Eighteenth date? "I never heard you say ...."

Editorial note: I am writing this post the night of March 14, 2026. But it belongs somewhere in April or May 2011. I know that because it tells the story of a traffic ticket I got while cavorting with D in Faraway City, and I wrote a check to pay that ticket on May 14, 2011. So the event itself must have happened before that date, but not too long before. Looking at the times I was with D in Faraway City, I deduce that our Eighteenth Date is the most likely choice for when it must have happened. I have not yet decided whether to post this note itself in 2011 when it happened, or fifteen years later in 2026 when I am writing it.

Once upon a time—circumstantial evidence puts it at our Eighteenth Date—D and I met in Faraway City, to talk and drink and fuck like we usually did. Saturday morning we drove downtown because they were having some kind of fair. Also we wanted breakfast. But parking was hard to come by, because plenty of other people were going to the fair as well. Finally, as we diverted up a residential side street, D suddenly pointed and said "There!"

It didn't look to me like much of a spot. It was right next to someone's driveway, and I was afraid that if I parked there I wouldn't leave enough room by the driveway to be safe. I told D I thought I'd be too close, but she insisted: "It will be fine!" Mentally I weighed the risk, and figured we weren't going to be all that long. So I parked there, and we walked back to the restaurant district to find breakfast.

We came back a couple of hours later, and—sure enough!—I had a ticket. Fortunately it didn't cost too much. I had my checkbook with me, so I wrote out the check then and there and sealed it into the envelope, rather than risking that Wife might discover it when I took it home. (But I don't remember if I could find a stamp on short notice, or if I mailed it from home.)

Then, as D and I drove to the airport, she remarked—her voice beaming with gratitude—"Do you know something? That whole time you were dealing with the ticket, I never once heard you say, 'I told you so.' I'm so grateful for that!"

I don't remember if I said anything in reply. Probably I just mumbled and changed the subject. But in later years, this event was part of what made me understand that D herself was every bit as narcissistic as she accused Wife of being; it mattered intensely to D what people thought of her, so the accusation "I told you so" would have been far more lethal to her than it would have been to most other people. (I assume most people would regard it merely as a childish annoyance.)

The other thing I understood years after it was too late was what I should have said in reply. My thought is that, after all, D was using that event to weigh my soul, just as Marie weighed my soul after I lost my wallet to some pickpockets in Athens. But that weighing could, properly, have gone in both directions. What I should have said to D, if only I had had my wits about me, was this:

"You are right. I never said 'I told you so.' Do you know what else I noticed? I noticed that there were words you never spoke, either. The whole time I was dealing with that ticket, you never once said, "Oh Hosea, it was my idea that you should park there. Let me pay the fine!"

L'esprit de l'escalier. 

            

Meeting Dorcas

Three days ago—last Saturday morning—I finally met Son 1's new girlfriend. I'll call her Dorcas. I spent a little over an hour visiting, and she was very pleasant. Wife was also there, and was significantly less pleasant. I wish I had been surprised by that.

The context is that I was driving to Big City to visit Mother, Brother, and SIL. You remember that I didn't go there for Christmas Eve, because the weather was too fierce. But Saturday was calm and beautiful; so we rescheduled Christmas for Saturday. And Son 1 agreed that I could stop by around 10 o'clock in the morning.

I arrived just about on time, clutching a little cooking I had brought them as a gift. Son 1 let me in, and then resumed his place on the sofa with Dorcas. Wife was on the other side of the room, so I found a chair that let me see everyone. For a few minutes we discussed their new kitten. Then I asked Dorcas what she does for a living.

This is a stock photo, or maybe it is created by AI. It is certainly not really Dorcas.
But it's supposed to be a research engineer, which is good enough.

It turns out she works in technology. She is some kind of engineer. Well, she's an engineer half-time, and a doctoral student half-time. Her research is related to the corporate work she's doing. I suppose I shouldn't go into a lot of detail, because it's a new field and it might be possible to identify her through it. But she has published three articles (in collaboration, of course) and already holds a number of patents (ditto). This was actually pretty interesting, and for a few minutes I tried to draw her out.

It also turns out that there are some unexpected crossover points where her work might have implications for the stuff I used to do ... and therefore for the stuff I write about in the professional blog under my real name. So I asked her some more about these points, and ended up asking if she could send me any kind of non-classified document from which I could learn more (and maybe write about it). She sent me one URL. I have yet to explore it deeply. But I was pleased to get even the one.

Of course the conversation bounced around in a very non-linear fashion. Son 1 contributed to it. I tried to tell some funny stories from my own career. I didn't learn a lot about Dorcas's personality, except that she is fond of Son 1 and is willing to tolerate his family.

Then Wife entered the conversation by booming,* "I notice nobody has asked me any questions about Henry II!" Back when Wife was in graduate school, she was a medievalist, and was starting to study the tax policy of Henry II of England. This was before she failed her Qualifying Exams, which means it was before she was given her terminal Master's and booted out of graduate school for the second time. (I describe the first time she left graduate school in this post here.)

Gosh, dear, what can you tell us about Henry II?

So Wife spent several minutes haranguing** us about Henry II and his tax policy. It had nothing to do with the previous conversation, and plainly nobody else was interested. She even made several remarks acknowledging that nobody else was interested, in a tone that was (I think) supposed to be wry and self-deprecating, but came across as merely self-pitying. (And in any event none of these remarks stopped her from prolonging her lecture.) 

After maybe 75 or 80 minutes (total, not just of Wife's lecture), I said I had to be on my way. Before Wife could make (yet another!) remark about how I was getting out because I was bored with Henry II, Son 1 quickly joined in to say, "Yes, you've got other family members to visit!" And I replied, "Yes, and I want to get there in time for dinner!" So we all said goodbye. I got hugs from Wife and Son 1, and even from Dorcas (though when I arrived she had greeted me by shaking my hand, as I expected).

My impression is that it wasn't an unsuccessful first meeting ... well, except for Wife, but I claim no responsibility on that front. But of course I can't read minds: not Son 1's, and not Dorcas's. So I don't know when I'll see them next. I hope it's not long delayed. So far as I could make a judgement, I liked her.

_____

The rest of the weekend, I spent at Mother's. I got there  somewhere between 1:00 and 1:30. We ate dinner pretty much on schedule at 2:00. Since Brother and SIL put together the whole meal, I have to qualify or retract any earlier remarks suggesting that the two of them are always late or behind schedule (see also, for example here or here).

There was a lot of food. It was all elegant and tasty. Then there was a dessert. (This was the only part Mother made.) It, too, was elegant and tasty.

Finally we opened Christmas presents. I felt a lot of anxiety about this, because all I'd done was a little cooking for everyone. Fortunately Brother and SIL hadn't gotten me much: just a couple of books about food. (Seriously!) Mother got my a gift certificate at a gourmet food store, and insisted that she was always thrilled to get the kind of cooking that I delivered.

Late into the evening, Brother and SIL went home. I slept over. Mother and I spent most of Sunday talking aimlessly, though part of the time was about Father's death and how unprepared she was. I suggested that the best way to avoid a repetition is to talk about what has to be done, so that Brother and I are prepared.

Monday, I drove home after breakfast, but I wasn't good for much the rest of the day.

And here we are in Tuesday.  

__________

* I think that Wife's hearing is getting worse. Her voice is a lot duller, flatter and louder than it used to be.  

** As I was saying ....     

      

Bad at chess

I was talking with Marie today, and she mentioned in the course of the discussion that she had never learned to play chess very well, not past the most rudimentary level. Neither have I, and it was no big deal. But then she told me why not: she found that she had a very low tolerance for losing! And of course the only way to learn to play chess well is to play a lot of it even though you start off playing badly; and that, in turn, means accepting that you are going to lose an awful lot of the time.

She also acknowledged that this low tolerance for losing might have made her life harder in other ways, but we didn't pursue it too far. (I still remembered sitting up talking a few nights ago, and didn't want to push anything too hard.) But I did start to wonder—silently, in my own mind—how far this preference had affected her other choices in life? In a post last year, I toyed with the idea of picturing Marie as a kind of atheist nun; but is it possible that she chose that path simply in order to reduce the number of direct contests she would have to fight? After all, if you never enter the arena, you can't lose. (You can't win either, but it doesn't feel to me like winning is nearly so important to Marie as not-losing.) 

Or consider her fears for many years about my continued friendship with Debbie, fears that seem only to have been put to rest recently. Of course it is more or less typical for a girlfriend to worry if her boyfriend keeps in touch with one of his exes. So maybe what is interesting is all the things that Marie didn't do. She didn't force the issue, or give me any kind of ultimatum. She didn't ask a lot of questions about Debbie, though sometimes if the subject came up she would cautiously ask one or two things before dropping the subject. Only once do I remember her ever criticizing Debbie (when I told her about how Debbie contracted COVID-19 ... I guess I never told that story here); after that I was careful to say less about Debbie and for a while she was careful to ask less. And she never overtly tried to compete.

In other words, Marie lived in fear that she was going to lose to Debbie, but she never did any of the common things that would have forced the contest out into the open. And maybe this was because she was afraid she might lose, and couldn't handle losing.

So what about me? I have remarked before that Marie and I have a lot in common, and that one thing we share is that our accomplishments are far smaller than our talents would lead you to guess. Do I share her unwillingness to lose?

It's possible. And after my ruminations last year on the concept of the Jungian Shadow (see here and especially here), I want to be careful about dogmatically asserting that I don't have this or that unappealing trait. There's always the risk that I have it but don't want to admit it.

At the same time, I don't think the data support it. Am I fearful of other things? Heavens, yes. But maybe not losing, at least not per se. When I was in high school, for example, I joined the cross-country team because I wanted to get in shape. I always came in last in all our races, but I knew in advance I was going to. It wasn't a problem. And in my long marriage to Wife, I learned that when she worked herself into a towering rage, the best thing I could do was to lose the argument. When we separated, I lost the marriage. I have put myself in the position of losing things a number of times—not as often as it would take to learn to play good chess, maybe, but still. So it is at any rate not obvious to me that this specific liability is one of mine.

Of course I have plenty of others, so there's no risk I'll run out. But it was interesting to think about.  

 

Enemies everywhere

I talked with Son 2 today, for something like an hour and a half. You remember that he just got his Master's degree. And now he's got a job, working for a Big Employer. So we started talking about practical stuff, like which health plan should he sign up for? Then I asked him about his work, and he told me a lot about what he does. Finally I asked him about a concern that I've been brooding on for a couple of months now, more or less ever since I visited in December. Turns out he's been worried about it too.

A little background will help. Back after Son 2 got his bachelor's degree—he graduated in May 2020, right smack into the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic—he couldn't find a regular job because everything had shut down. But he finally got an internship in his field of specialty, working for a woman I'll call the Professora. They got along really well; and while they never did anything flagrantly unprofessional (by which I mean they didn't fuck, or at least not as far as I know), nonetheless they soon became friends. The Professora invited Son 2 to have dinner at her house, where he met her two sons. (She's a single mom, as well as a professional.) Occasionally they sat up drinking whiskey together. It went on like that.

But not for long, because soon the Professora left that job. She landed at a big university, instead. Fast-forward two years, and she had a graduate student leave her in the lurch even though she had a fully-funded research project. So she called Son 2, and asked him if he wanted to go to graduate school. You've heard this story before.

Son 2 enrolled in graduate school, and the Professora was his advisor. Which was fine for a few months until she got fired from the University. I should emphasize that her firing had nothing to do with her competence. Everyone agreed that she knows her subject deeply, and that she is passionately committed to it. Her ability and her commitment were never in question. And yet, she was fired—probably because of some squalid departmental intrigue. 

In the kerfluffle that followed, Son 2 kept his grants and fellowships and program because nobody thought it was his fault. He was reassigned to another professor who was friendly but really didn't understand his research. He continued to meet once a week with the Professora, who continued to guide his research. Meanwhile she got a job with Big Employer. (Maybe you can tell where this story is going.)

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.

Was Tacitus talking about my marriage?

This morning I was reading this article by Charles Eisenstein (highly recommended!) and I stumbled across the following quote:

And … sure, I know he (Eisenstein, that is, not Tacitus) is talking about the relationship between the American government and the American people. But I can't help wondering whether these same principles also explain Wife's intense anger and animosity towards me for so many years? The idea would be consistent with this post, at any rate. Maybe there are others like it too, but I'm not going to hunt for them right now.

          

The fragility of the self-absorbed

This afternoon I saw "Maestro," with Bradley Cooper playing Leonard Bernstein. It's not really a straight biopic (you should excuse the pun), but focuses specifically on his relationship with his wife Felicia … and therefore it shows us something of his many affairs (without cataloguing them or always bothering to give us names). Men and women both, of course, although it looks like the men outnumbered the women. At one point he meets friends on the street in New York: they are a young couple carrying their new baby, at whom Lenny coos and makes suitable noises. Then he bends down as if to address the baby very seriously and says, "You know, I've slept with both your mommy and your daddy!"

I also found myself thinking about the dynamics of having any kind of a relationship with a very self-absorbed person. Lenny appears to ignore Felicia for years; but when she gets sick (she died of cancer in 1978) it hits him like a pile-driver. And I reflected that Wife fought tooth and nail for decades to be "free" of what she saw as my overbearing domination; but when I said "OK fine, I'm going" she crumpled and was utterly lost. It's not an easy dynamic to understand.

Of course, Wife was never a world-famous conductor, either.

It's late, and I can't think of anything insightful to say. So I'll stop here. Maybe I'll think of something more in the next few days. But the comparison did strike me.

          

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

I get most of my news from Twitter (or I guess now it's called "X") so I have an admittedly eccentric understanding of the hot topics of the day. One that I have seen a lot of posts about lately is the sexualization of children. I try not to read the details, but even a cursory glance tells me that the instances which make it all the way to Twitter are pretty horrific. And the discussion of the perpetrators seems to be mostly about whether to tar-and-feather them before or after drawing-and-quartering them. In any event, nobody doubts that they are evil people with evil intentions.

I'm not about to make excuses for these people, and it seems clear that sometimes the impact they have on the children who come under their influence is really bad. But I find myself wondering, in an intellectual sort of way, whether they are actually motivated by malice (or cruelty or lust or any of those things), or whether in some cases the problem might not be no more than mind-boggling stupidity?

"May they name a disease after you!"

There's a great Yiddish curse which runs, "May you become famous, so famous they name a disease after you!" (See, for example, references here and here.) But once upon a time I actually contemplated this for Wife. 

As you know, Wife was diagnosed years ago with systemic lupus. Lupus is an autoimmune disorder where the body's immune system overreacts to simple, normal stimuli and ends up attacking healthy tissue. But think for a minute how exactly this description mirrors Wife's temperament, as she chronically overreacts to minor setbacks or random bad luck with outrage and fury, as if the Universe were out to get her, personally. There were years where I thought, "If only we could document this correlation and submit it to a journal somewhere, Wife could be immortalized by having the syndrome named after her!"

Turns out other people have had the idea that there might be a connection between personality and disease. In a recent blog post, John Michael Greer explains that Eliphas Lévi wrote "Most physical maladies derive from moral maladies, according to the unique and universal magical doctrine and due to the law of analogies." (The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, chapter 20) And on his other blog, Greer has written that when he worked in nursing homes, experienced aides could identify what disease a patient suffered from simply by the patient's personality type, without ever looking at the chart:

• The heart-attack personality is "the famous Type A personality."
• "The cancer personality represses his or her emotional life, takes on extra responsibilities, and is constantly worried about not being good enough."
• "The diabetic personality is self-indulgent in a particular way, and -- yes, I know, it sounds like a pun -- rather sweet."
• "The multiple sclerosis personality is the kind that will ring the call bell fifteen times in an eight hour shift because the patient wants you to adjust the position of some little item on the nightstand, which the patient could adjust herself. It's weakness and constant requests for help as a means of feeling in control."

So maybe there's a "lupus personality." Maybe I can get someone to name it after Wife.

   

"You knew what I was ...."

I've spent the day mulling and fretting over what I saw when I visited Son 1 and Wife yesterday, and what I heard from Son 2 afterwards. I'm sad that Son 1 is so unhappy now that Wife is living with him. At the same time, I'm kind of amazed by Wife.

Progress of a kind

The last 24 hours have been … really informative. And they've meant a kind of progress in my relationship with Wife and Son 2 … and maybe even Son 1, though that's harder to tell. But explaining it is going to require backing up for a minute. 

Chapter One: Background

This weekend, Son 2 is breezing through town. A while ago I told you about his opportunity to go to graduate school. Since then he applied and was accepted for January admission. Now that it is December he gave notice at his work and his last day was Friday. This weekend he is moving to the city where his graduate studies will take place, and where his girlfriend has been living for a while. He is taking the long way around to get there, visiting first me and then Wife en route, for a couple of reasons: partly winter weather is forecasted to block the more direct route, and partly there are things in my storage unit and in hers that he wants to take to set up his new housekeeping with. He slept in my apartment last night, and he left early this morning for Wife's place. After that I think he'll wind up with a brief visit to my mother before driving to the new city.

Crime, revisited

The more that I read John Michael Greer, the more that I find myself in worlds of thought that are different from the ones I used to frequent. And so an idea occurred to me earlier this week — a silly one, trivial really, but I figured I'd record it here because why not?

For years I'd joked to myself that I'd married Wife deliberately, knowing it was going to be a painful slog, "as punishment for my sins." I'd say this, knowing that consciously I didn't believe in any metaphysics that could make sense of it, knowing that consciously it had to be a joke, and yet feeling that at the level of some subterranean emotion there was something to it. A few years ago I even tried to think my way through this paradox, in a pair of linked posts here and here. And maybe that explanation is the true one.

But Greer is a magician and an occultist. So he takes ideas like reincarnation and karma absolutely seriously, and talks about things like "the work you have to do in this life." And so it occurred to me, ... did I deliberately choose a life where I'd marry Wife, in order to burn off some karmic debt acquired earlier?

More generally, I thought about the affection I have always felt for narcissists and crazy people: people I've known personally, like Wife, Scarlett, D, and even Tartuffe back when I was a little kid; but also authors, like William Blake, or Julie Powell, or Robert Pirsig. (See also this movie review.) And all of a sudden I wondered, "Might it be that some of the work I have to do in this life has to do with dealing with crazy people? This could explain the inexplicable attraction" I feel towards them. In other words, if that were defined up front — before my birth — as a boundary condition, it wouldn't have to make sense to me in-universe (as indeed it doesn't) so long as it was a fact (which it is). 

I don't know what to think of the doctrine of reincarnation itself. In fact, I wrote out my thoughts on it earlier this evening and posted them here, on the Patio. But the idea did cross my mind.

        

The news from Cassius

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, my conversation with Cassius was really long.

           

Career counseling, redux

A little over three years ago, I wrote this post here explaining why I've always found it hard to articulate professional goals: namely, that I just don't believe in any of the work I'm actually doing. Somehow my heart of hearts still thinks I'm just on vacation and any day now I'm going back to Academia. (This means my heart of hearts is pretty stupid, for the record.)

Why am I thinking about this now? You'd think it's because I am unemployed (March 31 was my Last Day Worked), but no -- that's not it. Actually it's because I was killing time recently by reading old articles from The Last Psychiatrist, and I stumbled across this one: The Last Psychiatrist: The Near Death Of A Salesman.

Right now I don't want to talk about how much I resemble the character he describes in this fiction: yes, I don't eat as well as I should; and yes, I'm really out of shape. I don't listen to talk radio, so there's that. 

No, the part that hit me like a locomotive was three sentences in the middle of the third paragraph:

And this wasn't his real life, anyway, he was still planning his real life.  He was 47--  three years of youth left.  Three years to get his real life started.

That's what TLP's post is really about, anyway. The delusion that any of us might have a "real life" somewhere out there in another dimension that's different from the life we actually lead day-to-day.

Of course, it's not like I ever believed that. Not really. Besides, I'm not 47. That was back when I started the blog, more or less. (Not quite, but close enough.)

Trying too hard? Yeah, I thought so too. But if I suffer from the same narcissistic delusion as this moron, the salesman in this story … well, … I mean ….

Well shit, that sucks. Sure wish it weren't true.

   

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remembering another time when Christmas was a competition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another year, another Fourth

Last year I spent the Fourth of July in New Zealand, vacationing with Marie and parts of her family. The year before I spent it at my mother's house, where Brother and SIL were also visiting.

That's where I was this year, though the visit was a lot shorter. I spent about five hours there, plus about four hours total driving back and forth. (That's 2 1/2 hours going, but only about 1 1/2 hours coming back home. I got lucky with the traffic this evening.) It's funny because I left before we actually ate. But I think it was fine, and that I liked it better that way.

Apparently Brother and SIL have gotten together with my mother a few times since the outbreak of the pandemic. Of course they live a lot closer, and in normal times they certainly see her more often than I do. They say they have been scrupulous about social distancing. Certainly not long after I arrived, Brother gave all of us a stern little talk about how we should behave to reduce the risk of infection. He seemed particularly concerned by my cough, which I suppose is not surprising (even though I know it has nothing to do with COVID-19).

It was a hot day and we sat around outside and talked. Brother and SIL peeled homegrown apples to go into a pie. (My mother makes the best pies in the world, and I refuse to hear anyone say anything to the contrary.) They were also going to grill hot dogs for us all.

Nobody said anything about when we were supposed to eat, any more than I said anything about how long I was going to stay. I hadn't thought about it much. But I knew I wasn't going to stay the night, because how hard must it be to disinfect a whole house? Anyway, Brother and SIL spent a lot of time in their own little world, making cute faces back and forth and snapping pictures of each other on their phones. And some time after 5:00 they started fiddling with the grill. Around the same time I decided I'd leave about 6:00.

It was a propane grill that my dad had used for years before he died. I don't know if it has been used since. Everything they said was to the effect that once they turned it on, we'd eat within minutes. But they fiddled and fiddled some more and couldn't get it to start. Maybe it was out of fuel, or maybe it was something else. Anyway, by 6:00 they were starting to think about what else to use instead, and I figured it was a good time to hit the road. There was considerable surprise ("You're leaving? Before we eat?") but I was gracious and cheerful about it and then took off.

Do I wish we had eaten before I left? Maybe a little bit but not strongly. It really was hot. Eating hot grilled food on top of that would have made it feel even hotter. And I'd had a big breakfast, so I wasn't terribly hungry. Also my mother had put out little individual dishes of nuts, and I'd had some of those. And I'm pretty sure Brother will have felt more comfortable eating without listening to me cough: he had already expressed deep discomfort at my coughing (into my mask!) within a couple of feet of the table where the dishes of nuts sat.

Also ... how much do we have to talk about? Brother is a wannabe rock musician (even now, in his fifties) who does proofreading for ad agencies as a contractor. I work for a big company, in an office. (Or, well, I used to work in an office before the pandemic and lockdown, and I still do the kind of work that one associates with big companies and offices.) I suppose I could have talked about getting an article in print in the professional journal for people in my line of work -- the June issue, a mere 18 months after they accepted it! (Grin.) Or I could have talked about the time I've spent on the side during the pandemic, expanding that article (and some related topics) into a short book. (I have 92 pages now and I think it's basically done, but I have no idea what to do next.) But I hate self-promoting like that.

I don't know.

It's funny: I don't feel anything like this ambivalence about spending time with my uncle and aunt, or with my cousins (except for one first-cousin-one-removed, who looks to me like a demon of Pure Id -- Stan, of course, from this post). I enjoy time spent with them. But I don't seem to have anything to say to Brother or SIL.

I suppose that's too bad and I should regret it. But it's just how it is. I don't understand why it turned out that way. But it did. Shit happens, I guess.    

Blast from the past: Trying to cut a deal with Wife

[Here is something else I found in the old files on my computer. The document that I reprint here is dated September 23, 2003.]

Back in 2003 and 2004 I was out of work for a year and a half. Oh, I spent plenty of time every day looking for work. I must have clicked "send" on 800 applications, and I had lots of interviews. But one way or another it just took a really long time for the penny to drop. (Wife had stopped working and gone out on permanent disability because of her lupus just a few years before.)

During that same time, Wife had been church-shopping, and she had found a Baptist church that appealed to her. So she started attending it regularly, and kept asking me and the boys to come along ... not for the sake of our souls, but because she felt that it reflected badly on her to attend a church but not have her family with her. (This reason sounded crazy to me at the time, but I did not yet know the word narcissism.)

Somewhere along the line she told somebody in her small group about the trouble I was having finding a job, and also about how she couldn't persuade me to join her. They told her, Ask him what he needs from you. It's your job as his wife to support him through this trial, so get him to write out a list of what he needs from you: retyping his resume, making dinner, doing the laundry ... whatever it is. Then make sure you do everything on the list as well as you possibly can. And then you can ask him to join you at church in return.

So she asked. I thought about it for a while, and this is what I came back with. You can see from this that getting my resume retyped or dinner made was not exactly where I thought the problem was. 
____________________

What I want from you

High priority

Right now, I am told by everyone that my highest priority needs to be finding a new job. (Everyone except M---, who says I should also spend 2 hours a day writing; and somewhere in there I should also exercise.) But I often feel like my real job is negotiating major emotional upheavals between us. This can take hours a day, and it leaves me in no frame of mind to hunt for work. The best way to support my job hunt is therefore not to make my PowerPoint slides for me, but to lift this particular burden from my shoulders.

1. Be a walking example of a Christian:

• Let the love of Christ keep you happy, even – no, especially – when you don’t get what you want.
• Let God handle vengeance in his own time and his own way – therefore do not harbor grudges.
• When life dumps mountains on you – and it’ll happen! – rely on God’s infinite power and love to turn them into molehills.
• Trust in God, even when what he is doing is very bizarre.
• If Christ is with you, then the bastards can’t grind you down – so be not afraid that they might.
• Whatever happens to you – and sometimes it is pretty bad and horribly unfair – remember that Christ knows exactly how you feel and is suffering there with you. He too suffered from injustice, and his divine power could have left Golgotha a crater like Sodom and Gomorrah. But he didn’t. Let his friendship and en­courage­ment help you bear the troubles with a good heart.

2. Hold to the Truth as to life itself.

• When we get into big arguments (which I hope will be a lot rarer), you tell me about things I allegedly said and did that bear little or no relationship to anything I remember.
• Sometimes you can even quote whole conversations back to me that never happened, and I will be able to tell that the conversation grew out of one or two words that I did utter but that meant something totally different in context.
• When this happens I become truly frightened.
• I don’t know if this ever happens when you talk to others about things, and it may be out of your power to do anything about this; but so far as you can please try to hold fast to what really happened instead of allowing your memory to embellish it to what “should have happened”.

Low priority

(There are probably a bunch of these and – like any husband –I could probably keep adding to them if I took the time. But they are not central. If you can tackle them, great. If not, OK fine. I have not bothered trying to choose only the important ones because these are all lower priority.)

1. Remember that just because I yell about something doesn’t make it important. 

2. Eat foods that are good for you, at times that are good for you.

3. Don’t let yourself be helpless unless through illness you really can’t avoid it. (This means don’t let yourself be a victim of other people’s thought­less­ness, even if it is mine. For example, buy fruit if you need fruit and I haven’t gotten around to it. It doesn’t mean “Don’t rage against victimization,” because that is already covered under high-priority item #1 above.)

4. Do what you can to keep the kids occupied while I am job hunting. (You really already do this to a very large extent, so I’m not asking for any change here; I just need to mention it for the sake of completeness.)

5. More sex would be nice. (smile)

6. Let’s make dates to go to the gym a couple of times a week, regularly.

  

There will doubtless be other things I might want to ask until the Millennium comes and we are all made perfect …. 

What I will offer in exchange

1. I will go to church with you every Sunday. Not till Christmas. Not till Easter. I will go to church with you every Sunday as long as you carry out item #1 on the “high priority” list in the other column – because as long as you can carry that out successfully, it proves to me that Christianity is not a fraud. If God’s infinite power can’t help you to accomplish item #1, then Christianity is a fraud and it’s not worth my time to play along. [I'm not sure this actually follows, but it is the reason I gave her at the time.] If you do your best but stumble because we are all fallible … let’s discuss it on a case-by-case basis.

2. Ditto with sending the children to Sunday School, for exactly the same reasons. Same caveat.

3. When I yell, I will commit to getting over it right away, and to apologizing to the person I yelled to.

4. If you need to eat while I’m fixing another meal, I will not complain providing you eat foods that are good for you.

5. I will commit to exercising a minimum of twice a week, and try for a third time, whether or not you choose to join me.

6. I will drop the issue of Boyfriend 2 once and for all, permanently. (Notwithstanding this, I’d like to know who we get to do the repairs around our house or hear the kind of gossip I might hear about our other friends … if you feel inclined to share such gossip and not otherwise.)

There will doubtless be other things you would like to ask of me until the Millennium comes and we are all made perfect …. 

____________________

Her friends at church thought this was a wonderful offer on my part, and a great opportunity to rope me in. In the end she wasn't all that successful at being Christlike, but I guess it was worth a try ....
   

Narcissistic Personality Quiz, take 2

I was scrolling through some old posts this afternoon (sheesh, don't I have anything better to do with my time?) and I came across this one from five and a half years ago. Unlike the 7-deadly-sins quiz, where I think I am settling into a routine (my most recent instance is here), I hadn't taken this one again in the intervening time. So sure, what the hell? I tried it again.

You can find it here: http://psychcentral.com/quizzes/narcissistic.htm. 

Remember the scoring criteria:

Between 12 and 15 is average.
Celebrities often score closer to 18.
Narcissists score over 20.

This time I scored a 12, so it's nice to know I have worked my way up to normal. I wish I could remember what my answers were last time, so I would know what I had changed.

Something I didn't make a note of last time -- and maybe this is an enhancement to the quiz -- is that the scoring page also gives a breakdown of how I rate on several different components of narcissism.

Quoting from the website, those components are:

Authority

Authority refers to a person's leadership skills and power. People who score higher on authority like to be in charge and gain power, often for power's sake alone.

Self-Sufficiency

This trait refers to how self-sufficient a person is, that is, how much you rely on others versus your own abilities to meet your needs in life.

Superiority

This trait refers to whether a person feels they are more superior than those around them. You scored particularly high in superiority, suggesting you feel you are superior to most others.

Exhibitionism

This trait refers to a person's need to be the center of attention, and willingness to ensure they are the center of attention (even at the expense of others' needs).

Exploitativeness

This trait refers to how willing you are to exploit others in order to meet your own needs or goals.

Vanity

This trait refers to a person's vanity, or their belief in one's own superior abilities and attractiveness compared to others.

Entitlement

This trait refers to the expectation and amount of entitlement a person has in their lives, that is, unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with one's expectations. People who score higher on this trait generally have a greater expectation of entitlement, while those who score lower expect little from others or life.

And here, I think, is the explanation for the paradox that I noted last time I took the quiz, when I had so much trouble reconciling what feels to me like extravagant conceit with my (even now, comparatively) low score on this quiz. Because I scored particularly high on my sense of superiority, pretty high on authority, but low on exhibitionism, vanity, and entitlement. And I scored a flat zero on self-sufficiency.

This is pretty much what I said before ... conceit tempered with timidity. I think one of the differences compared with last time is that I gave myself a few more points for authority, based partly on Marie's observations to me about "the Tanatu charisma." (She came up with the phrase after meeting both my sons and learning that none of the three of us has ever been able to disappear into the wallpaper.)

I suppose it is nice to know I'm still not at pathological levels ....
      

Scarlett

A while ago I mentioned that I had tried to get in touch with an old school friend named Scarlett. Sure. Let me tell you how that worked out.

First, a few words about what Scarlett was like back in college. (This means 40 years ago, or so.) She looked nothing like Vivian Leigh. But her attitude was strictly "Take no prisoners." She might have been "only" a freshman when I was already a sophomore; but she had read more literature than I had ever heard of, had heard more music than I knew had ever been written, and had cast-iron opinions about all of it. Also she was a show-off, not only intellectually but in dress and style. She replaced the interior door in her dorm room with a beaded curtain, and sat around in a silk smoking jacket. In all these respects she was maybe a little like Bunthorne.

I was afraid of her scorn, but I also found her brass bitchiness really attractive. When I first met Wife, some years later, the very first thing I thought about her was that she reminded me strongly of Scarlett. (They even had the same hair color and general build, though Scarlett was a little taller.) Anyway, the flamboyance together with the arrogance are why I call her "Scarlett". She also dearly loved the color red.

[Update added July 19, 2020: I've thought about this some more since then, and realized that I was partway in love with Scarlett for exactly these reasons. Also this is part of why I fell in love with Wife so quickly, because she reminded me of Scarlett. That must be part of the reason I wanted to get back in touch with her, too.]

We all graduate. We lose touch with each other. I marry Wife and lose touch with everybody I used to know, because my new life is so bloody crazy. So ... fast-forward a few decades.

From time to time I would check the Internet to see if I could find any trace of people I used to know. It was partly a fantasy, partly a distraction. But twelve years ago I found an article she had posted online, and what I thought was her email address. I sent an email to the address commenting on the article, and got an error message back. Oh well. No other signs.

And every few years I'd look again. There were indications she was still in the same city where I'd found her the first time, still doing the same kind of thing ... but no clue at all towards a physical or electronic address.

And then finally this year it looked like my travel schedule would take me into the same ... large urban area in whose orbit she was living. (If she was still there.) So I did a few more searches, and -- lo and behold! -- she is now working somewhere new, somewhere that posts the email addresses of selected personnel on the web. If it's really the same Scarlett, I can reach her now!

Actually, when I first saw that my travel schedule seemed to be veering in that direction, I also checked our college's alumni directory and got a street address. No guarantee that it was current, but it's something.

So several weeks ago I sent her a card.

When a while went by and I had heard nothing, I sent an email.

When another while went by and I had still heard nothing, I sent a second email ... this time asking her opinion of an article I had seen about some Romantic composer I had never heard of before, a guy named Korngold. I figured it would be right up her alley.

Finally I got a reply, as follows:

Hello Hosea,
I've been out of town for a few weeks, and was very surprised to find not only your card, but also two emails in my work in-box when I returned.  I'd be interested to know how you got my work email address, since it's never been posted in our alumni directory.  Also, I must ask you not to use it again -- my work email is strictly for work.
Yes, I remember you -- we corresponded briefly after college, too.  I recall that in the last letter you sent, you said your life had become very, very busy and that you would not have time to reply to me any longer...but that you would be happy to receive any letters I might send.  You may recall I didn't reply.
...So I have to ask:  why the sudden urgency to get in touch with me now?  It surely can't be because of Korngold!

Best wishes,
Scarlett

Aha.

In other words, "Dear Hosea, You were a flaming asshole thirty-five years ago and therefore I wrote you off forever. Why the fuck are you contacting me now?" I suppose it is a fair question.

I sent her a reply in which I apologized for having been a jerk, and asked her forgiveness. I also told her that if she did not reply, I wouldn't pursue it. She has not replied.

Why did I do it? I hoped maybe I could re-establish some channel of communication, as I have done with Marie and Schmidt. Doubtless part of it is that I was so fascinated by her back when we were students, although my attraction to high-maintenance women has dimmed somewhat after Wife and D. And I was curious to learn if the resemblance to Wife carried through in some of their life experiences. Did Scarlett have the same struggles with mental health? (In retrospect I wouldn't be surprised if she had been a touch bipolar back then.) Did Scarlett have gastric bypass surgery for her weight? Did she ever establish any kind of permanent romantic bond with anyone? (She still goes by her maiden name, but that proves nothing.)

And is she happy with where her life has taken her? I was hoping to learn that.

I guess I won't. Damn shame.

[Update added July 19, 2020: Again, in retrospect I can make this easier. I got in touch with her again partly because I wanted to know if she had turned out the way Wife had, and partly because I had been in love with her way back when. So I could still think about her and sigh just a bit. Her reply, when I finally did reach her, confirmed that she was just as much a narcissist as Wife or D, and that I was better off not falling into her orbit again. Also, from what I could tell by stalking researching her on the Internet, it looked like she had spent the last thirty years in graduate school. Apparently she had given seminars and contributed to a book, but I saw no indication that she ever actually got a Ph.D. out of the whole thing. So in asking whether she was happy, I would have been asking her to reckon with some kind of academic failure. (That might be another reason she wanted to avoid the contact ... fear of having to explain where her life has gone since the Good Old Days when she was a Watson Scholar.) Anyway, that would have been malicious of me. Yes, I rationalized it to myself by suggesting that I could tell her why I think it is fine to be outside the Academy, but that's a little bit like saying "Your life would have been so much happier if you hadn't jumped off that cliff." Again, malicious. It's really just as well she blocked further communication. And I guess I really was being something of an ass. I wish I could see these things before I do them, rather than always only after.]