COVID-19 diaries, part 3

Days march on as Debbie lives with COVID-19 ….

Monday: "I'm feeling so very tired today. Otherwise much the same."

Tuesday: "Things are moving along here and the days are very quiet.  My breathing seems to be quite a bit better, so gratitude for that!  My main symptom now is extreme fatigue and lack of energy.  I don't even have the oomph to do much in the way of knitting, reading, or answering emails. Hence no daily update yesterday.  So I am hanging out, resting a lot, napping in the afternoon every day. Giving myself permission to do nothing."

Wednesday: [This day when I checked in with her all she said was, …] "Thank you, Hosea. How are things going for you?"

Thursday: Today Debbie hosted a Zoom call with her mom, her sister (and her sister's family), and another friend from the sangha she started here years ago. She looked a lot better, and she said she had more energy -- maybe not vast energy, but enough that she could start to think about when it would be safe to see her daughter again, and her daughter's family. We all chatted for fifteen minutes and she smiled, and then we hung up. I feel better, knowing that she has started to feel better. Hope it continues.

     

What's wrong with empowering messages?

Can you eat pizza mindfully?

I wonder whether it is possible to eat pizza mindfully.

Do you know what mindful eating is? It's a meditation technique. Thich Nhat Hanh talks about it here and here. The whole idea is that you slow down and really let yourself experience the food you are eating, that you think of nothing else but just the taste and texture of the food and all the feelings as you chew it and swallow it. It's really very pleasant, and I've it whenever I am on retreat with Debbie.

Only ... I don't know how it is possible to do it with pizza. Somehow there is something about the smell and taste of pizza that triggers me to scarf it rather than to savor it. I made some for dinner tonight and watched myself as I ate it. The only time I could make myself slow down and savor it was for my last slice of the night, after I was already full.

Wait a minute. If I was paying attention to my bodily sensations, why did I eat a slice after I was already full? Well, it's pizza. I wasn't paying that much attention, I guess.

It would be great to be more in control of my reactions. At least in principle. Maybe I can settle for being aware of them.
    

Despising fame

This morning over breakfast I was reading more of Anne Roiphe's Art & Madness. ("More" is a reference to the selection that I quoted here.) The book is a memoir of her time as a young woman in her twenties, when she was married to Jack Richardson, also a writer. (Actually at the time he was the writer and she was "just a wife.") The memoir explores all the things that people believed back then about being a writer and living with a writer. For example, Jack -- but also all the other (male) writers he hung out with -- drank huge amounts of alcohol, slept with his friends' wives, visited prostitutes, and generally carried on like he wanted to be Ernest Hemingway when he grew up. The crazy part is that in the late 1950's and early 1960's, everyone accepted it. Anne herself said she didn't mind Jack's horribly irresponsible behavior because she assumed that one day he would achieve literary immortality, undying fame, and this would make it all worth it.

All this was fine until Jack actually got a play produced in New York. (It seems unlikely that the play was on Broadway, but I forget at this point if it was off-Broadway … or off-off-Broadway.) The audience applauded politely but the critics hated it. Jack disappeared into a world of bars and brothels for a week. And it is with reference to that time that Anne writes:

That is the moment I began to despise the idea of fame. What does it do for the bearer of the laurel? Who cares if your name is in the paper? Who cares if you are mentioned as one of the top-ten cyclists, boxers, batters, painters, poets, artists, fly fishermen in the world? Who cares if your name is written in history books? When you have died you can't read those history books. When you have died the small trace you have left behind, even if you win a Tony, an Emmy, an Oscar, an election, will lose its vibrancy, fade into an outline. Oh yes, him, I heard of him, I knew someone who read him once. What difference does it make to the corpse if his books are in libraries or not in libraries? Who cares if his plays are revived on the summer-stock circuit for one hundred years? Isn't the simplest touch of a child's arm on the face more important, isn't the good meal, the brush against a thigh, a hand held during a movie, a swim in the sea, aren't those things of equal importance as the sands of time come rushing down on our heads burying ambition and love, good and evil, breath, blood, brains, waste, memory, alike in oblivion?

Jack wanted to be Michelangelo painting on the ceiling, lying on his back on the scaffolding. Good old Michelangelo. Good for us who stare up at the hand of God reaching toward Adam. But actually Michelangelo doesn't know that crowds line up and pay good money to enter the room to see his masterpiece, and if he had known, would his breakfast have tasted any better, his loves been any stronger, his life any longer? Would he have dined on a happiness of greater portion than the man who made a cabinet and sent it on to his patron's villa or the man who made puddings he sold from his cart? Fame is the snake in the garden, the great seducer. Perhaps Jack thought that if he were famous enough, enough like Keats, he could beat the hurt that chased him down dark streets or he might just sleep better at night.

The night of the bad reviews for his play was the night of a small assassination. I knew that each word cut his spirit, that no matter how hard he drank, how many packs of cigarettes he smoked, no matter what other drugs of highs or lows he found, these words seeped into his bloodstream, the pain would not lessen. No matter how many whores let him do this or that (and what did they do?), in the end he would be crushed, beyond repair. And so I grieved and began to hate the pursuit of fame and view it as a poison that withered my love and made me turn my face away from him in fear of his failure, which another man might have seen as a stumble on the path but I knew this man would see as a crash, as a cosmic condemnation, as a license to lie in bed all day and drink all night.

-- Anne Roiphe, Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason, pp. 174-175

Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill 1628 by Pieter Claesz

    

COVID-19 diaries, part 2

More from Debbie.

Friday: "Today has been pretty uneventful.  It is the first day that I have felt like I could stay in bed all day, I'm so tired.  I didn't do that, because my breathing seems easier when I am up and about and breathing more deeply.  But I did take a long nap midday.  Still no fever, very little cough, oxygen saturation okay, so I think I'm doing reasonably well."

Saturday: No update.

Sunday: "It was a quiet day.  My breathing seems better; my fatigue a bit worse.  I sat in on two church services by zoom this morning and I slept most of the afternoon. I am sharing dinner time each day with family by zoom.  That has become a grounding ritual and it is wonderful to stay connected in that way."
      

A great quote about productivity

"Generally any task that can be measured by the metrics of productivity — output per hour — is a task we want automation to do. In short, productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring. None of these fare well under the scrutiny of productivity. That is why science and art are so hard to fund. But they are also the foundation of long-term growth. Yet our notions of jobs, of work, of the economy don’t include a lot of space for wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring."

-- Kevin Kelly, "The Post-Productive Economy," January 1, 2013

The rest of his point in the essay is a good one, so far as I can tell. But I love this as an abbreviated extract:

"Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time."

Hell, I know I'm pretty good at wasting time. I'll take it.

See also "farting around" by way of comparison.
     

De monachismo, or, Orwell on sainthood and renunciation

Yesterday I rediscovered an essay by George Orwell that I first read maybe three years ago. The title is "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," [you can find the whole essay online here] and it does indeed start out talking about a pamphlet that Leo Tolstoy wrote attacking the work of William Shakespeare and in particular "King Lear," which he used as an example of the whole. Orwell, though, does not confine himself to a narrowly literary analysis of Tolstoy's venom but tries to explain it by putting it in the larger context of Tolstoy's religiosity. And when he considers Tolstoy's religious views about the virtue of sainthood and renunciation, he contrasts that perspective with what he calls a "humanist" view:

It is important to realize that the difference between a saint and an ordinary human being is a difference of kind and not of degree. That is, the one is not to be regarded as an imperfect form of the other. The saint, at any rate Tolstoy's kind of saint, is not trying to work an improvement in earthly life: he is trying to bring it to an end and put something different in its place. One obvious expression of this is the claim that celibacy is ‘higher’ than marriage. If only, Tolstoy says in effect, we would stop breeding, fighting, struggling and enjoying, if we could get rid not only of our sins but of everything else that binds us to the surface of the earth — including love, then the whole painful process would be over and the Kingdom of Heaven would arrive. But a normal human being does not want the Kingdom of Heaven: he wants life on earth to continue. This is not solely because he is ‘weak’, ‘sinful’ and anxious for a ‘good time’. Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise. Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. The humanist attitude is that the struggle must continue and that death is the price of life. ‘Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all’ — which is an un-Christian sentiment. Often there is a seeming truce between the humanist and the religious believer, but in fact their attitudes cannot be reconciled: one must choose between this world and the next. And the enormous majority of human beings, if they understood the issue, would choose this world. They do make that choice when they continue working, breeding and dying instead of crippling their faculties in the hope of obtaining a new lease of existence elsewhere.

Here, in the space of one paragraph, Orwell says what I tried to say at much greater length in my post "Contra monachismum." I like also his deft way of handling the question of suffering. You remember, after all, that both Plato and the Buddha propose their respective forms of asceticism as a way to maximize pleasure by avoiding suffering. Back in 2014, inside of two and a half months, I wrote two posts over on the Patio about this exact topic, one critical and the other sympathetic. (There's also this post, which I kept in this blog even though it is quasi-philosophical because it seemed just a little too raw and a little too extreme for the tame, placid environment of the Patio.) Yes, Orwell says, life is suffering. And it is grand anyway. L'Chaim!

I sometimes wonder whether Friedrich Nietzsche's supposed "love of pain" that some authors find in him is not really, perhaps, just a recognition that pain is inevitable in life and that it is even an inevitable part of the greatest pleasures. It has been too long since I last read Nietzsche for me to be sure of this idea, and I might be confused. Still, Nietzsche did get his philosophical start by analyzing tragedy; and Orwell is clear that this perspective is inextricable from the tragic sense.

Is humanism inseparable from tragedy? Is there any way of integrating what is good and beautiful about monasticism with a philosophy that denies the foundations of monasticism? I don't know. But I like Orwell's essay.
    

COVID-19 diaries

I wrote you all that Debbie has been diagnosed positive with COVID-19. Here is what she has said about her symptoms so far.

Monday: She got the test Monday morning because of some upcoming travel. Monday "afternoon I developed a tickle in my throat and felt a bit 'off.'  No other symptoms - no fever, no cough, etc."

Tuesday: "I'm feeling pretty tired and mildly achy - my feet feel like they are 'buzzing' which is a bit weird.  But other than that, still no fever, etc."

Wednesday: "Today, I am feeling very tired, somewhat achy and warm, and occasionally I have a dry cough.  But no fever and my oxygen saturation is normal."

Thursday: "I am still doing okay and only experiencing mild symptoms.  I felt sicker today than previous days, more tired and lethargic, with an achy head and an occasional dry cough.  My chest felt heavy and it felt like I had to work harder to breathe today, but my oxygen sats were okay - between 95 and 97, and still no fever.  I'm feeling better tonight than I did most of the day, so that's encouraging."

I haven't gotten an installment for today yet. I'll post follow-ups as I can.
   

Debbie has tested positive

I got an email about an hour ago from Debbie. She has tested positive for COVID-19. She says she is hoping for a mild case.

Yeah, no shit. I hope the same thing.

Wow.
   

Philosophy at home

Son2 called me in the middle of the day — I was home but "at work" — because he wanted to talk about Marcus Aurelius.

He has been reading the Meditations, and he said most of it seems like really sound advice. But he was really irritated by the Stoic take on ambition. Why should I reconcile myself to being a tiny speck in the Universe? What's wrong with my trying to become excellent at my craft and thereby to gain undying fame? What's wrong with wanting immortality?

Wow. Funny you should be asking me these things. 

I told him I couldn't stay on the phone long (in the end it was about half an hour) but that we should talk more on the weekend. And I added that this is a question I've actually spent a fair bit of time thinking about. So I gave him a few different ways to think about it and we called it a day, until the weekend or something. 

It's just funny that he's wrestling with the exact same question I did. Part of me figured that the reason I wasted so much time on it was that my father was always filling my head with hot air about my own superiority from a very early age. I tried hard not to do the same thing with my boys. That is, I assured them that I loved them, and that they should pursue what they wanted to pursue because they'd probably do well at it. But I tried not to talk about Greatness. I don't know what Wife might have said behind my back. 

But maybe this isn't a question you get from Someone Else. Maybe it's just one of those things that some people wrestle with, regardless. 

It was a delightful phone call and I look forward to continuing it. 

Sent from my iPhone

A new post back in 2013

I was storing a bunch of my old emails and found one between me and Debbie back in 2013 that is similar to other things I've posted before. So I posted it. You can find it here. 

To be clear, I am trying to say that I did not post it back then. But I could have.
     

Overdoing quarantine?

What's the new consensus on how often to shower? I mean for people like me, who live alone but hold normal office jobs that (these days) are conducted mostly from home.

How about leaving home? How often, and for what?

I worry that I'm failing to measure up.

This last week I showered on Tuesday morning and then again some time in the middle of Saturday. Call it maybe 100 hours, for a round number. Back in the olden days (before mid-March of this year), I showered daily. If I went more than 36 hours without a shower my skin started to itch uncontrollably all over. This week I hardly noticed.

I went into the office on Monday because of this and that. I went to the dentist on Wednesday. Other than that I have walked out to check my mailbox. When I remember. Which means less than once a day. I have not exercised this week. At all.

Last time I went to the store I bought some fresh produce to make a couple of recipes that looked interesting. I still hope to make them before the produce gets too old and disappointing.

Some time last week, or maybe it was the week before, I decided maybe I'd be happier if I stopped drinking for a while, because I no longer enjoyed how it made me feel. This seems to have been a positive change, at least so far. I'm sleeping better and with less interruption. These spells of dryness never last (or haven't in the past), but I'll take it while I can.

The world is very strange these days. I keep hoping some day there will be a "new normal" to adapt to. Somehow I don't think this can possibly be it.
       

A sucker's game?

"Here is a moral problem. My ex-husband had not so much committed adultery as rode out into the night, pumped with nicotine, shining with watery red eyes, brain cells floating in alcohol, his words swinging like ropes across the room, tying all the pretty women into a group from which he picked one to follow home, night after night. He also roamed the streets looking for prostitutes, when he was drunk enough. He had explained to me that this was necessary for his well-being. He had to do this. His nerves required it. He did have to do it and I understood. But as I waited for him to come home in the early hours of the morning, I had come to feel that I was a fool, a lady-in-waiting in a court that didn't exist. If other women had my husband, I too could do as I pleased. This was not so much a moral choice as an abdication of morality. Fidelity seemed like a sucker's game. I had been betrayed by fairy-tale myths of happily ever after. My conscience ached but I ignored it.

"My father, who did not love my mother, took to bed in downtown hotels, in uptown hotels, in apartments on the maid's day out, on the nanny's day out, on the cook's day out, my mother's friends, Dorothy, Sally, Helen, Honey, and others whose names I cannot remember. How did I know? I knew because my mother told me. Ice packs on her swollen eyes, a double scotch by the bedside, she told me. And I knew by the time I knew anything that the marriage vow was like the little boy's finger in the mythical dike, in the real world it wasn't going to hold. And so I understood, divorced lady that I now was, that I was a menace, a threat to someone else's hope for a reasonable ever after. I looked at Doc and detested him for what he would do to his wife. I also understood that I would not be an innocent bystander but, like Dorothy, Sally, Helen, and Honey, I would be both greedy and ashamed. I felt uneasy at how easy it was to become the other woman or one of the many other women. But then I believed or tried to believe that everyone should be free and every free act struck a blow against a world so cramped and sad that I could not endure it, would not pass it on to my daughter.

"In other words I was unmoored, uncertain, and violated the only religious precept I really believed: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But those untos in the phrase marked it as ancient news from an ancient world that couldn't survive the things we knew, the things we did, the terrible monster that was mankind. It wasn't so much desire that led me as my intention not to live like a coward. I was determined to take what life would offer. I didn't want to be the only woman of my generation to hold to standards everyone else had long ago abandoned. I do not excuse this because of youth or anger or past history. I think that no one knew, was really sure, whether it was better to snatch what sex one could from passersby or to remain faithful to a love and miss the party, miss the circus and grow old and bitter. I wasn't sure what was right or wrong or if it mattered. I considered Simone de Beauvoir. She was not impressed by the Lord's commandments.

"I had the morals of a four-year-old."

 

-- Anne Roiphe, Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason, pp. 18-20.

I wonder whether Wife ever thought through her infidelities with this level of discernment and exactitude. I think not. If she had, I think she would have been more of a libertine and wouldn't have tried to hide so much.  And in fact I have written here before that I would have liked that better than what she really did do. It might have been tough in it's own way -- Anne Roiphe's memoir makes it clear that this life was tough on her and her daughter -- but it would have been bracing, a challenge.

Right now I'm not sure what else the passage makes me think. But I'm certain it's important and I wanted to share it.
       

Closing up shop, part 2

So it turns out that I was reading my letter wrong. The job I have here is being eliminated because the corresponding job in Sticksville is technically a new position. But yes, they want me to move. But my boss told me privately that the people planning the move had asked him, "Do you really need this extra position, or can we get rid of it in the move and save a headcount?" And he told them, "Yes, I really need the position in order to take care of these and those tasks, and what's more I really need Hosea Tanatu to fill it." So that was nice to hear. 

I discussed it a little bit with Debbie last night. She asked where my thinking was, and I said so far I had kept busy enough I couldn't really tell. (She smiled.) But I added that mostly I have been having two thoughts.

1. Rationally, I remember that my last job hunt took a year and a half. And it's reasonable to suppose that it will be harder this time because I'm almost 59, with plenty of visible grey in my beard. And the economy sucks right now, so it's a hard time for anybody to look for a job. And there are a lot of technical tools that other people in this line of work are familiar with and I've never bothered to learn, so on paper that makes them more attractive. And a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. And so on.
2. Emotionally, I really don't want to move to Sticksville. And I have a largely emotional hunch that one day our whole business unit will sink, probably sucked down into the depths by the Sticksville plant. I have no hard data for this. But emotionally, I just don't want to move.

Then I thought a bit and remarked that so far I have detected only one additional thought bubbling up into the mix, and so far it has been a quiet one. It's just that one of my recurring fantasies has been that when I finish "what I'm doing now" (whatever you count that to be) I run off to Timbuktu to do something totally different. (See for example this post here.) Is this a chance to do that? I suppose it might be.

I wonder if anybody is hiring in my line of work in Timbuktu?

       

Closing up shop next year

Yes, our regional management is going to close our office. (See my post from yesterday.) Not right away. The last day will be March 31, 2021. But that's still less than a year.

There are 44 people at our location. Of those 44, 27 positions are being moved to Sticksville. Note that I said "positions": I have no idea whether the company will move any actual people, or whether (if you want one of those positions) you have to move yourself. Also Sticksville is a long, long ways from here, and it's not nearly as pleasant a place to live. Do they think anyone is going to take them up on it? Well, times are tough. Hard to find a job when so many places have closed down because of COVID-19. But wow. I'm not going to put a lot of money on them getting many takers.

Of the rest, 9 will be allowed to work at home the way they are doing now; the remaining 8 positions are eliminated. If you can find a job somewhere else in this behemoth of a worldwide company, good on you. (Of course, Americans aren't exactly welcome anywhere else in the world right now.) But otherwise, ... oh well.

If I read the paperwork I got correctly, I'm one of the ones whose position is being eliminated. But I have a meeting with HR tomorrow to go over the details. Maybe there's a remote chance I read it wrong.

On the other hand, I've been approved for three solid weeks of travel this fall. Most of it is going to be driving, because that is the safest way to travel when you factor in COVID-19. But in order to get to a place from which I can reasonably pick up a car, I'll have to take the train for two-and-a-half days from where I live to Weather City, a spot in the middle of all the places I'm going to. I'm taking the train because for most of the route I can be in a sleeper with a door on it, and so I expect that the likelihood of infection is lower than it would be if I flew. 

It's remarkable how far this damned pandemic has made itself part of so many discussions: look at how many times I've already referenced it in this post, when my topics are totally unrelated. Except they're not. Welcome to the future.

Anyway, the last time I was laid off it took me a year and a half to find a new job. I sure hope it doesn't take me that long this time, but this time I've got grey in my beard: so whom am I kidding? Oh well, we'll see how tomorrow goes.

       

Laid off tomorrow?

This afternoon the Regional President for our Business Unit in the USA sent a meeting invitation for a mandatory 30-minute phone call with everyone who works at my location, with the topic "business situation." (Phone call because of course he's in another state.)

Mandatory.

Everyone who works at my location, but nobody else.

"Business situation" in the middle of a pandemic when we know the company is bleeding money.

And when they've already made a big deal of saying they don't want to lay anyone off, but we just haven't rebounded as fast as we have to. 

Is there any way that this can not mean the company is planning to close our site? It's not like we are the headquarters, or anywhere especially important. I guess my only real question is whether the people will be tossed overboard as well, or whether they will just ask us to work from home permanently so they can stop paying rent.

I guess I'll know soon enough.

    

Sent from my iPhone

The real answer on what to do with your life

All those tiresome posts of mine about whether to look for a new line of work? Turns out there is a straightforward answer to all the insecurity that drives those questions.

My thanks to Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, by Zach Weinersmith. You can find this one here: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/quantified-self.
    

Who's out there?

Is anybody besides me reading any of this? 

Comment on this post and tell me something about yourself.

Of course there are trillions of websites on the Internet. (Is that even the right order of magnitude? I pulled it out of my ass. It could easily be too big or too small. Oh wait ... I just asked Google, who pointed me to the answer that as of January 2020 there were "over 1.74 billion websites of the Internet. So I guess I exaggerated.)

Anyway, there are a lot of websites on the Internet. The odds of anybody randomly stumbling across this one are correspondingly small. 

That was true when I first started this blog too, but back then I knew how to change it. I became a "comment whore." Back then I was struggling with my wife's chronic infidelity, so I commented on websites that offered support to the cheated-upon. I also started following some blogs by adulterers, to try to understand them from the inside (as it were). I left comments and plenty of linkbacks, and gradually people began to drop in and read what I had to say. Then I went private for several years, for a variety of reasons. Some people stayed with me, until in the natural course of time they slowly drifted away. The way everybody does.

Meanwhile I've gone public again, because the reasons that drove me private no longer obtained. But if anyone is reading today, they are keeping quiet.

And I no longer have a single, overarching theme. I write about whatever I'm thinking about. That makes it harder to play the "comment whore" game a second time, because there is no obvious place for me to go to leave my comments and trackbacks. Do I care? I don't know. Maybe this blog can just take the place of a journal, where -- as noted -- I can write down everything that happens to flit through my head. 

Or, well ... not everything, not with no filter at all. I still try to disguise my identity, so that I don't have to disguise what I think or say. (Oscar Wilde:  "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.") And I mostly try not to talk about politics, because that feels somehow sub-personal. Anything overtly philosophical gets posted on another site, which I refer to casually as "the Patio."

If I knew that I was in conversation with someone in particular, that might help me shape my thoughts. Or not. But it would be nice to know.
       

While I'm comparing Wife and Father ....

My post of a few hours ago about Father competing with Wife one Christmas was specifically intended to echo a post from some eight years ago about Wife competing with Brother. But it also reminds me that I have often felt there were significant similarities between Wife and Father. That's one reason why, once I was disentangled from Wife, I thought about using this blog in a slow and relaxed way to meditate on my relationship with my dad. If it worked to help me figure out one problematic relationship, maybe it could help with another. (As soon as I wrote that I started browsing through the blog to find where I say so. I'm sure I do somewhere, but my indexing isn't very good and I can't find it. I can find this post where I wonder if I still need to keep the blog at all; and by the time I got to this post I had already made that decision some time in the past. But I can't find where. Oh well.)

Here's one similarity that struck me some months ago. I jotted it down, and if I write it now I won't have to keep the note. Both of them think (thought) of people schematically, "putting them in boxes" as it were. 

I wrote about this with respect to my dad in this post here. (And actually, come to think of it, you can cross-reference this essay over on the Patio.) But Wife always used to do it too. (I suppose it is likely that she still does, but I don't have any recent data.) She listens to what someone tells her and then uses that to construct a two-dimensional picture of him or her that she then uses as the basis for her future interactions.

In fact this is one of the things that frustrated her the most when she first met my dad. My father was fond of floating ideas to see how people reacted, and sometimes he would introduce one with the words, "Well I always thought that ...." I grew up around him, so I knew that this meant "Here's something I just thought of." But Wife assumed it was a statement of deep religious principle, and was therefore puzzled and frustrated to hear him contradict it blandly the next time they talked. (I just did a search and found that I mentioned this same fact about their interaction in this post here. Maybe after a while everything I say is just repetition of one sort or another.)

Anyway, it's not a profound point. But it's definitely a similarity. One of many ways that maybe, in a weird karmic sense, they deserved each other. Given how famously they got along, that's a funny thought.
   

Remembering another time when Christmas was a competition

My title is clearly an allusion to this post here. But last week I was reminded of another time that the same thing happened, kind of, in a different way.

What happened last week is that my coffee maker broke. After several years of reliable service, I had it making espresso one morning when there was a loud BANG! and steam started shooting out of the seal where the lid fits on. It was about done so I turned it off; but the next time I tried to use it, there was no seal left. It no longer forced the boiling water through the ground coffee, which means that it is now useless. Time to get a new one, I suppose. And as I was musing about this, I thought back to when and how I got it.

It was a Christmas present from Wife, back ... oh, I'm not sure when. It couldn't have been any later than 2012 (the year of the post I linked above) but it was probably a couple of years earlier. I doubt it could have been any earlier than, say, 2008. Maybe we can compromise and call in 2010, until I remember some other detail that pins it down more exactly.

Anyway, somehow I had gotten the idea that I wanted a coffee set in my office at work: a coffee maker, and a set of little espresso cups. Of course it would be handy when I actually wanted a cup of coffee, instead of having to walk all the way down the hall. (Which wasn't far, of course.) But I also thought it would look really cool, and maybe I could offer coffee to other people if we were having a meeting in my office or something. (I think that happened once.) So contrary to my usual diffidence around Christmas gifts, I asked Wife for exactly what I wanted. She responded by buying me this perfectly serviceable coffee maker and four really cute little espresso cups with matching saucers, wrapping it all up festively, and putting it under our tree with a big bow for Christmas morning. I was delighted.

Only, ... as we were unwrapping presents that morning she said something that I didn't really understand. She said she had talked with Father on the phone in the days before Christmas -- planning and coordinating, as usual -- and had mentioned this. And she went on to say she was afraid he was going to try to get me a bigger and fancier one, to compete with it.

I wasn't sure I understood her too well, or that she was telling me what really happened. I knew that frequently Wife would talk about something she was doing in a self-deprecating way that could make my dad misunderstand her: maybe he thought she wasn't really going to do it, or maybe he thought she hoped he would take the burden off her, or something like that. (Only part of their chronic miscommunications resulted from Wife saying things obliquely, or in a manner that you had to get used to before you understood it. The other part is that my dad really didn't listen very well, most of the time.) Or perhaps he had said something that she'd misunderstood -- maybe he hadn't bought me any such thing at all. It seemed altogether possible to me that the miscommunication could have gone in either direction.

Anyway, after we were dressed and breakfasted, and after we had opened our stockings and all our presents to each other, the four of us piled into the car and drove the two hours "over the hills and through the woods" to the home of Mother and Father, where we also met up with Brother and SIL. And of course there was more food, and more presents, and lots of hubbub to be enjoyed by all.

When it came time to open the presents at my parents' house, Son2 took on the role of "Santa": he would pull an item from under the tree, check the label, and deliver it to the intended recipient. And, as always, we started out doing these pretty much one at a time, with all attention focused on each recipient in turn: "Oh, what is it?" But after a while -- as always -- everyone's attention began to wander. Side conversations sprang up, people wandered out to the kitchen for more coffee, and there was less intense focus on each new person in turn opening exactly this present here.

Somewhere during this latter phase of the process, Son2 informed me that there was a large box over against the wall with my name on it. There was enough side conversation at the time that I think the discussion was pretty much just between us. I asked him to drag it over to me, but quietly, and then not to wait but go right ahead and deliver the next person their next present. So while the next person was noisily opening his next present and everyone was exclaiming over "Gosh, what did you get?" I quietly sliced open the wrapping paper at the very top and peeled it back.

Sure enough, it was some kind of high-tech super-duper coffee maker from my dad, with lots of switches and controls and settings. I don't know what all it made, honestly, because I didn't look at it that closely. I just quietly replaced the wrapping paper and slid it back to its former place by the wall.

After a while the whole potlatch glut wound down and people started to meander away, either to a more comfortable sofa, or back into the kitchen for some coffee or cookies or aquavit. But my dad looked around vaguely disconcerted and said, "I think there's a present missing somewhere that someone forgot to open."

I shrugged and said, "It doesn't look like it."

He nodded coyly over against the wall and said, "Over there? Did you miss that one?" (And he seemed a little disappointed that the audience was wandering away.)

I shook my head and said, as deadpan as possible, "I didn't miss that one. I have no use for something like that. Where would I put it? You know our kitchen has no counter space."

"Well maybe you could use it at the office, to entertain all the European VIP's that come through there so often."

I just repeated, "I have no use for it." And then got up and walked away, in case it wasn't clear that the conversation was over.

As an aside, maybe I should explain my dad's remark about "entertaining all those European VIP's." Of course my office was only a small part of a very large company. And the same company has offices in Europe as well as many other places around the world (including plenty more in the United States). From this slim collection of undeniable facts, Father spun a fantasy that seems to have included a lot more European visitors than we ever really got, many of them in exalted positions in the company (also a stretch) ... and this fantasy apparently also included seeing me in a position to entertain them (which has certainly never been part of my job description).  

This was one of the things he did that made conversations so frustrating: he would piece together fragments of what you said, especially if you said them carelessly or inexactly, and then extrapolate them into implications that were far removed from any reality. Then if you told him "That's preposterous" he would always reply, "Well that's just what you told me, back when you said ...." Whatever followed would be a fair imitation of what you actually said -- uncomfortably close, so that you couldn't pretend he'd made it up, with perhaps one or two words subtly adjusted to suggest his more grandiose interpretation. 

And then what? Most of the time -- until very, very late in the game (only his last few years, really) -- I let myself be sucked into the argument, insisting "No what I really said was this other thing," and generally going into far more detail than the original topic could ever possibly be worth. My dad loved this kind of correction, for at least two reasons: first, it gave him lots of my undivided attention, which he craved with a kind of unquenchable thirst; and second, it gave him far more information than I ever wanted to give him about subtle details in my life ... which he could then cook into more overheated fantasies. 

In his last few years I finally learned just to shake my head, feign bewilderment, and tell him, "Well that's not the way it is, so it can't be what I really said." When he'd ask, "So how is it really, then? What did you really say?" I learned to shrug and say, "It doesn't matter. Never mind." This made him disappointed and frustrated and (intermittently) fairly bitter, but it allowed me to protect my boundaries better. I wish I'd thought of it years earlier. So soon old, so late smart.  

Wow, that was a longer digression than I had planned on! Gosh, where was I?

I never called him out on having bought this big, shiny, whizzbang coffee maker, nor even asked him why he did it, but it bothered me. Of course there was always the possibility that he had simply misunderstood Wife (as I imagined, above). But it really seemed like he was trying to compete with her. And I kept thinking, "Dude, are you really trying to compete with my wife? You know I fuck her, right? So you know that's a competition you can't ever win. Do you have any idea how pathetic it makes you look? Unless you think you're going to fuck me too, which is not only pathetic but really creepy and not gonna happen. So ... what the hell?"

And of course if I had ever put it that way he would have denied everything.

But I think he did want to compete with Wife, at some level. I think he felt like Wife had come along and snatched me away from him, and that the two of them were in a regular struggle over me. It would fit better with our ideas of how this works if I had been a girl and Wife had been my husband, because God knows we've certainly got a cultural archetype to fit the creepy father that feels a rivalry with her husband for the affections of his daughter. But in that cultural archetype the rivalry is more obviously sexual. I have sometimes described the uncomfortable parts of my relationship with my dad using sexual imagery, but so far as I know it has only ever been a metaphor. I don't think -- really, I don't! -- that he actually physically craved my body. It's just that emotionally he desperately needed so much validation and had such poor boundary control (at least where I was concerned) that it felt very creepy just the same. 

Anyway, it looks like it's time for me to buy a new coffee maker.
      

On lying, part 10, continued

The very same day (yesterday) that I read the passage in the preceding post, I read the following paragraph in an article about Joe McCarthy:

Like many bamboozlers who succeed by preying on the earnest and the credulous, McCarthy was easily bamboozled. He often tied witnesses who had little to hide in knots, but the actual spies who testified (and there were one or two) completely fooled him.

-- Louis Menand, "Sloppy Joe," The New Yorker, Aug 3&10, 2020, p. 73.

This, too, sounds right in retrospect. I remember lamenting to myself many times that Wife would take anybody else's side before mine. What this meant was that if I disagreed with some random stranger -- or warned her against him -- she would use her sharp critical intelligence to scrutinize and tear apart everything I said, clause by clause; and then she would go piteously soft-hearted when it came to the other guy's side. This is what happened when I tried to warn her against paying Boyfriend 5's electric bill, which in the end she did anyway. When she got an email from someone claiming to be the only living relative of a little girl in Nigeria who needed money for a cancer operation, I had to threaten her to prevent her from sending money: I forget at this point if I threatened violence or divorce, but I remember it required me to assert levels of marital authority as Husband and Head of the goddamned Household that I never once actually believed in. It wasn't just yelling ... she was used to me yelling. I somehow (and after all the years I no longer remember quite how) had to make her afraid of me before she gave in. And I wondered for years ... why does she trust these obvious shysters so easily and never trust me? I never understood it.

But according to the remark in this article, maybe that's normal. I still don't really know.
      

On lying, part 10

Guild cleared his throat. "She told us about finding this here chain and knife on the floor where the Wolf dame had most likely broke it off fighting with Wynant, and she told us the reasons why she'd hid it till now. Between me and you, that don't make any too much sense, looking at it reasonably, but maybe that ain't the way to look at it in this case. To tell you the plain truth, I don't know what to make of her in a lot of ways, I don't for a fact."

"The chief thing," I advised them, "Is not to let her tire you out. When you catch her in a lie, she admits it and gives you another lie to take its place and, when you catch her in that one, admits it and gives you still another, and so on. Most people -- even women -- get discouraged after you've caught them in the third or fourth straight lie and fall back on either the truth or silence, but not Mimi. She keeps trying and you've got to be careful or you'll find yourself believing her, not because she seems to be telling the truth, but simply because you're tired of disbelieving her."

-- Detective Guild and Nick Charles, in Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man, chapter 25, pp.123-124 

It has been years now, but when I read these lines yesterday it felt exactly like life with Wife. Probably I'm overdramatizing, or giving her too much credit. If I think about it, I recollect that I could often (usually? or maybe only sometimes?) tell when she was lying, and if I felt like I had to I could sometimes break her down to what appeared to be the truth. So maybe she wasn't really a Mimi Jorgenson. But dear God it was tiring.