Me and groups

Over the last couple of days, I've been thinking about how I relate to groups or organizations.

There's a story I tell myself that makes the answer sound easy: I'm a consummate outsider. I suffer from social anxiety. I'm shy, or an introvert. These are all stories I have told myself for years.

Of course this story is partly true, or I would never have concocted it in the first place. But it is not the whole truth. A number of recent experiences have made this clear to me.

Case One

Two nights ago (Thursday), I joined an online meeting of the leadership for the local Region of the professional society that I belong to. There are plenty of reasons I needn't have bothered. In the first place, I'm not even working any more. I joined the professional society two or three years before my local office closed. As you recall, I never found another job after that. I've been volunteering with this society as a way to keep busy, more than anything else. 

Also, I'm only in leadership in the most tenuous way. I was Chair of the local section for four-and-a-half years. (There's a rule in the society that limits you to two years, but, well, stuff happened.) But I was able to resign my Chair-ship at the end of last year. Fawn, whom I recruited to join our leadership committee as Program Chair, took over as the new Chair on January 1 of this year. I accepted a minimal role in the leadership committee because Fawn asked me to be available, to give her advice. And that minimal role means that I am invited to the monthly meeting of all the Regional leadership, because they want to make sure that there is at least one representative from each section. In case the Chair can't make it, someone else should still be there to report.

Fawn has made it to these meetings very reliably, all year. But still I show up whenever I don't have a conflict.

That's the first interesting question: Why do I bother?

The second interesting point—and this is what started me ruminating on the subject—is how other people in the meeting treat me. Of course they are used to seeing me. I showed up for these meetings for four-and-a-half years as Chair of my local section. My attendance at these meetings has now overlapped with the tenure of three different Regional Directors. I also notice that—despite the term limits—there are a few names that I keep seeing, year after year. I guess they must have rotated into new roles or job titles (as have I). But they keep representing their sections in these meetings. It's interesting.

But the moment that struck me, in the meeting two evenings ago, was when one of the long-time representatives (used to be Chair of his section, I think now he is Treasurer) started joking with me in a very obvious way, the way two old veterans might kid each other over long shared experience. Of course in the moment I responded by rocking back in my chair and laughing—we were on Zoom, after all, and I had my camera on so people could see my reaction. But in the back of my mind I wondered: If I am genuinely shy and introverted, how did I get into this position? I keep trying to avoid having to do hard work for this society, so how did I become a veteran that this man feels comfortable joking with?

That started me mulling. Then the next afternoon I acquired more data.

On self-defeat, part 2

I just wrote about how Wife's whole life—so it seems—has been one long exercise in self-defeat. This is a line of thought I started after looking at the journals she left behind when she vacated Son1's apartment.

But my reflections didn't stop there. Oh no.

Father undercut himself the same way. I've talked here and here about how he undermined his own authority as a businessman. I don't know the details of his stint as a university professor, except that he failed his first tenure review (after three years) so his contract was not renewed. Decades later he found a letter he had written to the Dean after his contract was canceled, and read it to us over the dinner table. As a piece of rhetoric or invective—as a letter that burst into flame upon reading—it was a remarkable piece of work. But by that time I was already an adult, and in fact I was a manager with employees of my own. And what I thought privately (though I never said it aloud) was, "Gosh, if that's where your head was at the time, I'd have fired you too." The letter was all about him, and never mentioned the needs or strategies of the university. And even if he didn't care about the university, anyone who wanted to play the employment game should know enough to pretend to care. Not Father. 

After he retired from business, he tried to make a living as an actor. There he was dogged by a special kind of bad luck that repeated over and over. Time and again, he would get a part in something very small whose schedule neatly prevented him from auditioning for something large and rewarding. To hear him tell it, this happened so often that he could almost count on it. Now was this self-defeat? I have no idea. All I know is what I heard from him, and he made it sound like random bad luck each and every time.

On the other hand, we've all heard the saying: Once is chance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. I just don't know which "enemy."

In other words, the topic of self-defeat is one I probably need to spend some time with, because I've lived around it much of my life. First Father, then Wife. That's definitely why I need to think about it. Right?

Ha. I should be so lucky.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have discussed my own self-defeating behaviors many times. Good luck seems to be wasted on me. And I never had the skill to advance up the corporate ladder. I hide myself, and I seem to court failure. You can multiply other references throughout the blog without breaking a sweat.

I think this is why Kimberly Steele told me (three years ago!) that publishing my book "is going to be an act of will that will act as one of your major tests in your life." I have spent too much of my life trying actively to fail. I have worked at defeating myself, and I have surrounded myself with masters at self-defeat. So the challenge is, Can I pull out of such a dramatic dive? Can I get my ass in gear and make it happen?

The questions about Wife matter to her therapist, but I'm not her therapist. The questions about Father are of biographical interest, but after all he's dead. The questions that have to matter to me are about me. 

I have achieved two long-term goals in my life. The first was my marriage (and children). The second was my separation. What comes next? Now that I'm a senior citizen, what long-term goals can I still accomplish? And can I do them without ruining myself in the process?

Those are the questions that matter now. I suppose I should be grateful to Wife's old journals for making me think of them.   

           

On self-defeat, part 1

I've been thinking more about those journals that Wife left behind, when she moved out of Son1's apartment.

She must have been writing them under the guidance of some psychotherapist, or at any rate under the guidance of some psychotherapeutic ideas—ideas that she might have read somewhere, or might have gotten from a therapist in the past. The journals specifically talked about her experience of compulsive thinking, and she set up tables to work out concrete examples.

• Column 1: Initial idea.
• Column 2: Compulsive idea that it triggers.
• Column 3: Rational idea towards which she should redirect herself.
• And so on ....

Examples included:

• Initial idea: "I hurt Hosea by my infidelities and by overspending the budget."
• Compulsive idea: "I am a terrible human and don't deserve to live."
• Rational idea: "I did cause pain but it will be manageable if we work together on it." [Actually I don't remember this entry, but I assume it would have to be something like that.]
• I don't have more examples, because you remember I left the journals there.

It all looks like a very logical therapeutic approach. But the single most important fact—overwhelming everything else—is that it didn't work! Self-understanding counts for bupkes unless it results in meaningful changes of behavior, and Wife's behavior never changed! So all these journal entries were just masturbation, nothing more.

During my most recent visit, Son1 mentioned as an aside (as if it were an obvious point, while explaining something else) that Wife still suffers from these compulsive ideas. Someone criticizes her and right away she falls into a spiral of ranting, "Oh I'm a terrible human and don't deserve to live!" Then whoever's talking to her backs off, because he (or she) didn't mean the criticism to be quite that extreme. And therefore nobody ever succeeds in talking to her about behavior that she actually has to fix.

As I typed those words, I found myself thinking, "Nice work, if you can get it."

And indeed, in the short run it seems like this uncontrolled and disproportionate response is an effective tactic to prevent Wife ever having to face any serious criticism. It insulates her. If narcissism means having to preserve her self-image at all costs, it's a very sturdy form of narcissistic defense, ... even if it is awfully remeniscent of Russian roulette. 

In the long run, of course, the tactic is self-defeating because it means she never confronts the habits that make her fail. So she never learns new habits instead, and she continues to fail. At this point, Wife has failed:

• As a musician. (Good enough to be a church organist, not good enough to be a professional.)
• As a scholar. (She dropped out of one graduate program for complicated reasons, and then failed her Qualifying Exams in her second program.)
• As a businesswoman. (She alienated several employers and they fired her; then her health collapsed while she was still working for the last one and she had to go out on permanent disability.)
• As a church-goer. (I don't know as much about this. But she transitioned over the years from Wiccan to Baptist to Mormon. She was pretty open—to me and the boys—about joining the Mormon church because they look after you. But I think I remember her saying a few years ago that her bishop had actually thrown her out of the church for some reason. Maybe freeloading.)
• As a friend. (Wife keeps making new friends and then keeps alienating them. She tried to contact her friend Leia to say goodbye before leaving town, but no such luck.)
• As a wife. (OK, maybe I'm prejudiced on this point. But read the first ten years of this blog to see my perspective on the question.)
• As a mother? (Whatever else is going on, Wife has clung to her identity as a mother of two wonderful boys. But the last long email I got from her makes me think she is reconsidering what that relationship really looks like.)

If you run into an asshole one day, well, tough luck, you ran into an asshole. If everyone you meet, all day long, is an asshole—it's because you are the asshole.

What this means, in turn, is that Wife's whole life is one long exercise in self-defeat. And it didn't have to be. It was all avoidable. I mean ... maybe her bad health was baked in from the beginning. But the dysfunctional personality, that squandered every opportunity she was handed? That seems to have been something she did on purpose. And it is sad.

           

Fearing for your children's future

Tonight in the UU Sangha I attend, we started reading a new book for our dharma study, a book by Thich Nhat Hanh about Fear. So during the discussion period, people began discussing their fears. And I heard several of them express fear for their children or grandchildren.

Debbie, for example, is afraid for her grandchildren because her daughter Mattie, and her son-in-law (Mattie's husband), are such martinets, and always yell at their sons (Debbie's grandchildren). Debbie said she's not afraid of dying for her own sake, but she's afraid of the consequences for her grandsons if one day suddenly she's no longer there for them. (To be clear, there's no imminent threat. Debbie's in her early seventies, and she has various ailments that are consistent with her age, including periodic bouts of long COVID and atrial fibrillation. She also has celiac disease, that seems to be slowly morphing into a more generalized autoimmune sensitivity. But she's not on a timeline, with "X years to live"!)

But then another member is worried about his children, too. (I'm pretty sure I haven't given him a name yet.) His kids—a son and a daughter—are legal adults but just barely. They were both adopted out of a dreadful situation, spent their whole childhood being oppositional, and regularly make terrible decisions. So their lives aren't going well, to nobody's surprise. And he's deeply troubled by this.

I think there was someone else too, but I forget the details.

Of course this is common. At some level, everyone who has kids wants those kids to have a wonderful life, free of the spectres that so routinely blight the lives of Other People. That's why I was so upset at the idea that Wife was going to live with Son 1: I wanted him to be able to have adventures in his life (if he wanted them, of course) and I figured there would be no adventures if he were looking after her. As a secondary concern, I feared that living with Wife would ruin his relationship with Wife, although I figured that he was honorable enough he would never throw her out on the street. (Turns out that I called that secondary concern exactly.) 

The romaine lettuce incident

OK, this story is from long, long ago. I don't really remember when it happened, but I think it was before Wife and I were even married—back when we were just "dating". (This means I was living in her apartment and we were regularly fucking, but the whole thing hadn't been formalized yet by a ceremony.) Call it ... well, maybe early-to-mid 1984. All our big turmoil was still in the future. I was still baffled when things went wrong, instead of cynically resigned to it. But the interesting thing is that I'm telling you the story now, not to tell you anything about Wife but actually to talk about me.

What happened?

I remember we were visiting my grandfather. Also, my parents were both there. Maybe we were helping him sort through the immense stacks of useless clutter that he and my grnadmother had accumulated over something close to fifty years of marriage. But it wasn't a holiday, because nobody had done any advanced planning for meals.

In the middle of the afternoon, Father (my dad) realized that the refrigerator had basically no food in it, because my grandfather was very old and lived alone. So he went shopping only when he absolutely had to, and he shopped for one person with a small appetite. I don't know whether he had known in advance that we were coming out to see him, but in any event he hadn't bothered to lay in any supplies. My grnadfather never really thought about other people except when he was forced to, and for many decades he had been able to rely on my grandmother to do all that for him.

So Father realized we were all going to need something for dinner, and he began making a shopping list. (He also planned to do the cooking.) So he asked for suggestions. 

What would we like for dinner?

Someone made a suggestion, and he wrote down the ingredients.

How about a salad? Would everyone like a salad too?

Sure, that sounds great.

What kind of lettuce should I get? 

At this point, Wife—who of course was just a Girlfriend back then, but you all know her as Wife—said, "Pretty much any kind would be fine, except please don't get romaine lettuce. I hate romaine lettuce."

My heart sank. Maybe it's too grandiose or self-important to say that I had a premonition of what was going to happen. But at some level that's exactly what I had. From that moment, I knew the whole evening was going to turn out badly.

And I say that because of course—maybe this doesn't sound like an "of-course" situation to you, but to me it was absolutely predictable!—when Father got back from the store we discovered that he had bought romaine lettuce for our salad!

So the arguing began.

Wife: Why did you buy romaine lettuce when that's the one and only kind of lettuce I told you I don't like?

Father: Well why the hell do you have to be so fussy?

Wife: But you asked for suggestions! Nobody expressed any different preferences, besides me! So why would you buy this? It wasn't to satisfy anyone else's preferences, because nobody else expressed any. Is this just a deliberate slap in the face because you hate me?

Father: My God, you think the world revolves around you! Jesus H. Christ, I bought what I bought. Leave me alone and don't give me so much shit over it. If you don't want to eat any salad, you don't have to!

"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.

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. 

          

Childless cat ladies

Sometime while I was staying with the Schmidts last month, I started thinking about the trope of the "childless cat lady." Of course the phrase got a lot of attention during the last election, because the news media pointed out that some years earlier (before he was a candidate for anything, let alone an officeholder), JD Vance had used it in an interview with Fox News. So in a sense cat ladies had their moment in the sun last year, just as "bad hombres" did eight years earlier.

But what, I began to wonder, really is the distinguishing characteristic of a childless cat lady, and why do they get so much grief? 

Why do people look down on childless cat ladies?

I tried googling this question, and all I found were articles saying that childless cat ladies aren't nearly as bad as everyone thinks. Here's a collection of them:

• The Guardian, "Claws out! Why pop culture clings to the crazy cat lady," April 16, 2018
• NBC News, "JD Vance doubles down on 'childless cat ladies' dig: 'I've got nothing against cats'," July 26, 2024
• City Journal, "About Those 'Childless Cat Ladies'," September 3, 2024
• Ipsos, "Why America's childless cat ladies are more than just Taylor Swift," September 11, 2024
• The Cutprice Guignol, "On Childless Cat Ladies," September 16, 2024
• The Conversation, "‘Childless cat ladies’ have long contributed to the welfare of American children − and the nation," October 21, 2024
• The Guardian, "Fur and loathing: do America’s ‘childless cat ladies’ hold the key to the US election?" November 3, 2024

And that's great to know—don't get me wrong. I guess it's reassuring to hear that the stereotype is incorrect. But I wanted historical information on where the stereotype came from in the first place—and, more particularly, on what the image means in the popular psyche. A couple of articles waved vaguely towards the idea that the condemnation of childless cat ladies was a holdover from the ancient fear of witches. But that doesn't sound likely to me. 

Thoughts on prayer

One evening while I was sitting with Ma Schmidt—I had almost a week to go before coming home, and it was maybe eight or nine days before she died—I suddenly had an idea. She had been moaning "Help me" over and over, even as she was totally unable to answer the question, "Help you do what?"

And suddenly I wondered, Is that how God (or the gods) experience human prayer? Everybody knows that the great majority of prayers seem to go unanswered. Could it be that the problem is on our end, not God's? To flesh this out a bit: Maybe it's the case that there is a limited range of things that God can do for us, but "Make It All Better" isn't one of them. Or, well, it might be one of them if we could specify exactly what we mean. But maybe (for whatever reason) we can't ask God to figure it out for us. Maybe He's willing to help if only we can spell out what we want, but remaking the Universe from scratch so that I personally am never unhappy, … well that just isn't on the menu. (And after all, what I want out of the Universe is probably different from what you want.) So the end result, so far as we can perceive, is that our prayers go unanswered. And we blame it on God. Ma Schmidt probably blamed it on us that her pleas for help fell (to all appearances) on deaf ears.

The virtue of procrastination

Someone on Twitter wrote:

"What is the evolutionary advantage of putting off a task? This is the sort of thing that makes me believe in original sin."

Without thinking, I immediately shot back:

"Every action has risks, including death. So the best strategy is to save all your energy for when you really need it by doing nothing UNLESS you need it. This means real needs, like escaping the tiger; not socially-constructed 'needs' like impressing your neighbors." 

Probably I'm wrong. But I felt I had to put in a good word for procrastination.

"What the hell is happiness anyhow?"

Marie is being confounded by philosophy.

You remember that last month she agreed to receive formal transmission of the Five Mindfulness Trainings. Since then she has been thinking about them regularly, which is good. (Surely that must be one of the points of receiving them formally, no?) At the same time she's had a routine share of bad luck, including a trip-and-fall accident at her work that banged up her knee. And of course she joined me at the Schmidts' farm a couple weeks ago, to help with Ma Schmidt's decline.

Yesterday she wrote me an email that ran, in part:

I am in a little pain today from my knee (I didn't elevate it last night, and apparently I still should have!), and yesterday it really hit me how sad I am that Ma Schmidt is dying. Oh, and the sweet potatoes I put in the soup I made for lunch today aren't very sweet, so the balance of flavors is off a bit.  Whine, whine, there's always something!

So, I am thinking of the Second Mindfulness Training, the part that goes "I am aware that happiness depends on my mental attitude and not on external conditions, and that I can live happily in the present moment simply by remembering that I already have more than enough conditions to be happy."

I'm going, ok, so I can be happy while being sad at losing Ma Schmidt, and while experiencing pain, and.... um, what the hell is happiness anyhow?

Yes, exactly.*

I replied:

You talk about whether you can be happy while losing Ma Schmidt, and I remember while we were there she would regularly say (trying for sarcasm), "Gosh, this must be a great vacation for you, looking after your buddy's old sick mother!" When she said that I'd always try to say something reassuring, but I never told her what I was really thinking. What I really thought, as a reply, was, "Yes, actually it is. Not in the sense that it is FUN, exactly. But I can't think of anywhere else I would rather be, under the circumstances." (And of course I never said that out loud because it just didn't sound like the kind of thing you can say out loud.)

Does that mean I was "happy"? Or does it mean that the vocabulary of happiness is too small, and is missing a few dimensions? I vote for the latter choice, and maybe that option works for you too.

And actually she agreed:

Yes on the "nowhere I'd rather be."  If someone I love is dying, I want to be there; and if someone else I love is overwhelmed because their mother is dying, I want to help.  But you're right, that's hard to say.

Yes happiness may need some redefining.  I am thinking of water again, the surface and the depths.

__________

* There's actually a long philosophical discussion of exactly this question. Epicurus maintained that the wise man could be happy, even on the rack. Aristotle, for his part, said this is nonsense. (Nic. Eth., book VII, chapter 13, Bekker page 1153b.)       

Veterinarian manqué

Marie flew home today. But one evening while she was here, we sat up talking for a while about Schmidt. And I had one of those moments where I said something and only then realized that I had never known it before—that I had literally figured it out in the process of explaining it to someone else.

We were talking about television. Whenever she is awake, Ma Schmidt has the television on as a distraction. She started this habit back when she could still hear, but suffered from severe tinnitus; the noise from the television blotted out her perception of the ringing in her ears. Now it's just a habit; but because she's too deaf (and too forgetful) to engage in normal conversation, it's not a crazy habit.

But what to watch? Schmidt says he doesn't want the channel turned to national news, because he finds the national news too depressing. (Like most of my friends, Schmidt suffers from some degree of Trump derangement syndrome, and evaluates all developments in national or world news accordingly.) In practice, Schmidt normally switches to the National Geographic Wild network, to watch reruns of The Incredible Dr. Pol, a reality-show about the veterinarian Dr. Jan Pol. Sometimes he changes it up by turning to some other animal documentary instead.

The thing is, I think Ma Schmidt is profoundly bored by all these animal shows!

The Schmidts live on a farm, though they no longer have any animals. (They let a neighbor graze his cattle on their fields.) They have certainly spent a lot of time around animals over the years. But that was never Ma Schmidt's passion. Pa Schmidt was the one who wanted to live on a farm. Ma went along with him because she loved him, and they were married, and, well … you know … "for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health."

This is not a picture of Schmidt.
But in an alternate timeline, it could have been.

How about Schmidt himself? Back when he was a boy, he wanted to be a veterinarian when he grew up. Then he went to college and studied physics. (God only knows why!) When that didn't work out, he came home and carried on his father's artistic craft, though he readily acknowledged that he lacked his father's creative brilliance. But he could make the products that people ordered, and that brought in the small amount of money the Schmidts needed to get by. (They have owned the property outright since they bought it, so there's no need to service a mortgage. And once upon a time they had food wandering around in their fields, though that's no longer true.) 

That's when it hit me. Schmidt has half a dozen cats, or more. He is always adopting and taming feral cats when he finds them on the property, or raising kittens if he didn't get one of his own cats spayed in time. He insisted that Ma take on two cats in her house because it was easier than setting mousetraps; but she never had cats until he told her to. He is still the focus of all animal care on the farm, even though they "no longer have animals."

In other words, Schmidt has found a way to make himself into a (quasi-) veterinarian after all! That's what he wanted to do as a boy, and by heaven that's just what he has done. No wonder he always changes the channel to veterinary shows or animal documentaries. They're not boring to him, because he's genuinely interested in what he can learn from them. He said plainly a couple of days ago that one of the episodes of Dr. Pol taught him about a syndrome affecting cats that he now regularly checks for in his own.

So often people abandon their dreams as they grow up. It's remarkable to realize that Schmidt merely adapted his.

But now that makes me wonder. What did Marie want to be, when she was a girl? And has she achieved it? (See, for example, this post here.)

And how would I answer the same question about myself? 

   

The Red Shoes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why publish?

This post follows on from one I wrote two months ago, called "Why Write?"

I woke up at 3:30 this morning and toddled into the bathroom. While I was there, I put something together.

You all know that I've long had a fantasy of writing and publishing stuff. (See, for example, oh I don't know, maybe here and here—or, more recently, here and here.) You know that sometimes I have played with the idea of letting it all go and forgetting about it. (See, for example, here.) And you remember that more recently I have gotten external advice that says, No, you actually need to get your ass in gear and do it. (See especially here.) Not that I've made any progress, but it's the latest input I've gotten.

But why? In the long run, what does it matter? In my earlier post "Why Write?" I quoted one expert on self-publication that there are two reasons to publish: Money and Fame. But I don't really need the money (though of course it would be nice). And remember what Anne Roiphe says about fame:

That is the moment I began to despise the idea of fame. What does it do for the bearer of the laurel? Who cares if your name is in the paper? Who cares if you are mentioned as one of the top-ten cyclists, boxers, batters, painters, poets, artists, fly fishermen in the world? Who cares if your name is written in history books? …. Jack wanted to be Michelangelo painting on the ceiling, lying on his back on the scaffolding. Good old Michelangelo. Good for us who stare up at the hand of God reaching toward Adam. But actually Michelangelo doesn't know that crowds line up and pay good money to enter the room to see his masterpiece, and if he had known, would his breakfast have tasted any better, his loves been any stronger, his life any longer?

So why bother? Who needs it? And in particular, why does Kimberly's ogham say I have to get it done?

I think it's not because there's anything special about writing, nor about publication. It's not because there's necessarily anything special about achievement, per se. The problem is with me.

Why write?

I think I've told you that back during the COVID-19 lockdowns I wrote a book about the stuff that I used to do in my professional life, back before I more-or-less retired. And then I've never done anything with it because I'm paralyzed by trying to find the next step. The writing was the easy part, but what then? I talked to someone who was supposed to be an expert on marketing self-published books (this was about two years ago), and her first question was: What outcome do you want from this book? What do you want to achieve? The marketing strategy will be fundamentally different, depending on your answer.

And I froze. I had no idea how to answer the question.

She even made it easy by telling me there are only two choices for the answer: Money or Fame. (To be clear, she then explained that in practice saying you want Fame means that you want the book to advertise your consulting business. I read a great book by This Guy, and now we have to hire him to help us transform our company!) But I still couldn't answer. Neither of those options sounded right to me.

So there it sat. For two years.

Recently I realized I'd made no progress at all on publishing this book, even though it's something I need to do. So a couple of days ago I tried to think through the question, What do I want from this book? The results were inconclusive. Then this weekend I went on a meditation retreat. And today at lunch I suddenly saw the last step in the (hitherto-unfinished) chain of reasoning. So let me write it out for you here.

What do I want from this book: Money or Fame? Let's consider them one at a time.

Echo chamber, 3, "Lines you can't ever cross"

No, we haven't had another conversation about this same topic again. I just can't let it go.

You know, when Marie says "there are certain lines you can't ever cross," maybe I shouldn't get irritated or feel judged. Maybe I should just feel grateful that she has led such a charmed and sheltered life. Of course she has had bad things happen to her, like we all have. What I mean by the words "charmed and sheltered" is that maybe, somehow, she has reached her sixties without ever having to face her own capacity for evil.

Meeting my Shadow, 2

Just a quick follow-up to this post from New Year's Day.

Ten minutes ago I was on the sidewalk out in front, stretching my legs for a few minutes, and I thought about this ongoing argument with Marie. And suddenly it occurred to me: one reason that Marie's moralism drives me so crazy is that I used to do the same thing. (Maybe I still do, but I try hard not to.)

At the moment that the thought struck me, there was an example to hand as well. Now, ten minutes later, I don't remember what it was. Oh wait, yes I do.

What games did I play as a child? part 3

This post follows on from two that are nearly ten years old, here and here. There's no sense in which it is important. In fact, it would probably never have occurred to me to write it at all if I hadn't drunk an entire bottle of cheap wine with dinner.  But that can send your mind down interesting byways.

Ten years ago I explained that Dale and I used to make up pretend countries. In principle these were micronations, though I hadn't learned the term yet. It was silly, but fun. Back when I wrote about this before, I fit this game into an understanding of my adult life by saying "Making up useless systems? Check."

But there was another side to it that was odd. Sometimes several of us would all join a single country, and then we would debate what its political structure ought to be. My experience of this is that usually I was outvoted. I'd have some idea that I thought was really cool, and I could never persuade other people that it was nearly as cool as I found it. So far, this is pretty consistent with my self-understanding later in life. (See all my discussions of Sister Failure, for example.)

The weird part—the part that contrasts with my adult self-understanding—is that even when I was totally incapable of convincing anyone else to vote for any of my ideas about how this or that micronation ought to be organized, I was usually elected President anyway. At the time, this seemed normal and I never thought about it. Today, in retrospect, it is a great puzzle.

Marie, after meeting Son 1 and Son 2, has started to talk about a phenomenon she calls "the Tanatu charisma." This is the same whatever-it-is phenomenon that makes it impossible for me to blend into the wallpaper even when I try my damnedest. Maybe that's what this game displayed … already at work, long before I was old enough even for college.  

                

Freedom is overrated

Freedom is overrated.

I guess I've talked about this before, not always in those words. I find only two places where I have said literally this: here in 2010, and here in 2023. But my post here, arguing that freedom is failure, comes pretty close to saying the same thing.

I first figured it out by watching Father. Back when he owned our family business he had a terrible time of it: I talk about that some here and here, and probably in other places too. At the time, I thought he was being imprisoned by the business; and it was plainly killing him. When he finally sold it, I thought, Now at last he'll be able to do all those things he has wanted to do for so long!

But he didn't. He'd start one project, and then he'd start another, and then he'd email crazy conspiracy theories with his old Army buddies, and then he'd stay up to watch the Late Show, and then … on and on and on. [I have no idea how far he got on any of these projects, but Mother would like me to find out.] But he never got anything actually Done, because he didn't Have To. He was free—as free as anyone I've ever known.

It didn't make him happy. Not having to go out and see people on a regular basis just made him sour and solitary. (He died in 2015, but compare also this post, just for example.)

I worried that could happen to me when my job ended, if I didn't get a regular full-time job to replace it. And, … well, you know, … it's hard to say I was wrong. Just in the last year I talk about that here (after coming home from Scotland) and here (after coming home from France and then Thanksgiving).

Ironically, there's even an argument that this is true of political freedom as well. A few days ago, I posted this over on the Patio, explaining the argument that the best regimes in the world are places like Niger, Uganda, and Angola—none of them "free countries" by any normal metric. 

It's funny. We feel a natural irritation when someone tells us what to do. Who do they think they are? I'll decide what I want to do! But when we have that freedom—well, for some of us, at any rate, it doesn't make us happy. I bet that's true for many of us. It's probably true of me, not that I'm about to surrender my freedom. It's easier to surrender my happiness.

Freedom is overrated.