Son 2 has a girlfriend

Yesterday Son 2 called me. He often calls on the weekend to say hello, though he's not strict about it. Anyway, this time he really said he had only one piece of news -- namely, that he has a girlfriend. I said this was much better news than his stepping in quicksand. He said, "Now you can decide that I'm normal," and I chuckled that I wouldn't go that far. He told me her name, and corrected my attempts to spell it. And that was about it. Then he said he was going to call Wife and tell her.

You will notice that this call told me almost nothing about her. Son 2 texted me a couple of photos, including one of the two of them together. She looks very pleasant; he's smiling. It's not quite what I've called a "goofy grin" but close. But he told me nothing else about her besides what I've told you here, and I didn't ask. My father was always really pushy and intrusive about wanting to know the details of my private life, and I want to spare Son 2 that same inquisition. I replied to his text saying that I'd be happy to hear any stories he wanted to tell me, but on his schedule. And that means that right now I know virtually nothing.

Son 2 did suggest that Wife won't be nearly so lenient. He left a message on her phone, and said that he expects "a barrage of questions." 

The call sounded rehearsed, and the abrupt way he ended it made him sound awkward. I assume that this relationship really isn't new, but that he got to the point of wanting to be able to refer to her by name when talking about her. Or maybe she pushed the issue, the way D once pushed it on me. Either way it didn't really feel like news. The last time or two that he stayed with me, whenever we talked he seemed to start a lot of sentences with "My housemate." ("My housemate did this," "My housemate did that.") Now he can give her a name, which is shorter. And one morning while he was sitting at my kitchen table, he got a phone call that prompted him to stand up and step outside right away; when that call wrapped up, I heard him sign off with "Love you." So as I say, it didn't really feel like news.

Doing the math, I realize that Son 2 is 23, and this is the first time he has said anything about dating anyone. That doesn't mean he hasn't dated, of course. He went to boarding school for high school and he went away to university, so anything is possible. But if he was dating before now, he never bothered to mention it. So it is possible that he started his romantic life kind of late, the same way I did.

Meanwhile his older brother, Son 1, has never said anything about dating at all. He has had the same opportunities as Son 2 for carrying on a romance out of sight of his parents, but I just notice that he has never said anything.

Twenty-three years old? When I was that age, I was already married. Not that my example is necessarily the best one to follow, obviously enough.

Anyway, that's the news.

         

Death of a Buddha

You may have seen in the news already that Thích Nhất Hạnh died today. This afternoon I got an email addressed to the UU Sangha that I used to attend back before COVID-19, spreading the word. Then in the early evening I logged in for my regular weekly Zoom call with Debbie. She was watching the tail end of a memorial service for him at a Zen retreat center in another state, and I said it would be fine for her to share her screen so we could watch it together.

We talked about him for a long time. Thầy — that's an affectionate nickname for Thich Nhat Hanh and means "Teacher" — is or was the founder and spiritual leader of the tradition Debbie follows. When I mentioned back in 2013 that she was ordained into a lay order, that meant that she had formally received the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings which ordained her into Thầy's Order of Interbeing. 

She talked about times she had been privileged to hear Thay speak in person. I added that I had seen and heard him in person exactly once, because he was there on the occasion of Debbie's ordination, formally officiating. Then afterwards he gave a dharma talk and took questions for a long time from the group as a whole. Some of the questions came from pretty far out in left field, but Thay answered them all: carefully, respectfully, simply, and compassionately. He was remarkably skillful. Debbie said at one point, "I truly believe he was the Buddha for our day."    

Later she said that all week she had been contemplating one of Thay's poems, "No coming, No going," and that it had helped her come to peace with his death. She added that even though he is physically dead as of today, she can feel his presence around her through his teachings. So in one way she was sad, of course, but in another way not. She was in any event profoundly moved.

After a long while we began to talk about the rest of her week. It has been a tough one. She works as an occupational health nurse, for a clinic system where close to 10% of the staff are sick at home with COVID-19, even as cases among the public in her area are spiking. She has to connect with every staff member who is out sick, and check on their progress, so the clinics can figure out how to reassign staff to maintain their coverage. And she told me, not only was the workload heavy but the emotional weight of it was just as heavy, because so many of her colleagues are sick and suffering, or have family members who are sick and suffering. One was a grandmother, who contracted the disease from her grandson; the grandmother was weathering it well enough, all things considered, but the grandson was in the hospital and intubated. Debbie asked if the grandmother would accept prayer for her grandson, and the grandmother grasped at the offer gratefully. By the time that phone call finished, Debbie added, both she and the grandmother were weeping openly.

She added one other thing, which did not surprise me a bit. One by one, her coworkers have been talking to the president of the clinic system, telling him how grateful they are for Debbie's unstinting help and deep compassion. She told me this only by the way, only to say how grateful she was that she had been able to help them so much. She explicitly rejected the idea that it reflected anything special on her. But — as I say — I wasn't a bit surprised. Debbie's compassion really is almost boundless. It's one of the things I love about her. She would rebuke me sharply for putting it this way, but she is a bit of a saint.

So she talked. I listened, reflected back to her what I heard her saying, and tried to console where I could. I remarked that hard weeks like this are even harder when you can't meet anyone in person, to offer a hug or even hold a hand. (The thought came to me because there were so many times during our call that I just wanted to hold her.) She agreed, and pretty clearly understood what I was saying. When we wrapped up the call, she looked straight into the camera and said:

"You know I love you."

I nodded and replied:

"I love you too. I will always love you."

And I will. Of course I knew it and she knew it anyway. But sometimes it's nice to say the words out loud.

            

Quicksand?!

I got a call from Son 2 this morning. He was out on a job site and accidentally stepped into a patch of quicksand. Me, all I know about quicksand is that it's used as a plot device in movies, like "Lawrence of Arabia" or "Blazing Saddles." But apparently it's an actual hazard out where he's working.

The good part is that he had a stout wooden staff with him. As he left for the site this morning, he figured that surveying it would require a lot of hiking and the staff would come in handy. Well ... it came in handy helping him out of the quicksand! Then he called me for about a minute, to let me know it had happened, and went back to work.

This has nothing to do with any of the other threads in this blog, but I just couldn't fail to mention it.

    

A different future for marriage

Some years ago — gosh, seven, now that I take a look — I wrote a post on the future of marriage, with some of my thoughts at the time. Just today I saw an article on-line that harmonizes remarkably well with what I wrote, though it reflects an option I don't believe I considered at the time. The option is "platonic life partnership," and it means ... well, it's interesting.

When I read the headline, my first thought was, "Marriage without sex," and it didn't sound like much fun. In a sense it's that, but in a sense not at all. The idea is that modern marriage combines multiple relationships into one: a spouse should be a lover, a best friend, a co-parent, and a part of the household. Marriage is supposed to involve compaibility of values, of temperament, and of sexuality. And the concept here is, Why not unbundle those? So the article talks about people who are best friends, who already know that their temperaments and values are compatible, who therefore decide to set up a household together even though they have no intention of ever fucking each other. That's not to say they plan to live lives of celibacy: they are perfectly free to fuck other people. But it means that they don't rely on a bond as passionate, unreliable, and evanescent as lust to ground a relationship that requires permanence — the way that establishing a household, building a financial future, and raising children do.

So these people establish permanent partnerships with their best friends, and then date on the side. If one of their dates wants to stick around for longer than a one-night stand, right away there is a conversation about, "My life is tied to my friend here. If you want to be part of my life, you have to accept that."

The original article is here in USA Today, but seems to be behind a paywall.

I read it here in MSN Start, but I don't know if that link will work for everyone.

Interestingly, this kind of relationship fits all of the descriptive statements that I mentioned in my post from so long ago, except in two places where the statement may not be applicable:

• Marriage is a school for character. 
• Marriage provides a home for raising children.
• Marriage must be practical, not idealistic.
• Adultery happens. Get over it. This one's not really applicable, because there is never any sexual expectation built into the relationship in the first place.
• Marriage does not have to be between one man and one woman.
• Once the kids are out of the house, it might be time to call it quits. The applicability of this one is open to question. What I really meant at the time was, Don't quit while your kids are still in the house because they need you. And I still believe that. But why should we expect the bonds to loosen over time? Because "People change"? Yes, people change; but I think one of the common kinds of "change" is that the fog of romantic lust slowly dissipates over time, revealing a relationship between people who are in other (non-sexual) respects seriously incompatible. In a "platonic life partnership" there isn't that fog of lust in the first place, so maybe the odds of long-term compatibility are better. I think we need more empirical research to be sure.

Anyway, I thought it was an interesting respin on the concept of marriage. I'm glad to see there are people thinking through the options. And I'll be interested to see where it goes.

 

  

Silly coincidences

A couple weeks ago I mentioned a blog post by John Michael Greer on numerology, which has to be the least plausible form of divination I've ever heard of. But Greer is an interesting fellow, so I continue to follow what he writes. And today he posted another one, here.

This one is specifically about how to calculate your "birth number" and what it is supposed to mean. How to calculate is easy: write out your birthdate in numbers and add them up. Suppose you were born on July 4, 1976: then your birth number = 7 + 4 + 1 + 9 + 7 + 6 = 34, and 3 + 4 = 7. So you would be a 7. And his post gives a long paragraph about what it means for your personality and destiny to have "7" as a bith number. (Normally when you get a two-digit answer you add the digits to get a one-digit result. But there is an exception for 11 and 22, each of which gets its own description.)

I'm not going to quote any of his descriptions: you can go read his post for that if you want to. But I was struck by a number of coincidences, by which I mean pairs of people I know who both have the same birth number.

Hosea: 22, which has its own description but shares a lot in common with 4.
Brother: 4

Wife: 8
Marie: 8

[The description of an 8 is very close to what Wife used to be like before she got so sick and basically became a whole different person.]

D: 9
Debbie: 9

Schmidt is also a 9, come to that, but I don't think of him in quite the same way that I think of D or Debbie. 

Son 1: 6
Son 2: 6

[I suppose this could explain why Son 1 has made a point of taking in Wife to make sure she has a roof over her head.]

The descriptions don't always work. My mother comes out as a 5, which doesn't describe her at all. But maybe that's what she used to be like before I was born …? No idea. (My dad was a 7, in case you wondered.)

[Update a year and a half later: I revisit my mother's birth number in this post from May 2023, in which I conclude that it makes a lot more sense than I thought at first.]

But my brother and I are both 4 (more or less); my sons are both 6; my first two girlfriends (Marie and Wife) were both 8; my two romances immediately after Wife (D and Debbie) were both 9. I mean, sure, the odds for finding a pair here or there probably aren't that bad. But it sure looked a little funny.

Maybe I should stop talking about this now.

      

Gender dysphoria and transition

I told you that Cassius suffers from gender dysphoria, and wants to transition to life as a woman. When Cassius told me this in our long phone call, he said, "I don't know what you think about these things," and I said I hadn't thought about them much.

But in fact I had already thought about them some, and these days I am thinking about them more. Since these are general philosophical topics rather than strictly personal ones, I'm posting them over on the Patio. I start with this post here, and then proceed with the next few posts after that.

     

Madness road

Last month I explained an idea that had occurred to me many years ago, that there was a connection between Wife's openness to the invisible world and her mental illness. On the one hand, she did seem (at least in the early years) to have some demonstrable level of psychism, sometimes knowing what was going to happen before it did. The psychism, for that matter, seemed to run in the family: her mother had the same Gift, and talked about it in the same matter-of-fact way that she would talk about her sewing or her needlepoint or the latest gossip from the local Historical Society. Wife's oldest sister had the Gift as well; she lived in another state so I didn't know her nearly as well, but again she took it as a matter of course. Wife's middle sister never talked about the Gift, not even with Wife or their mother, and apparently didn't have it (or else turned her back on it). All three brothers — so I was told — lacked it as well. (I met the middle sister many times, but never met any of the brothers: one had killed himself, one had died of cancer, and one had abandoned the family — all many years before I ever met her.)

As I say, sometimes Wife knew what was going to happen before it did. Not always, of course, but once in a while. She also had remarkably good success reading Tarot for herself or others. I watched her do reading after reading while she was learning the cards, with the result that I kind of picked up the textbook meanings associated with each card. And I learned the layout she usually used. But then I would watch her read for a total stranger — some friend of a friend that she met at a party, who asked her to do it. She would shuffle, lay out the cards, ... and then confidently tell them things about their lives that had nothing to do with the textbook meanings of any of those cards. Afterwards it would turn out that she was right.

And she was very good at "aspecting" the Wiccan gods or goddesses, most often Cerridwen (her patron) but any of the others as well. I mean by this that she was good at making herself a vessel or channel through which one of Them could speak — good at letting her own personality step aside so that the Deity could possess her body and speak with her voice. (I mention this briefly in a couple of paragraphs here, and I allude to it in this poem. Not sure if I explain it anywhere else in the blog.)

Anyway, some years ago I began to wonder whether there might not be some kind of link between these abilities and her mental illness. I don't mean it in an insulting way ("People who think they are psychic must be crazy!"), but in a clinical or diagnostic way. In other words, I wondered whether the reason that some people have a greater ability to do these things than the rest of us is that they are somehow born with naturally thinner shielding around their minds. The rest of us have naturally thick shields, and screen out all the psychic or supernatural data that is normally in the environment; therefore we don't see it, and assume it doesn't exist. But maybe a few people are born with thinner mental shields: then on the one hand, they are able to perceive data that the rest of us miss (so that they exhibit psychic abilities); but on the other hand, their minds are correspondingly more fragile and break down a lot more easily.

On this view, Wife's mental illness — along with all the misery that it caused her and me and everyone around her — was somehow in the nature of a tragedy. On this view, her neuroses and all her craziness were just side-effects made possible by the same natural endowment that provided her Gift. And on this view, her total collapse once she got sick was just a predictable consequence of the same thing. She came into the world as a delicate instrument who could pick up signals the rest of us could never hear. But delicate instruments don't fare well when they are dropped. And when, because of the normal vicissitudes of life, she slipped off the shelf ... she hit the floor and smashed into a hundred pieces.

For several years I tried to comfort myself with that story. In some ways, it is a very generous story because it makes so much of what happened to be Not Her Fault. But I never knew if it was just a private conceit, or if it was the kind of thing somebody else might come up with too.

Until today.

Today, while I was wasting time on the Internet, and found a link which took me to Galina Krasskova's blog Gangleri's Grove. Once there, I saw a post from New Year's Eve called "Treading the Path of Memory," in which Ms. Krasskova spells out the striking similarities between ballet and shamanism. (If those don't sound related to you, read the article. Once she gets into the details, it becomes a lot clearer.) In particular, though, she has some very specific things to say about the relationship between shamanism and madness. She writes as follows:

Long ago, I learned that there were two paths to becoming what many might term a ‘shaman': madness road or death road. The idea is that you are cast down from your world, shattered and in the process of rebuilding and restoration, one comes back stronger and more resilient than before. There is a third way though, and that is the road of art. What is that? It is living a life where you are fully given over to the daimon of an art – in my case dance. Every inch of your identity, everything inside and out by which you exist and define yourself as a human being, centers around, relies upon, and is defined by one’s art. Then…usually at a terrible and critical juncture, that is stripped away and the result is a psychic shattering of the self. You rebuild (or not, but “not” involves consequences that are a luxury for a spirit worker. “Not” involves destruction, devolution, sometimes madness, drug addiction, and death). You claw your way back into some semblance of existence. You learn to live again and eventually, if you’re lucky, to find some measure of joy. If this is part of a spirit-worker’s journey, then this is when the Gods begin the process of direct formation. (In the end, I think every spirit worker or shaman ends up traipsing painfully down every one of the roads at some point in their life as we are remade again and again in service to our Gods. It is the way of things – formation never ends). The easiest and most productive thing to do is to embrace the process.

This could have been Wife's story, with only cosmetic edits. 

• She started out wanting to play music, and became accomplished on the pipe organ. Then her teacher told her she could never play professionally because her hands were too small — playing for church services was the best she could hope for. 
• So she gave up music and threw herself into scholarship and teaching. That lasted until she failed her qualifying exams in her second graduate program and had to leave school. 
• Then she gave up scholarship and teaching for the world of business. And that was taken away from her when her health finally collapsed and she could not go on another step. 

One by one, her goals were taken away from her until she had none left. If you ever wondered about the source for the despair she shrieked out in this post ... well, this is where it came from.

An interesting consequence of Ms. Krasskova's perspective is that Wife's losses stop looking like disasters, and start looking like tests, ... steps along the way towards learning to become a Priestess. I don't remember if I ever proposed that she look at things this way. Some days she would have taken my head off for saying anything like that. But that's the kind of thought I had in mind when I wrote:

The road marked for my wife is hard,
With pain and sickness closely barred.
But those who will to serve the gods
Must meet their tests, despite the odds.

Anyway, it was nice to find that someone else sees it all the same way.

__________

P.S. [added the next day]: The thoughts in this post are also connected to the line of thought I pursue in this post from three years ago. The difference is that the kind of "dying" I talked about back then is nothing like as dramatic as the things Ms. Krasskova discusses above, and nothing like as dramatic as the physical or mental illnesses that wracked Wife and destroyed her life. Also I have never claimed to be a shaman or spirit-worker. But there is an echo here, however distant.   

        

What was wrong with us all?

I've wanted to write this post since I spoke with Cassius back on New Year's Eve, but I've had no idea how to start or what to say. That's still true: I still have no idea. But instead of trying to work this out, I've just spent my evenings drinking too much and browsing the Internet. So I may as well make a stab at it. I can't promise not to drink too much tonight, but I can try to explain what is irking me. Solvitur ambulando.   

Back when I was growing up, in the 1960's and 1970's, there was a pretty common idea of what adulthood looked like, at least in certain basic respects. You went to school for a while (through high school or through college), started working at a job, got married, and had kids. Marriages might not be perfect, but they provided islands of stability in an uncertain world, environments in which it was safe to raise children. Once upon a time, there was even an assumption that they were permanent, though that became obviously less and less certain as the 1970's wore on. But long-time readers know that even when I started out this blog in late 2007 I still believed that marriage should be permanent -- see, for example, this rant from early 2008. 

Anyway, of course intellectually I understood that just because a huge number of cases averages to X, that says nothing about individual cases or about tiny sample sets. So if you had asked me, back when I was in college, "Are you mathematically certain that the lives of you and your friends will fit the Standard Narrative?" I would have known that I could not answer Yes. But at an emotional level I would have thought I should be able to answer Yes anyway, or else I would have thought that any deviation required some kind of systematic explanation beyond random chance. I never was very good at understanding statistics.

How did it turn out? Let's look at my sophomore year in college. During that year I was part of a well-defined group of seven friends. I mean, of course we all had other friends too, but the seven of us regularly ate together and hung out together. How well did the seven of us fit the Standard Narrative?

• Hosea: Pretty well. I married two years after graduation. We had two kids. We stayed together for thirty years. But now we are separated. Also, Wife was a bipolar, abusive narcissist, so "stability" was sometimes a question. But I did my best to compensate.
• Cassius: Married a few years after graduation, a woman 22 years his senior. No children that were genetically his own, but two stepchildren from her past: one was three years older than Cassius, and one was three years younger. One way or another, the domestic environment (including the domestic power dynamics) had to have been very different from what you expect from the Standard Narrative. After he was widowed, he started a relationship with an abusive, nonbinary sociopath. He suffers from gender dysphoria and is now considering gender transition.
• Schmidt: Flunked out of college and went home to live with his parents. Never left. Took over the family business after his father died. After some years, figured out that he is gay. Never married. Never established any long-term romantic or sexual relationship with anyone. No children.
• R: Shortly after graduation, he entered a prolonged sexual and emotional relationship with a woman a generation older, just like Cassius. But to the best of my knowledge he never married her. The relationship lasted at least three years, probably rather more. Cassius tells me that R is now living on the other end of the country and has a 14-year-old son. I got no more news than that, so I have no idea whether he also has a wife. Maybe so. A fortiori, I know nothing about their relationship -- if any.
• Mac: No idea. I have no data. I know where he is working now (because the Internet is amazing). But I know nothing about his personal or domestic life. Mac was always kind of wild. It's hard for me to imagine him settling down with a wife and kids. On the other hand, back when we were in college most of us assumed we would end up in academic careers and Mac is the only one with a professorship today. So you never can tell.
• Scarlett: As you know, she doesn't want to talk to me. But I've been following her online (off and on) for over a decade, so I know something about how her life has turned out. She entered graduate school the year I left it -- at the very same school. Then it seems like she was associated with that graduate school from then (the mid-1980's) until only a couple of years ago. That would be thirty years or more. I'm pretty sure she wasn't a student all that time. For a while she was the Director of the English as a Second Language program. She wrote scholarly articles and contributed to at least one book. But so far as I can tell, she never finished her Ph.D. And today she is working in a more-or-less clerical or administrative job in the same city, but in an organization totally unconnected with the University. Now, in fairness this school -- think of it as the University of Hell -- is well-known for feeding on graduate students, chewing them up until all the nutrients have been extracted from them and then spitting them out. But it's sad. As for her domestic life, ... strictly speaking, I suppose I should say that I have no data. But she is still using her maiden name. And graduate students at the University of Hell have a hard time maintaining relationships, to say nothing of marriages. It is almost impossible for me to imagine Scarlett as both a graduate student and a mother. So my bet is that she has had no long-term relationships and no children. Maybe I'm wrong.
• Marie: I've talked about her a lot, of course. But as for the Standard Narrative -- some short-term romantic relationships, but nothing long-term (before me, if you want to count me). No marriage. No children.

In other words: of the seven of us, two certainly married and another two might have; the two who definitely married are no longer so (but there is no data about the other two); three have definitely (or pretty definitely) never married. Also -- again, of the seven of us -- two have children genetically their own, and one has legal stepchildren who are about his own age; three definitely (or pretty definitely) have no children; about one, I have no data. This is a poor showing for the Standard Narrative.

But what's the most remarkable failure with respect to that Narrative? 

• Is it that only two of us begat children (or three, if I should add Mac to the list)? 
• Or is it our track record with romantic relationships, wherein: ... 
• at least two of us (me and Cassius) entered abusive relationships, ...
• two of us (Cassius and R) entered relationships with partners a full generation older (so that the power dynamics were inherently unequal), and ...
• three of us (Schmidt, Marie, and probably Scarlett) managed to avoid any long-term relationships whatsoever? 

Only Mac is an unknown quantity on these scales.

And I wonder, what the hell was wrong with us? Why did we turn out this way? Was it literally just random chance? (As I said, I was never very good at statistics. It might have been.) Or did we have something in common: something that made us choose each other as friends, because we somehow resonated with each other; but which also made us weak or ineffectual in romantic relationships, so that we later sought out partners who abused us or who overawed us with age and experience ... or else we avoided romantic relationships altogether? Is it even possible that any common feature might answer to this description?

I truly don't know. And maybe it's just random chance. But I can't stop wondering about it.

__________

P.S.: If I try to make the list longer, I come up with two other friends I can fold into the mix.

There's Dale: he didn't go to the same college that I did, so he wasn't part of the group I listed above. But I knew him in high school. His marriage ended up being eerily similar to mine.

And there's Fillette: as far as I can tell, her life fit the Standard Narrative pretty well -- stable marriage, two daughters, and lots of friends saying wonderful things about her life after she died. My data is skimpy, but she may have come closer than any of the rest of us to realizing the Standard Narrative. Good for her.

            

"Licorice Pizza"

Has anyone else seen the new movie "Licorice Pizza"? Opinions seem divided between people who think it's the best movie of the year, and people who find it "deeply problematic." I wasn't sure how much I liked it until I wrote Marie an email about it. After I wrote her over 1500 words, I decided maybe I really liked it.

The people who find it "problematic" point to two things that really bother them. One is the casual racism that we hear from some of the characters, particularly anti-Japanese and anti-Jewish racism. I don't think I need to describe the scenes in any more detail than that; if you've seen the movie, you know which scenes I mean. And my short answer to these scenes is that nobody is asking us to approve. To me it was pretty obvious that the director didn't approve, and that he included the scenes to tell us something disreputable about the characters who expressed this racism. At the same time, the movie is set in 1973. Attitudes like the ones we see weren't uncommon then. And the director has clearly said in interviews that some of these events were based on real things that happened (back then) to people he knows and is close to. Surely that's enough to explain the scenes?

The second thing that people object to is ... well first let me back up and say that this is basically a story about two people. Boy and girl. The "plot" is largely a collection of events loosely strung together under the rubric of A Lot of Stuff Happens, and it matters insofar as it illustrates (and affects) the relationship between these two. But the characters, and not the events, are the focus.

What kills some people -- more than anything else in the whole movie -- is that she's 25 and he's 15.  And so you get people talking about pedophilia and abuse. You get people complaining that this movie should never have been made, and that the only way it could ever have been green-lighted at all is that we have a persistent, if immoral, double standard in our society in how we jusge the behavior, respectively, of men and of women. I can't count how many critics I've seen who have insisted, rhetorically, that if the sexes were swapped (so that the movie featured a 25-year-old man and a 15-year-old girl), everyone would be horrified and the movie could never have been made. 

Of course this claim is rubbish. Make the girl 16 and the man in his 30's and you have "An Education." Dial the girl from 15 down to 12 and dial the man from 25 up to 45, and you have "Lolita." Problematic, yes, but not un-make-able: "Lolita" was made into a movie in 1962 and again in 1997. But fine -- even if you could make such a movie, everyone knows that Humbert Humbert was a bad guy. Are we supposed to think of the young woman in this movie as a predator?

No, we're supposed to understand that these two are not boyfriend-and-girlfriend! Or at least they really don't want to be. Yes, they "meet cute." Yes, they go out to dinner. And yes, it so happens that they end up spending a lot of time around each other, for a variety of reasons. People keep asking them if they are together, and regularly each of them says, "No, no, not at all. It's just that ... [whatever]." The boy tries to date girls from his high school. The young woman tries to date men her own age. And they annoy each other. He annoys her, in particular, by being grandiose and arrogant and thoughtless and immature. She treats him like a kid. She's always driving him places. Once they are fighting and he needs to go somewhere. First she says, "Don't think I'm going to drive you!" because she's still mad, and he replies that no, he'll drive himself. And right away she tells him no, don't be crazy, don't do that, I'll drive you.

But she's also having trouble figuring out a direction for her own life. She still lives at home, she has poky little jobs, and she doesn't have a lot of luck with her own dates. What's more, even though they both deny vigorously that they are a couple, each of them starts to get irritable whenever the other is dating someone else. So it's clear that each of them is starting to get jealous where the other is concerned. It takes them a very, very long time to figure this out, partly because they are just as aware as the most censorious viewer that there's no way they can be in a romantic relationship with each other. (The whole thing is very chaste.)

Do they desire something more? In some ways. He pursues her, and obviously thinks that it makes him a lot cooler to hang out with an older woman. She enjoys the validation that she gets from him, when she doesn't get it anywhere else in her life, even if he does irritate her by being less mature. And so certain reviewers call this out, insisting that she must by definition be predatory and abusive, that she must be ruining his life and traumatizing him. They complain that the script doesn't unambiguously condemn this inter-age attachment that they develop for each other.

And I find myself wondering, Who are these people? Have they forgotten how horny they too must have been back when they were 15? What the actual fuck are they talking about??

More exactly, Don't they understand how variable all of these things are, and how far these boundaries depend on the individuals involved, and on context? Because the reality is never simple. I mean ... the law is simple, because it has to be. The law states an age limit: if you are 18 years old, it's OK to fuck; it you are 17 years and 364 days old, it's not. That's because the law has to be clear and exact; the law cannot stand liminal cases. And many of these reviewers who hate the age gap between the principals also ask, "Why couldn't the movie have made the boy 18 instead of 15, so it would have been all right?" As if the difference between 15 and 18 is so great that the 10-year gap with the older woman becomes irrelevant! Girlfriend 1 was 18 when my Wife was fucking her: did that mean she wasn't still a sheltered virgin who had been in Catholic schools all her life? Hint: no, it did not mean that. Girlfriend 1 was still a child in many ways. But she was physically mature, and she was 18.

The suggestion is asinine. And it reveals that these people clearly aren't thinking about the characters as if they were human beings at all. They are thinking of them as legal categories, and their objections are nothing more than public posturing to prove that they are pure and would never stoop to anything illegal. If the story had taken place in Texas, where the age of consent is 17, they'd be saying "Why couldn't the movie have made the boy 17?" (Not 18.) If it had taken place in France, where the age of consent is 15, there would have been no problem. A fortiori in Brazil, where the age of consent is 14.

Here's the thing. In the first place, the division between childhood and adulthood is not a clear, bright line. It's a vast, messy, foggy stretch of time. People mature at different rates, and they can handle different aspects of adulthood at different times. This person might be able to handle sex earlier, but might still be unreliable when it comes to holding down a job until much later. Someone else might be the exact opposite. If you try to tell me that a person one day under 18 is fully incompetent and has to be shielded from the world, while a person one day older than 18 is fully adult ... well, if you try to tell me that, then you are lying. The law states a limit and has done; but real life is never so tidy.

In the second place, if you actually watch the movie you realize that the characters themselves are really aware of the age-gap as an issue. They understand -- every bit as well as the most censorious viewer -- how impossible it is for them to have any kind of romantic relationship. They do everything they can to avoid it. But in the end they find themselves fighting against their own desires and inclinations. So life is tough for them. And honestly, life is tough for most of us. That part is realistic.

In the third place, I have a question for all these critics who complain about how "inappropriate" the relationship (if you can call it that) is between these two characters. My question is, Haven't you ever in your life felt inappropriate desires of some kind? Really?? Because honestly I assume we all have, one time or another. Oh, they will be desires of different kinds. Maybe for this person it's a romantic desire for someone unavailable, either because of age or because they are already married. Maybe for that person it's a desire for another slice of cake or another shot of whiskey. For a third person it will be something else again. I can't list all possible inappropriate desires. But I am certain that everyone on the planet has felt them, one time or other. So why is it so bad to explore a story about people who find themselves troubled by inappropriate desires and never give into them? As I said a couple of paragraphs ago, the movie is very chaste. There's no sex. Why is it so wrong to explore people who have to navigate a complicated emotional terrain? Isn't that (part of) what movies are for? Why is any of this an issue?

Or is it all just empty moral posturing? My bet is on that option, actually, except I think the people who raise the complaints don't realize it.        

     

The news from Cassius

In the first few years of this blog, the posts were urgent and angry. These days they are mostly a lot more sedate and reflective. Some years ago I wondered about that and decided it was because Wife was no longer a major character. Or at any rate, Wife-as-she-was-back-in-the-day was no longer a character, partly because we had separated and partly because she is no longer the dynamic, brazen bitch she was back when I met and married her. In one respect, the blog really lost something when it lost her as a central character.

But after my long phone call with Cassius on New Year's Eve, I think maybe the whole problem could have been avoided if only I had let Cassius add posts of his own. Of course, literally speaking that would never have happened, because I was totally out of touch with him. But what he told me to fill in the history of the missing 37 years made his story sound just as exciting as mine.

It's late tonight, but it has also been a couple of days and I haven't posted any of this yet. So let me post the details briefly. Then maybe later I can discuss some of them at greater length, at least to try to wrap my head around them.

Cassius mentioned that he had been diagnosed with ASD, and he then explained further that this is The-Syndrom-Formerly-Known-as-Asperger's. That news didn't surprise me much. I mentioned before that Cassius usually sounded scornful and acerbic when I knew him back in college. If he were somewhere on the autism-spectrum -- somewhere well towards the high-functioning end, but still on it -- that might explain why he would routinely speak in a way that risked alienating people. It's just a thought, and perhaps wrong ... but it did mean that I wasn't surprised by this particular piece of news. That makes this point stand out, in a conversation that largely had me raising my eyebrows ever higher.

Then he told me his wife had died a few years ago. Nothing strange in that, right? Only his wife was 22 years older than he was. She already had two daughters at the time she met Cassius, girls who therefore became his stepdaughters. (He has no children with his own DNA.) One of his stepdaughters was three years older than Cassius, and one was three years younger. I remarked that this narrow age gap must have made his relationship with them rather ... umm ... unusual, if not actually strained. But no. He said that the girls told him that the years their mother had with him -- the 28 years their mother had with him [damn near as long as I was with Wife!] -- were the "only" happy years of her life. I'm left thinking that this must be a remarkable story, although Cassius didn't go into it a lot. He did mention that the age gap gave her a level of power in the relationship that could almost turn abusive, though he didn't dwell on this point. (He had more dramatic things to talk about later. See below.) 

But I do wonder what the story looked like from his stepdaughters' perspective? ("Oh look, Mom has married a boy our age! And it sure seems that things are better for her now than they were -- say, just for example -- all the time we were growing up!" I'm just saying that it's probably a hell of a story.)

Some time after his wife died, Cassius entered a relationship with a nonbinary individual that I'll call M. I'm not sure how long this relationship lasted, but apparently it ended only about a year ago. 

With Cassius getting a restraining order against her ... sorry, them. 

A restraining order issued some time after M had threatened his scalp with a machete ... and smashed a plate glass window with something they were throwing at him ... and ... oh gosh, there was more but I don't remember it all. 

But in the course of the account, Cassius definitely used words like violent, sociopathic, and narcissistic. Also the word abuse. He used that one a whole lot, actually.

So he and I spent a while discussing what it is like to come to the realization that you are being abused, long after the events themselves.

But there was even more after that. Or it might have come before, ... I don't quite remember. This post is a logical reconstruction of the call, and not a chronological one.

On top of the rest of it, Cassius explained that he has been in therapy recently (no kidding!); and after deep reflection, he has come to understand that he suffers from gender dysphoria. And so he is currently considering (or perhaps planning) whether to transition to being a woman.

Honestly, I had not expected this last point. Even with all the rest of it.

This evening I talked with Marie over Skype, and I brought her up to date on the news from Cassius. (We had all been friends together back in college.) She said the gender dysphoria didn't surprise her, and she reminded me of one Halloween when Cassius decided to dress elegantly as a woman. I remembered the occasion, but I thought he had just dressed up like that for the hell of it. Marrie said yes, of course once Cassius had established his character as scornful and acerbic, anyone would naturally interpret his choice to dress up as a woman as no more than a way to tweak everyone's expectations. And that was certainly how he played it at the time. But she added that just because he played it that way doesn't mean that was his real or only motive.

I've mentioned before that Marie is really smart. Right?

Anyway, my conversation with Cassius was really long.

           

Numerology follow-up: what is this cycle that's ending?

Yesterday I posted some fun stuff on numerology, based on a blog post I'd seen from John Michael Greer. It doesn't matter whether you (or I) take it seriously, but some of the correspondences were striking, even if coincidental. One of the statements that came out of it was that for me this coming year -- 2022 -- will be the wrap-up of a cycle of nine years. "This is a [year] of completion and karma. The cycle that began with 1 ends this year, for good or ill; your actions in previous years will determine how this one turns out. If you don't like the outcome, learn from your mistakes and prepare to try again."

So this morning, I began to wonder, What has the cycle been like? What patterns am I winding up? And I tried to think of any commonalities among the last eight years.

The cycle began in 2014: that was my first full year out of the house (since I left in 2013). Debbie broke up with me in January. I started my relationship with Marie a couple of years later. Also during this time I started traveling for vacation: to Peru with Son 2 in 2014; to Greece with Marie in 2017; to New Zealand with Marie in 2019. I continued to travel for work, and got particularly known for a set of skills that made it worth letting me travel even when the country was shut down for COVID-19.

In fact, let me compare the nine years against what Greer says each of them is supposed to be like, to see if there are common themes.

2014: "1. Ruled by the Sun, this is a number of new beginnings and opportunity. This is a time of practical action and constructive change.  It's a good time to take direct action and to start new things in motion, so long as they aren't complex or evasive. Move ahead forcefully during this year."

• Debbie broke up with me.
• Took Son 2 to Peru.
• Wrote 175 posts during the year, the most in any year since I started the blog.
• Packed off Son 1 to university.
• Started volunteer work.
• Did a lot of work with Hil, wrote long letters to Elly, and began making friends with Suzie. But I didn't really push to make any of these more than a friendship, and so none of them became more.

2015: "2. Ruled by the Moon, this is a number of ups and downs, ebb and flow, and variability. This is a time of variable outcomes and of indecision, and is unfortunate for action. Spend the year weighing possibilities and researching options rather than trying to make things happen."

• A lot of my blog posts from 2015 were multi-part, meditative posts turning over some topic to look at it from all sides, starting with this one in January, and continuing straight through the end of the year.
• Joined a Working Out Loud circle at work: spent a lot of time thinking about it but didn't do much with it.
• My father died.
• Tried to resume contact with Marie after decades, but she rebuffed me.

2016: "3. Ruled by Mercury, this is a number of complications, minor changes, and many things to do. Plenty of opportunities and challenges can be expected. Stay nimble and you can manage them all. Cooperation rather than conflict is highlighted."

• Began the relationship with Marie, which involved tip-toeing nimbly around emotional landmines at first.
• Met some of Marie's family over the Fourth of July. This meant organizing flights on the spur of the moment, and so on.
• Packed off Son 2 to university.
• Tripped and fell multiple times when I wasn't being "nimble."

2017: "4. Ruled by Venus, this is a number of stability and steadiness, but also of being stuck in one place. It is favorable for hard work and patience and is beneficial for small things, but trying to push events to a conclusion will have bad results. If you can, stay quiet and avoid trouble."

• Finished the Separation Agreement from Wife early in January, but it took until June for the state to record it.
• Visited Debbie for the first time since we broke up.
• Traveled to Greece with Marie. 

2018: "5 is ruled by Mars; it is a number of crisis and change, and a year ruled by it is marked by instability and sudden shifts.  It is a bad time to take unnecessary risks or to do anything on a whim, but a good time to take decisive action, once you've done the necessary research and know what the dangers are."

• Found out I was going to be demoted at work. Tried and failed to get another job at my existing level.
• Car troubles meant I almost got killed on the road.
• Wife announced she wanted to come to my family's Christmas celebration.

2019: "6 is ruled by Jupiter, and it's a number of harmony and peace. It's a favorable time for ease and comfort, for settling disputes amicably, for following precedents and using established approaches. It's a bad time for conflict, which will prove ruinous for those who start it, and unfavorable for direct action, sudden changes, or new beginnings. Slow and easy is the motto of a 6 year."

• Fell on the ice in Sticksville and cracked my head, interrupting my memory.
• Son 1 moved in with me.
• Traveled to New Zealand with Marie, her sister, and others.
• Bought a new car.
• Got really irritated at my cousin's parenting, but backed away and didn't make an issue of it.
• Fantasized about getting out and away from my job, but never actually changed it.

2020: "7. Ruled by Saturn, this is a number of contemplation and mystery. Things get weird during a 7 year as factors you don't yet know about take charge. It is favorable for study and preparation. Avoid depressing thoughts, as it will be easy to be dragged down by them."

• One factor we didn't know about yet at the beginning of the year was the COVID-19 pandemic.
• That gave me time for some philosophical contemplation, and I wrote a bunch of pieces over on the Patio.
• My company decided to close the office I worked in, here in Beautiful City.
• Despite lockdowns I was authorized to travel for work ("things get weird").
• But I sure had "depressing thoughts" related to losing my job, or the alternative of moving to Sticksville.
• Visited Debbie and she actually poured me out a glass of alcohol ("things get weird" again).
• Got in touch with my old friend Fillette, only to discover that she had fourth-stage sarcoma. She died the same year. ("Ruled by Saturn.")
• Had to end my volunteer work, because of COVID-19.

2021: "8. Ruled by Uranus, this is a number of material success and practical effort. Sustained effort this year brings substantial rewards. Focus on the big picture rather than the little details, and work on finishing up projects already begun."

• Decided not to move to Sticksville. This means I was laid off work.
• Despite being laid off work, I did not successfully find new work. And I felt this was OK.
• In fact, I began to think I might not have to go back to work ever.
• Spent time with Debbie as she was in-state to look after her declining mother.
• Concluded that I like having solitary space inside a relationship.
• Worked to address a difficult patch with the boys.

Are there any common themes? Maybe a few, though I'm not sure they add up to a consistent picture.

• Travel for vacation.
• Flirtation and almost-but-not-really romantic interaction.
• Real relationship, but with gaps, long distances, and solitude in it.
• Sons growing up.
• No success at finding new work.

Is that enough to base any predictions on? Or is there something I'm missing?

I guess I'll find out.

     

Numerology is silly, right?

I've told you that I've been following the posts of John Michael Greer. Well today I read one that he posted yesterday, in which he explained the basics of numerology and suggested you can use it to foretell what kind of year you'll have. The basic concept goes like this:

To know what the year is going to be like in general, add the digits. If the result is greater than 9, add those digits and so on until you get a number between one and nine. Then he has a list of correspondences where you look up the number to see how the year will be in general. So for the year 2022, you add 2 + 0 + 2 + 2 = 6, and this means 2022 is going to be a "six" kind of year.

But if you want to know what the year will be like for you in particular, it's more complicated. First you add the letters of your name, using a chart that he posts in the blog entry which gives correspondences between letters and digits. This gives your "name number." Then you add the date of your birth: day + month + year. This gives your "birth number." (For each of these sums, reduce it to a single digit like I described reducing "2022" above.) Then add those two digits, and reduce it if needed. This gives your "time number." Finally take the answer from that and add it to the value for the year. Reduce it to a single digit. Look up what kind of a year corresponds to that single digit, and that's what kind of a year you'll have.

Silly, right?

So I tried calculating some of these numbers. According to the chart he gave in his blog post (linked above). H + O + S + E + A + T + A + N + A + T + U = 35 and 3 + 5 = 8. So the name I use here adds to 8. Interestingly enough, the name by which I am normally known in real life also adds to 8. And the abbreviation of my name that I use when I am in a hurry also adds to 8. So one way or another, my name adds to 8.

My date of birth adds to 4.

So my personal "time number" = 8 + 4 = 12, and 1 + 2 = 3. My personal "time number" is 3.

Since 2022 adds to 6, that means that for me, this year we have just started will be characterized by 3 + 6 = 9. His description of a "nine" kind of year is as follows: 

Ruled by Neptune, this is a number of completion and karma. The cycle that began with 1 ends this year, for good or ill; your actions in previous years will determine how this one turns out. If you don't like the outcome, learn from your mistakes and prepare to try again.

So according to this, 2022 will not be my year for fame and fortune. Gosh, that's too bad.

But 2023 should be something different. 2 + 0 + 2 + 3 = 7. Since my time number = 3, my prognosis for 2023 is 3 + 7 = 10, and 1 + 0 = 1. So next year (I mean 2023) should be a "one" kind of year for me. And that means this:

Ruled by the Sun, this is a number of new beginnings and opportunity. This is a time of practical action and constructive change.  It's a good time to take direct action and to start new things in motion, so long as they aren't complex or evasive. Move ahead forcefully during this year.

Maybe that means that 2023 will be the year I conquer the blogosphere. Or something like that. Just remember, you read it here first.

Just to be clear, this is all for entertainment, right? Nobody takes any of this seriously, right?

I checked a few other years:

• For me, 1984 came out as a 7: "Things get weird during a 7 year as factors you don't yet know about take charge. It is favorable for study and preparation. Avoid depressing thoughts, as it will be easy to be dragged down by them." That's the year I got married and started graduate school.
• 2002 came out exactly the same, as a 7. That's the year my office closed (at the job I used to have, long before you ever knew me) and I was laid off ... and it took me 18 months to find a new job.
• 2020 was yet another 7! That was the year we learned (out of the blue, because of "factors you don't yet know about") that my office would close permanently, and I had the choice of moving to Sticksville or being laid off. Good thing there were no risks of "depressing thoughts" as a result of all that! 
• On the other hand, 1994 came out as an 8: "Ruled by Uranus, this is a number of material success and practical effort. Sustained effort this year brings substantial rewards. Focus on the big picture rather than the little details, and work on finishing up projects already begun." That's the year Wife and I bought a house.
• 2007 came out as a 3: "Ruled by Mercury, this is a number of complications, minor changes, and many things to do. Plenty of opportunities and challenges can be expected. Stay nimble and you can manage them all. Cooperation rather than conflict is highlighted." 2007 was a very busy year. In the first part of the year, Wife had a whole lot of duties at the kids' elementary school. Over the summer Wife and I sent Son 1 (age 10) to Europe with the People-to-People program and without us. Also that summer, Wife and I traveled to Paris together. I've often thought 2007 was our best year together in all the 30 years of our whole marriage. By late in the year, though, she was already entangled with Boyfriend 5. On December 28, I started this blog. So it was a very, very busy year.
• 2013 came out as a 9, same as 2022 above. A year of completion and karma, where actions in previous years bear their natural fruit and a cycle comes to a close. That's the year I moved out and we sold the house.

So ... naah, ... this is all for entertainment. It never works out according to this system in real life. Just a joke. Just for fun.

But I do start to wonder what kind of karma I've built up in the last eight years? What's the logical conclusion of the way I've been living since 2014? 

I guess I'll see.

     

New Year's meditation and ritual

Last night -- New Year's Eve -- Debbie hosted a meditation and ritual over Zoom. Besides Debbie herself there were three members of her current Sangha in attendance, plus me. And much of the event was classic retreat practice in the Plum Village tradition (that is, the tradition taught by Thich Nhat Hanh). Debbie led us in a guided meditation, then we spent some minutes in walking meditation, and then we meditated silently. So far, so normal.

Then, after a short break, Debbie asked us to get some paper and write down things that we were grateful for in 2021. I found I had a few, of which perhaps the most unexpected was that I was grateful for having been laid off work in the spring, under circumstances where I didn't have to be afraid about where my next meal is coming from. I was also grateful for my friends and family, of course -- in particular for Debbie and Marie, though I didn't think it was exactly the right time to say so that explicitly. Anyway, we all shared our gratitudes.

Then Debbie added that Buddhism is about achieving freedom, and in particular about the freedom that comes when we let go of things we have been clinging to. So she asked us to think of things that we were willing to let go of as we moved into the coming year. We were to write them down on slips of paper ... and then burn them. 

I didn't share my whole list. But there were four things I put on it, that I would be willing to let go of:

• Distraction: this means compulsively browsing the Internet, and it also means drinking too much.
  
• Delay and indecision over what to do with myself. (See also this post earlier today.)
• Related to that, fear that I absolutely have to get a job.
• And finally, after my discussions over Christmas with Son 2, bad or unhelpful trigger-reactions to Wife. 

I don't really know how to let go of these things. But I suppose intention matters. Sometimes ritual can help make things happen, as well. I guess we'll see.