My cough is back, 3

This is not me, obviously. But sometimes it feels like it might as well be.

I'm writing and posting this today to put a mark on the calendar. I hope I'm wrong, but it feels like today is the beginning of Coughing Season for me. Yes, it's the same damned allergic cough that I've complained about regularly for years (and that I've lived with regularly since long before I started complaining in these pages). Look up the posts tagged "cough" and you'll see what I mean.

Based on my calculations last spring, I guess this season—if that's what it is—should last till the end of February. Four months. That gives me hope for an endpoint.

It's funny how sharp the dividing line can be between On and Off. Over the last couple weeks I've had moments where it feels like my allergies are building up, but they have passed immediately and not returned until days later. I'm pretty sure I haven't taken a single cough drop since last February. Today I took five of them, to calm and soothe my throat. 

Just in time for the holidays, I guess. And in other news, ... I visited with Wife this afternoon and we talked very civilly for a couple of hours.

Time out for signals

I've got a bunch of posts to write and publish. Mostly they will fill in the last couple of weeks, between this one and today. Most of them are going to be back-dated.

See, back on October 8 I flew out to visit Debbie for a week. While I was there, we went to a silent retreat for the weekend, put on by a local UU Buddhist organization in her area. The prolonged time in silence helped me think about a number of things, some of which resolved themselves into blog posts that I wrote out long-hand on the airplane as I came home (October 14).

Then the very next evening (October 15), Marie arrived here in Beautiful City to spend a week visiting me. She flew home yesterday, on October 22. From this visit, I think I extracted maybe two topics to blog about.

So over the next few days I expect to post all of these topics online. I'll fit them in more or less where they belong sequentially. And I may not bother to type up the earlier ones before the later ones. So if you are watching this blog and hoping for a chronological account, you should keep the last fortnight in view all as a whole, until I get done. In the end, there will probably be six more posts added, all told: four from the visit with Debbie, and two from the visit with Marie. Of course that might change.     

     

Sexualized politics

Marie and I had the strangest argument tonight ... admittedly after both of us had had way too much to drink. On the one hand it gave me what I think are some useful insights into how she thinks about politics. On the other hand, it made me despair of ever reaching a common understanding with her on the subject. It's not just about correcting this or that factual misunderstanding that she might have picked up somewhere along the way. For her ever to understand the way I see American politics—or as an alternate goal, using the famous Straussian criterion, for her ever to understand her opponents as they understand themselves—will require a total demolition and reconstruction of the furniture in her mind related to politics. It would have to start with massive cognitive dissonance and proceed through total breakdown. I don't want to inflict that on her, and I don't foresee it. But this means she will be a prisoner of her peculiar delusions for the rest of her life.

It all started when I was talking about something else. I was describing how people interpret moral topics, and I said that people respond far more than they realize to the intuitive picture in their head. So when a Malefactor does something bad, you get some people who see him intuitively as a saber-toothed tiger or a cave bear—that is to say, as a lethal threat to their friends, neighbors, and children. Then there are other people who see him as an erring child who can learn better with a little education. These two groups argue with each other over what to do with the malefactor; they quote studies and statistics, and delve deeply into academic criminology to argue their cases. But all this sophistication is window dressing. What really motivates the two groups is their intuitive picture of what is going on. Is he a saber-toothed tiger, or an erring child? On that question hinges the pragmatic decision whether he should be killed straightaway, or rehabilitated.

That was the theoretical point I was trying to make. So far, so good.

Marie stopped me to say that sometimes the roles switch. She said that in cases of rape or sexual crimes, Liberals are more likely to condemn a Malefactor as irredeemable, and Conservatives are more likely to wink and let it pass on the grounds that "boys will be boys."

Now, I had never used the words "liberal" or "conservative" in my discussion. So what I should have said is. "OK fine, that's one more example of what I'm talking about." Perhaps I could have reminded her that I never used words like "liberal" or "conservative" because I was trying to talk about a general disjunction in how people treat Malefactors, and not to make a political point. Then I should have steered the discussion resolutely back to the most general level possible.

Depressed?

I wonder if I'm depressed?

Look over the last few posts. Not exactly upbeat, are they? Now look over the last several years. Count how many posts have complained that I am stuck, becalmed, going nowhere. Do you detect a theme?

Some time ago—I guess it was back when I was still working and had medical insurance (so in 2021 or before)—I stopped taking my daily wellbutrin because I couldn't tell that it made any difference. Also I read random voices on Twitter who suggested that SSRI's are useless or worse. And since I haven't had a lot of firm commitments since my work ended, it's been hard to tell whether I'm slowing down.

But yes, I'm slowing down. I eat and drink, I browse the Internet, I sleep a lot; but I don't exercise, and compared to the time I have available I'm not very productive. Maybe the wellbutrin is the relevant factor.

At any rate, it's likely one relevant factor. Another may be my comparative isolation. When I ask Google about the consequences of prolonged isolation, it gives me an answer that includes depression, obesity, and social skills deterioration. (I'm pretty sure I can detect that last one in myself, though self-diagnosis is always tricky). And the first two linked articles—by the CDC and the APA, respectively—give a spooky list of long-term outcomes.

I'll try taking the wellbutrin again, starting after Marie goes home from her impending visit. (I don't want to change anything before then, in case of unexpected results.) I suppose this means I have to find a doctor, since my last one retired back in 2023 and I'll need a prescription. Maybe Wife has a stockpile I can hit up. But experimentation has to be the key. I hope for the best. 

So controlling, part 3

Yes, the first two posts by this name were more than ten years ago, here and here. Deal with it.

I wrote recently about the many little ways Debbie and I got in each other's way in the days leading up to the retreat. Well, they didn't end there. They peaked, if you want to call it that, while we were driving home. We had stopped to recharge her EV,* and on the way out of the parking lot I was giving her instructions at the same time that the GPS did. She asked me very pointedly if I thought that was helpful. I admitted that of course it wasn't, and added lamely that I wasn't aware I was doing it. For the rest of the day I was painfully aware of every syllable that escaped the barrier of my teeth. I was pretty aware of it the next day too.

Then this morning, as she was making breakfast,** Debbie was setting out some ingredients and said, "You can start on this, and I'll eat that." I asked, "Is that something you want me to do now, or do you mean when everything is ready?" Debbie admitted she wasn't aware she had said anything.

And suddenly the penny dropped. Some people vocalize tasks they are doing, while they are doing it. Some people imagine themselves doing a task when they see someone else doing it. So it stands to reason that some few people just start reciting instructions for things that other people are doing.Most of the time we probably contain the impulse, so that strangers don't see us standing alone talking to ourselves. But in certain kinds of liminal situations it can be unclear—even to the speaker, to say nothing of the hearer!—whether we are talking to ourselves or to others.

This, I think, must be another of the roots of Wife's insistence that I was "so controlling": a habit of talking through what someone else is doing, while she is doing it. Of course I don't do it all the time. If the task is one I don't understand, I keep quiet. And if the other person clearly has it covered, we are likely talking about something else. But especially when I am with someone who doesn't seem confident about a task that I would be confident of—or who seems to be doing it the wrong way around—I probably vocalize the task at hand. This leaves the other person the option of asking me to stop (as Debbie did), of ignoring me, or of complaining later (when there is no longer anything I can do about it) that I am "so controlling." Debbie took the first option. Wife, famously, took the last.

_____

* We had bad luck finding charging stations on the way home, with the result that we drove several miles out of our way—at least twice. The exercise convinced me that the EV-charging industry is a lenocracy, in John Michael Greer's felicitous coinage. Debbie is still convinced that electric cars are the wave of a bright, new future, and that experiences like ours are just growing pains. I look at the same data, the same experiences, and think of Greer's mordant observation, "If you want to see that the decline of a great civilization looks like, look out the window." 

** Debbie and I no longer cook together in the same kitchen. During this visit, she cooked and I washed dishes, except for the time we were at the retreat (when the retreat staff did both). 

This development has been slow but steady in coming. You remember that when I first visited her in her new state, eight years ago, we cooked together and washed dishes together. At the time I commented, "Who needs sex to be intimate, when you can work together in the same kitchen, picking up and handing off tasks smoothly and conveniently?" Two years later we were still cooking together. But by 2020, I was starting to notice slippages:

"... we didn't work together in the kitchen as smoothly and effortlessly as we have in the past, which made me realize we have gotten out of practice. Nothing serious, but we had to pay more attention not to bump into each other, and I didn't always know right away what to do next. Little things."

I don't remember how we handled cooking last year, and I can't find anywhere in this blog that I wrote it down. Not that it matters, I suppose. The Buddha teaches that all things are impermanent, after all. Right? So it should be no surprise that our ability to cook together smoothly in the same kitchen is impermanent as well.       

Silent retreat

This weekend, I'm on a silent, residential, meditation retreat with Debbie. It's just like the one I joined last year at this time; and at only a weekend it is shorter than the weeklong retreat we joined at the end of 2013. It's organized as a UU-Buddhist retreat in the state where Debbie lives.

A silent retreat isn't literally 100% silent all the time. There are instructions when you arrive, and there are occasional dharma talks. (This time around, we are watching videos by Pema Chödrön in place of dharma talks.) Also, there is a relaxation of the requirement for those who want to socialize quietly during meals, though there are still tables designated for those who want to eat in silence. And there are periods of "free time," which should be quiet but which are not policed too closely if you aren't disturbing others. But then there are meditation periods, when nobody speaks. And the whole campus "goes into silence" in the evening after the last meditation.

The purpose of silent meditation is that it allows you to watch your mind in action—particularly the repetitive scripts that keep us perpetually ill at ease—and in the run-up to this retreat I certainly had plenty to watch.

• I flew out to Debbie's place on Wednesday afternoon. Debbie spent the afternoon looking after her grandsons, and we had dinner with them and their father. (Mattie—their mother and Debbie's daughter—was late at work.) Debbie had to interrupt one of my stories because I was unaware that it was time for the kids to go to bed.
• Thursday was easy, with a couple of errands.
• Friday we drove to the retreat. So that morning Debbie decided that she had to vacuum and wipe down the entire inside of her car before we could pack it.
• Then we got in each other's way while packing—or rather, I got in her way, and we had to spend time talking about it.
• Debbie drives an EV (electric vehicle), so we had to plan the trip around where there were charging stations. There aren't a lot in her area. This part wasn't a big frustration, because I let her handle it. But it was an added challenge.
• Then there were other similar issues when we got to the Retreat Center, unpacked, and got through the first evening. If I avoid spelling them all out, that's partly because they were so trivial that they would bore you, ... and partly because they were so trivial that they would make me look really bad.
• It was all little stuff. But it was one minor irritation on top of another, all because I was running along my little tracks of automatic responses and—at least sometimes—she was running along hers. By bedtime last night I was very grumpy.

I slept long, ate breakfast alone in silence this morning, and hiked around the grounds for an hour. Then I joined the group to listen to Pema's first video, after which they rang the bell for silent meditation.

And oh—how delicious that silence was! After my grumpy and grumbling evening, after I blundered sullenly through the morning—the silence of that first sit felt like I could taste it. It was refreshing like cool water on a hot day. All of a sudden I felt, This is why I am here!*

I sat through the first two morning meditations. Then I skipped the thirs one to write this post instead. Now it's lunchtime, and maybe I'm a little less grumpy.

__________

* In fairness I should add that the other, later sits weren't all equally amazing. But the contrast that first morning was real.    

        

Another death

There's been another death this year, a woman I've known for a dozen years though not deeply. But for most of those years, I saw her regularly, once a week. I'll call her Janet, which wasn't her name in real life.

Janet and Debbie co-founded the UU Sangha that I attend regularly. During all the years up through when we suspended meeting because of COVID-19 in 2020, Janet facilitated every meeting, every week, except for the handful of times that she traveled to visit family. By the time we resumed meeting—first remotely, and then in a hybrid manner—her treatments for ovarian cancer had started taking a toll. So she was rarely there, and no longer led. Still, she was in everyone's hearts. This year Debbie traveled here (to Beautiful City, where I live) several times to visit with Janet and her family; and finally, five weeks ago, Janet died.

This is just some random UU congregation on the Internet, and not the one
Janet belonged to. But her Celebration of Life was easily this crowded.

The Sangha did an adapted Buddhist ceremony for the dead at our next meeting, and we are doing an abbreviated ceremony by Zoom once a week for the seven weeks thereafter. (Tonight is number five.) Last weekend the UU Church that hosts us (of which Janet was also an active member) held a Celebration of Life for her. In fact, Janet herself designed the Celebration of Life ceremony. There was a little Buddhist input, when the Sangha came up to the front to chant "The Three Refuges." And there was a walk through her life, with lots of photos. Several people stood up to talk about what she had meant in their lives. And there was lots of food. It was a lovely service.

Already some of the other members of the Sangha have started to think about their own deaths. (None of us is exactly young.) One woman has said she wants her service to look just like Janet's, and so she has started writing her life because nobody here knows anything about it.

Where does this leave me?

Son 1 has a girlfriend

This evening I discovered that Son 1 has a girlfriend. Of course I don't know how many others he might have had that I never knew about. I'm sure he'd never tell me. And even now, I learned of her kind of by accident.

A couple weeks ago, I sent Wife a couple of articles I'd seen about some witches who hexed Charlie Kirk shortly before he was shot. (See this link, this one [since the original article seems to have been taken down], and also this one.) She still hasn't said anything substantive about the articles, but yesterday she texted me that Son 1 had acquired a new kitten in addition to the cat I knew they already had. Then she mentioned another name I didn't know. I asked, "Who's ⸻? A third cat?" This evening, Wife replied:

No, she's Son 1's girlfriend. If he hasn't told you about her, maybe I shouldn't have. He didn't tell me either. I came home unexpectedly from a failed sleep study. I also just had a colonoscopy, but won't get the results back for a month. [Wow, nice that you managed to make it All About You again by the end of the paragraph!]

So this wasn't an Official Announcement, unlike when Son 2 called each of us in turn to announce his relationship with Beryl. This means I have no idea whether the young woman in question is a Serious Relationship, or just a casual fling that Wife happened to walk in on. (Didn't I say this would be one of the risks when Son 1 first said he was going to give Wife a place to live?)

On the other hand, I have to confess that I feel a little put out that I learned it like this. I can understand Son 1 telling nobody. But once the operation's security was compromised (so to speak), I could wish that he had wound up the job like a gentleman by notifying those who didn't know yet—namely, me. I assume that Son 2 already knows, because I think the boys talk more to each other than they do to either parent—well, except insofar as Son 1 has to coordinate basic household stuff with Wife because she lives there. But for personal things, I assume he talks to his brother first. Maybe I'm wrong.

If she's going to be a long-term item, I'd like to meet her. I wonder if I can possibly visit sometime while she's there ... maybe during the holidays? After all the obstacles I put up to Wife joining my family for the holidays, Son 1 would be well within his rights to say No. It would be no more than karma.

But maybe I can ask. 

       

Magical tales 3, bindings and blowback

I've told you some stories before about Wife's magical workings, for example here and here. Both of those posts also included commentary by John Michael Greer, after I had described some facet of the working to him. Well, I've got another. This is one I had forgotten all about until the first time (a couple years ago, I think) that I read Greer talk about bindings.

A magical binding is a spell you cast on someone else that prevents him from doing some particular thing. Greer has talked about these more than once in his blogs, as a way to illustrate a point about magical ethics that he calls "the raspberry jam principle." The principle runs like this: You can't spread raspberry jam without getting it all over your fingers or the table. In the same way, when you direct magic at somebody else, the very same energies are going to affect you too. The idea, therefore, is that you should never aim a spell at someone else that you aren't willing to undergo yourself, because sure as anything the blowback will catch you.

This also means that if you want to use magic to control someone else's behavior, you have to be very careful how you craft the spell. Greer has told the story more than once that early in his career as a mage, he was good friends with a woman who was threatened by a rapist. (I don't remember if this was her husband, or a domestic partner, or a stranger.) Greer protected her by putting a binding on this fellow that prevented him from raping. And Greer explained to his readers that he was careful to prevent the offender from raping, and not from all sexual contact. His point was that he knew the very same binding would affect him too. But he accepted that consequence, because he didn't want to rape anyone anyway! So it was no problem for him that the spell which blocked the other guy blocked him too.

Anyway, in today's Magic Monday post, someone asked about bindings again. Greer told his story. And I remembered something that had happened to Wife almost 25 years ago.

Back when the Twin Towers fell, Wife was still unambiguously Wiccan. (Her entanglement with Christianity came later.) Like many people she was angry about the attack, and felt that she wanted to Do Her Part in some way. And she hit on the idea of putting a binding on Osama bin Laden, so that he would be immobilized. So that he couldn't do anything. 

I don't know the details of the ritual. (I was generally supportive of her worship, but I wanted to stay away from this working.) I do remember that she made a doll to represent Osama, and then bound it with rope or twine—so that, symbolically, it was bound hand and foot and couldn't do anything—and tossed it in the back of the closet to sit in the dark. Doubtless there was more to it as well.

To this day, I have no idea whether her working had even the slightest effect on Osama bin Laden himself. I kind of assume not, partly because Wife was no mage, and partly because there were so many other people in the world wishing him (respectively) good or ill that I figure her spell likely got lost in the shuffle.

But interestingly enough, she got very sick after that--so sick that for the next two years or so she could scarcely crawl out of bed even just to go to the bathroom. She couldn't work. She couldn't look after the children. (We had to hire a nanny, and I didn't make all that much money. Interesting times.) In fact, she couldn't ... umm ... do anything! Wait, really?

At the time I never connected her illness with her working against Osama. But now after reading Greer for some years, I no longer treat the synchronicity as a coincidence.

I posted this story on Greer's blog. His reply was brief, but to the point:

Typical blowback. Never, ever cast a spell on anyone else you wouldn't want to experience yourself...because you will experience it, whether you want to or not.

And that, I guess, is that.     

      

Vajrayogini

It's not really related to anything else we've discussed, but two or three years ago I stumbled across the most remarkable Buddhist deity. Her name is Vajrayogini, and that's a picture of her up above.

What's so special about her, besides the utterly mind-blowing picture? I think she might be a key figure to help communicate what I used to see in "high-maintenance" women.

"Living consistently with your values" part 2

This post follows on from an earlier post a little more than four years ago.

Last week—I think it was last week—I was talking to Debbie over Zoom. She had just come in from roasting marshmallows with her family: daughter Mattie and her husband, plus their two boys (Debbie's grandsons). Roasting marshmallows? I said. That sounds like fun.

Oh it was, she added. And then she told me the story behind it.

The older boy is now in ... I'm not sure, but I think it's first grade. And at the beginning of the week, his teacher handed out a flyer about the Cub Scouts. Anyone who wanted to join could attend a meeting at a certain date and time, and they would roast marshmallows. 

Mattie and her husband told him No, they weren't going to sign him up for Scouts.The way Debbie described it, they gave two reasons:

1. The Boy Scouts require you to believe in God.
2. The Boy Scouts are homophobic.

Besides, said Mattie's husband, the main thing you do in Scouts is learn to go camping, and we already do a lot of camping.

But they were going to roast marshmallows!

So Mattie and her husband offered that the family could roast marshmallows on their own. And they did.

Psychological safety

Yesterday I too a couple of online classes related to job skills. In a sense it was silly of me to waste the time, because I'm retired—why should I need to improve my job skills now? But they were offered for free and I hated to waste them. Anyway, one of the classes was about how to develop your employees, and it made what should have been a commonplace observation: your employees need to feel psychologically safe before you can talk about developing their skills or their careers. Otherwise they won't take the risk.

Psychologically safe??

And right away I thought about this post here, plus any number of other times at work that the same topic came up (but I didn't write about it).

Looking back with the perspective of ... gosh, it looks like seven years by now! ... I think I was too harsh in my assessment of what was going on. You can go read the post itself for the Grand Narrative that I spun at the time, but I think the simpler explanation is that I didn't feel psychologically safe. And this was for a couple of reasons.

One is that I really felt our Human Resources department (by that time) was dangerous, or even predatory. Years before, when we had our own local HR staff, I had a good relationship with them. But by the time all this went down, HR was located elsewhere and I felt a distinct sense of menace from most of them.

Another is that I was working in a discipline that I had learned entirely on-the-job, and there were huge parts of it I didn't know. I had established a good position for myself over the years, but I knew that there were large provinces of my own field that I knew nothing about, and I didn't even know what the possibilities were in the profession. So I had no idea where to start a conversation.

Finally, I could never really bring myself to care about making any serious, long-term contributions to the business. I talk about this phenomenon here.

All in all, I think the lack of psychological safety I felt at work was largely just an extension of my status as the Consummate Outsider. (And see also the story about Aristotle that I tell in this post I already referenced.)

Is that a good thing? No, I guess not. But it's not as discreditable as the Grand Narrative I came up with seven years ago.    

Failed again, 2

This afternoon I logged into my bank account, and on a whim I looked up what you have to do to link a savings account as the backup to prevent overdrafts on a checking account. I discovered that the service is free. Next I wondered: Since I'm still listed on Son 1's accounts—that's why I get copied on his overdraft notifications—I wonder if I have the authority to link his savings account to his checking account?

Only one way to find out. So I tried it. Less than five minutes later, it was all done.

This should prevent future overdraft notifications, I think. Unless things get really bad, I mean.

I emailed Son 1 to tell him I had done it, and to explain that he could undo it if he chose. (I think.) I have heard nothing back from him, but I didn't really expect to. I hope this solves the problem.

    

The cat-whisperer

Last week, I was back in farm country visiting Schmidt again. I spent all day on Saturday the 9 driving there, and all day on Monday the 18 driving home. Marie visited too during the exact same stretch, except that she went back home the next day. We visited some, listened to music, watched some old movies, and generally hung out. Some notes follow.  

What was the occasion?

Schmidt had hernia surgery scheduled for Monday the 11. His doctors told him not to lift anything heavy for six weeks after. Schmidt had already explained to us that he had no intention of following this instruction literally, because he knew ways to use leverage to make the work easier on his healing incision. And he made a big point of saying that he could manage by himself if he had to. But he needed someone to drive him home from the hospital, because he would still have a lot of opiates in his system then. And yes, he supposed he could use some help with a few tasks around the farm in the early days.

So Marie and I came to visit. We drove him home, and we fixed dinners for a week. When we all went out shopping, I carried the big carton of cat litter that he bought (to supplement one he already owned). He pushed the cart so that he could lean on it. So I guess we helped in little ways. We also kept him company.

The cat-whisperer

Schmidt discussed his approach to training cats. (See also this post and this one.) He actually used the phrase "cat whisperer" for himself, as an allusion or hommage to the work of Buck Brannaman (see also this documentary), who has been nicknamed "the horse whisperer." Schmidt's basic point is the same as Buck's: it is your job to understand the animal you want to train. You can't expect the cat (or horse) to understand you, or to think like a human being. You have to think like a cat (or horse), and use that insight to encourage the behaviors you want. Schmidt went on to say that the conventional myth about cats being arrogant and uncooperative is just that—a myth and no more. He said that using his methods, he has had geat success—within reasonable limits, of course—getting his cats to do what he wants.

Schmidt and Marie talked about cats a lot. I didn't have much to contribute to those conversations.

Could Wife have Asperger's?, 3

OK, the last time I asked this was five years ago. I think the answer is definitely "Yes" based on lots of experiences that are all more or less summed up in this post. Wife herself thinks the answer is "No" (or that's what she said when I asked her), as described in this post and then this one right after.

But then this evening I was reading John Michael Greer's Ecosophia blog, specifically the comments to this post, and he makes the following remarks in comment #58:

My late wife was the same way — she was on the autism spectrum, and from late childhood on preferred to hang with boys (and then men) rather than girls (and then women) because she disliked the informal-power realm and never could do it well. That’s one of the reasons why she became the first female presiding officer of an Odd Fellows lodge in Washington state; when the Odd Fellows decided to let women join, the brothers of my lodge (who all knew her via social and charitable activities) asked her to join and then voted her into the big chair because they all knew her, liked her, and knew she’d follow the rules of formal power rather than trying to twist them into comformity with the ways of informal power.   

I read this, and right away I thought of Wife's career as a high school teacher.

She spent four years teaching at all-boys Catholic high schools. (That's one year before graduate school, and three years after.) Then she finally had a chance to teach at an all-girls Catholic high school. She jumped at the chance: partly for practical reasons (it was a lot closer to home, and her daily commute had become very difficult), but mostly for idealistic reasons. Wife called herself a feminist. She had gone to an all-women's college, and valued all-female spaces. She looked forward eagerly to training young women so that they could achieve the best they had in them.

Be careful what you wish for.

Wife was very successful in teaching boys, but she failed utterly at teaching girls. She held that job for only one year. If she had not been accepted at another graduate school after that (which rendered moot any question of her further employment) she would surely have been fired, and might have had to go back to secretarial work.

Of course I wasn't on campus. I had my own job. But the way she described it, the girls were all two-faced and treacherous.She often summarized the difference like this:

Back when I was teaching boys, I'd do something one of the boys didn't like and right away he'd shout out in the middle of class, "Oh, Mrs. Tanatu, that isn't even fair!" Then I'd tell him, "Suck it up, Johnson, this isn't a democracy." And we'd be done—the whole problem would be over. But with the girls, any time I do something they don't like they smile and smile just as sweet as pie. I never even know there's a problem. But then they go tell all their other teachers that I'm picking on them, and the other teachers come and ask me quietly, "Why are you being so mean to Sonya? Or Tanya? Or Suzie? Or Betty?" And these little conversations in the hallway are the first I've heard of it! I literally never knew there was a problem before this. But now the whole faculty thinks I have some kind of crazed vendetta against this or that girl, just because she never turns in her homework and wants me to coddle her anyway. God, but I miss teaching boys!

Is it just me, or does that sound pretty much exactly like what Greer says about his late wife? That she—like my Wife—understood formal power and could work with it effectively, but that she—also like my Wife—was totally at sea when it came to informal power, those quiet conversations in the hallway, and the focus on whether you like someone rather than on whether she's following the rules.

Sara Greer was like this because she was on the autism spectrum. Isn't it the most natural thing to assume that Wife was also somewhere on that spectrum, if she got identical results? 

   

Why do I court failure?

At one point back in 2016, when we first got back together, Marie told me that decades earlier—when we knew each other in college—she had been racking her brains trying to figure out why we got along so well. That sounds like a strange thing to say, but here's what she meant by it.

By the time she was in middle school, Marie's home life was hopelessly dysfunctional: her father had committed suicide, and her mother was a blackout drunk who had once molested her all the way to orgasm (back when Marie was 12 and didn't understand what was going on). See, for example, this post and this one. And when Marie looked around at her friends, the only ones she felt naturally at-ease with were the ones whose home lives were equally dysfunctional. So she just figured that's how it was: she was messed up, and the only people she could really relax around were equally messed up.

Then she met me, and right away felt at ease around me. So she tried to create conversational openings to let me explain how my family was dysfunctional, while she shared how her family was dysfunctional. She figured it would be a bonding exercise.

Only I never took the bait. On the one hand, I had long since internalized the rule that you Never Talk Your Family Down to Others. And on the other hand, I genuinely didn't understand that there was anything dysfunctional about us. By conventional standards we were all pretty normal. My dad sometimes drank a lot, but not to the point that he ever lost his job or got into fights. My parents stayed married during ten disastrous years of running a business that they hated and didn't understand (or not at first). We didn't have a lot of money, but somehow we got by. So I never had any lurid tales of dysfunction to share with Marie, and she was left baffled. How can I possibly feel so at ease with him when he and his family are so normal?

In the first couple of months that we were back in communication, she kept probing at this point until I finally asked her to stop. Also after a couple of months we started fucking, and we had better things to talk about.

Over time, of course, I have come to have a clearer understanding of some of the mind games that Father played ... mostly not, I think, out of actual malice, but in an attempt to placate some of his own demons. And I've talked about how he interacted with me using a power dynamic that felt very sexual, even if we both had our clothes on. (See, for example, this post and this post; for a more light-hearted approach, you might also try this post.)

But just this evening, I thought of a neat formula that summarizes the profound ambivalence—and that's putting it nicely!—that I feel about great achievement.

Father forced me to feel pride in my achievements in the same way that Marie's mother forced her to feel orgasms.

I'm not sure I have stories to back that up—well, I've got one but I'm not ready to share it yet. Other than that one, I think it mostly took the form of little remarks here and there by the way, bits and bobs that I probably can't remember accurately or at all but that contributed to an overall ambience of expectations.

But the end result for both of us was very similar. 

• For years, Marie could not take pleasure in sex, or at best she could take only the limpest and most qualified form of pleasure. 
• For years, I have not been able to take pleasure in my achievements, or only the limpest and most qualified form of pleasure.

What does this look like in practice?

• When people praise Son1 and Son2, I agree that they have both grown into fine young men; but I insist that parents don't have a lot of influence on that, and that the credit goes to them for choosing to become so good. The only parenting victory that I will own is my forcing Wife to let both boys go to boarding school, in order to get them away from the two of us!
• Back when I was working, my greatest victories at work were the kind of thing where I could easily say, "Everyone came together as a team and did their parts really well. All I had to contribute was a little organization, and taking minutes." And you can bet that's exactly what I said.
• I have confessed to you lot (who would never tell a soul, and besides I'm hiding behind a mask) that yes, in odd moments I have occasionally felt little wisps of pride in my ancient academic achievements, back during the Buchanan Administration; I have also said that those wisps of pride feel like "a really degrading sexual fetish," or like "masturbating in public." And of course you remember the cartoon I posted about it all. 

So honestly I think it's a pretty good analogy. It captures just how slimy and unclean I feel around the whole topic of achievement.

And how much cleaner I feel around failure, by comparison. 

P.S.: I think this insight helps explain much of the ambivalence I have around school and anything that looks like it. I've talked about that a lot over the years, but see especially this post and this one. Now I'm wrestling with the question how much of this post about Marie applies to me too. I think any simple answer will be wrong, and that the true answer is "Not 100% but also not 0%."

  

Failed again

Yesterday—good Lord, was it only yesterday?—I had a totally pointless fight with Son 1. I don't even know if "fight" is the right word. All I know is that—ironically for someone who talks and writes as much as I do—sometimes I really suck at explaining what I mean. (As a point of comparison, consider, "I never could teach my sons to do their math homework.")

If you are reading this and you have any suggestions for how I can fix it, please leave me a note in the comments. [Update a month later, 2025-08-22: I may have solved the problem since then, as explained here.]

Background

It all started ... well no, it started long before that. Years ago, when the boys were first graduating from college and starting out on their own, they authorized me to have access to their bank accounts. From time to time they needed little boosts of cash while they were getting their footing in the real world, and it was easier for me simply to transfer funds than to write a check, mail it, wait for it to arrive, and wait for them to deposit it.

But it turns out that an arrangement like this is a lot easier to set up than it is to discontinue. The only way to cancel it is for the owner of the account (this means, respectively, either Son 1 or Son 2) to walk into the bank and ask for a new account number. (Actually two new numbers, one for checking and one for savings.) Then as the bank sets up the new accounts and transfers over all the history from old to new, the account owner has to say, "Oh yeah, one more thing: don't put my Dad on the new accounts." This is cumbersome. Also it's a nuisance in case (for example) the account owner has set up Direct Deposit for his paycheck, because now he has to re-set it with the new account number. Then he has to wait for the bank to issue new ATM cards, and all that. It's a pain. And since at this point Son 1 and Son 2 each live somewhere else, we haven't gotten around to dealing with it.

It's weird. If Father had ever had access to one of my bank accounts (which he never did, once I was in college), I would have been eager to shut off that access as soon as I possibly could. I suppose in some sense it is a vote of confidence that the boys have been so blasé about the issue.

Exercises in compassion, part 2

As I mentioned in the earlier post, the dharma teacher at this meditation retreat integrated his spiritual teachings with a political point of view. Occasionally this made his teachings sound distinctly un-Buddhist, like the time that he suggested that We often believe that our moral authority is proportional to the extent to which we cling to our views, and to our moral anger at the malefactors in public life. He spent several minutes describing this perspective, and seemingly warming to it. The attendees were lapping it up. Finally he said No, no, it's all false and this approach doesn't work. Clinging-to-views isn't a productive way forward after all. (But I wonder how many people truly heard him say that.)

But as he discussed these things, he introduced the concept of "pathological do-gooders," or "pathological altruism." This is when someone just can't stop doing things for others, or when someone does things for others with a reckless disregard for his own well-being, or indeed for any cost to himself at all. I think the teacher's motivation must have been that many of his listeners sub­consciously believe that to be their moral ideal. That's what they believe they ought to be doing! Of course that's crazy, but consider the audience. And much of the teacher's advice here was very sound and sober. He reminded us that "Caring is costly," and that if we cling too tightly to our ideal of eliminating all suffering everywhere, we will burn out. One of the most basic Buddhist teachings, after all, is that clinging causes dukkha, or suffering. So to the extent that he was able to wean people away from their fantasies of redeeming the world, his teaching was entirely orthodox and wholesome.

What caught my attention was one of his incidental comments. He may have been quoting another author—my notes don't say, and I don't remember for sure. But he pointed out that there is one circumstance—and only one!—where "pathological do-gooders" seem normal, and where it seems the most natural thing in the world to throw away all other considerations in order to help others.

That one, unique circumstance is war. (Then as an afterthought he included floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters as more or less equivalent.)

My first reaction was a sardonic smile: Gosh, could someone spin this into making a Buddhist argument for more wars? But then I began mulling.

In his classic memoir Storm of Steel, Ernst Jünger describes that when World War One broke out, Germans greeted it with enthusiastic idealism.

Movies made after World War Two—movies like The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956)—treated as a commonplace the trouble that soldiers had returning to civilian life, because it lacks all the unity, cameraderie, ésprit, meaning, and purpose of life under fire.

Even an antiwar vehicle like the television series M*A*S*H could not help but celebrate the common purpose of the team at the (fictional) "4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital" during the Korean War. The last episode, in which a ceasefire goes into effect and the characters all go home, is both celebratory and deeply poignant. 

And surely we have all heard stories of people who accomplished deeds of great bravery and daring in wartime, who rescued their team from certain death with no thought of their own safety, who nonetheless could never settle down in peacetime and make something of themselves. The image feels like it should be a commonplace. Isn't it?

War puts all conventional values in question. 

• Rank and status? Sure, they matter. But the man commanding an assault might be killed in the next moment; and any grunt with gumption and initiative can be given a battlefield promotion to take his place.
• Wealth and acquisition? Anything you have acquired can be lost just as easily. But unexpected loot can also be found. It all comes down to luck, although some people may argue that the valorous tend to be luckier than the cowardly.
• Comfort? As if!

So maybe it is possible to understand Jünger's talk of "idealism." Maybe I wasn't crazy a couple of years ago to argue that the experience of war really is the experience of "pure dynamic Quality" seen through a Social lens. Maybe when all life is being lived on the extreme edge, it makes sense that extreme, pathological altruism becomes the order of the day.

This is not an argument for more wars. But it does leave me with some sense of why certain authors have found peacetime petty and squalid and corrupt, compared with the moral purity they feel they have touched in war.

Maybe we, as humans, truly are made for war and catastrophe, not for peace and prosperity.

It's a conundrum. 

          

Exercises in compassion, part 1

A week ago, I attended a weekend-long non-residential retreat at the local State University. The theme was "Love in Turbulent Times"; based on my sense of the practitioners and the attendees, it could probably have been subtitled "How to Preserve Equanimity When the Bad Guys Won the Last Election." The dharma teacher tried valiantly to keep overt political statements out of his talks, but didn't really succeed. I wasn't surprised: I know this town and at least some of the local Buddhist community, so I expected that going in. And mostly it wasn't political, or not very.

He talked about compassion, among other topics, and this is one of the themes I found myself pondering. In particular, I remember when I first read Jack Kornfield's A Path With Heart, Kornfield wrote that one of the ways to test whether your spiritual path is a healthy one is to check whether you have become more open and compassionate with time, or more isolated and hard-hearted? (I discuss this passage in this post from eleven years ago.) So I asked myself: Am I more compassionate than I used to be? And I answered, Partly yes. I think I am more compassionate towards people I know, like Wife or Father. Certainly I get angry at them a lot less. What's less clear is whether I am more compassionate towards strangers, and the dharma teacher seemed to put some emphasis on compassion towards strangers in his talks. (You could probably use this recent post to argue that my compassion for strangers is not high.) On the other hand, I wonder how often "compassion for strangers" counts as real compassion, and how often it is merely performative, in order to make the do-gooder look good? So I've got something to meditate on.

Then the morning of the second day, I was confronted with a concrete exercise in compassion! I got to the university early, and pulled into the parking lot. As I pulled in, I saw one party just walking away. They were elderly, obviously not University people, and obviously attendees of the meditation retreat. So far, so good. But when I got to the parking kiosk, I realized they had walked off without paying. More exactly, they had activated the parking kiosk, and had recorded their license plate number. But they had not actually fed the machine any money! I assume this negligence has to have been caused by confusion or ignorance; if they had intended to park-and-dash, they wouldn't have initiated the process. What should I do?

I thought about it while paying for my own parking, and for too many minutes thereafter. I saw three options:

1. Forget about the problem. In that case, campus parking enforcement would probably give them a ticket.
2. Write down their license number, and then ask around at the retreat "Is this your car? You need to go back and pay for your parking!"
3. Just pay their damned parking myself. (It didn't cost much.)

As I say, I spent way too much time thinking about this. In the end, I just paid for their parking. It seemed the easiest thing to do. (Strictly speaking, I guess it would have been easier to do nothing. But it would have bugged me if they had actually gotten a ticket.)

I do not know whether my decision was influenced by my rumination the previous day on the role of compassion in my life.  

Then the dharma teacher's remarks the second day sent my thoughts down a whole new path! See Part Two for details. 

    

Golden Bough in concert

OK, here's something different. The Celtic folk band Golden Bough, in concert.

I didn't attend in-person, but I did get a link to watch it live-streamed.

There were a few hiccups and glitches, but they are still recognizable.

They are still a delight to listen to.

One warning: you have to advance the video past the 16:00 mark (that's 16 minutes!) before you get anything. But after that it should be fine. Leave me a note if it's not.

I can't get Blogger to put up a window, but here is the link. 

Feeding a coyote

Sometimes fate arranges the perfect metaphor. If only I felt I could take advantage of it!

When I talked with Marie a week ago, she was solemn and worried and upset and frightened, all over the deportations that the Administration has recently started enforcing. Mind you, Marie is a natural-born citizen. Her parents were natural-born citizens. She looks White, though apparently if you go far enough back one ancestor was Chippewa. In other words, there is about as much chance that she'll be deported as there is for Melania Trump. But that doesn't stop her from worrying. I've mentioned before that Marie suffers from TDS somethin' terrible, so naturally she believes the very worst it is possible to believe.

What does Marie know about immigration? She is friends with two different families who both think they have to leave the United States proactively before they are deported. In one of these families, the husband in English and the wife is Canadian; their son is a natural-born American. In the other family, the husband is American and the wife is Mexican, though you wouldn't guess it unless she told you. In both families, all the paperwork is in order and has been for many years. Again, these people are not the targets of any deportation effort. But try telling them that.

So I spent our weekly call a week ago trying to talk Marie down from what seemed to be—figuratively or emotionally speaking—a very high cliff.

When we talked yesterday, she was in a much better mood. It seemed that she had forgotten her earlier worries. But buried in her chit-chat about what had gone on the previous week was the news that she had seen a hungry coyote.

Marie lives in the suburbs. This is not normally coyote country. There are wild areas within driving distance, to be sure. But for a coyote to wander all the way into Marie's neighborhood, it must be either desperately hungry or else really bad at directions.  

And Marie has been leaving out food! What's more, she has seen the food disappear. So while she can't be intellectually certain that it's the coyote who has eaten it all, nonetheless she is morally certain that she has saved the coyote from starvation!

I asked her how long she plans to keep leaving out food? She didn't give a date, but in general she wants to keep him alive until he learns to hunt for himself.

Really? How's that going to work?

Boxes of books

As usual—at least if you don't count when I spend the holiday with Marie and her family—I spent the Fourth of July with Mother, Brother, and SIL. (See also, e.g., here and here.)

The Fourth was on a Friday. I drove down in the late morning, and encountered pleasantly little traffic. 

Brother and SIL did all the cooking, and we started to eat in the very late afternoon, as the heat started to lift.

Brother and SIL have also been working their way through boxes of papers in Mother's garage, mostly papers left behind by Father when he died. They have been looking for things that might be worth saving, and trashing the rest. There has been a lot to trash. I don't know how carefully they are filtering them, but I do know that he left behind a lot of junk. That said, I did scan through a box of papers that they had marked "Trash" and found a draft copy of Mother's doctoral dissertation, along with a letter to her from her old faculty advisor. I hope this was an exception.

Meanwhile, Brother has asked me to go through the boxes of books in the garage. There are a lot of these. But I wonder if we are all agreed on what to toss?

When I began to tackle this task on the Fifth, I found—in boxes that had been sitting in the garage—books that I had given as gifts: at the very least there was one that I gave Mother after Father died, and one that I gave Father while he was still alive. Why were they in boxes in the garage, when they used to be on shelves in the house? Clearly someone had decided that they didn't deserve shelf-space. I don't credit Mother with that much energy or initiative these days, and I know it wasn't me. That leaves Brother and SIL. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I judged that both books belonged in the "Keep" pile. So now I wonder if I'll have a fight with Brother and SIL when they find out. (At the moment, I think they don't realize it yet.)

My first pass through the boxes generated three categories of books. 

Death by laughter

Chrysippus of Soli died from laughing.

Can you die from laughing? Today I learned that Chrysippus of Soli, the Stoic philosopher, was said to have died laughing at one of his own jokes.

I remember Father mentioned one time that he thought he was going to die of laughter. I was somewhere else for the event itself, possibly away at college. But it was one evening and he was sitting up late. I don't remember if Mother was sitting up with him, or if she had started getting ready for bed. Also, I don't remember what provoked his laughter—whether it was something he read (perhaps The Funniest Joke in the World), or just a funny idea that occurred to him. Probably it was something he read.

Anyway, he described that he started laughing and laughing, and then found that he couldn't stop. This "couldn't stop" experience wasn't frightening though—just very pleasant. Finally he laughed so much that he felt himself detach from his body. He said it felt like he could just float away and go somewhere else, and he thought about it for a while. Finally he decided, no, he would rather stay where he was. So he nestled back down into his body, stopped laughing, and let his life return to normal.

When he told me this story, Mother commented that she could hear him laughing (or, as I say, maybe she was still in the same room), and was worried if he would be OK because it went on so long. She did not say she was afraid he would die. And for his part, he didn't appear to regard the prospect of death with fear. The way he described it, it just sounded interesting. But no, he had responsibilities still in life, and people to attend to. So he decided not to move on just yet.

If I've remembered the approximate year correctly, that would have been before his grandsons were born ... possibly even before I married Wife. So he would have missed a lot.

When he finally did die, it wasn't from laughing. I hope it was as free of fear and as interesting to the inquiring mind as the time he almost laughed himself to death.

I guess there's no way to know.