When did you start ...?

How old were you when you lost your virginity?  If that's different from the age at which you started having sex regularly, how old were you then, too? 

Now how about your kids?  Do you have any idea of the corresponding ages for them (if they are old enough for it to be a question)?  Do you have any idea how old your parents were?

The reason I ask is that I had an idea the other day and I want to check it out: I wonder if these ages tend to track in families, across generations?  That is to say, we all know that some people start young and some start older.  But the children of people who started young... do they also start young?  The children of people who start older... do they also start older?  And if so, why?

What got me thinking along these lines was my realization of just how personally conservative Son 1 and Son 2 are.  I'm not talking about politics here, but about behavior.  They dress like teenagers, God knows they eat like teenagers, they listen to loud music, they are Internet-savvy (far savvier than I am), they download TV shows to watch for free, they leave their stuff lying around in a jumble, and they don't do laundry often enough ... all these things I expect.  But underneath that teenage-textured surface I think I can detect a level of real reserve -- almost fastidiousness -- about what they do with their bodies.  Son 2 won't drink.  Son 1 sometimes talks as if he'd like a beer now and then, but the one time (I know of) when he had a chance to drink himself silly he spent the night looking after his friends instead.

And somehow I just have a feeling it will be the same with sex: that they will be cautious and standoffish -- tempted, maybe, but not letting it go any farther than that until they are really ready.

For what it's worth, my answers to the two questions up at the top of this post are "almost 20" and "almost 22".  I was really shy, sometimes to the point of being priggish.  At the same time I was frustrated by the straitjacket of abstemiousness that my shyness confined me to.  Part of me wanted to burst out as a libertine, but I was too terrified ever to do so in reality.  So I watched my friends drink and smoke and fuck -- nurse hangovers, get sick, suffer broken hearts, flunk the occasional class "for personal reasons" -- and I quietly envied them.  I think they sometimes envied me what they imagined to be the calm in my life; I know I envied them the anguish and tumult in theirs.

I can't really read my sons' minds.  Maybe their fastidiousness is just that.  Maybe it's shyness, like mine was.  Maybe they suffer the same anxiety I did, or maybe not.  I can't tell.  And strictly speaking I suppose it is possible that one or both of them has already lost his virginity but managed to do it with such stealth that nobody ever found out.  But somehow I don't think so.  And somehow I won't be surprised if they are close to 20, or older, before that day finally comes.

For what it is worth, my father was around 20 when, as a nervous young GI who wanted everyone to think he was suave and sophisticated, he lost his virginity to a prostitute in Paris.  My mother was younger -- I think maybe 18 -- but I'm pretty sure that she lost it to my father, back before they were married.  (But it was the 1950's, so they got married soon thereafter.)

And this raises the next interesting question: if there is a commonality through the generations, what causes it?

I never discussed this kind of thing with the boys, so it's not because I taught them something consciously.  But could I have taught them an attitude subconsciously?  I suppose so.  That's probably how most attitudes get taught.  But when?  How?  What did I think I was doing at the time?  I have no idea.

Does anybody know whether shyness is hereditary?  A quick look on Google suggests that opinions differ (I found yes, no, and maybe), but I freely admit I spent no more than five minutes on the whole search.

It's a puzzle, and I wish I understood it.    

Blogging at work, part 2

You've heard that there are supposed to be three famous Chinese curses, right?  (Wikipedia says they appear to be apocryphal.)

• May you live in interesting times.
• May you come to the attention of your superiors.
• May all of your dreams come true.

Every job I've ever held, I've had a problem with the second one.  I talk about it here.  At this point even my boys joke that this is part of the price of being a Tanatu, of belonging to our family: anywhere you go, and anything you do, you are going to stand out.  Obscurity is not an option.

A couple of hours ago I posted a blog article at work, one that I talk about here.  And just now I have received an automated e-mail telling me that the president of our division just posted a comment on it.  He starts off, "Well written. I think we need to do both!  I understand that this is easier said than done, but I also see...." and then the rest of his answer devolves into management happy-talk.  Which I would expect.  Of course he's going to say we need to do both.  If I asked senior management to make a clear strategic business decision between having our cake and eating it, I'd probably get the same answer ... at least in a public forum.

What I didn't expect was to be seen quite so high, quite so fast.  The Internet is an amazing tool.

"May you come to the attention of your superiors" ....

Blogging at work

You remember that a while ago I explained that my company has been trying to push a culture makeover.  They've taken this to really significant lengths: one of the most striking is that they have set up their very own in-house social networking system and encourage us all to use it.

This morning I was browsing through it and came upon somebody's post about how we had to become more agile.  It was slightly more interesting than the normal run of most of these exhortations -- exhortations which largely seem to rely on the principle that if you repeat the word "agile" often enough it will make you a better company.  What was more interesting was to watch my own reaction: I thought I might have something to say in reply, but I really didn't know what I thought about his post ... so I started writing.  One thing I have learned how to do after six-plus years writing this blog is to dive into a topic, explore it for a few paragraphs, and figure out what I think about it in the process of typing.  It's a useful skill, I guess.  For what it is worth, I did revise this before posting it on one of the internal blogs, but not to change the conclusion.  All I did was to improve the wording, take out needless words, and generally make it punchier.

I'm not sure this counts as a productive accomplishment today, but I sure had fun. 

Just for the sake of leaving a record that I really did write something today (the two posts from earlier were both written last night), I'll append it here.
__________

Almost a month ago, "John Doe" wrote a very interesting blog post about being agile, including some good references to the external literature.

One article he cited was by Andy Beal about "5 Reasons why being Agile is more important than being perfect".  At the end of this article, Beal identifies a couple of applications where he'd rather wait for the perfect solution than go with the fastest one (brain surgery and brakes).  But these exceptions don't contradict the main point.  It's all a question of what you want.

In the market this question has to be rephrased as "Who do we want to be?"  Since nobody gets to be a monopoly, there's always differentiation: this supplier is the cheapest, that one is the fastest, the other over there is the most reliable.  Which are we?  Traditionally [our company] has chosen to be reliable even at the expense of the other two.  And when you are making brakes -- or doing brain surgery -- that's the right choice.  But it's often not an agile choice.  So why do we care about agility now?

Two reasons. 

First, it's a useful corrective against the natural tendency of all organizations to fossilize.  Striving to be agile, we test all our structures and break down the ones that have become deadweight.

Second, the market itself is ever more agile.  "John Doe" writes about winning [a certain big account recently], and everybody will have another favorite example of his own [where our ability to be flexible for the customer won us some business].  In any market where technology is advancing, offerings change quickly and companies are either agile or left behind.

But nothing is free.  One cost of agile methods is that they are hard to scale.  Remember that our vision is to be everywhere, [selling] worldwide.  And one of our strengths is that we already have a worldwide scope, which gives us unparalleled reach and a massive manufacturing capacity.  Scalability matters to us.  So we have to ask, "Can we be agile and worldwide too? Or does agility force us to work like hundreds of small companies who all use the same brand name? Does leveraging our global scale efficiently force us, because of the sheer burden of planning and communication, to slow down and narrow our offerings?"

I don't know the answer.  I sure hope we can do both.  But doing both will require some creativity, and we have to remember that it won't just drop in our laps.  There is a challenge here for us to meet.

Rock concert

Sunday night I took the boys to a rock concert.  It was four hours long: Don Felder (formerly of the Eagles) opened, then Styx performed, and then Foreigner.  We were way up in the nosebleed seats.  The concert was loud, it ran late, and it was a lot of fun.  Two thirds of the way through, during the changeover from Styx to Foreigner, Son 2 said to me, "I don't know how much you paid for these tickets – but whatever it was, it was worth it."

 

I told him, "Actually I sold you into indentured servitude to pay for them."

 

He answered, "That's fine – it's still worth it."

 

By the very end, … well, I think they still enjoyed it but actually their feelings were a little more nuanced.  The audience had gotten steadily louder with each new performer, singing along when they knew the words and shrieking or squealing when they didn't, so that it was actually pretty hard to hear what Foreigner was singing.  (I murmured to Son 1, who was sitting next to me, "This is why the Beatles stopped touring.")  Also the boys knew most of the songs Don Felder sang, and a large fraction of the songs Styx sang, but not a lot of the songs Foreigner sang (other than "Cold as Ice" and maybe one or two others) … so they couldn't let memory fill in the gaps on those songs where the audience outshouted the performers.

 

Why did the audience get steadily louder?  I assume there were three reasons.  First, as the concert went on they just got more and more into it.  This is pretty basic.  Second, the concession stands were doing a brisk business in beer and wine all throughout the concert; so as it got later, the audience got steadily drunker and less inhibited.  Third, when Don Felder started singing we were still in daylight; by the time Styx wrapped up and was replaced by Foreigner, we were sitting in the dark of night.  That too helped to uninhibit the audience.

 

The boys don't drink – they are too young and on the whole they are pretty strait-laced – so they were critical of the audience for getting so toasted.  But they did allow that there were some advantages to nightfall.  A couple of rows in front of us was a young couple who spent most of the concert (when they weren't getting more beer) on their feet dancing … only their "dancing" seemed mostly to involve a good bit of caressing or groping each other's bodies.  I was amused by them, and I didn't realize that they made the boys uncomfortable; but later, when we discussed it, the boys told me that one good part about the coming of the dark was that they could no longer see these two.

 

I did try to explain – again, this discussion was all afterwards – "Guys, it's a rock concert. This kind of thing is normal."  Son 1 asked, "How many rock concerts have you been to, Dad?"  I admitted that I wasn't quite sure but the number was pretty small; but I added that these were things everybody knew.  Rock music was born as an ecstatic experience; the thing that differentiated it so starkly from so much of what went before was the raw and direct way it intoxicated the listener, just exactly like booze or pot or sex.  That's why so many moralists condemned it, for heaven's sake.  I reminded the boys that girls at Woodstock would take off their clothes and dance naked.  Not that I was there, of course.  I was just a kid during the Woodstock Concert.  And as for the boys, the Summer of Love is farther in the past on their calendars than the Reichstag Fire is on mine.  It is clearly, for them, a thing of legend.  But I was trying to make a point.

 

That so many in the crowd were aging hippies contributed to one other factor that made the boys nervous.  We were well into Foreigner's set when the woman on the other side of me – she must have been at least my age and probably older – grabbed my shoulder for support, leaned over, and shouted to me (there was no other way to make herself heard), "WOULD IT BOTHER YOU IF I LIT UP A JOINT? I'VE GOT TWO HIDDEN IN MY BRA."  What was I going to say?  "No"?  Come on, … it's a rock concert.  Of course I told her that was fine.  Then she asked "WHAT ABOUT YOUR BOYS?"  In retrospect I'm not sure if she was asking "Would they mind?" or "Do they want any?" but I told her not to worry about it.  So she did.  Everybody was standing and joining in the song (or at least the noise), so she sat down in the dark using the bodies all around her as a windbreak and fiddled with her lighter.  Several times, of course: it's a rare joint that lights on the first try.  I wasn't really watching her so I'm not sure quite when she got it lit … I think she handed it to her daughter … and then suddenly I felt her tug sharply three times on my sleeve to sit down and she offered it to me.

 

Of course she did.  That's what you do with pot … you hand it around.  It's just common courtesy.  And what did I want to do?  I had a fraction of a second to decide.  So I figured … gosh, it's been a long, long time since I had any of that.  Well over thirty years.  I'm not working in defense, or in any other industry where random drug testing is a credible threat.  So sure, hell , why not?  I had no intention of letting myself get fucked up, but I also knew that one or two puffs wouldn't do that.  So I sat down, took a puff, and handed it back to her.  I had another a few minutes later, and then that was it.  I figured I'd stop at two, and in any event she didn't offer more: she later said she had handed it to somebody else who never gave it back.  So much for common courtesy.

 

The boys didn't say anything about it directly, but I think I may have shocked them.  Actually when I took my second puff Son 1 chided me, "Hey, remember you've got to drive home."  Clearly he has never tried pot on his own or he would realize that two puffs, for someone my size, doesn't mean much.  And in all honesty I was never very good at sealing my mouth around a joint the right way to keep the smoke from escaping, so my two puffs probably got me almost none of the actual drug.  But yes, all that having been said, I think in fact they were shocked.  And we didn't have much time to discuss it, at any rate not in a natural way.  I suppose I could have jumped on the topic when we drove home but that would have sounded awfully defensive … and they would have been entitled to wonder, "What's he so defensive about? It must be worse than he's letting on."  The next morning, though, I had to go to work while they slept in; and that evening I drove them to stay with Wife for the week.  I suppose I'll have to look for a chance next week to bring the subject up in a natural way and talk about it. 

 

For whatever it is worth, they don't appear to have a really good sense for alcohol either, in the sense of understanding what the effect is of this or that amount.  There's a line of thought that would suggest this is a defect in their education; but on the other hand it's a little hard to persuade most people that the prudent and effective use of intoxicants is a valuable subject in which to educate youth.  I don't quite know where to go with this.

 

It's a little odd to think this, but in some ways I think they may be more conservative than I am even though I'm the one in his fifties who holds down a boring job while they are both teenagers.  I'll have to mull that for a while.

 

 

Out of practice

My meditation practice has gotten sloppy lately.  There was a while there, a few months ago, when I meditated half an hour a day or more, pretty regularly.  Lately it has been at best a lot less than that – fifteen or twenty minutes is doing well – and half the days last week I never meditated at all.  Maybe more than half.  Some of those days I just slept in and then had to get moving to get to work.  Other days I found myself sitting idly during the time I would have meditated – so far, so good – but thumbing through a book.  As a result, when I sat down with my sangha tonight for a twenty-minute sit, my mind was all over the place and it seemed like a long, long time.

 

I wonder a little bit, though, about this business of thumbing through a book.  Often I wasn't paying it much attention.  Generally I didn't bother to put on my glasses, and these days it is hard for me to read print without them.  (Getting old.)  And invariably it was something I had read before.  So while my eyes were running over the words and my mind was hearing them said, I wasn't putting a lot of effort into any of it.  I wasn't learning anything new, or having to follow a storyline.  I wasn't trying to figure out whodunit.  And so in a sense I was using the book as a tool for shifting into neutral and letting my engine idle.

 

I've treated books this way for as long as I can remember.  When I was applying to colleges, one of them asked for an essay on how I relate to books.  I still remember writing that I would pick up a book in an idle moment to thumb through it, then sink deeper and deeper into it until I would finally – if I let myself – become oblivious to the outside world.  What I didn't add is that the books I sank into in this way were books I had already read.  But they were.  I have always treated books as friends, or as comfortable places of refuge; and I revisit the same ones over and over.

 

Could this possibly be some kind of meditation practice after all?  Certainly it's not "pure" meditation, whatever that means.  The presence of the book, of the written text, does steer my mind in this direction rather than that one.  I'm not exactly being present with whatever arises.

 

What I am doing, though, is disengaging from the noise of the world, from its driving and shaping, its pushing and pulling, its desire and aversion and confusion.  When I enter the book I leave all that behind.  And because it is a book I already know, the demands it places on me are less: I don't have to feel that the book itself is trying to drive and shape me, because we're already friends so I know what to expect.  I know that the book will accept me as I am and that I can accept the book for what it is … because otherwise I would have picked up a different book.  So there is a lot of striving, fretting, craving, that I can just give up while I am in the charmed circle cast by the book.

 

It may not be meditation, but it is something kind of close.  In any event I'm not going to fret about not meditating.  Just pick myself up, climb back on my cushion, and do it again.  I do find it interesting, though, that this is yet one more behavior (like going out for long walks) which I developed all on my own decades ago, which turns out to have something in common with contemplative practice.  It's as if I needed meditation all my life, and had to make it up for myself during all the long years before I learned it from somebody else.

 

 

"I've *tried* to get rid of them!"

This is purely for the humor of it all, nothing more.

 

Son 1's university is planning several days of orientation for new students before classes start.  We'll drive him there in a few weeks (I think "we" in this case means me and Son 2), arriving on a Tuesday night.  The dorms open Wednesday, when he moves in.  I figured then we'd turn around and come home – hell, it's an eight-hour drive each way.  But reading the pamphlet I suddenly realized that they have "parent orientation" events planned through Friday afternoon, after which  -- they suggest most delicately! – it will be about time for the parents to get the hell out of town and let their children adjust to school.

 

Three days of parent orientation?  What in God's name can they possibly plan to tell us that requires we stick around for three days?

 

Well, I e-mailed them to ask, and I suppose I'll hear back in a while.  But in the meantime the boys and I looked at the pamphlet a little more closely and saw that it talked about helping parents adjust to their children being away from home for the first time.  Oh.  Right.  They've scheduled three days because they figure that we're all helicopter parents who can't bring ourselves to let go.  So they've got events for us to keep us out of the way of the students.

 

But honestly, Son 1 will do just fine without me there.  He even suggested that he could single out other new freshmen who look particularly beleaguered by their parents and try to help them cope: "Hey, man. I know how you feel. I been there. It's OK, you'll get through it."  Maybe he'll have a whole social circle set up by the time classes start the next Monday.

 

We also had visions of me going to one of the parent gatherings and addressing them all in something like this vein:

 

I'm just here to tell you that you don't have to worry about leaving your children here on campus while you go back home.  Kids are resilient.  They'll do just fine.  I know this for a fact, because even when you want to get rid of them, they keep coming back.  I know I've tried to get rid of mine, over and over, and nothing doing.

 

We sent the oldest one [that's Son 1] to Europe when he was just 10.  For two blissfully quiet weeks he was away, but then he came back.  So then we tried sending him away to boarding school for high school, more than two hours from home.  But every vacation, like clockwork, he came back unharmed.  Usually he brought a stack of unpaid bills with him, for excess snacks he'd eaten over the previous semester that the school had obligingly run up like a bar tab.

 

With his younger brother [Son 2] we realized we were going to have to step it up.  So first we sent him to Australia, where every indigenous life form except the koala bear is poisonous and carniverous.  He came back.  Next we sent him to Costa Rica, figuring he'd come down with, … oh I don't know … yellow fever or malaria or something.  He came back.  Then we sent him to India, with the fond thought that maybe he'd get eaten by a tiger, or stepped on by an elephant, or abducted by a yeti, or even just banged up in traffic.  But no, you guessed it … he came back.  Finally we sent him, too, away to boarding school – this time to a school way out in the middle of nowhere, where they have to chop the wood to build their own fires for heat, and where casually ignoring frostbite is a badge of honor.  But every vacation he comes back, three inches taller than he was six weeks before, hungry, and toting a big sack of dirty laundry.

 

Try as we might, we just can't get rid of them.  Our kids keep coming back home at regular intervals, safe and sound, despite our best efforts.  Yours will too.

 

Thank you.

 

Whaddya think?  Suppose it would go over well?

 

 

 

 

Voices of the boys

The other night we were discussing the custody schedule for the rest of the summer.

Son 1: So when do I go to college? And how do I get there?

Hosea: [Names a date in August.] I will have had both of you here since the previous Sunday, so I assume we'll work out how you get there from here.

Son 1: Son 2 also?

Hosea: Yes, he's with us both from the same time. [Discusses the logistics of getting Son 1 to college.] And then after that Son 2 stays with me for another week before going back to stay with Mom [Wife].

Son 2: How long am I there for?

Hosea: You're with Mom for one more week before going back to school.

Son 1: Oh, dude, I'm so sorry. [Grins.]

Son 2: Sorry for what?

Son 1: That you have to spend a whole week with Mom, by yourself. I'm sorry that I won't be there to absorb some of the impact.

Son 2: But it's always like I'm there by myself. If Mom is yelling or needing something, you never speak up. You're always stuck on the computer. I'm always the one that goes to help her. The only difference if you're gone is that I'll be able to use the computer some of the time ….

I think Son 2's complaints aren't literally true, since Son 1 cooks dinner there a good bit of the time.  What I found interesting was that staying with Wife is described as being such a burden.  I mean, I guess I'm not surprised, but I'm still getting used to hearing it.

__________

Of course it's not all roses at my end either.  Last night I made a dinner that neither of them would eat: it included boiled broccoli rabe – rapini – stirred in with pasta.  Too bad, I kinda liked it.  Oh well. 

__________

On the way back from collecting them from Wife's house, they asked to swing by our old house to see if the new owners had fixed it up any.  The differences were subtle, but there were a few. 
 

Son 1: And just think … if you and Mom had been able not to be totally wrong for each other, we could still be living in a house instead of driving back to your crappy apartment.

Later on they said something else in a complaining vein about my apartment.  I'm trying to remember … I think it was something about how I can't afford to live anywhere else.

Hosea: No, it's just that I prefer to spend my money elsewhere. On your tuition, for example. Or on art … that's why I was happy to buy you tickets to the upcoming rock concert. But I don't want to spend it on a big, fancy place to live.

Son 2: Actually I'm with you on that. I wish Mom would move into a smaller place, though I know she never will. But if she did, then maybe she could keep it clean ….

A sister-in-law dies

Wife's oldest sister died Saturday.  I just found out about it yesterday, from the boys: apparently Wife had texted Son 1.  (Son 2 doesn't have a phone.)  Son 2 did, however, tell his brother, "We better call Mom to see if she's doing OK."  Son 1 just said, "If you want my phone, be my guest."  So Son 2 called to check how she was coping.  What he told me at dinner last night (when I heard all this) was that she said she was more or less OK right now but would probably fall apart next week "when the crisis is over."  I'm not quite sure what crisis this is -- Wife's oldest sister lives thousands of miles away from us, and her husband is presumably making all the arrangements.  But that's how Wife's family traditionally treats bad news: handle it in a totally business-like way until there is no more work to do, and then fall to pieces.

Half an hour ago I finally got a text from Wife confirming the death.  (How about if I call this woman "SIL1" for "Sister-in-Law 1"? There's another sister, SIL2, with whom Wife is not on speaking terms; plus some brothers; and then Wife is the baby of that generation.)  But she's at her weekly therapist's appointment, so she didn't take the time to say anything else.  I wonder, in fact, how she is taking it?  For years Wife used to say she had a psychic bond with SIL1 ... I mean the kind of bond where (so she claimed) they could carry on conversations psychically for weeks or months and then pick up where they had left off when they finally saw each other.  But I haven't heard her say anything about that in some years now.  Did it go away?  Because if not, then it would be interesting to ask if she can still communicate with her sister, though dead?

There won't be any kind of inheritance to pass around.  SIL1 was always poor, and if she ever did get her hands on a little money she handled it as badly as Wife.  Plus she had ... what is it? ... I guess three sons, at least two of whom have families of their own.  So if there is anything to pass on, then her sons will get it.  Of course that's only fair -- all the more so because when Wife's mother died, Wife and SIL2 conspired to hide one of the bank accounts from SIL1 so they wouldn't have to split it three ways but only two.  Then SIL2 cashed it out all by herself and didn't share with Wife, which left Wife feeling furiously betrayed ... but she hadn't felt bad about cutting out SIL1.  I don't know, it's a strange family.

SIL1 was a nice woman, sweet and pleasant in an impractical (and almost otherworldly) sort of way.  She was a lot older than Wife -- about the age of my mother -- so it doesn't surprise me that she died.  In fact, half the time Wife was growing up she lived at SIL1's house as if she had been another of SIL1's children, because her own mother was so unstable and the home life there so chaotic.  So I guess in some senses it's rather like Wife has lost another mother, not just a sister.

I'm not sure I have more to say about this right now, but I'll want to keep an eye on how Wife holds up under the strain ....
    
 

What is money for?, 2: fear of beauty

A little while after I wrote the post two weeks ago about what money is for, I began to feel uncomfortable because it sounded too confident.  Not that there is anything false about it as it stands, but just that it doesn't make clear how recently I came to these conclusions.  But there were many, many years before when I was a lot more lost around money.

I've already alluded to this in other posts, like this one.  But really my confusion went back a long time.  On the one hand, I adopted an air of magnanimity in paying things for other people: the idea was to be able to wave my hand in a relaxed but dismissive gesture while saying, "It's not a problem."  And in truth I very much thought about money (when spending it on others) in terms of this little theatrical gesture, far more than thinking about it in terms of (say) arithmetic.  I wanted to be able to look unconcerned.  I think I learned the gesture from my father, and I copied it carefully.

On the other hand I avoided spending money on myself if I could at all help it.  But even here I wasn't completely consistent.  I didn't mind buying myself snacks, for example.  But when it came to buying something more substantial, I would deliberately choose the least expensive thing I could find rather than buying something I liked.  In fact I adopted a habit of deliberately overlooking what I wanted, in order to spend out of necessity instead of pleasure.  I remember once I was buying a telephone for my apartment, and I specifically asked if they had one in black.  I didn't want black; I didn't think I would enjoy black.  What I thought was that it would be appropriate because it was so basic, because if I had a black phone then nobody could think that I was buying things for frivolous reasons like the pleasure they might bring me.  If black was good enough for the Model-T, it should be good enough for me.  Really, my attitude towards myself was almost punitive.  (In fact they didn't have black so I settled for beige, which I enjoyed a lot more.)

In some cases I chose practicality over aesthetics in order to make a point, but it was still about creating an identity for myself -- an austere and intellectual one.  One Christmas my father asked me what I wanted and I suggested a calendar would be useful.  He got me a "calendar" that was a long poster of a naked girl stretched out on a sand dune, with the twelve months listed at the bottom in small type and a string of numbers 1 to 30 (or 31) underneath each one.  Right.  A calendar.  I refused the present, saying that it was no use to me because I needed something that had boxes in it where I could list upcoming events or deadlines so I wouldn't forget them.  But there was more to my refusal than that.  I resented what appeared to me to be my father's overt attempt to pander to me, to offer me something that was more or less pornographic (no matter how artistically done), to try to excite some kind of desire in me.  His seeming need to stand in the role of a procurer for his own son just disgusted me.  And so there was no way I could possibly have accepted the calendar.  At the time, though, I was not sufficiently self-aware to articulate all these reasons that I hated it so much.  So I jumped on the one reason that I could articulate and that I felt comfortable saying aloud: the calendar was impractical.  And I made other choices, step-by-step, to re-enforce my identity as someone who would turn down such a poster on the grounds of practicality.  I chose to have things around me that were useful rather than beautiful.

I was also afraid that my own taste in what was beautiful might be childish or shallow, that I would expose myself to ridicule by saying "I like this, I find it lovely."  I knew that back when I was a kid I had liked certain kinds of designs, but they were the kinds of designs associated with the fantasy or science fiction subcultures, or with the hippie friends of my parents back in the 1960s.  As a college student in the late 70s or a young adult in the early 80s, could I still have such tastes?  Or would I do better just to abjure beauty altogether?  In the event, that's what I did.

In fact, I realize that I took this fear of beauty to extremes.  My girlfriend in college was not beautiful: she had sharp features (particularly a sharp chin) and she often pulled her hair back tight on her head to look "severe".  (When she would let her hair fall loose and let herself smile, she softened the effect considerably.)  [Update years later: This was Marie, in case you were wondering.] And then Wife, when I met her, wasn't especially pretty either.  Oh, her face was pretty enough, but even then she was heavy enough to have a visible belly.  I don't mean just that she had some gentle cushioning around the edges (which I find quite attractive in a woman); she was fat.  But during the ramp-up to my decision to propose to her, I consciously told myself that my awareness of her physical looks could have nothing to do with her value as a person.  

I seem to have wandered a long way from my theme: I started out talking about money, and ended up talking about beauty.  This may be indicative of how confusing I found money for so many years, however: I made financial decisions based on non-financial reasons, assuming that somehow the money would work itself out; and I denied myself the things I enjoyed, as a point of principle.  Then of course after I was married I found that I had to think hard about how we spent our money (because Wife wasn't about to exert any self-control), and I also found that she self-denial which had become so natural to me was something I could never sell to Wife at all.  So I resorted to shouting and screaming, which seemed to be the only argument she could hear.

So far from learning to think about money more intelligently, this last development simply covered my earlier confusion with a thick layer of emotion and anxiety.  It didn't help me get any better clarity.  And there I sat, until -- decades later -- my affair with D and my progressive distancing from Wife allowed me to experiment a little bit with spending money on myself.  And then I started to look at the whole question a little more coolly.  It has been an improvement ....

How much longer do I stay private?

I was thinking idly this evening about things I'll want to change once the separation is final, mostly rehashing ideas I've mulled dozens of times before, when a brand-new one suddenly hit me.  Maybe I can take this blog public again.

Can I?

Should I?

I went private back when I thought that Wife might have discovered it, when I thought she might be following me through it.  At the time I was involved with D, and I didn't want Wife to know the details … not so much that I feared hurting her as that I feared she might use the information against me.  And God knows that since I have gone private I have been very open about what's going on.  I also had fantasies that I might use this blog as a forum for airing this or that legal strategy before deciding to use it, and naturally I didn't want her forewarned.  But presumably once our agreement becomes final and is issued as a Court order, it no longer matters.  Does it?  Once we've settled who gets what, does it matter what she knows or thinks about me?

There are things I've written that I would prefer the boys not see … things I would prefer that she not show them.  But of course there are plenty of things I've written about her that I'm sure she wouldn't want them to see either, so it could be pretty counter-productive for her to draw their attention to any of it.  (Not that Wife thinks things through very well before acting, usually.)

I suppose theoretically she might pick on some of what I have written about alcohol use and threaten to re-open the question of custody.  But I don't think my alcohol use is as alarming as hers – the boys have certainly told me bad things about her drinking and these days I pretty much don't drink when they are with me.  Also, I can always respond by referencing her incestuous fantasies about Son 2.  And really, custody is hardly an issue any more anyway.  In ten weeks, Son 1 turns eighteen and ceases to be an object of custody agreements at all.  Son 2 hits that same milestone in less than two years.  If we did go to Court over custody, the first thing the judge would do would be to laugh in our faces.  The second thing he'd do would be to tell Son 1 take a hike – welcome to adulthood – and then to order Wife and me both to shut up while he asks Son 2 "Where do you want to live?"  Then whatever Son 2 said, that would be the Court order.  Total elapsed time, 10 minutes.  Case dismissed.

And of course she might never find it.  She might (in the first place) never have found it before, and I was just spooked over nothing.  Or if she had found it, she might not have written down the address or remembered anything concrete that would help her find it again.  And there are … ummm, how many blogs out there on the Internet?  The chances of Wife or the boys stumbling across this blog by accident are probably considerably less than the odds of finding a needle in a haystack.

Who else would I not want to find it?  My father, for one.  He has always had such a prurient, salacious interest in asking after the lurid details of my sex life – really, it's disgusting – that I would hate for him to find a place that answered all his questions.  He's not very Internet-savvy, but I suppose if I'm going to worry about anybody I know seeing it then he has to be on the list.

What about D or Debbie?  For each, there would have been times when I would have been fine with her reading it all and then other times when I would have wanted to prevent her reading it at all costs.  Now, I don't know how much I care.  Certainly there are things I say about each of them that might be embarrassing – and certainly there are far more things I say about myself that would be pretty embarrassing.  But I don't see either of them any more, so what does it matter?  D still e-mails me once or twice a year; I don't know why.  I usually send very brief notes back, enough to be nice pro forma but not enough to tell her anything about what's going on in my life.  My current theory on why she e-mails me is that it's sort of like drunk dialing (though I don't know that she's drunk when she does it) and that she's horny.  So maybe at a certain point her need for sexual release overrides her desire not to make a fool of herself, and she sends me a quick note just in case I might have decided recently that I want to go back to fucking her brains out regularly.  Then I reply, she realizes the answer is No, and she falls silent for another six to twelve months.

Debbie has e-mailed me a couple of times, but only when pushed by something external: like a few months ago when my "home e-mail account" started sending out spam by itself, or more recently when my father wrote her and asked her to come visit.  She is invariably sweet, and says she has been thinking about me a lot – God, I hope that's not true! I think about her occasionally but not "a lot" – but she is also clear in a polite way about keeping the distance in place between us.  Of the two of them, D is far more likely to obsess over whatever I have written than Debbie is.  (Of course I also wrote far more about D.)

Now, if I took the blog public again there is one very easy way that either D or Debbie could find it, if she were so inclined and ever thought to try: google a line of my poetry.  I wrote poetry for each of them, and I've posted all of it here.  I assume there wouldn't be a lot of matches, if they chose the line right.

But maybe it is pure self-centered egotism for me even to imagine that anybody would ever look for the blog, or care if they found it.  More likely nobody would care, and (given the chaotic disarray of the Internet) nobody would even find it in the first place.  So that brings me back to the original question, … Could I?  Should I?  Does it matter either way?

I'm pretty sure at this point none of my invitees are reading either; but in case you are … please comment briefly to let me know if you have an opinion on this.  I've usually found that when I ask for opinions, what I get back is better than what I was able to think up on my own.  So I look forward to hearing from you.

Power failure

We had a power failure about a week ago … actually pretty close, as it happened last Friday evening, and this won't post till Friday morning (though I'm writing it Thursday night).  And I made a note to myself to write you about it, though I'm no longer sure exactly why.  But here goes.

Last Friday was the day when I was slated to drive the boys to Wife's place.  In fact I drove Son 2, but not Son 1: he had been invited to a Saturday birthday party by the guy who will be his new roommate at college in the fall (they met on Facebook, of course), and Wife had given permission for him to go.  The thing is that getting there meant a train ride of several hours, and the train doesn't stop in Wife's town.  So Son 1 stayed with me one more night and then left first thing Saturday morning.  But he came along for the ride when I delivered Son 2.

On the way back to my place, I decided to stop off downtown.  It's summer, and it was a nice evening … and the city had decided to show silent movies for free in the town square.  So we grabbed some burgers, found parking, and then wandered over to find a place to sit.

Of course the movie started late: someone had to say "a few words" first, in gratitude to all the people who had made this showing possible.  And he offered an excellent lesson-by-example for why you should always prepare your public remarks ahead of time and speak from notes.  Very few people can extemporize and stay pithy, and … well, … he wasn't one of them.  Then when the film finally started rolling, we got advertisements from local merchants who had contributed to pay for the show.  So it was a good 15 or 20 minutes after the advertised starting time that Harold Lloyd's "The Freshman" finally started to roll.

Son 1 had been expressing reservations about this plan for a while.  Why would anybody want to watch a comedy from the 1920's?  It was going to be dumb, he just knew it.  He'd give it a chance, but he was sure that pretty soon he'd be asking me for the keys to my apartment, and he'd walk home if I insisted on watching the whole thing.  Except that once it started, he was laughing as much as I was.  Neither of us had seen the movie before; and while it telegraphs all the jokes, they are still funny.  Son 1 murmured to me, "My God, it's so full of all these movie clichés! Only I bet when they made this, they weren't clichés because every cliché has to start somewhere and this was probably it."

So we sat there, wrapped up in the ever-more-outrageous story that Harold Lloyd acted out with such earnestness, until all of a sudden – maybe twenty minutes from the end – the projector went dead.  There were the normal cries of "Ohhhhh…" until people realized that the whole city block had gone dark.  As had the next block.  There were lights way over that-a-way, but none nearby.

What to do?  Nobody made any announcements, neither that they would start up again in a minute nor that the show was over.  The audience began to drift away.  I insisted on waiting around for ten or fifteen minutes (while Son 1 got ever more impatient), and then conceded that yes, we might as well go home.  So we walked back to our car and drove home.

My apartment was dark too.  Actually so was my whole city block, and all the adjacent blocks.  The street lights seemed to be working, and in our trip from downtown to home we had passed areas that were lit up.  So I'm not sure quite how to account for the differences between those areas that were dark and those that were light.  Obviously all the dark ones must have been on a common circuit, but then who would have laid out the city's grid so that such an oddly-gerrymandered area was all on one circuit?  It didn't make a lot of sense.

Once we were home, Son 1 proposed a walk around the block to try to reconnoiter just how far the darkness stretched.  Then we lit some candles, settled down, and talked.  Normally Son 1 would have been playing computer games all evening, while Son 2 listened to music.  But Son 2 wasn't there, and Son 1 had left his computer unplugged all day so it had very little charge … and now of course he couldn't plug it in.  So talking was about all we had left.  I don't actually remember what we talked about, because none of it was earth-shaking … but I remember that it was the kind of relaxed-but-kinda-serious conversation that I find I can have pretty naturally with either boy so long as the other one isn't there.  It's interesting: when the two of them are together, each picks up an energy from the other that steers our conversation more towards jokes or silliness … or towards cutting me out of it completely while the two of them retreat into discussing things I know nothing about.  With either one alone, though, I find we can talk easily and relaxedly about subjects that interest me as well as them.  I guess that dynamic doesn't surprise me, but I've noticed it.

After a while we both went to bed.  In the morning the power was back on.  We had breakfast, and I delivered Son 1 to the train station.  Then I had time to myself – finally! -- and settled into a weekend of doing not very much ….

Can anybody really change?

Sometimes I look brightly forward and think that I'm making my life better: slowly, maybe, but measurably.  (For example, here and here.)  Then other times I think that I'm feeding myself a load of bullshit.  (For example, here, here, here, here, and here ... Jesus, but I whine a lot!)  And its in the latter moods that I wonder, Can I really expect to change anything anyway?  Does anybody ever really change?

I suppose that I start off prejudiced against the idea that real change is possible, because all the time I was growing up I saw my Father go on about a thousand different diets.  Each one was announced with great fanfare: this was going to be the diet that finally got him thin; from now on he was going to eat only what this book allowed him to eat; and he was also going to start a strict exercise regimen at the same time.  Well, by the time the weekend rolled around he'd be eating something that wasn't allowed on the diet -- "Just this once, because it's a special occasion."  Then it would happen again, ... then again.  And the exercise regimen would last a couple of days before he just wouldn't be feeling well or couldn't get away this particular moment for one reason or another.  And pretty soon he'd be back to eating and sloth-ing the same way as always, until the next miracle diet came along.  He bought a lot of diet books over the years, along with a lot of books about how to get organized and get rid of clutter (two other things he has never yet succeeded in doing).  For what it's worth, this habit of backing off of any regimen whatever probably almost killed him a couple of months ago.  

So the upshot is that I grew up pretty jaded about the possibility of self-renewal or self-reform.  It's one of the reasons that I never, ever, ever want to admit that I'm on a diet: I assume that the very act of saying you are on a diet means you won't be by the time the weekend rolls around.  (See also this post here.)  The most I will let myself say is, "This is what I feel like eating right now."

What made me start thinking about this these days is that this week I am back to 2-3 drinks a night, a rate of alcohol consumption that would have been pretty normal even a few months ago (and would have constituted a very light evening back when I lived with Wife, as noted here or here).  But compared to the last month or two, when I have been drinking not at all ... or very little, at any rate ... it looks like an increase.  And I wonder: Am I just being my father's son?  Is this just like his stupid diets?  Am I going to spend the rest of my life unable to change anything fundamental?  When I'm eighty, am I going to be living just the way I do now, only with more deterioration?

I don't know.  Sometimes I think so, and it worries me.  (Then I remind myself that my meditation practice tells me not to worry, even about the parts of myself that I don't like. So maybe I can just drink up and be fine with it.)  But on the other hand, I do actually think long-term change is possible.  It's just not easy or obvious, and sometimes it takes time.

My prime example to justify this qualified optimism is that whenever I used to cook dinner it centered on some large piece of meat, and now my meals are almost totally vegetarian.  I'm not fanatical about this: if the boys are visiting me I'll cook meat some of the time because they like it.  And I'll cook some vegetarian meals too.  A mix.  But when it's just me -- unless there is a recipie that looks interesting that I want to try, my cooking is pretty much all vegetarian.

I scrolled back in this blog to find out how long ago I started making the change, and the earliest instance I could find for the word "vegetarian" was in October 2009.  At that time the change was just partly under way, and I described it as having started "a couple of months ago".  In posts a year later I find references to the change as largely complete.  So it took a while.  A few months at any rate, if not a year.  And there would have been back-and-forth then too.  But the tide was all in one direction, even if the waves washed in and out.

What helped me make the change?  I found I got more enjoyment from a wider variety of foods, and I felt freed by not having to cook the same five things over and over and over again.  So not only was it probably a good thing for my health, not only did it mean I give just a little less support to the cruelties of the food industry, but I liked the output.  And that was about the same time I was starting to free my mind in other ways from the prison I had built for myself out of my home life: through the affair with D, and generally through allowing myself to look at things as if they could possibly be different from how they just happened to be.  So I had enough positive reinforcement to put up with the griping I got from Wife (and to a lesser extent the boys).

This must be the key: change is possible if you get something out of it, if you enjoy it, if it brings you pleasure.  It's more or less the same insight that I had here: assume that you will always end up doing what you want to do; and then, based on accepting that fact, figure that if you want to change in such-and-such a way you must manipulate your situation so that those changes are what you really want to do.

How does that apply to drinking?  Or do I even want to change how much I drink, really?  I don't know right now.  Shit, I've been plunking slowly away at this post for almost three hours, looking up references and dithering shamelessly.  I have no idea what I "really want".

But I do know that I shouldn't worry about it.  Also I'm getting hungry for dinner.  Glass of wine?  Probably ... but still it's less than it used to be, by a good bit.  That's something.  Remember the tide.     

What games did I play as a child? part 2

After writing this post here, I sent a note to my brother asking if he could remember (better than I did) what we used to play.  His reply included quite a lot, and was great fun to read ... especially as I sat and remembered these things as I read them.  Some excerpts:

Interesting question!

- I remember some word games. The main one was the geography game (though it could be applied to any subject) where each new answer has to start with the last letter of the previous answer. There was also an interest in the game Botticelli.... There was also just testing one another on things we were interested in, especially geography and flags.

- Does doing Monty Python, Get Smart, and Tom Lehrer routines count as games?

- Does drawing count? Though I guess that's more of a solitary pursuit than a game played.

- There were various board games...: Monopoly, Sorry!, Clue, Chinese checkers, regular checkers, chess, Go, Othello, Yahtzee ... We didn't have [the kinds of games] that had fancy molded plastic, like Operation!, Mousetrap, or Hungry Hippos. I don't know why. Perhaps our parents saw them in the same way as they saw junk food. [Hosea adds: Yes, that's exactly why!]

- Also playing-card games: Fish, Crazy Eights, War, Spit (my favorite) ... plus ones that had custom cards like Mille Bornes and Waterworks.

- We did run around, playing tag and the like. (I remember once you outpsyched me and I was so sure I had gotten away from you that, when you tagged me in the front bathroom by coming around the back way, I just laid down and "died". It was an odd feeling, just to give up so completely.) We also wrestled and fought.

- Badminton of course! Sometimes accompanied by a history lesson....  :-)

- Throwing a baseball was known to occur....

Did any of those cross over into my adult life?  Probably all the verbal stuff.  Not sure about the rest ....  Still, it was fun reading the list.

What, me mindful?

Yesterday afternoon I knocked off work and drove out to where the UU Sangha meets, the one that I attend when I can.  It was a nice day so I thought, "I'll take the scenic route."  Five minutes into the drive I realized I was taking the ugly route, by force of habit.  Shortly after that I realized I had left the remains of my lunch on my desk instead of packing it up.  Gosh, Hosea, that probably won't be so appetizing by tomorrow morning.  So I drove back to the office, picked up my lunch, and left again -- this time taking the scenic route!

Then as I drove along I found my mind fully absorbed in some kind of story or fantasy, ... something far more interesting than the drive.  This continued fully halfway there, and then something else caught my attention for just an instant ... and I could no longer remember what I had been thinking about.  So not only was I not being present to the drive, I wasn't even present to my own escapist fantasy.

I've been like this lately.  I also haven't been posting.  I wonder if there is a correlation, or if it's just a coincidence that my mind is so scattered at the same time that I'm showing no regular consistency with this blog?  ("Correlation" is probably better than "causation" here ... I have no idea which way a causal linkage would go.)  What else could be related?

One thought that comes to mind is my sloth-fest last weekend.  But it's a little hard for me to think that that's everything.  If it were, ... well, what about last week?  I've been like this for a while.
 
A more intriguing (but possibly false) correlation is that my schedule at work hasn't been very meeting-heavy lately.  So my deadlines have all been self-imposed.  This could have lead to a lot of posting if I just decided to blow off work completely.  But in fact I've been struggling to figure out a new way to calculate ... well, never mind, you wouldn't be interested in the details.  Suffice it to say that one of our administrative systems has been held together all this time with duct tape and chewing gum, and I finally decided to try to overhaul it.  And found out I can't.  So I've been hacking away at trying to cook up a second-best solution.  On the one hand it has been kind of pleasant to have a project that I can dive into and ignore the rest of the world.  I've spent several lunchtimes (when I might otherwise have written something) just continuing to work unabated.  On the other hand from time to time I have all at once gotten so bored of it that I launch out into Internet-land, looking up some old movie or odd phrase in Wikipedia and then losing the next hour in random clicking.  So it hasn't been solid work, but my breaks from work have been unfocussed and undirected.  Unproductive.  It does kinda look like there could be a connection.

Of course there's no magic bullet to fixing it.  Just get up and start in again.  Maybe this will help.   

What games did I play as a child?

I just saw a fun post on "Free-Range Kids" called "Did What You Played as a Kid Influence Who You Became as an Adult?"  It reminds me of Plato's dictum that there is nothing so important as children's games for determining how their character will grow in adulthood.  In fact, I probably ought to post this over on the Patio except that I don't really have anything to say about it yet.  But now I'm trying to remember ... what kinds of games did I play back when I was a kid?

With my friends at school I did a lot of talking about things I had read, things they had read, things they thought I should read, things I thought they should read (but they were never going to), ... and so on.  (Reading and talking. Check.)

Later on, with my best friend in eighth grade and high school, we made up and wrote down stories about the interlocking histories of countries on a make-believe planet.  (Writing. Check.)  We made up countries here on earth -- that all started one day when he announced that his bedroom was seceding from the United States -- and designed political systems to go with them.  (Making up useless systems. Check.)

With my little brother, ... I don't remember exactly but I think whatever we played usually involved a lot of running around.  It also usually involved my beating up on him until one day he was bigger than I was ....

I have to think about this some more.
     

Sloth

This past weekend was deliciously slothful.  I did almost nothing.  (You can tell, in particular, that I wrote or posted nothing.)  Read a little, napped a little, went to the movies, bought some groceries, did some laundry ... and otherwise enjoyed the peace and quiet in my apartment now that the boys are with Wife for a week.  Saturday evening I tried out a bar that I discovered recently near my apartment: they serve beer and wine, and the place is furnished with sofas and books.  Delightfully civilized.

I could get used to living like this.  Too bad that (like all things) it has to come to an end ....
  

Tired and stressed

It's Wednesday night (this won't post till Thursday some time) and I am tired and stressed.  The boys have been here with me since last Thursday evening, Son 2 goes back to Wife's place two nights from now (Friday), Son 1 stays over one more night until Saturday morning so he can go to a friend's birthday party … and I can't wait for them to be gone.  The thing is, I have no idea why.

It has been building, I guess.  Over the weekend it was fine … actually what the hell did we even do over the weekend?  I can't remember.  Saturday I cleaned the apartment some.  Sunday I did laundry and cooked.  I think I took a nap.  But I can't remember what else.

When they first got back here, we talked in the evenings.  Then for two or three evenings I read to them.  (Yes, they are teenagers but they still enjoy being read to.)  Last night they listened to music on their respective computers while I just sat in my room and flipped idly through a book I wasn't reading and stared.  This evening I haven't even made dinner yet.  (None of us is terribly hungry just at the moment.)

But I don't know what this is about.  Am I tired?  The sun is still up.  And work wasn't especially hard today.  Am I worn down by petty irritations?  There are those, of course, but they are pretty petty.  I could take up time telling stories about them, but even I find it hard to take them seriously.

Do I need exercise?  If they weren't here, I would have gone to Sangha last night – but I don't go when I have them to come home to – and the gym is on the way.  I might have gotten a (rare) round of exercise in.  Or maybe I miss going to Sangha.  Maybe I need to make a point of keeping to my routines even when they are here, rather than letting them change everything around.  My impulse is to treat them like honored guests, but maybe I should treat them more like … err, … family.

I feel like I want a drink.  Does that mean actually I'm sleepy instead?  I'm not sure … maybe tired, maybe stressed.  Or anxious … possibly that's more accurate.  I don't think I'm sleepy.  I lay down a few minutes ago as if to take a nap; and while I enjoyed taking myself offline, I didn't fall asleep or even doze.

Why am I anxious?  Let's sort through some possible reasons.  Starting at one extreme … do I expect any harm from them?  No, of course not.  Does it tire me out to have to know what to say when we talk?  Maybe that's closer … and it's true that I worry about whether I'm saying the right thing or being the right person.  I care what they think about me and feel for me, and I worry if I'm not good enough.  So is it that I'm tired of expending the effort to have to be somebody in particular, in this case to be Dad?  Ummm, … maybe, but that sounds kind of abstract.  It sounds like I'm looking for a hi-falutin' sounding excuse for how I feel, when how I feel isn't anything at all high or grand.  It's low and tense and sort of grotty.

Maybe I'm just hungry.  Maybe I should make dinner.

I'd like a drink, but these days I'm kind of trying not to do that.  Or at any rate not while they're here.  That's the other reason I can't wait for them to be gone – because then I'll let myself have a drink.  I only hope that by then I won't feel I need one.

__________ 

P.S. (added the next day):  Hunger seems to have had something to do with it.  I felt better after dinner.  Something else to try when I feel like I want a drink.  But I do also feel like I want my peace-and-quiet back.  Funny how once upon a time I was worried that living alone would make me feel lonely, and so far that seems to be the least of my problems.

Also ... the next time I tell you that all my anxiety seems to have gone away miraculously, it will pay you to wait a week and then check back in with me to see if I'm still saying the same thing.

What is money for?

The boys are staying with me this week, and saw a listing for a rock concert that will be coming to town.

Do you want to go? 

Of course, Dad, what kind of a question is that?  But it's probably sold out already ... it's just three weeks away.

Well, let me check it out.

Turns out there were a few seats left.  Not many, but I got three together up in the nosebleed section.  This also meant rearranging the custody schedule with Wife just a bit, but she seemed willing to go for it.

But I found myself thinking ... isn't it a little strange that I am buying these, when in so many other ways I try to economize?  Is it just to pamper the boys?  Well maybe, but then I haven't gotten an Internet connection in my apartment yet; and I've restricted going out to eat to maybe once a week, even if they aren't all that thrilled with the stuff I cook.  (It depends on the night.)  So it's not just pampering them .... 

What it is instead is that for a while now I have been formulating a list in my own mind of what money is for.  Some parts of this list reach back years, I think ... or at any rate I don't remember how far back I started thinking along these lines.  Anyway, it goes something like this.

Money is for spending on things you need and things you want.  Another way to describe these two categories is "Things you buy because you are forced to" (the realm of Necessity) and "Things you buy because you want to" (the realm of Value). 

Now, there's no joy in being forced to something out of bitter necessity; so for that reason, I'm willing to do whatever I've gotta do but I'd rather not do more than that.  I'll spend on Necessities, but I'd really rather economize on them whenever possible.

But being surrounded by things of value does bring joy: that's more or less the definition of the word value.  So I'm happy to spend on Values, subject only to a little basic prudence that remembers to save for bigger long-term Values rather than squandering everything on smaller short-term Values.  But if it is possible to squeeze a bit of both out of the same budget, ... then let's go for it.

What do these categories contain, in my way of thinking?

Necessities:

• shelter
• clothing
• transportation
• food (most of the time)
• medical care

And so I rent a tiny apartment, I drive a twenty-six-year-old car, my shirts are all fraying at the cuffs, and I comparison shop for peanut butter and beans.

Values:

• education
• art (includes the plastic arts, the performing arts, and occasionally food)
• travel

And so I gladly pay for the boys' private educations; I buy paintings, and go to concerts and movies and live theater; I took Son 2 to Peru last February; ... and so on.

Looked at this way, it makes perfect sense.  I'm not even terribly unclear about these priorities in my own mind.  As I say, I've been thinking along these lines for a long time.  (It should be obvious that this is not at all the way Wife thinks about the same topic.)

But I do realize that most people who travel the world, or buy original art, or send their kids to expensive private schools ... most of these people don't have old, rusting cars and shirts with frayed cuffs.  So it may be a minority perspective ....