Wife wants to come to my family's Christmas

I got an email from Wife a couple days ago, as follows:

Dear Hosea,

I still very much love and miss our family -- which is how I think of [your relatives]. The greatest Christmas gift you could ever give me would be to include me in family festivities, not because I'm depressed and lonely up here,or I'm not getting my fair share of time with the boys (that's really entirely up to them at this point) but because they're good people, and I enjoy their company. I would enjoy sharing the holidays with them, including you. I guarantee I can be civil,and better than that, and I think we mutually proved that at Son 1's thesis defense, for which I thank you again. [Looks like I haven't posted that story yet and it ain't gonna happen tonight.] The only time you rebuked me, you were right -- and I did remember my question and ask Son 1 later.

Please just consider it -- maybe not this year, but maybe for the future. If you think you could ever entertain the idea,maybe you could run it up the flagpole this year. I honestly think the rest of the family would be fine with my being there..

Wife

 

Wow, is she just completely  tone deaf? Does she not realize that the only reason the rest of the family put up with her so long was for my sake? Apparently not. In any event I replied like this:

 

Hi there!

 

Sorry I didn't reply to this right away, but I wanted to give it some thought rather than just replying off the cuff.

 

I will admit that my very first reaction when I read your letter was that I thought it would feel a little weird. [Imagine her coming to Thanksgiving some year that Marie is there too.] But then my second reaction was that you are absolutely right when you say [my family] are good people. And we all want good people in our lives. Don't we? That's when I decided to think about it more carefully.

 

Here's what I came up with.

 

It's not strange that you contacted me first to ask about this, but in the long run I think that's not your best strategy. If you approach the family through me, then it's going to look to everyone like you are there as my guest, or like you are somehow under my wing. But that's not really true any more (except where it concerns medical insurance!) and in your email below you take care to make a point that is different in subtle but important ways. Specifically, you make it clear that it's really not about me at all: you want to spend time with these people for your own reasons, on your own initiative, because they are good people. It's about you and them. I am sort of an afterthought -- maybe not literally, but for these purposes and in a manner of speaking.

 

But in that case I think your best strategy is not to wait until Christmas rolls around again a year from now. Work on your own independent relationship with these people during the year. You may not be able to get out to [my mom's city] very often, and my mother doesn't drive as much as she used to. But Brother and SIL are peripatetic, because SIL's work takes her all over. Maybe you could drop her a note about fashion, or invite them over to tea the next time they drive up the coast. Or maybe those are bad ideas but you'll think of something better. But the core point is this: if what you want is a relationship with these people that is independent of your relationship with me, then the way to get it is to work on developing the relationship with them directly without using me as an intermediary.

 

Once you've laid that groundwork successfully, then I think next Christmas should take care of itself. At least, that's the way it looks to me.

 

I don't know if this is helpful, but it is the best I have come up with.

 

Merry Christmas,
 H.

 

I'm a little afraid she'll do it. but on the whole I think that's a risk I'm willing to run. I don't think anyone else will accept her invitations.

 

It's really late and I'm going to bed. Night-night, all!

How many times have you died?

A couple days ago I found myself thinking about death, and an interesting thought came to me.

Of course, meditation is supposed to help you let go of craving so that you don't fear death. And classical philosophy likewise was supposed to help you keep calm in the face of death. In the Phaedo, Socrates says that philosophy is the daily practice of death.

But really, how can any of us be calm when we are about to die?

Well, what I realized is that when it is my turn to die my body probably won't be calm because instinctively my body is designed to want to live at all costs. If I fall, my body will be afraid. If I drown, my body will be afraid. In either case that physical panic is sure to disrupt my mental equilibrium.

But if I am just getting weaker, if I simply know that one day I will go to sleep and not wake up ... I no longer expect that to frighten me because I realize that I've been through it before. At least twice.

When Wife and I left graduate school I found it disorienting. Sure, there were things I had to do: get a job, move into our apartment, make dinner, ... that sort of thing. But I realized that all my life I had understood my entire existence in terms of school. I had spent all my time being tested and having to please other people. And now, at a stroke ... that was over. (Or so I thought.) Now that I was no longer in school, I [thought that I] no longer had to care whether I measured up to other people's standards. I no longer had to worry about constantly improving myself. If I decided that This Is Good Enough, I could just sit down and stop growing right here. It was up to me.

Of course that was never really true. I still had to be measured by my boss's standards if I wanted to keep my job. But thinking it gave me a feeling of autonomy and agency that I had never had before. So in a sense it didn't matter if it were literally true. Measured in terms of its practical consequences for my outlook on life, it was true enough. And it meant there was a whole stable-full of fears that I didn't have to worry about any more. I could just let them go. They no longer applied to my life.

The same thing happened during the period when I was separating from Wife. A lot of concerns that dictated how I related to other people gradually fell away. I had built up a stable-full of fears about how to handle the intimate relationships in my life. These fears had governed how I interacted with Wife, and with D, and even to some extent with Debbie. But I realized I could just let them go. They no longer applied to my life. And the internal ground rules governing my relationship with Marie are very different.

And this is what I think -- intellectually -- an awareness of the nearness of death will mean for me. I think it will mean that all the things I used to worry about will fall away ... that I will realize I can just let them go ... that they will no longer apply to my life. No point worrying about This or That when I'm dead. And if I'm close enough to dead, maybe I can stop worrying about them today anyway. If I have so far failed to achieve this or that dream ... well by that time I'll know they ain't gonna happen. And I will have to be OK with that, because I'll have no choice.

Thirty-two years ago, I died as a Scholar. Five years ago, I died as a Husband. When it comes time for me to die as a Man ... well, nobody knows the future but I somehow think it will be easier than it would have been otherwise because I've had practice.

How many times have you died?

Almost dying on the road

Have I told you about my car troubles lately? No? Good for me.

Two months ago my car stopped working. More exactly it was racing and the mechanic said he couldn't get parts for it any more because it's 31 years old. He tried putting in a remanufactured part and it was worse than before. Can I live with the racing? Then it started overheating even when it wasn't racing. I didn't bother to go back to the mechanic ... just stopped driving it.

I borrowed a car from my mother that she wasn't using ... it used to be my dad's car before he died. And I started trying to figure out what kind of car I want to get. Yeah, right ... make a major decision about a major purchase without Wife badgering me into it? Good luck.

Then the borrowed car started to behave oddly. I didn't take it into a mechanic. There were reasons -- I was traveling for Thanksgiving and then for two weekends afterwards -- but of course the main reason was that I couldn't make myself do it. My social anxiety made me rather do anything than pick up the damned phone and make an appointment.

Finally the boys both came back from college for the holidays. (Son 1 graduated.) And I drove them to stay with Wife for a week. The following email to Marie picks up the story from there.

Hi love!
 

I drove the boys to Wife's place this evening.
 

Have I told you about the troubles I’ve been having with my dad's car that I’m borrowing from my mother? For the last couple weeks it has been slipping out of gear unpredictably as I drive. (This means the car continues to drift forward at almost a constant velocity because of the First Law of Motion, but pressing on the gas accomplishes nothing besides racing the engine.) That’s the short version. There’s a lot more narrative but none of it rises even to the level of correlation, let alone causation.
 

So the drive to Wife's town was a little too exciting. (Only once did we nearly die, I think. The other times I wasn’t too worried.) Once there we discussed with Wife and she let me leave my dad's car there and borrow one of her cars to come home. [She has two.] Tomorrow the boys will take my dad's car to her mechanic.
 

On the way home I nearly died again, for a totally different reason: some crazy man coming the other way swerved out of his lane into mine, coming straight at me. I swerved onto the shoulder and he missed me. But I drove the rest of the way home very skittishly.
 

I got your email about [stuff that happened in her day] but all the same I hope your day was less interesting than mine.
 

Glad to be home safe and sound,
Your Hosea

 

Her response was less polished than some of her emails have been at other times:

 

FUCK! 

Fuck, fuck, fuck!

Jesus, love, this kind of shit is not supposed to be happening to you!

Okay, sweetness.

I probably wasn't helpful there.

But FUCK!

You are not allowed to die, LEAST OF ALL TAKING YOUR SONS WITH YOU!

Dearest.  Sweetness.  My beloved.

I'm really wishing I had studied feminine wiles more in my youth, because there's no logic I can employ that you can't beat me at.

But, fuck.

If you're driving a vehicle that you know might randomly fail in a way that will kill you, don't drive it.

Please?

Of course, there's nothing you or anyone can do to protect yourself from random insanity by strangers, but operating failing machinery is a known, and avoidable, risk.

Think of it this way:  would you tolerate something professionally, if strangers' lives were at risk, rather than yours and your sons?

Finally, I am SO VERY GLAD you are home safe.

Rest now.

Always your Marie.

 

Of course she was right, and I told her so without trying to explain or exonerate.

 

Wife's mechanic said it might cost $5-7000 to fix. It's not worth that. So my mother had it towed back to her place while she decides what to do. And I'm driving one of Wife's two cars because I can't get my ass in gear to buy a new one of my own.

  

New job in February?

Hey all!

News from work. 

Some of this may be old news, or may reference posts I've made in the past. But right now I'm working on my cell phone instead of a computer ... and even if I were on a computer I'm too drunk this evening to go look up all the relevant links to earlier posts. So for the moment I will content myself with repeating for your benefit a couple of emails I recently sent to Marie. Enjoy. (Or skip it ... I mean, hell, why not?)

__________

I was talking with my boss today. On the one hand, now that I was have been reclassified as a non-manager, I have no raise this year because my pay is too high for my new categorization. On the other hand, my boss is going to be opening a new managerial job in February … in Sticksville ….

 

He told me about it in the course of the conversation about my salary. The context clearly meant "In case you want to apply for it and win back your managerial status." He did NOT say any words to suggest that, if I were to apply, I would be particularly favored to get the role. (That he said nothing in this regard actually tells me nothing about his thoughts on the matter, though. He ought to say nothing like that.)

 

The nature of the role is that this manager will be the Plant manager for my function. In other words, right now my boss has a dual role: on the one hand he is the local  Manager for this function for the Sticksville plant; and on the other hand he is responsible for all the North American region. This means he is always working: evenings, weekends, holidays. (I guess it helps that his family is all still in Europe.) He will be hiring to separate the roles. After hiring this person he will retain the responsibility for North American regional topics, and this other person will take over responsibility for the tactical, local issues in the Sticksville plant.

 

It's an interesting thought. On the one hand, it's a position that plays to my weaknesses: personnel management (it's a large department there) and factory operations (my perceived unsuitability for which is exactly why I was never considered for his role in the first place!). As far as subject matter is concerned, my strengths are all on the regional side, not the local side: [example 1 and example 2]. But of course my boss isn't going to resign his Directorship and hire for THAT spot!

 

On the other hand, if I don't apply for it then my boss is entitled to wonder, Gosh, you whinge and whimper about being displaced from your existing role but when I give you a chance to take on a comparable role – in fact, one that commands a good bit more real power because of the larger headcount, only maybe one that requires a little more actual work – you can't be bothered. Why should I take your whimpering seriously?

 

And inside the department, on the one hand there is the dynamic that it is always hard to elevate a colleague over his former peers; on the other hand I've always been geographically distant from everybody else (and until recently I had the title of a manager) so I wasn't exactly a colleague. There has always been some distance in the literal sense, and that has probably contributed to distance in the emotional sense. Whenever I visited Sticksville I have always been treated as something of a visiting VIP. (OK, that overstates it … but it is directionally correct even if it overstates the magnitude of the vector.)

 

If I overthink it I will do nothing. If I underthink it I may do something stupid. I may anyway … there's an argument that all choices here are stupid choices, for different reasons.

_________

Then a few hours later, after a couple of drinks, I added more, but my email system seems to have lost it. 

The gist was:

• I don't want to live in Sticksville because it's boring. I'd rather live in the major metropolis an hour away, though I'm not sure I'd like the drive. 

• I've had managerial roles before and been successful in them. It just takes a lot of work because I am playing against type every step of the way.

• I don't like the plant in Sticksville, nor most of the people there, because (with few exceptions) they are simultaneously condescending and stupid. The attitude is basically a smug assurance that "We don't have to understand you because we are going to do things the way we've always done them — because we've always done them that way and for no other reason — and nothing you can do will ever change that. So fuck off."

• I suspect my current job will be eliminated in a year as no longer necessary. Maybe I'm being paranoid. But if I were making a hard-headed business decision about it, that's what I'd say.

Fun, huh?

Sent from my iPhone

Irritating workshop

At work today, HR put on a three-hour workshop about how to develop yourself and your career, and I spent much of the time clenching my teeth. I went because I thought I needed to go, but the whole thing made me feel irritated and profoundly uncomfortable.

Why?

One obvious little thing was that the presenter didn't listen to us. At one point she announced that "all" internal company job postings can be found in a certain database. One of my colleagues said softly, "No they aren't." And quick as a whip she replied "Yes they are," and went on. Really? Would it have killed her to listen to the possibility that maybe there's something she didn't know? Why couldn't she have said, "That's interesting -- during the break please come talk to me and tell me what you've found missing"? She could still have been privately certain that my colleague was an idiot, no harm in that -- but she would have sounded more open to her audience. As it is, ... well why should any of us trust an HR department that won't listen to us?

At another point -- right at the beginning -- she asked us to list the things we wanted to get out of the workshop. She wrote down on the board the ones that corresponded to what she wanted to say. But about half of the suggestions didn't fit her agenda, and she just dismissed each of them with a flip little remark and moved on to the next one. So at the end -- guess what? -- she could look at the board and say we'd met all the expectations.

But these aren't the real reasons. These are just excuses.

The real reason I was clenching my teeth is that the whole topic makes me feel deeply unsafe. I'm not sure why, so I'm writing this post in order to figure it out.

I mean, in the abstract you wouldn't think there would be anything wrong with the idea of planning your career, would you? If you can figure out that there's another job you'd like more than this one, why not apply for it? If it requires that you have some different experience first, why not arrange to get that experience? It all sounds pretty harmless at that level.

But that's not how I react to it. Every time the topic comes up I feel profoundly threatened.

Really? How interesting. So tell me ... what tools did she explain that the company makes available for your career advancement? Just list what she listed, in order.

First she mentioned the system of training classes available through the online HR portal. Many of these are web-based classes; some are conducted in-person, in a classroom. Your manager might assign you a class, or you can self-assign ... though of course if you assign yourself a class that requires you travel to another city and then be out of work for a few days in class your manager has to approve the budget and the time away. But there are quite a lot of these classes, covering a wide range of topics.

Do these classes make you nervous?

Heavens, no. I've taken quite a few of them. Many of them are actually pretty good.

What's next?

There's a mentoring program. I volunteered to be a mentor once, about three years ago, but the "mentee" assigned to me didn't really need a mentor. She had been with the company even longer than I had. But that was the fall of 2015, and since that time I've really felt my ambition in the company wilt pretty suddenly and significantly. I never volunteered again, nor have I volunteered to be a mentee. I think I even wrote a post once, wondering why my levels of ambition shifted so suddenly and trying to imagine whether it had anything to do with my father dying about then. That is, I can't think of a causal connection but there is a correlation in time so who knows?

So you haven't joined the program. Does it intrinsically bother you?

No, I guess not. I participated in a similar program at a (much smaller) company years ago. It was OK then. I suppose this one is too.

What's next?

Next she talked about a Buddy System that is supposed to align every new employee with a seasoned buddy who can show them the ropes. She stated flatly that this was in place everywhere, but none of us at our site had ever heard of it. Anyway it's for new employees, so it doesn't especially apply to me.

What's next?

The Career Development Discussion. This is a formal discussion that centers on you (the employee). The other attendees are HR, your manager, and his manager. Before the meeting you fill out an extensive set of forms all about what you enjoy doing and what you really want to do. Then the others tell you what they see as your strengths from the outside, and help you figure out what you have to do in order to get from where you are now to where you want to be.

Sounds useful. Have you ever participated in one of these discussions? Or do you want to?

I'd rather remove my own appendix with a kitchen knife.

Aha. Now we are getting somewhere. Why?

I don't want those people to know what I really want to do.

Why not? What DO you really want to do?

At work? In the context of this company? I don't even know. But there is no way that I would trust any of those people with that kind of information. I assume that the HR department will always be institutionally antagonistic to the kind of person I am. That is, not every single HR representative is necessarily evil (though the people who rise to the top sure look that way) but all of them want a rational system that allocates the people in the organization in an appropriate way to the functions that have to be done. Well any such allocation will start by firing people like me, because I don't belong there. I'm not sure where I belong instead -- it's easy to say I belong in a philosophy department somewhere, but that might not be true either and anyway probably none of them is hiring. But the work I do for this company isn't who I AM, it's just what I DO. Which means that according to any rational system for allocating talents to tasks, I am misallocated. To rationalize the system they should fire my ass. There's no way I want to let them know that! I need the job.

My boss ... well, he's a mensch, most of the time. He probably wouldn't fire me. But I assume he'd look at me askance and no longer know what to make of me. He'd probably respect me less. People get uncomfortable when they catch a glimpse inside me. It's like ... once, years ago I worked at a small company where everyone knew each other pretty well. I was knew, and so one of the developers sat down with me at lunch to get to know me, and asked what I was reading over lunch. It so happens that recently I'd decided I wanted to read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, because it's well-known and I never had. So I had to tell him I was reading Aristotle. About ethics. "Oh, are you taking a class on the side?" "No, I just wanted to read it." "Oh." [Dead, uncomfortable silence.] "Well I'm really interested in ethics," he tried to suggest, lamely. [Further silence.] Finally I asked him what his hobbies were and we started talking about golf. I know bugger-all about golf, but I kept up a stream of questions and learned that golf was basically this guy's entire life outside of work. We pointedly did NOT talk about Aristotle. And that's not a performance I want to repeat.
This is part of why I hate the mantra to "bring your whole self to work."

My boss's boss? I assume he'd just have no time to waste on whoever I really am or whatever I really want to do.

I also assume that if I did identify anything else I wanted to do outside what I'm doing now, everybody would tell me I'm unqualified for it. In performance reviews I always ask what I can improve, but that's about finding specific flaws in a specific task. I don't really want to be told that I'm simply unqualified, lock, stock, and barrel. But I'm sure I would be.

Why are you sure you would be?

Because I don't fucking belong here! Because if I have managed by coincidence to find a specific task I'm good at, the best thing I can do is sit in the corner and do JUST THAT -- nothing else -- and hope nobody notices me.

Didn't you use to be ambitious? Didn't you use to want everybody to see you?

Yes and no. It's complicated.

Fine, what's next?

Well there is the annual goal-setting process. We do that every year. It's not exciting. Whatever. And there's a process where each boss has to rate his higher-level employees according to they potential: are they ready for the next step? are they better left just where they are? or what?

How do you feel about that?

Well now that I no longer have direct employees I am going to be slid backwards a step. Once you hit a senior level of expertise, the only possible "advancement" is by managing people. Ever since Laurence Peter and the Peter Principle I thought we all knew that some people are really good at DOING but not so good at MANAGING, so that "rewarding" a top performer by making him a manager is often counterproductive. But that doesn't seem to matter.

You've been a manager before. Do you want to do it again?

Not these days. I was always playing against type. I could do it, but it took a lot of work and was very hard for me.

So you just want your job to be easy? Do you think everybody else at work has an easy job?

No, of course not.

So why should you?

Ssshh, talk quieter. If they hear you they'll start wondering the same thing. I did mention, didn't I, that I don't want them to fire my ass?

You did. What's next?

Next she explained the whole concept of career bands, which is what I've just been talking about. She also explained that if you are at my level, basically the only way you will ever advance (back to management) is to leave town, because our office is so small there's nowhere to move to inside it. I asked, "What about advancing as a technical specialist?" She explained that there is such an option in other parts of the company, but our division has chosen not to implement it. Tough luck, except you can always look for a job in another division. Again, that will require moving. Also you are likely never to find out about such opportunities unless you network your little heart out.

Have you?

That sounds like a lot of work. Admittedly I know it is possible to fuel it with passion, but I haven't really gotten there yet.

Has it occurred to you that the reason the company would be likely to fire your ass if they knew the real You has nothing to do with your hobby of philosophy, and is actually because you are so lazy and entitled? That you rely on being smart to coast by doing enough that people are happy with your work, even though if you were graded on the effort you put in you'd be scraping the bottom of the bucket? Do you understand that?

Not until you said it just now. Gosh, thanks.

Are there more of these tools?

God yes, the notes in my notebook go on for another ... [flips quickly] ... five pages. Do we really have to talk about them all now?

No. Not now, at least. I think we've gotten a couple layers deeper into what makes this reaction of yours tick.

Yeah. Thanks a whole hell of a lot.

Any time ....

Back-dated post on prodigies

I just found a note that I wrote myself back in June, so I posted it today but dated as if it had been posted in June. You can find it here.

Inga

Of course, another part of the reason that I spent Monday thinking about old friends so much is that I had just reconnected with one a couple days before. Nothing romantic this time, although Inga was a pretty girl back when I was in college. But Son 1 is due to graduate next weekend and is looking for a job ... ideally with the Federal government. I seemed to recall that Inga had worked for some other branch of the Federal bureaucracy years ago, so I thought maybe I could look her up and ask her for some advice for him. Even if she weren't interested in talking to me again, everybody loves to be asked for advice ... right? It's flattering.

So I dithered and dawdled for way too long and then on Saturday I finally composed the following e-mail to her.

Hello Inga,

I hope this finds you well. Yes, it has been decades since we spoke last; and no, I haven’t kept in touch during that time. These days I am in contact with only a couple of people from college: Marie, whom you might remember; and Schmidt, whom you might not. Some years ago I connected with M-- on LinkedIn, but after saying “Hello” we never continued the conversation.

 

I’m writing to ask your advice. My Son 1 graduates from college this month, and is hoping to find work with the federal government. By itself that tells you almost nothing, of course, and I’ll add some details in a minute; but my basic question is, Do you have any advice for someone beginning such a job hunt?

 

Son 1’s degree is in Security, from [his college], with a minor in International Relations. His senior thesis studied the process of naval acquisitions, or, Why the Navy won’t get the 355 new ships they are asking for. When I asked him to write an elevator speech to explain his goals in a nutshell, he sent me the following two sentences: “I have been studying global security, international affairs, national policy, and intelligence matters, and how to present those topics in both written and verbal form. I am looking for intelligence, policy, or security jobs that will get my foot in the door with the federal government.”

 

Son 1 has submitted a few applications already, but the federal government is so vast that I know I am out of my depth giving him job-hunting advice. But I also know you went through that process successfully, even though you are doing other things now; and if you had any generalities you were willing to pass along to someone who is just starting, he and I would be grateful.

 

Other than that — gosh, I could catch you up on 35 years worth of news but I can’t promise it would hold your interest. At a high level it follows a familiar arc: marriage, house in the suburbs, dog, two kids ... followed by separation, selling the house, sending the kids off to school, and moving into a small apartment in town, not in exactly that order but close enough. (The dog died of old age.) I’ll spare you the details unless you ask. And I’d love to hear your own story. It’s true I found hints on the Internet, at least enough to find an email address, but no more than hints. If you are interested in picking up conversation after this long, that would be grand.

 

But in any event, I would still be very grateful if you had any advice I could pass to Son 1.

 

Hoping to hear back, and with all best wishes,

Hosea

I wrote this while sitting in the Denver airport between flights; and after sending it I got up to walk around for a while. Nobody gets an answer right away to anything like this. She would have to find it in her email (could be days), read it, then decide if she even wanted to reply to me, then get around to writing it ... all this stuff. Right? No point being antsy about it. But of course I was.

Finally I couldn't stop myself from pulling out my phone to check my mail. She had answered already -- in eight minutes. Hot damn. She wrote:

Hi Hosea,

 

I'm absolutely thrilled to hear from you and would be happy to offer whatever input I might have of value on the joys and pains of Federal life. And, shockingly, I also genuinely AM interested in whatever additional life details you might care to share. My story, in a nutshell, is married to the love of my life but temporarily physically separated while (finally) working on my doctorate, retired from bouncing around the State Department and Intelligence Community, failed as an artist but loving my garden, and not had any dogs for way too long. I promise you more details too, should you so desire.

 

I'm absolutely available to either email or talk with your son, but do ask for a few day's pause, first. Unfortunately, you caught me right in the middle of writing a final due Monday. (Joy!) I'll be free to talk on Tuesday, and then heading home to hubby on Wednesday, but am most available to talk after that.

 

Also, if you're on Facebook and interested, I'm "Inga." I'd be happy to be your friend (not that there's ever been a time I haven't considered myself just that).

 

All my very, very best,

 

Inga

 

And yes, this made me giddy for the rest of the trip home. As I say, I'm not expecting anything romantic out of it -- did you notice that after I told her I was separated she was very careful to slip in the words "married to the love of my life" as if they were tossed off casually? I did. But it was great to hear such enthusiasm from somebody I had been very fond of 35 years ago.

 

We exchanged a couple more emails very quickly, including phone numbers. Then yesterday I called her and we talked for half an hour or so.

 

She sounds just the same. She said the same of me. I got time to tell her just a bit about my life and to tell one "Proud Poppa" story -- her first question, though, was "Are you happy?" which you may remember was one of my leading questions to Marie three years ago. And I heard a bit about what her life has looked like.

 

One thing, from the job hunting side. It turns out that the work she spent 16 years doing for the government was literally, exactly what Son 1 wants to do. So I am more than ever determined to get the two of them to talk ... maybe in a week or two, during the holidays.

 

On the other hand, I can already see a complication if she and Son 1 start talking regularly, so that he takes one of her calls while visiting Wife (or even if he just mentions her in Wife's presence). Inga's first name in real life is the same as D's, and of course Wife now hates D with a purple passion. I can see that becoming an awkward scene until Son 1 can explain to her that they are two totally different people who happen to share a first name.

 

Also, Inga is doing some research for her dissertation that will pull her towards this part of the country, so she has already told me that some time in the spring she will be stopping into town to see me.

 

I keep saying that there's nothing romantic here, by which I mean we're certainly not going to end up fucking. But God knows I feel a frisson that comes because she was a pretty girl that I was very fond of 35 years ago. And I found a photo of her on the web ... she's still a pretty girl, even if she's in her 50's. So yes, I have a bit of a goofy grin on my face and a spring in my step. It's a good feeling.  

 

Old letters

Son 1 graduates from university in a week. He'll be coming home until he finds a job, and will have to park his stuff in my storage unit. So last Sunday I went out to the unit to organize it so there would be room.

Termites had gotten in, eating the door frame and damaging some of the boxes (though not, so far as I could tell, their contents — or not much). So I moved everything into the (happily vacant) unit next door, throwing out a bunch of trash in the process and making some room for Son 1. 

I wrote Marie a long email about the whole effort and considered pasting it in here, but the only part that really matters is one or two paragraphs near the end that touch on the most emotionally relevant part of the four and a half hours of work.

__________

[After talking about moving the physical stuff — bunk bed frame, camping supplies, an old chair — I then wrote about the boxes of paper, which are far and away the largest part of my storage. Some of this is old business or bills that I can probably shred once I sort through to make sure nothing important is hiding there. Besides that, though ....]

And letters. I have at least two different boxes full of letters, and I only looked through the one that I had to rebox. But there were letters from grandparents, teachers, form letters I'd kept because God knows why; letters from my friends in Canada, keeping up with me after I moved to California [back in the early 1970's]; letters from high school friends when we all went different directions to college; letters from friends at college. Oddly enough I found none of yours, and I know I kept them. They must be in the other box. But I found letters from correspondence I'd forgotten all about: C—, the summer after my freshman year; R—, filling a whole folder of his own; K— griping about whatever she felt like griping about [and lamenting "Why aren't you here when I need you?"]; Fillette apologizing for not having written in so long [and enclosing a photo of herself in a wimple captioned "Does this look appropriately penitent?"]; even one from Flora obviously sent after I had graduated, saying "Nobody seems to have the slightest idea if you are coming for Ren Fayre! Are you?" (Actually that one was signed "Sybel" and it took me a while to figure out who Sybel was.) 

[Flora was a woman Marie had been in love with for several years and they were briefly lovers; so while I mentioned her letter because I thought it would be funny I didn't mention that there were actually more like three of them. For a brief time Flora went by the name "Sybel" and the only way I worked out who that was (lo these many years later) was that she signed one of her letters with that name and also her legal name.]

It left me ... is there a word for it? "Nostalgic" is probably closest, but it implies too much sadness and I wasn't exactly sad. "Very aware of the past" might be a better way to put it. And it left me shaking my head a little at how much I walked away from when I got together with Wife and dropped completely off the face of the earth as far as all my existing friendships were concerned. Hmm. Maybe sadness is an element of it after all? It's hard for me to think of the right words. 

Maybe I'll go full Californian and summarize all these emotions with "Oh wow." Sure. That covers it.

__________

The letter goes on after that, but to me that's the heart of it. Last night Marie and I spoke on the phone; and while she sympathized with all the work, she didn't much comment on this part. But it lingers with me. Yesterday I spent too much of my time at work googling old friends or trying to find them on LinkedIn and wondering what any of them would say if I sent them a note all these decades later.

Wondering ....

Contra monachismum

(For the Latin-impaired, the title means "Against monasticism.")

This post is lightly adapted from a long email I wrote Marie two years ago. If I worked at it I could make it better, I'm sure. But it belongs on this site and not just in my email, so let me put it there now and worry about polishing it another day.
__________

So. Why didn't I go to graduate school? Of course the short answer is that I did: Wife and I were both enrolled in graduate school from 1984-1986. But at the time we left I had no advanced degree, and I never went back. Why not?

 

Multiple reasons. Let's start with the most ... immediate, concrete, tangible, something like that. When we were there, Wife and I fought a lot. One of the recurring fights was that I spent "all my time" studying and "never" paid any attention to her. Of course I really did spend a lot of time studying; this is me we're talking about. And I probably didn't spend as much time with her as would have been good in a new marriage -- partly because I was studying, and partly because she often wasn't a lot of fun to be around. But I didn't see that so clearly at the time. I knew I was in pain over my marriage, but I had trouble identifying causes. So I bounced between thinking it was all her fault and thinking it was all mine. And the point is that when we left in 1986, I promised myself that I would never enroll in any school ever again so long as I was married to Wife. I had decided that, whatever other factors might or might not have been at work, I was "clearly" too obsessive a student to be allowed to carry on a romantic relationship if I were also studying for a degree.

 

That promise didn't stop me from thinking about going back. I fantasized about graduate school -- with or without Wife -- off and on for some years. Six, in fact -- right up until my former faculty advisor died in 1992. (That was an important year, in retrospect.) I had always imagined him as my lifeline back into Academia. I never really kept in touch with him, but we're talking about fantasy here. Anyway, that fantasy came to an abrupt end when he died and I really began to accept that what I was doing was not a digression from my real life, but actually WAS my real life.

 

From that time on, I pretty well abandoned the fantasy, except sometimes explicitly indulging it AS a fantasy. But it became more and more impractical. I had lost touch with all my contacts at school, and had abandoned my program with half my classes incomplete. For all I know, the I's may have turned into F's by now. Then in 1994 we bought a house and got a dog. In 1996 we had a baby, and in 1998 another. Pretty clearly at this point I was launched into whatever trajectory my life was going to have; it made no sense to think about starting over in another direction instead. Even when I lost my job at the end of 2002 and realized I'd have to do SOMETHING new, I never seriously entertained the idea of graduate school. A friend suggested I should teach classes at Adult Ed in some of the areas where I has acquired expertise, or maybe write a book. These ideas were flattering and I toyed with them briefly, but they weren't the same as going back into the heart of the Academy. After all, I needed a job and an income.

 

Those are the practical, "tangible" reasons. But of course there were others. Again, this is me we're talking about -- a born student. Right? One way or another, it's something I thought about a lot.

 

SO ALSO. Even while I was in graduate school, I felt like going there represented a failure of nerve. My dad once said that the reason he went to graduate school is that after he got his B.A. he found that the only thing he knew how to do was to go to school. So what the hell? He decided to keep going to school because it was easier than looking for a job. And I saw myself in the same boat. I'd had two years off between undergraduate school and graduate school -- what had I done with the time? Mostly nothing. Well, a few months of substitute teaching at the end, but nothing else. The accusation that maybe I didn't know how to do anything but go to school looked disturbingly plausible. And that made me want to do anything else instead. If all I knew was how to go to school, then damn it! I ought to be forced to do something else instead, just to learn another skill. If I were going to choose an academic life, I wanted it to be a real choice, a choice from strength, not a default that I simply fell into out of weakness and incapacity.

 

Besides, there was a corner of my brain which associated school with childhood. That's not crazy. Children go to school; adults Do Things Out in the World. So going to graduate school felt like choosing to perpetuate my childhood, perhaps indefinitely. But I was sick of being a child. I wanted -- finally! -- to be an adult. Which meant getting my ass the hell out of school and into the job market.

 

AND ALSO. You remember what I wrote you back in December? There was a part of me that hated my books, hated them passionately. Just like in the song, I felt like they were a wall cutting me off from other people. From real experiences. From the whole world. A wall that kept me locked in where it was drab, colorless, dusty, boring, and alone. What's more, I felt that this personal wall was just a smaller version of a much bigger wall which cut off the Academy from ... well you remember that back in college we referred to all of non-academic life collectively as the Real World. What were we saying about ourselves then? That's how I felt about it.

 

AND IN FACT. I felt there was something sterile and impotent about academic life. Clearly part of this feeling is that I associated academic life with my own life in books, and I associated my own bookishness with not having any sex. Equally clearly this chain of inference is provably false: plenty of professors have sex. Plenty of professors have children and raise families. To pursue an academic career does not require a vow of celibacy. But these are feelings, not thoughts. Facts have comparatively little relevance.

 

But there is a metaphorical sterility to the scholarly life as well. The whole point of scholarly research is to spend your life digging out new information that (for the most part) NOBODY WANTS TO KNOW. You work like hell to figure something out that nobody has ever understood before in the history of the world. You sweat over writing and rewriting it, until you say it just right. You fight like hell to get it published. And then nobody reads it. Ever. Nobody gives a shit. Ever. And you might as well make your living by digging a hole in the ground and then filling it in again.

 

Even you probably don't care that much. How many scholars do you suppose care deeply about the questions they are researching? Isn't it mostly that -- well hell, it looks interesting enough and they've got to be studying something? How many of  them will find their own lives transformed by anything they have learned? Isn't it mostly just a job? And if it is, aren't there easier jobs out there? Maybe even ones that pay better?

 

So a lot of research starts to look like masturbation: it might feel good at the time, but it doesn't generate anything new -- not new life, not even new (or deeper) love. Sterile.

 

BY COMPARISON. There's a strong overlap with how I feel about monasticism. This is something Debbie talked about from time to time: she wants to be a Buddhist nun. And the thought of it always bugged me. Why? Why wouldn't I want to be a monk? Well, there's the vow of celibacy to start with. There's also that you can't leave the monastery. You are as if locked in. Which makes monasticism sound a bit like prison. (Both prisoners and monks live in cells.) Now, the monastery we visited together hosts a lot of retreats. People go there for a weekend or a week. And if you live there as a monk or a nun, any relative of yours is welcome to come visit you for as long as they like. But you can't leave without permission of the abbot. It's a much nicer place than any prison I've ever heard of. But you can't leave. That's part of the deal.

 

ON THE OTHER HAND. You have to live somewhere. You can't live in two places at once. For somebody committed to the Buddha Dharma, wouldn't it be more pleasant to live somewhere that everybody else is as committed as you are? Isn't that actually the point? What sense does it make to complain that you can't leave?

 

MOREOVER. I have been on the campus of the local state university from time to time over the years, for lectures or movies or plays. I have been on retreat at the monastery, as I mentioned. The places in all the world where I feel most content and at home are university campuses and monastery grounds. There is something in the air in these places that feels like home in a way I have found nowhere else.

 

How can I so love the environment and still flee the life that produces it?

 

This is a great paradox for me, and I do not know how to read it.

What young women believe about their own sexuality

This is a companion piece to my rant of a few months ago against purity culture.

Only this time you don't have to listen to me. This time it's a TED talk by somebody who's done interviews and listened to the answers -- so maybe she knows what she's talking about? Just a thought.

Listen and weep ... or, better, listen and then try to make it better.

Dream this morning

I dreamt I was showering somewhere ... it wasn't a gym, but it was somewhere with several showers in the same place, like a gym or a barracks or so ... and I noticed that a couple of the people walking in to shower (naked, of course) were women. And what was interesting about the dream was how unremarkable it was. Nobody especially commented — I think in the dream I knew one of them and said "Hi" — and there was no sense either of embarrassment or of sexualization. That is, it did not signal to me inside the dream as particularly arousing, nor did anyone (men or women) make a point of turning away or hiding. It was just an unremarkable part of a larger story, and I was thinking about whatever it was in the story I was going to do next after washing ... only it so happened that that was when I woke up, so that's the bit I remembered. (And of course when I woke up I realized how unlikely an event it was and therefore remembered it longer.) But it was nice in a way not having the scene freighted with all the weight it would have in real life. Interesting.


Sent from my iPhone

What's an IYI?

I've talked before about how I am ill-at-ease with academic life, even though historically I was very, very good at it. (See here, for example.) There are multiple reasons, of course. One of them I wrote to Marie some time ago, but I seem never to have published here so I should go find it. (It compares academicism with monasticism as ways of life.)

But another part of it is that it always seems there's a risk of academics talking on and on about things they don't know. It's such an easy mode to slip into, it's not always clear that ignorance can stop you. And in my experience, it doesn't always.

This point has been made in multiple ways, over the years, by a wide range of people. Owen Ulph was always very good on the topic. (See my profile, or this obituary.)

But I recently ran across the writings of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and it is a running theme of his as well. So when I found the following passage available online -- with a statement giving blanket permission to reprint it under certain circumstances [scroll all the way to the bottom for a complete list] -- I could hardly resist.

This is an excerpt from Taleb's book, Skin in the Game.  

The Intellectual Yet Idiot

(Chapter in Skin in the game )

 

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

 

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

 

Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats who feel entitled to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They can’t tell science from scientism — in fact in their image-oriented minds scientism looks more scientific than real science. (For instance it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types — those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior — much of what they would classify as “rational” or “irrational” (or some such categories indicating deviation from a desired or prescribed protocol) comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.) They are also prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components as we saw in the chapter extending the minority rule.

 

---

 

The Intellectual Yet Idiot is a production of modernity hence has been accelerating since the mid twentieth century, to reach its local supremum today, along with the broad category of people without skin-in-the-game who have been invading many walks of life. Why? Simply, in most countries, the government’s role is between five and ten times what it was a century ago (expressed in percentage of GDP). The IYI seems ubiquitous in our lives but is still a small minority and is rarely seen outside specialized outlets, think tanks, the media, and universities — most people have proper jobs and there are not many openings for the IYI.

 

Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite. He fails to naturally detect sophistry.

 

The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “red necks” or English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When plebeians do something that makes sense to them, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated”. What we generally call participation in the political process, he calls by two distinct designations: “democracy” when it fits the IYI, and “populism” when the plebeians dare voting in a way that contradicts his preferences. While rich people believe in one tax dollar one vote, more humanistic ones in one man one vote, Monsanto in one lobbyist one vote, the IYI believes in one Ivy League degree one-vote, with some equivalence for foreign elite schools and PhDs as these are needed in the club.

 

More socially, the IYI subscribes to The New Yorker. He never curses on twitter. He speaks of “equality of races” and “economic equality” but never went out drinking with a minority cab driver (again, no real skin in the game as the concept is foreign to the IYI). Those in the U.K. have been taken for a ride by Tony Blair. The modern IYI has attended more than one TEDx talks in person or watched more than two TED talks on Youtube. Not only did he vote for Hillary Monsanto-Malmaison because she seems electable and some such circular reasoning, but holds that anyone who doesn’t do so is mentally ill.

 

The IYI has a copy of the first hardback edition of The Black Swan on his shelves, but mistakes absence of evidence for evidence of absence. He believes that GMOs are “science”, that the “technology” is not different from conventional breeding as a result of his readiness to confuse science with scientism.

 

Typically, the IYI get the first order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects making him totally incompetent in complex domains. In the comfort of his suburban home with 2-car garage, he advocated the “removal” of Gadhafi because he was “a dictator”, not realizing that removals have consequences (recall that he has no skin in the game and doesn’t pay for results).

 

The IYI has been wrong, historically, on Stalinism, Maoism, GMOs, Iraq, Libya, Syria, lobotomies, urban planning, low carbohydrate diets, gym machines, behaviorism, transfats, freudianism, portfolio theory, linear regression, Gaussianism, Salafism, dynamic stochastic equilibrium modeling, housing projects, selfish gene, election forecasting models, Bernie Madoff (pre-blowup) and p-values. But he is convinced that his current position is right.

 

The IYI is member of a club to get traveling privileges; if social scientist he uses statistics without knowing how they are derived (like Steven Pinker and psycholophasters in general); when in the UK, he goes to literary festivals; he drinks red wine with steak (never white); he used to believe that fat was harmful and has now completely reversed; he takes statins because his doctor told him to do so; he fails to understand ergodicity and when explained to him, he forgets about it soon later; he doesn’t use Yiddish words even when talking business; he studies grammar before speaking a language; he has a cousin who worked with someone who knows the Queen; he has never read Frederic Dard, Libanius Antiochus, Michael Oakeshot, John Gray, Amianus Marcellinus, Ibn Battuta, Saadiah Gaon, or Joseph De Maistre; he has never gotten drunk with Russians; he never drank to the point when one starts breaking glasses (or, preferably, chairs); he doesn’t even know the difference between Hecate and Hecuba (which in Brooklynese is “can’t tell sh**t from shinola”); he doesn’t know that there is no difference between “pseudointellectual” and “intellectual” in the absence of skin in the game; has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past five years in conversations that had nothing to do with physics.

 

He knows at any point in time what his words or actions are doing to his reputation.

 

But a much easier marker: he doesn’t even deadlift.

 

---

The Blind and the Very Blind

Let’s suspend the satirical for a minute.

 

IYIs fail to distinguish between the letter and the spirit of things. They are so blinded by verbalistic notions such as science, education, democracy, racism, equality, evidence, rationality and similar buzzwords that they can be easily taken for a ride. They can thus cause monstrous iatrogenics without even feeling a shade of a guilt, because they are convinced that they mean well and that they can be thus justified to ignore the deep effect on reality. You would laugh at the doctor who nearly kills his patient yet argues about the effectiveness of his efforts because he lowered the latter’s cholesterol, missing that a metric that correlates to health is not quite health –it took a long time for medicine to convince its practitioners that health was what they needed to work on, not the exercise of what they thought was “science”, hence doing nothing was quite often preferable (via negativa). But yet, in a different domain, say foreign policy, a neo-con who doesn’t realize he has this mental defect would never feel any guilt for blowing up a country such as Libya, Iraq, or Syria, for the sake of “democracy”. I’ve tried to explain via negativa to a neocon: it was like trying to describe colors to someone born blind.

 

IYIs can be feel satisfied giving their money to a group aimed at “saving the children” who will spend most of it making powerpoint presentation and organizing conferences on how to save the children and completely miss the inconsistency.

 

Likewise an IYI routinely fails to make a distinction between an institution (say formal university setting and credentialization) and what its true aim is (knowledge, rigor in reasoning) –I’ve even seen a French academic arguing against a mathematician who had great (and useful) contributions because the former “didn’t go to a good school” when he was eighteen or so.

 

The propensity to this mental disability may be shared by all humans, and it has to be an ingrained defect, except that it disappears under skin in the game.

 

---

Postscript

From the reactions to this piece, I discovered that the IYI has difficulty, when reading, in differentiating between the satirical and the literal.

PostPostcript

The IYI thinks this criticism of IYIs means “everybody is an idiot”, not realizing that their group represents, as we said, a tiny minority — but they don’t like their sense of entitlement to be challenged and although they treat the rest of humans as inferiors, they don’t like it when the waterhose is turned to the opposite direction (what the French call arroseur arrosé). (For instance, Richard Thaler, partner of the dangerous GMO advocate Übernudger Cass Sunstein, interpreted this piece as saying that “there are not many non-idiots not called Taleb”, not realizing that people like him are < 1% or even .1% of the population.)

Post-Post Postscript

(Written after the surprise election of 2016; the chapter above was written several months prior to the event). The election of Trump was so absurd to them and didn’t fit their worldview by such a large margin that they failed to find instructions in their textbook on how to react. It was exactly as on Candid Camera, imagine the characteristic look on someone’s face after they pull a trick on him, and the person is at a loss about how to react.

 

Or, more interestingly, imagine the looks and reaction of someone who thought he was happily married making an unscheduled return home and hears his wife squealing in bed with a (huge) doorman.

 

Pretty much everything forecasters, subforecasters, superforecasters, political “scientists”, psychologists, intellectuals, campaigners, “consultants”, big data scientists, everything they know was instantly shown to be a hoax. So my mischievous dream of putting a rat inside someone’s shirt (as expressed in The Black Swan) suddenly came true.

 

---

 

Note: this piece can be reproduced, translated, and published by anyone under the condition that it is in its entirety and mentions that it is extracted from Skin in the Game.

Grand opera

Today is May 19, 2019, and I just realized I never posted this here. I'm back-dating it to the date I got a few suggested improvements from Marie, which I have incorporated.

The context was ... well it grew out of another one of those long, tangled phone calls with Marie where she was lamenting that in one respect or other we don't have a perfect, fairy-tale romance. And once again I sat with her on the phone and then tried to suggest that no, we don't, and that's a good thing. Later on I worked it into a sonnet as below.

For reference, it's not that she does this a lot. She's not (well ... no longer) as high-strung that way as Wife or D used to be. But it still worries at her from time to time.

Anyway, here's how I tried to express it.






For you and me there’s no grand opera staged,
No fairy tales are told, no epics sung —
Because we’re both securely middle aged,
And songs like that are all about the young.

So I am I, and not a handsome prince;
And you are not a blushing ingenue.
The weakness of those girls, though, makes you wince,
And princes get no scriptless things to do.

So let us write a story on our own:
A tale of second acts, in medias res,
Of tumults weathered, other loves long gone,
Of patient smiles and wrinkles in the face.

Our messy lives don’t shine with fairy dew,
And yet our love is every bit as true.


   

planning

I just now wrote and sent this email to Marie.

My love, my sweet,

This morning when I wrote you about swimming I ended with "More on this theme later." In your most recent reply this evening you talked about me putting structures into my life. (Not nearly enough of them, I add ruefully!) Yes, well I've been thinking.

This week I was supposed to be deciding about [a professional continuing education class]. (At this point I think I'll do it, provided I still can. The deadline is Saturday but there's nowhere to register online, which means filling out a piece of paper, attaching a check, and mailing it. I emailed the coordinator this evening asking if she thinks a letter mailed from here on Friday will get to her there by Saturday. Of course it's only a 15-minute drive....) Anyway, then out of the blue somebody on the NextDoor social media site advertised this furniture. Picking up the sofa sounds like an obvious thing to do, but then I started looking at it more deeply.

The thing is, some time ago (I forget how long -- a year? two years? more?) I started visiting a local furniture store. They work with a company that makes custom furniture, so I got their information on making sleeper sofas. I looked at different styles and sizes, then came home and made a scale model of my living room (the one I texted you) and played with all kinds of variations. And in the end I never got the project finished. I never actually ordered the damned sofa. There were too many decisions and steps along the way, and I ran out of steam. Then this January I thought, "Well I have a good reason not to work on it now because maybe I'm going to move this year." Only that doesn't look very likely either.

Anyway, what this means is that buying a sofa from Donna across town is the same thing as admitting defeat in the larger project. And it's a well-earned defeat, to be sure! If after five years I still don't have a sofa in this place, that approach plainly wasn't working.

What this shows more generally -- one instance isn't enough to prove anything, but it illustrates it beautifully and I already know it's true -- is that I'm very weak at long-term planning and decision-making. I can make impulsive decisions. I can decide to go visit your family for the Fourth of July and book tickets the afternoon you formally invite me. I can make plans to take Son 2 to Peru when my cousin tells me I've got six months before she leaves the country. But something long-term, like researching, planning, and buying a custom sleeper sofa? Not so good.

I am not proud of this, but it's a fact.

Of course, at an intellectual level I know how to solve the problem ... or how I OUGHT to be able to solve the problem. It's the very same thing I was telling you about swimming: start by breaking the problem into the smallest pieces I can possibly imagine, and then just do The Very Next One with no thought to the larger task. If I think about the larger task, I'll quit; but if I just do one tiny piece at a time, then in principle I should make headway against any project which is finite in scope. (Clearly a Cantorian argument will show that I'm not going to make a lot of headway against infinite projects.)

The problem is keeping at it. The problem is accountability. What makes you go swimming when you'd rather sleep in? What makes you order a sofa when you'd rather go to the movies?

Well, I know that too. We all do. Having somebody check up on you, or somebody to answer to. This is why the world needs auditors.

I wish I were better at this kind of long-term task, and I suspect I've known what it takes to address it for a long time. The question is, who do I report to? This isn't the kind of role I want to ask a work colleague to take on for me, because it means exposing an awful lot of my own weaknesses and I'm not sure that's something I want to do to someone I know from work. The obvious answer would be someone close enough that I don't have to worry about maintaining a face in front of them, someone who already knows my weaknesses too well for that, someone more or less like a spouse -- but by the time I started to see and understand this stuff (and I truly don't remember when that was) there was no way I could have trusted Wife far enough. I never got far enough with D or Debbie to try it either. (It might have been possible with Debbie if we hadn't dropped out of touch, because she alluded to having had to do similar things at her end in the past to train herself how to make long-term plans. But in any event it didn't happen.)

You can probably see where this is going.

I'm not going to ask you to hold my hand while I buy furniture, though, because as noted I have already given up that battle. Time to pick something else that I've let dangle for too long.

One obvious thought would be [a writing project we've talked about recently], which certainly sounds fun and engaging. But I was actually thinking of something that is ... more tangible and in some senses easier, though not easy by a long shot. You remember when we were getting my living room ready to have my new neighbors over for dinner, that there were all these stacks of paper lying around that had to be moved? And if you open my filing cabinet it's almost impossible to squeeze anything else in because there's already too much. And in my storage unit there are boxes of old papers -- God knows what, really -- that I probably don't need, or most of them at any rate. One of the tasks I set myself on moving in was to set up a system for handling all this paper so I don't drown in it, and so I keep only what I want or need.

That was five years ago.

Would you be willing to hold me accountable to this? That doesn't mean putting off [the writing project] till it's over. Once I get my feet under me, maybe I can block out time in my week for writing as well. But what it would mean is this. Step one, due by the end of this weekend, is to write a plan for how to get it done. This means breaking it into tiny steps, absurdly small, the smallest I can imagine. Then it means committing to do at least ONE step every weekend. Remember, these steps are to be really tiny, so there should be no excuse for not getting at least one done each weekend. But if I do two steps one weekend, that does NOT allow me to do zero the next. At least one.

Progress this way will be very slow, of course. But consider: maybe I break the task down into 100 steps. At one step every weekend, that's two years ... but I've already spent five without doing anything. Getting it done in two years would be a huge improvement.

Note also that by planning to act only on the weekends, it means that in principle I can do other things during the week. Go to Sangha. Do my homework for the professional development class. Go to movies. Or maybe, ... you know, ... start writing. At least I don't rule it out. There is room into which it could be structured.

But without structure, it'll be like buying furniture, or any of the other things I want to get to Some Day.

It's a really unflattering picture, but then you already know plenty of my faults. What's a few more, at this point? So maybe the "warts and all" side of it won't exactly be a shock .... (faint smile)

Thoughts?

 

 

Know that I love you ever,
Your dilatory and unstructured (but ever-hopeful!) Hosea