself telling myself this kind of story kind of frequently lately, so I thought I'd make a record of it while I remembered.  Who knows, by next month I'll probably be telling myself some totally different story.  It's always something ....