Debbie is coming to town in February

Actually she will be visiting people in several parts of the state. She has quite an itinerary planned, starting with a visit to her mother.

And when she gets to the town where I live? Well she has a lot of friends here too. And there's the Sangha that she'll want to visit ... the Sangha she founded, and that I now visit weekly.

But she also asked me what I'd like to do. And when I sent her a few suggestions she accepted them all, adding, "I would love to spend as much time with you as we can both manage."

I'm pretty sure that offer still excludes fucking. But it is flattering to hear and sends a little frisson down my spine.

Naturally I told Marie that Debbie will be coming to town. I always tell her when Debbie and I are going to meet, though lately it has all been because I traveled to her place. I did, however, not quote the words "as much time ... as we can both manage." If I thought there were a risk of fucking, I would probably feel the need to be more conscientious about an exact quotation. Since there isn't I doubt it matters.

But anxiety is normal, dammit

Last fall I posted a gripe that my "default setting" was somehow "wanting-to-be-distracted". In the post I link to lots of others where I have whined about the same thing.

And then a few weeks ago, sitting in Sangha, I realized how natural that is.

After all, the Buddha's First Noble Truth is that all life is dukkha, where dukkha can be translated "suffering" or "stress" or "unsatisfactoriness." In fact I'm pretty sure we were reading an essay of dharma teaching at that point, and that the author made the point that this longing to be distracted is part of the fundamental nature of reality. So instead of whining about it, I should just be glad that I have perceived the fundamental nature of reality.

Just bloody wonderful.
  

Post from Thanksgiving

Just this evening I posted a bit from last Thanksgiving. You can find it here: https://hoseasblog.blogspot.com/2019/11/uninvited-parenting.html.

Pounding on the door

Marie was here a week ago to visit. We tootled around town some. kept talking about going out to a new restaurant I want to try but never got that far, and talked, and fucked. Yes, well.

So it was late Friday night, and Marie was squealing loudly to heaven for all she was worth, ... and suddenly I heard pounding on my door.

Ooops. That's right, I live in an apartment. It's midnight. Maybe other people want to get some sleep.

I didn't know which neighbor it was, and I sure as hell wasn't going to go answer the door stark naked and smelling like sex. So I just stopped dead. Marie stopped making noise. Silently I climbed over to my side of the bed, blew out the one candle we had going, and we went to sleep.

The next morning it turned out that Marie hadn't heard the pounding when I did. She just stopped because I stopped doing things to stimulate her. So I explained and made sure she understood she really had to be quieter.

That afternoon I got a text message from Son 1, who has been traveling for work all month. (He hasn't moved out yet, so his absence was part of why Marie hadn't bothered to hold it down.) He said, "So your downstairs neighbor texted me last night saying she heard yelling or screaming. You know anything about that?"

I replied, "Umm ... er ... yeah. It's fine. Sorry we woke them. Nothing was wrong and nobody was hurt."

Son 1 answered that by forwarding me this picture. I don't blame him.

Then I sent a slightly longer text to the couple downstairs:

"Hi! I just now heard from Son 1 that you texted him last night asking if everything was OK. I am really embarrassed and really very sorry for keeping you awake. Everything was OK and nobody was hurt, but I feel terrible for being a bad neighbor. Umm ... Marie has been visiting for a week but her flight home is this afternoon. So it should be quieter. Again, I'm really sorry."

It must have been four hours later that I finally heard back.

"Hi Hosea, just now able to respond. I apologize and also feel embarrassed by not thinking how that could have been a different kind of scream. I'm just glad everyone is OK! My apologies again. I'm glad you guys had a nice week together!"

What I think that means is that there's lots of embarrassment to go around, but it all turned out OK in the end. And I suppose it's good that my neighbors care enough to be worried about screaming ....
  

Jury duty

So this is different. This afternoon at 4:30, I finished serving on a jury. My first jury ever. Yes, I'm almost sixty.

The judge gave us several pep talks. In one he said, As American citizens you have three privileges: to pay taxes, to vote, and to serve on juries. Of course he immediately added that some people might not consider all of those to be "privileges": but, he went on, the system is designed around jury participation and can't work without it.

And it was an interesting experience. It was a civil case, not a criminal one; and in fact in an earlier phase the defendant had already been found liable to pay "suitable damages" to the plaintiff. It was our job to determine what constituted "suitable damages".

In the end we awarded him less than he had asked for, but more than the defendant had suggested. Indeed, our number came awfully close to being the arithmetical average between the two positions, but that's not how we arrived at it. (And in fact we were forbidden to arrive at it that way.)

What interested me most was learning that we as jurors were allowed to ask questions of the witnesses. Not directly, of course. We would put written questions on the ledge of the jury box; then from time to time the bailiff would sweep up all the questions that had accumulated and pass them to the judge. The judge would decide whether each question could be legally asked; if a question could be asked, he passed it to the clerk, who made copies for each of the attorneys ... and then, finally, one of the attorneys would ask the question.

And the question itself was interesting, because it involved the conflicting opinions of two different expert witnesses. Was one of them lying, or in cahoots with one side? Or was it just a hard question, on which expert opinions could honestly differ? (I suspect the latter.) Why did each expert witness look at a set of data that managed neatly to exclude any of the other guy's data? And what if we tried to analyze the question fresh for ourselves? (The group contained three engineers -- plus me -- so this is actually what we started to do.)

Anyway, we stayed awake and we submitted a steady stream of engaged questions. This led the judge and the opposing attorneys all to tell us what a great jury we were. The plaintiff's attorney said he has literally had to drop a big stack of books during the trial to make enough noise to wake a sleeping juror. Maybe the bar we had to clear to rank as a "great jury" wasn't actually all that high. 😊

But it was fun. And a novelty for me.
  

I'm going to regret this

I told you all about Wife wanting to come to my family's Christmas. In the end it came to nothing, but it took a while to get there. Son 2 was staying with her for most of the season; and what I arranged with him was that maybe she could show up when I wasn't there. But then nobody called my mom to make arrangements. Turns out that Son 2 told Wife, "I'm not your social secretary. If you want to visit Dad's family, you have to pick up the phone and make the arrangements." And she never did it. So that was good, as far as it went.

But I couldn't stop wondering about next time. So today I wrote Wife an email, as follows:

Hi.

You asked to join my family's Christmas this year, and that got me to thinking about what "family" really is. It's not a perfect definition -- certainly not complete -- but I think part of it has to be this:

Your family are the people who always put you first (and you them, of course).

That doesn't mean you always hang out together, or you are always interested in the same things. But it means that you don't betray each other.

But by this definition you chose to opt out of my family years ago, by your own actions.

The day that became really clear to me was July 14, 2008. That's the day you paid Boyfriend 5's electric bill with our credit card, after I had spent an hour begging you not to.

You had never met Boyfriend 5 in the flesh. You had never spoken to him on the phone. In fact, you remember that he turned out not to exist at all; you were just being played by a lonely girl in Dallas who pretended to be a terrorist from ----.

And if you had been willing to act like family, you would have gone along with me when I asked you not to pay "his" bill, ... just to make me happy, for no other reason than that I asked. In reality you pressed me for reasons.

So I told you that Boyfriend 5 looked like a fraud. (He was.) I told you the Internet is full of thieves and scam artists who harvest other people's credit card numbers for purposes of identity theft. (It is.) But you decided you were in love with Boyfriend 5, ignored what I said, and paid his bill anyway. With our credit card.

And here is the important part. When I thought about it later I realized this was exactly in character. When it came down to a choice between me or The Other Guy, you would always choose The Other Guy. You and I can both think of other examples too, but this is the one that crystallized it for me. In some ways this was a very tiny betrayal, but this is the one that made me realize I could never trust you not to betray me.

But if I cannot trust you not to betray me, then we are not family. Simple as that.

If you want to visit my mother on some other day, or prowl through thrift stores with Brother and SIL, ... it's up to them. If they enjoy your company and want to see you, it's a free country.

But please don't ask to join "family celebrations" ever again. By your own actions, you chose to opt out of my family.

Happy New Year,
Hosea

After clicking "Send" I forwarded the same email to my mother, and to Brother and SIL, so they would know I had made the request. Since I assume they know nothing about Boyfriend 5, I included a cover letter as follows:

Dear Mother, Brother, SIL,

I hope this finds you well. It was great seeing you all for Christmas.

You remember there was some discussion about Wife wanting to join us some time over the holidays. The more I thought about it, the more that felt wrong to me and I finally figured out how to express it in words. So I sent the attached note (below) to her today, asking her never to make that request again. I am sending it to you as well, so we are all on the same page.

The event that I reference in my letter took place over a decade ago. I had better explain what happened, because I realize I jump into the story in medias res. If you don't want to know about it, you can skip this part.

Wife had met someone on the Internet who claimed to be a terrorist from ---- named "B5", and after a while she decided she was in love with him. I was pretty upset at that part, but then it got worse: one day he told her he couldn't afford to pay his electric bill, and so she paid it for him online with our credit card. She called me at work first to ask if it was OK and I said "No, absolutely not." I explained the risk that "B5" was an identity thief and that giving up the card number could be very dangerous. But after I got off the phone she decided that I must be wrong. She "knew" that B5 was a wonderful person whom she was in love with, so it would be perfectly safe.

In the end it turned out that "B5" really was a fraud, but -- thank heavens! -- wasn't interested in stealing our credit cards. But the event was a turning point. She had done worse things before, and would do worse things after. But somehow this event, small though it was, made me realize that nothing I said was ever going to matter. And so it was the beginning of the end.

Mostly I have kept pretty quiet about the things that went on at home while I was married to Wife, and I'm not trying to dump garbage in your laps today. But since I asked her please not to ask to come to Christmas again, or any other holiday, I wanted to be sure you knew I had done so. Then in the interests of transparency I decided to send you the same letter I sent her. And then I realized that I had better attach this cover letter because otherwise you wouldn't know what I was talking about.

In other words, it's not my plan to start complaining about all the bad things that are securely in the past by now. I consider this to be an exception.

And of course -- as I say in the letter to Wife as well -- if you enjoy her company and want to spend time with her outside of family events, by all means feel free to do as you like.

If you think I'm wrong about any of this, I should probably understand why so please drop me a note.


Thank you,
Hosea

And I have spent the rest of the day on tenterhooks.

I have gotten no reply from anybody yet. But I worry that sending these will prove to have been a catastrophically bad idea. I guess I'll find out.