History rhymes, Lily, and Movie meme 9

Where do I start with this? I want to tell a story about visiting with the family for Thanksgiving, and also to introduce a name for a character I've mentioned before. She's dead, but "only in the technical sense." And as I give her a name, I also want to give her a cinematic face. So many things to do.

My cousin and her mother-in-law

Let's start with today and work backwards. A month ago, Mother and Brother and SIL and I all drove to where my aunts and uncles (and all their children) have settled. It's in another state, but reachable in a day's driving. I mention this year's trip here, and I've talked about making the same trip before, around other Thanksgivings (for example here or here or here).

Anyway, while I was there I stayed with one aunt and my uncle. Some of that time was spent cooking for The Big Day. Some of it was spent in silence, or just reading placidly. And occasionally we visited with other members of the family.

Once day, her oldest daughter came over. (This is my cousin C.) The nominal reason for her visit was to discuss some aspect of the food preparation for Thanksgiving. But then she started talking to my aunt about how things were going at home. C's husband is from Latin America, and last year his mother emigrated from the Old Country to the USA to live with them. C's mother-in-law is wheelchair-bound and doesn't speak much English. Also, she complains chronically. Whenever she makes any comment on anything, it's a negative comment. C is having a lot of trouble dealing with this ongoing criticism. My aunt talked to her for a while. I was sitting in the same room reading, so I heard what was going on. But nobody invited me into the conversation, so I stayed out of it.

But I remembered what she said. And a few days later, when the whole family was out to dinner one evening, I motioned C over so I could talk to her for a few minutes. What I told her was something like this:

Marie and me

Just now I was scrolling through my Downloads folder looking for a picture I know I saved a while ago, and I ran across this. It seems that I saved it back in the middle of November. I have no recollection where I saw it, what the context might have been, or any of that.

It describes my life all too well. Also Marie's. I always knew we had something in common.

  

"Just another mental disorder"

I just stumbled across a delightful video clip on Twitter. Curtis Yarvin explains that "at a certain level, intelligence is just another mental disorder."

Does anyone know how to embed Twitter videos in these blogposts? Here's the best I can do:

Curtis Yarvin Twitter video  

Being late

Yesterday I wrote that I thought SIL was mad at me because I made a slighting remark about her and Brother potentially being late for something. (In reality we arrived only a few minutes before they did.) Why would this make her mad?

Most basically, it would make her mad because the two of them must hear it a lot. (Or do they? Is it only from me?) And that, in turn, is because they are always late. For everything.

It's possible that they may have gotten a little better in the last couple of years, but Brother is almost 59. (SIL is only in her forties.) A couple of years doesn't make much difference when it stands up against decades of predictable lateness.

And honestly, the whole family jokes about them behind their backs. I may be the only one who says anything to their faces—or at any rate, the only one since Wife left the family—but my remarks are joking and friendly compared to the acid commentary from my aunts. Even Mother, who is careful never to say anything overtly critical (because Brother is, after all, her son) nonetheless builds plans around an assumption that Brother and SIL will be late.

So if this is an established pattern, where did it come from? I tried to think about it this evening, and that turns out to be a harder question than it looks like.

When Brother and I were little kids, the "Late Ones" in the extended family were the four of us: Mother and Father, with Brother and me in tow. Since the "extended family" in question was always Mother's family … 

(Father was an only child, his father never saw his relatives, and my grandmother's sisters rarely visited), 

… the blame was implicitly dumped on Father. The principle seems to have been, "Always blame the one who married into the family for any dysfunction, rather than one of Us."

For years I believed this, just because everyone else seemed to believe it. But in retrospect, I remember many times that we were getting ready to go somewhere and Father was standing at the front door with his car keys in hand—and suddenly Mother decided she had to wash her hair. She kept her hair very long in those days, so washing it (and drying it) was a really big deal. Father would yell impatiently (and impotently), "But we're going to be late!" And she would go ahead anyway. Sometime in the last year or so, she even admitted to me that back in the past she was bad at sticking to a schedule or getting to events on time.

Making everybody mad at me, 2

OK, partly I borrowed the title from an unfinished post back in 2008. But also I'm starting to think that my social skills are failing me. (See also this post and this one, both from earlier in the year.)

Recently I visited Son 2 and Beryl, on the occasion of Son 2 getting his Master's degree. I allude to it briefly here, where I also mention that this was the first time since Son 2 graduated from high school eight years ago that all four of us—Son 2, Son 2, Wife, and I—were in the same place at the same time. So Son 2 insisted strictly on goof behavior from all of us. There was to be NO UNPLEASANTNESS, no matter what. It was a good rule, and I agreed with it.

Several times, Son 2 issued a warning on this point: all of them were when Son 1 made some kind of sarcastic remark about Wife (who lives with him). But only once did I see Son 1 and Son 2 mobilize in unison to shut someone down. And it was me. We were at a restaurant, and the waitress repeatedly misunderstood my order, besides assigning my order to Wife (who had ordered something totally different). I tried to clarify for what felt like the third time (though perhaps it was the fourth), and both boys stopped me short. It was time for me to keep silent and say nothing. And they both had a look and tone of utter seriousness. 

Well, I shut up and the order got straightened out. Dinner went on. But it made me think: Of all of the possible detonations in the minefield of our immediate family, the one that they are most worried about is Me Going Off about something. And it shook me. These days I don't think of myself as all that threatening. But maybe they remembered a time in the past, when I used to get much angrier. "As angry as Daddy," as the saying went.

That's one story.

This weekend I visited Mother. The two of us, together with Brother and SIL, went out to the Philharmonic. We met up there. Brother and SIL have a long-standing habit of showing up late to things, and Mother wanted to hear the talk that was given an hour before the show. At seven minutes before the talk, she told me we'd wait until five minutes before the talk, and then go in without them. Two minute later—at exactly five minutes before the talk—Brother and SIL showed up. I said, "Great timing!" in a congratulatory tone, and passed along Mother's plan as we all went in together. SIL did not speak to me the entire evening, and pointedly sat as far away from me as the seating arrangements would allow. We all went out to dinner together afterwards, and she still didn't speak to me. (And she sat diagonally across the table from me—again, at the farthest possible distance.) It was subtle, but also obvious for anyone who was watching for it. (I guess that means me.)

That's another story.

I guess I told a third story when I talked about my visit with Schmidt.

Maybe I'm being oversensitive, straining to find rejection and criticism where there is none, because it feeds my fantasies of being rejected. (See, e.g., here or here or here.)

Or maybe living alone so much has made me forget how to be around other people.  

     

Mother is aging, 2

Over the weekend, I visited Mother. While there, I told her about my visit to Schmidt, and explained that Ma Schmidt has effectively no remaining short-term memory. Mother said she worries about that too. But she still works (part-time) at an intellectually demanding job. Also she's five years younger than Ma Schmidt. And five years ago (at the time of this visit, though I don't discuss the topic in that post), Ma Schmidt was already showing more signs of memory loss than Mother shows today. So I told Mother than I guess her work is keeping her mind active. She said if she starts getting forgetful about her work, she'll have to retire.

Then this morning I was making us some eggs for breakfast, She got out a loaf of panettone from Trader Joe's, cut a few slices, and put them under the broiler to toast. Then she wandered off to fiddle with the coffee maker and make us some coffee.

Within sixty seconds—maybe more like thirty—the panettone was burning and smoke was flowing through the kitchen. I jerked it out of the oven and turned off the broiler. Mother continued to fiddle with the coffee-maker, and suggested, "You can flip them over and toast the other side too." "No, I'm dealing with the eggs!" Five minutes later the eggs were done and the coffee was finally dripping. Only then did she wander back to the oven to toast the other sides, and I told her no, we were ready to eat.

Was it forgetfulness? Maybe, but maybe not. It all happened too fast for me to be comfortable blaming forgetfulness. It was certainly bad judgement. 

Was it a new phenomenon? I don't know. Cooking really isn't her thing. If I had put food less than two inches from a 550° broiler and then ambled away, it would be a clear sign that I was either drunk or senile. But I cook more than she does. So it's hard for me to diagnose.

I feel like I'm seeing the first cracks in her hitherto admirable intellect. Or not quite the first cracks—see also this post from just about two years ago—but some very early ones. I don't want to admit it or think about it, because she's my mother and I love her. Also, if her fine mind starts to become unreliable, it will mean someone has to move in with her (and I'm the one without a job) or else she has to move into managed care. Either way means a huge change in the way all of us lives, including me. So I want to postpone that day as long as possible.

But like it or not, Mother is aging.

      

What's my favorite movie?

Back in August, in this post here, I raised the question What is my favorite movie? It was genuinely a question. At the time I posed it, I had some ideas, but I wasn't sure I had a winner. At some level I'm still not certain, but I think the preponderance of weight is in one direction.

At the same time, it may be more informative to think about all the contenders. If nothing else, that may give a more rounded picture of my obsessions. (I think that's a joke.) No single movie can say everything, after all.

I emailed the question to Son 1 and Son 2, asking them:

If people were having this discussion about me after I was gone, what would they SAY was my favorite movie?...

Does either of you have an idea how you'd answer the question, based on knowing me for a bunch of years? There's no wrong answer, because it's all about what impressions you've gotten from me over the years. (And those could be anything.) But I'm curious.

If you've got a quick, shoot-from-the-hip answer, go with that. Don't overthink it.

Son 1 ignored the email. Son 2 sent back two possible contenders, which I will identify when I get to them, below.

A word about how I came up with this list: I've seen a lot of movies, over the years, so I started by making a list of movies that I have referenced in this blog. That gave me a good starting point, but I realize just now as I am writing this that it leaves out some spectacularly good work. Because it just so happens that I never wrote about them, I left off of my list classics like "The Godfather" and "The Producers", both brilliant films. So if I had composed my long-list differently, is it possible that one or both of these might have made it to my short list?

It's possible, but not—I think—in an interesting way. What's interesting about my father's love for "The Red Shoes" is how it sheds light on the major themes in his life. And while I love to watch the dramas of Michael Corleone, or Max Bialystock—or hell, even Rick Blaine or Charles Foster Kane—their lives are definitely something Other, something that is happening Out There. There's no real resonance In Here, except for the resonance that every moviegoer feels (which is why they are all such popular movies). So in that sense, doing an initial filter by considering movies that I've written about here isn't a bad way to proceed.

With all that in mind, here are the six movies that particularly jumped out at me, as I pondered the list of movies I have discussed in this blog.

Silence of one kind or another

I must be really stuck. When nothing is going on, it seems like I can write any number of posts to fill up the time. Once I start traveling this year, all you get is radio silence.

Last weekend, Son 2 got his Master's degree from a big land=grant college in one of the states adjacent to ours. So the rest of us—I mean Wife, Son 1, and I*—all converged on his town to watch the ceremony and with him well. Son 2 and Beryl played hosts to us all. (Wife stayed in their apartment. Son 1 and I each took a hotel room.) Maybe I'll write about those days some time soon.

The point of this post, however, is that while I was visiting Son 2 I realized I was fairly close to the Schmidt farm. I mean, … "fairly close" is a relative term. In best case, the Schmidt farm is a good 3.5-hour drive from where Son 2 and Beryl live. (And in the event, this did not prove to be a "best case.") But it was still a damned sight closer than just driving home. So, just like I did nine years ago, I emailed him out of the blue and asked if I could come stay for a night or two. (I emphasized that I have obligations back home, so it could not possibly be more than that. So much for Benjamin Franklin's fish) He replied that yes, of course I was welcome, although he added ruefully that I hadn't left them enough time to tidy up and disguise "what slobs we really are." 😀

So the day after Son 2 got his Master's degree, I had breakfast with the rest of the group and then took off for the Schmidt farm. I had googled the directions, so I thought I knew where I was going. In fact I made one wrong turn, and the compounded the problem by not calling the Schmidt's for help until I'd gotten well and truly lost. In the end, my mistake added another two hours onto the trip, but I still got there in time for supper. I call that a win.

The rest of the visit? It's hard to tell, but maybe not so much.

My cough is back, 2

I guess I already told you this, a month ago. Yes, it's the same damned cough it always is. It started in the middle of last month, and now it's just chronic.

Or almost. I may have discovered a way to allay it temporarily. 

You see, the frequency of the cough seems more or less proportional to how active I am. When I'm asleep, I don't cough. In the first few minutes after I wake up, I don't cough. Then as I come fully awake, it starts up again.

So this afternoon, after lunch, I sat down on a sofa and held as still as possible. I breathed slowly and shallowly. I pretended to be asleep. In fact, more than once I genuinely started drifting off to sleep. But you know what I didn't do? I didn't cough. When I got up to get this tablet to write this post, I walked slowly and didn't cough. In fact, it wasn't until I got really into what I was writing -- and tried a bunch of ways to link a phrase to a URL (thus getting wrapped up in what I was doing, and no longer breathing slowly) -- that I started to cough again.

Of course, knowing this is of limited use. It doesn't help me when I am around others. It doesn't stop me from coughing whenever I try to talk. So this week, when I am visiting relatives for Thanksgiving, I'll end up coughing whenever I try to socialize. That's hardly great.

But in a way it's progress. I wonder if I can make this a mindfulness exercise?

Stuck

I haven't written—anything—in a while.

In the middle of October, I traveled for a week and a half. I visited Debbie at her home with her family (Mattie and her husband and their two boys, Debbie's grandsons); then I flew on to a city in another state, where Marie was attending a conference. I got back home a week ago.

My last post for this blog was something I wrote on my phone, during the outbound flight. My last post for the Patio was back in July, when Joe Biden was still a candidate for re-election to the Presidency. You may remember that I have a blog about professional topics, under my real-life name, but I wrote that ahead through the end of October so that it would still post while I was out of town. Consequently I have written nothing since that post introducing Fawn. Nothing in the last 18 days. Nothing.

Dinner with Fawn

This dinner (Monday, two nights ago) may mean nothing in the long run, or it might be a chance for me to introduce Fawn. What's not clear to me is whether I need to. But I spend so much time alone these days that I may have forgotten how to distinguish people I'll see again from those I won't.

Fawn belongs to the professional association I do, and a few years ago (when I hosted a few pizza get-togethers in the wake of COVID-19) she attended one of them. I didn't remember much about her except that she was extroverted and friendly. A couple times since then, I'd gotten emails from her about future events (of which there have been pathetically few), and finally one or two saying explicitly that she'd like to see me again ... in a social way, presumably.

I did wonder a bit about this. Was she just being friendly? It didn't seem possible that there could be anything more behind it. (And now that the dinner has happened, I can confirm there was no hint of romantic intention from either of us.) In the meantime, I have been trying to find people who are willing to help with the Section leadership next year. So I told her, Yes, let's have dinner; we can catch up on news (if any) provided I can try to talk you into a leadership position. She picked a very nice restaurant.

The short version is that she spent much of the time talking about her unorthodox health conditions, why she can't lose weight, her troubles with doctors over the years, and the cancerous tumor they pulled out of her brain last year. (Except for that last, it could have been a conversation with Wife from the old days.) We both talked about our divorces (or separation, in my case), and our kids. She explained some things about herself that she doesn't understand but wishes she did. I even got a few minutes to talk about our professional association. 

Mostly I don't expect Fawn to have any relevance to the topics of this blog. But she seems like the kind of person I sometimes befriend in spite of myself. So let's see. Right now I've mentioned her like a bookmark.

The end of the trip

Then there is the end of the trip.

This actually happened on Sunday, September 15. I'm posting it a couple of days later because I'm splitting up the elements of this trip into separate posts. No other reason.

I think I mentioned that I took the train this time, instead of flying. This year there has been a little too much drama in the news around air travel, and the train was a relaxing interlude. Mostly the trip was uneventful. There were only two exceptions.

When I got to the train station to go home, there was a man who got to the line at the same time I did. He insisted I go ahead of him. All visible patches of his skin were covered with tattoos—this means both arms plus his face.  At one point I inadvertently stepped on his foot, and apologized. Then he started to complain to me about everything that had already gone wrong for him today. (It was still morning.) I joked, "And then I stepped on your foot!" but he waved it away. He pulled down his pants to show me a spider logo on his underwear, and a matching logo on his shirt. (I don't know what this logo was supposed to tell me.) He didn't appear to have a seating assignment, and I debated with myself whether to remind him of this or to let the Amtrak staff do it. Then suddenly he stepped out of line and joined another line instead. I lost track of him shortly after that, and did not see him onboard the train after we left the station.

The train trip took something like 32 hours, but finally we got to my town and I reclaimed my suitcase. Then as I walked away from the station, my right foot stepped crookedly on one of the train tracks I had to cross. I lost my balance, and for one terrifying moment felt myself lurching forward. I was sure I was going to plant face first on the empty track, possibly rolling just enough to smash the computer in my backpack.

Then by some miracle I staggered a couple paces and did not fall. I don't know how that happened, and I walked very carefully the rest of the way home.

Right now I'm just grateful for miracles.

The trip was otherwise uneventful, but I got home somewhat shaken. 

Marie and Walter

Another thing that happened while I was visiting Marie … well, I mentioned we went to a bookstore. While there, I picked up a stack of second-hand movies. So one evening, Marie and I watched The Big Lebowski.

Marie had never seen the movie before. She found it very funny, and immediately connected with the character Walter. It's interesting, because she doesn't normally approve the kind of casual violence that Walter threatens, and I'm certain she wouldn't endorse his accommodating remarks about Nazism. ("Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.") But clearly there was something in Walter that sparked a kind of recognition in her. Maybe it was just his insistence that "There are rules!" in so many areas of life. I asked her if that was it, and she laughed.  (Compare, for example, this post here.) 

 

Talking with Marie

What did we talk about during the visit? 

We never discussed politics, or almost never. I think she mentioned a couple of things she had heard recently—once she said she'd heard that Donald Trump was going to round up LEGAL immigrants into concentration camps, along with illegal ones—but I just let them drop or made a joke.

The week before my visit, Debbie came to town briefly for something unrelated to me, but she and I had dinner one evening. Afterwards I sent a note to Marie because I remembered that I had promised always to let her know whenever Debbie and I were together. But I asked her, did she really want to keep hearing about these events, even if (as always) Nothing Happened?

During my visit, she said No, not any more. Marie explained that when I first visited Debbie, her insecurities were so severe that she assumed, As soon as he sees Debbie he's going to remember all her virtues and contrast them with all my weaknesses; and right away he will break up with me to be back with her! In the ensuing eight years, of course, none of that has happened. And I reminded her that Debbie and I have agreed we do better without the added complication of sex and romance. For her part, Marie said she finally realized that even if I did ever fuck someone else, that wouldn't have to mean that I'd break up with her. So she has finally decided not to worry about it.

In practical terms, this isn't going to mean anything. I'm pretty sure my fucking days are over at this point, as noted above. And it's not like any of my girlfriends ever overlapped any of the others, except for the brief period when my involvement with D overlapped my marriage to Wife. (See this post. For the sheer comedy of it, compare also my remarks about D's jealousy of Wife here and here.) But in the abstract I suppose it is nice to know that she's finally not worried about possibilities that could never have hurt her to begin with. Does this count as progress, even if it is meaningless?  

Visiting Marie

I've just been visiting Marie for a week. Now I'm on the train headed home, and I'm thinking about the trip. What worked, and what didn't?

Marie lives in a dingy apartment. She has furniture she doesn't use, which is generally clogged with junk and whose surfaces are all scratched to ribbons by her many years of cats. (In the terminology of the current election cycle, Marie is definitely a Childless Cat Lady, with all the political predilections that term implies.) The furniture she does use is scarce and spare. There are two mismatched chairs (one an office chair, the other an overstuffed living room chair with gashes scratched in it) flanking one small glass-topped table. Her setup is clearly fine for one person (who can use the glass-topped table alternately as a dining table or a desk); when both of us are there, we can use the table together after a fashion, but there is no opportunity to serve an elaborate meal because there simply aren't enough square inches on the table.

The comparisons with my space are unsettling. I too have enough furniture for one, but it is awkward for more than one. I do have a usable desk that is different from my dining table; and I have extensions that I can put in the dining table if I'm going to seat more than three people. But I have no sofa; my chairs are all dining chairs, which makes them not very comfortable for long sitting; and my living room has stacks of junk that I keep meaning to deal with. (Compare, for example, this poem from eight years ago. Nothing has gotten any better since then.) On the other hand, I don't have cats. (You may remember that Wife got the cats we owned back when we separated. They have both died since then, and she's gotten another. I've never had any.) Briefly, Marie and I both live like graduate students (only without the classes, or scholarly productivity, or promise that it will all get better after we get our degrees and get jobs). 

Her apartment seems (from the times I've visited it) to be often dirty. Of course there is always cat hair on everything, no matter how often she cleans. And of course there is a litter box in the bathroom, which means that there is often cat litter sprinkled across the floor. When I arrived a week ago, the sink and counter in the bathroom were scummy, though it seems that she cleaned them a day later when I wasn't looking. And she started vacuuming the carpet my second day there as well. She did dishes very often while I was there, so the dish drainer was always overfull. Nonetheless there were open containers of food scraps or other oddments that she was collecting—I think to use as mulch for the miniature garden on her porch. Her toilet has long-term stains on it.

Again, the comparisons with my space remind me how far I am from where I'd like to be. When I first moved into my apartment (eleven years ago) I set myself a schedule of vacuuming once a week and mopping the kitchen floor once a month. It has been a long time since I have stuck to that schedule, or—realistically—to any other schedule instead. Maybe when I get home I can take the inspiration to give the place a deep clean. My toilet is always clean, or at least it has been ever since Kimberly Steele issued her clean-toilet challenge. My counters are usually clean, and I don't cultivate homemade mulch. But I've got to do something about those floors.

What else did I notice?

We went swimming a couple of times at her local recreation center, and I couldn't swim nearly as far as I did the last time I visited her. I have let myself get flabby and out of shape.

We had quite a bit of sex, or at any rate she did. At this point I can't get hard enough to enter her, and the only way I can come is through masturbation. So there wasn't a lot in it for me, but it was (as always) gratifying to be able to do so much for her.

I've been trying to teach her lately about whiskey, so she bought two bottles this week. One of them we finished off between us Wednesday night (along with a bottle of wine); the predictable consequence is that we did very little on Thursday. Friday night we had just one glass each (an ounce or two, judged by sight), with much better results. I reminded her that whiskey is something to drink slowly.

We went out and about, though we managed to miss a couple of the sights we had in mind to visit. We also went to a bookstore, which was a reliable entertainment for both of us. Last night we went out to dinner with some of her friends.

Also we visited a cemetery. Nothing profound and there was no one in particular whose grave we were visiting. We looked for the oldest graves we could find (mostly from the late 19th century) and read the inscriptions. One of them reminded me of a story that Florence King tells in her memoir Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, but Marie hates Florence King so I avoided recounting it. 

So from the perspective of writing a travelogue, there's not a lot to say. From the perspective of general observation, I'm made uneasy by how she is living, and by how closely it matches how I am living.

I don't know if there's more. Maybe after I have mulled a while longer.

    

Fortieth anniversary

Earlier today I checked quickly, and yes—sure enough—I posted something ten years ago today, on the occasion of Wife's and my thirtieth anniversary. 

Now it's ten years later. Our fortieth. And since we are still legally married, I suppose that technically it counts as an anniversary. But this time around I haven't heard anything from her.

Ironically, I even sent her something, though I didn't look at the calendar when I ordered it, and so didn't think of it as an anniversary present. But I called her a couple weeks ago. (Well, it was on July 30, a day after this post.) I was still puzzling over the way that the job offer had dropped into my lap, and I wanted to ask if she had worked magic for it without telling me. (I was thinking of this story here.) She said no, but we talked for a while longer. Then she did a Tarot reading for me on the phone, and told me that I was confronted with two paths and would have to make a choice between them. (Gosh, thanks.)

But after I hung up the phone, I remembered that I had thought more than once that she might like John Michael Greer's The Witch of Criswell. It's a mystery novel, it's about the occult, and the heroine is a young adult. (Does that make it a YA novel?) Wife likes all three of those. So I went online and ordered her a copy … without, as I say, looking at the calendar.

When I got the order confirmation, they estimated delivery on August 12. Only then did I do a double-take, and chuckle.

I sent her a text message to let her know it was coming. She ignored the text message until I followed up with a hand-written letter via snail-mail. I also asked her to let me know when it arrived.

I haven't heard anything from her today, but the online service sent me an email announcing that the book had been delivered. Maybe she'll send me a text tomorrow, or maybe I'll have to send a hand-written letter to get her to acknowledge it. I'm not sure why she won't reply unless shoved. Maybe it's a problem with her phone, but I'm inclined to guess that she has just become so self-absorbed that it never occurs to her to reply to the messages she gets.

(Sigh.)

Yes, I know I'm making uncharitable assumptions about her. At this point I'm pretty sure I have a history of that.

You'd think after all this time it wouldn't be so easy for her to trigger me, wouldn't you? I would. But I guess I'm wrong. 

               

"I find out what I really want …," 3

A while ago, I wrote you about the possibility of a new job that had appeared on my horizon. I interviewed via MS Teams with the recruiter and the hiring manager, and then with the two senior employees in the department. The company made plans for me to fly there at the end of this week, to meet everyone in person and look around at the city. (You remember that this job is about 400 miles away from where I live today.)

Then this morning I sent an email to the recruiter and the hiring manager, saying that I'm really not prepared to move that far away, so I'd like to withdraw my application. I thanked them for their time, and said I was sad to miss meeting them in person. But it wouldn't be fair to let them pay for my travel if I knew I wasn't going to take the job. They were very understanding, and the hiring manager even added, "Wish you the very best in all your future endeavors. You never know, our paths may cross again." 

I had been tending in this direction for a while, and in fact I wrote the email last night. (But then slept before sending it.) What I was not prepared for was how much relief I felt after I clicked Send. Normally I think that words like "it washed over me" are just picturesque and a little over the top. But that's exactly how it felt.

"I find out what I really want by seeing what I do. That's what we all do, if we're honest about it. We have our feelings, we make our decisions, but in the end we look back on our lives and see how sometimes we ignored our feelings, while most of our decisions were actually rationalizations because we had already decided in our secret hearts before we ever recognized it consciously." (Ender to Miro, Children of the Mind, chapter 3, by Orson Scott Card.)

The Red Shoes

A week ago, I visited Mother. We talked all weekend, as usual. Partly we talked about this potential job that I've been mulling, because I wanted to assess how tough it would be on her if I moved 400 miles away to take it. Her answer was basically what Brother had said: it would be sad to have me farther away, but not devastating. (And, knowing my Mother, it would have to be pretty damned devastating before she would ever admit it.)

But somewhere along the line she mentioned casually that "The Red Shoes" (1948) had been Father's favorite movie, back when he was alive. Whenever it came on the Late Show on television, he made sure to see it; and then he would talk about it long after. She said she thought it was deeply meaningful for him.

It must have been. But what does that tell me about him, that I didn't already know? Is there anything?

Well, maybe. Of course he was an actor, not a dancer. And he was dedicated to his craft. Even if he was playing forgettable roles in silly, summer stock shows he approached them with professionalism: to portray the character the best way he could, and to give the audience more than they had paid for. I remember the theater critic who wrote for the local paper when I was in high school used to roast the local theater company for failing to bring out the subtleties of "Charlie's Aunt" or "The Mousetrap" … and he always qualified his scathing remarks by saying, "… except for [Mr. Tanatu], who delivers, as always, the solid, polished performances we have come to expect from him."

He loved the fine arts. In a sense it's funny to say that, because I don't remember him going out to art galleries a lot. And while my parents had a large collection of LPs [that means "long-playing vinyl records to be played at at 33⅓ revolutions per minute," for those unfamiliar with the term] it seems like they played a lot of music when I was a baby or young child, and not so much when I was older. It is as if their music-playing dropped off sharply when they reached their mid-thirties. (Maybe there were external factors involved, because of things going on in their lives. I can only guess.) But I know that he thought of himself and described himself as someone who loved the fine arts, so I'll give him credit for that here. (That self-understanding also caused him problems in other ways, as I discuss in this post here.)

Answer to Kimberly

Last Saturday, I left a question for Kimberly Steele about this job that has come up through my former employer, BehemothCo.

Kimberly, bless her, responded here rather than just deleting my question.

I replied to her answer: briefly here in a comment on her blog, and at greater length in a post here on mine.

So far, so good.

And then, in a burst of generosity not to be imagined, Kimberly replied to my blogpost in a comment here, which runs as follows.

Kimberly Steele here, thanks for sharing this. It seems to me your Tarot are telling you the same things as my Ogham. From what I can tell, you sincerely want to take the job and you want to move away, but both your Tarot and my Ogham are saying you would come to regret it. If you need to take the job and relocate because it is your heart's desire, then go ahead. Sometimes we can only learn certain lessons the hard way.

You also have other choices -- one is taking a local job or joining a local volunteer group or other Meetup for structure. You could also look into living and working in someplace that is not related to this job. The point is you have options even if you feel emotionally blinded to them right now.

Pause with me for a minute to appreciate what this comment means to me.

The frustrations of divination

I told you all about the possible job that I've been discussing with a recruiter from my former employer (affectionately nicknamed BehemothCo for the purposes of this blog). At this point, I have spoken to the recruiter, to the hiring manager, and (just this afternoon) to the two most senior employees in the department.

I have also—this should be no surprise—been consulting divination. The problem is that the message I get from divination is consistently different from the message that I get from my regular human interactions. But of course divination doesn't speak English, and there's always the possibility that it's not true. But I remember enough times in the past that it has described reality that I am reluctant to dismiss it. This means that I am stuck.

What do I want?

Yesterday I spent several hours reviewing my resume and preparing for my interview. I had the interview. Then I wrote up my notes, looked up some relevant data online, went to the store, and talked with Brother on the phone for an hour afterwards. It was a very productive day.

Today I accomplished bugger-all, except for sending a couple of (very belated) thank-you notes for the interviews, and going to Sangha in the evening. Maybe it's just a reaction against having actually achieved something yesterday, but I also think that my compulsively doom-scrolling Twitter might be a way to avoid thinking about what I really want.

Do I want a new job? I don't know. But I do think I have stumbled on the worst way to find out.

A new job?

About a week ago, a recruiter contacted me out of the blue. Normally I ignore recruiters, because I think of myself as retired. But this one had a very unusual story.

• In the first place, she works for the same global Behemoth corporation that I used to work for up until our office closed in 2021. 
• In the second, place, she wasn't calling because "my background matched her needs" blah, blah, blah. She was trying to contact me personally, Hosea Tanatu, by name.
• In the third place, she represents a location which was just recently acquired by BehemothCo, and which is in the process of being integrated. This definitely sounded interesting. I have been through two corporate acquisitions in my career to date, and I'm starting to think that navigating that unusual terrain is something I'm good at.

So I took her phone call last week. Then she set up an interview with the hiring manager: that happened yesterday. Where do things stand now?

I'm still kind of interested. It involves work that is similar to what I used to do, but not quite the same. So I'd have to learn something new. It involves setting up a whole new program, which in turn means I'd have to navigate the BehemothCo bureaucracy to get things done. But I got good at that, back in the day. 

It also means I'd have to move. The new plant is something like three or four hundred miles from Beautiful City, and the job is necessarily on-site. Now of course I moved when Wife and I separated and we sold our house. But that was just, … like, … across town. (Well, strictly it was from the suburbs into town. In any event it wasn't far.) I have lived in the general area of Beautiful City since Wife and I moved here in 1990. That's thirty-four years, for the arithmetically-challenged. More than half my life. I own a lot less stuff than the two of us owned when we were moving out of our house, so it shouldn't be a big deal. But emotionally it's a big deal, because Beautiful City has become home to me in a deep way.

Also this move would put me farther away from Mother. I spoke with Brother last night and he thinks she is pretty stable. So from his perspective the main consequence of my moving farther away would be that it would be "sad" I wasn't around more. But I want to discuss it with her directly, as well.

Oh, … I asked the hiring manager where she had gotten my name? Turns out she was meeting a lot of people in BehemothCo who work in her area, and one of them was the guy I called "Bill" in this post here. He and I were never collocated; but over the years we worked together a fair bit. And apparently he told her, "This is a long shot, because I don't know if he's even working any more; but the guy you really want to hire is Hosea Tanatu, and here's how to find him …." So that was flattering.

The flattery is probably another reason that I'm interested.

Anyway, I don't know what the hiring manager is thinking right now, and I don't know for sure that I'll take it if offered. But I'm mulling it.  

               

Alone

There is no one I can discuss this election with.

I'm not sure when I first realized this. But my friends—I mean Marie, Schmidt, and Debbie (I don't have a lot of friends)—and my family are all 100% wrapped up in the Dominant Narrative: Joe Biden may be old but he is the Savior of Democracy, Donald Trump is a would-be authoritarian, and Robert Kennedy is a nutcase. 

Me, by contrast? A couple years ago I started following Bari Weiss and Scott Adams on Twitter because I thought they sounded intelligent. But you know how it is with gateway drugs. Pretty soon I had added Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson, Abigail Shrier, and Robert Kennedy. Sure, I tried to soften the impact by also following John Cleese, Bill Maher, and James Surowiecki, but it was never enough. It was only a matter of time before I was following CatGirl Kulak, Vivek Ramaswamy, Dave Portnoy, and the University of Austin. You know—the hard stuff.

This doesn't even mean that I have been completely red-pilled. Mostly it means that I have come to know—like Socrates—how little I really know about what is going on in the world. When I read accounts from the Right about What Really Happened on January 6, 2021, or about the cartons of documents in the bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago, I realize that the political parties in this country are divided not by values but by basic facts. One side will assert that this-and-that happened, and it was bad. You would expect the other side to argue that it was good, but No! In fact, the other side agrees that IF this-and-that HAD happened, it would have been bad; but in fact what happened was something else totally different!

Not a normal election

This afternoon, Donald Trump was speaking at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania and someone took a shot at him. The shot apparently nicked his ear, which means it narrowly avoided doing much worse damage. Trump stood up again to gesture to the crowd before the Secret Service dragged him to safety.

People are saying, "That's it—he's won the election." Maybe, but the election is nearly four months from now. That's a long time in politics.

Other people—mostly Trump's political opponents—are saying loudly that "Political violence has no place in America." Clearly these are people who don't understand America very well. I've discussed this point before: for example, here and here, and to a lesser extent here and even here. Sorry, but in some ways we are all about political violence, even as we repeat the motto that "Ballots are better than bullets."

Blast from the past: Gossip

This evening in Sangha we talked about gossip and I suddenly remembered a habit from early in my marriage with Wife.

It didn't start out that way. But for our Dharma study, we read the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings. Then as we began to discuss them, someone (maybe I can call her Annie, in case she needs a name) commented that she had a problem with the Ninth Training.* Specifically, it's not that she thinks there is anything wrong with the behavior that it recommends—"We will … [refrain] from speaking about the faults of other persons in their absence …. We will not spread rumours nor criticise or condemn things of which we are not sure"—but that she has a lot of trouble living up to it. Fundamentally, she enjoys gossip! She added that she doesn't really know why she likes it so much, but there it is. It's just a fact of life that she has to deal with.

Of course I had (and have) no idea why in particular she enjoys gossip, and I didn't pretend otherwise. But the whole conversation put me in mind of the early years of my marriage to Wife. So when it came around to my turn, here's the story I told the Sangha.

What was Flora like, anyway?

This is not a picture of Flora! This is a royalty-free
picture of a dark-haired woman from the Internet.

While I was writing the previous post, I scrolled back through my old emails looking for a couple of data points. In the process, I stumbled across an email from Marie back in 2020 that included the following description:

It suddenly occurred to me … that there are in fact certain obvious points of similarity between my mom and the woman who occupied most of my erotic imagination for years, long ago.

(Put differently, between the two very different women who occupied most of my erotic imagination during my youth.)  

Beautiful, check.  To men, check.  Dark-haired and a bit exotic-looking, check.  A bit of the "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" glamour, check.  Brighter than most of her contemporaries, check.  Unwilling to settle for provincial dullness...

Ulp.  Hosea, love, this is sort of unsettling.

So maybe this helps you picture her.

I also found that way back when Marie briefly re-contacted Flora—when Flora's reply confirmed that she had a new boyfriend (now that her husband had died) but hinted tactfully (at least to my ears) that they weren't monogamous yet—I did indeed call that implication to Marie's attention. Marie, for her part, thought that I was overthinking things.

               

Flora and Marie

I talked with Marie this morning, and we discussed Flora a little bit. I told her that I had looked online for an obituary, but all I found was a date of death. (Last December.) Marie said, "There was a time when I would have known when it happened, but that was years ago."

"Do you mean you would have known without reading anything or being told in any way?" (Compare, e.g., this post.)

"Yes."

"When I was searching, I did find an obituary for her husband a few years ago. [He was a good bit older than Flora.] It said he left three children. Were they hers, or was she a second wife?"

"She was a second wife. Actually she wanted children of her own, but I think they were adults by the time she married their father so she never got a chance to raise them as children."

"And her husband didn't want any more at that point?"

"Or they decided not to have any, yes."

So I guess I can add Flora to the sad list from this post here: marrying a significantly older spouse, and no children. But wait!—as the ads say—there's more!

Another classmate died

I got the latest issue today of my college alumni magazine. Another classmate is dead.

That makes five, now, that I know of: not all the same year, but close enough. Many of us hung out together, at least from time to time.

Today's news is about a woman I've mentioned a few times before. When I first wrote about her I called her "L" (not to be confused with the sex-blogger formerly known as L!), but at this point I think I have gone back and changed all those references to call her "Flora" instead. So "Flora" it is. And I've written about her in a number of posts: for example, she shows up in some of Marie's recollections (here, here, here, and here) and also in one of mine (much tamer, here). 

Flora was a science major, back when we were all undergraduates. Somehow (maybe because we were all young) many of the stories I remember about her have to do with sex. 

• When I got to know her (through R–, one of my circle of friends), she had already had an affair with one of the science professors. 
• During the time we were in school, she settled into regularly fucking both R– and Mac (q.v.)—though to be fair, I learned not long before graduation that R– and Mac were both fucking each other as well. (Yes, they are both guys. It's amazing the things people will say casually when everyone's on MDA.) 
• She wanted to fuck Schmidt, who really wasn't interested. He had determined that "Everyone who fucks Flora goes crazy," and he didn't want to go crazy. He later said that at one point he had to make a point to fall asleep at a strategic moment, while she was trying to seduce him.
• Marie remained friends with Flora after that time, and fell in love with her for a while. Marie tried to go to bed with Flora, but it never worked out—as she describes (with some anxiety) in the selections linked above. 

Not long after Marie and I got back together, she [Marie] contacted Flora to ask her some questions about relationship-management, and to catch up. It turns out that in the intervening decades, Flora had married and her husband had later died. At that point she was seeing someone new. The way she described it to Marie was delicate, but to my ears it translated as "We are fucking but we're not monogamous yet—or at least I'm not." (I don't remember if I ever discussed this with Marie.) I never heard Marie mention her again. I thought of getting in touch with her independently, but it felt like Marie discouraged that.

Anyway, now she's dead.

Debbie is in town

Debbie has been in my state since the 12th, visiting family and friends. She has been here in Beautiful City since a week later, arriving the evening of the 19th. 

Whenever Debbie and I see each other, I always notify Marie ahead of time. But this time I somehow forgot to say anything until we texted each other the morning of the 20th about getting together later in the day. Then I suddenly thought, "Oh shit!" and sent Marie a quick email with all the plans that I knew about up till then.

Hey love,

Just a note that I forgot to mention before. Debbie's visiting [this state] for a couple weeks. She was in [another city] for a while, and last night drove all the way [here], where she's staying in the house of some of her friends from [the UU church that hosts our Sangha]. I have not seen her yet. 

I got a text from her this morning, and she has come down with a cold (ugh) but is testing negative for COVID. So we might have dinner or something, if we can find a place with tables outside. I forget how long she is in town, but this is not her last stop. (Sometime next week she'll go on retreat with a Buddhist Fellowship that she's connected to, down in Big City.) But I think she's here for a few days.

As I say, I didn't think about it when you and I were talking, because it was driven clean out of my head by our exciting discussion of [your current writing project]. (Actually I mean that seriously!) But when I got her text a few minutes ago, I remembered that I should drop you a note before seeing her. (And as noted, if we can find a suitable set of tables that probably means dinner-time.)

So far, so good. And all of it was true, as of the time I sent it. Marie replied briefly.

Oh, thank you for keeping me posted, love!!!

Very considerate of you.  I hope you do get the opportunity!

Blast from the past: The Baptists and the rest of us

I've explained how Wife started attending Christian churches, and how she ended up at an Evangelical Baptist church. (OK, strictly speaking I don't have a story about how she ended up there in particular. But she was church-shopping, and that's the one she settled on.) I've told you a story which let you know that the Senior Pastor was willing to go out on a limb and try something unusual. How did the rest of us end up there?

[What follows is an account based on a long email I wrote to Marie in May of 2016, with minor additions or adjustments where suitable.]

Once Wife settled on a church, she started asking us to go with her. The boys had no special interest, but they were still little kids at this point. Clearly it wasn't up to them. I had no special interest either. Wife insisted that it made her look bad if we didn't come with her. I told her this was silly, but I didn't have the vocabulary to explain that the whole idea was absurd. Really, Babe, it's not all about you.

Now, this was while I was out of work. [Let's call it 2003.] And Wife was being particularly unsupportive: indeed, it felt like not only did I have to be looking for work 8 hours a day but I had to be managing her anxiety (and her consequent shrewishness and regular threats to divorce me) something like 16 hours a day. It wasn't much fun. Anyway, I finally sat her down to talk earnestly, and made a deal with her: I would attend church with her (and put the boys in Sunday School) if she would commit to behaving in a Christ-like way. (And of course I meant this in the sense that her church was teaching her to understand the word "Christ-like": I certainly didn't want her to behave like the rabble-rouser who smashed up the tables of the money-changers in the Temple!) She said she didn't think she could possibly do that; I said "Of course not, not under your own power. So if you succeed in doing it anyway, that's proof that God is helping you; and in that case God must be real and I'm willing to go to church." Well, the bargain didn't hold forever—after a while she had started an everything-but-physical-sex emotional affair with the Lead Tenor in the church choir—but for a while it bought me a bit of peace. So sure, hell, why not? Besides, this gave me a whole new vocabulary with which to try to talk her out of her crazier and more destructive behaviors.

 [Now that I think about it, I give the details of the contract itself in this post here. Go read it. But I don't talk about the aftermath.]

Blast from the past: Stigmata

Strictly speaking this story isn't necessary to explain how we ended up attending a Baptist church for a few years. That story will be adequately covered by the previous post and the next one. But it fits nicely between them, because it took place after Wife had started regularly attending the Evangelical Baptist Church near us, and before the rest of us started attending as well. And maybe—just maybe—it might help add some layers of nuance to the generally dismal and dispiriting picture that I have painted of Wife in this blog. (See also, for example, this post here.)

One Sunday morning, Wife left for church at the normal time. By this time she had passed through the Pentecostal churches of he church-shopping phase, and had settled down at an Evangelical Baptist church not too far away from us. While she was gone, the boys and I did whatever we did. I assume they played in the back of the house somewhere. I might have done the breakfast dishes, or just sat in the living room to read.

At more or less the usual time, Wife's car pulled back into our driveway, a little sloppily. A minute or two went by. Then Wife opened the door and came out of the car, stumbling and lurching as if she were drunk. She got up to our stoop, came in the front door, and lurched her way into the living room, where she collapsed on the sofa. Her speech was not very coherent. And when I went over to ask if she was OK, I saw that the palms of her hands were a bloody mess.

So I wiped off her hands—I don't remember seeing a visible wound, or at least there was no fresh blood coming out once I cleaned them off—and asked her what happened. What follows is her story, as I remember it.