When did you start ...?

How old were you when you lost your virginity?  If that's different from the age at which you started having sex regularly, how old were you then, too? 

Now how about your kids?  Do you have any idea of the corresponding ages for them (if they are old enough for it to be a question)?  Do you have any idea how old your parents were?

The reason I ask is that I had an idea the other day and I want to check it out: I wonder if these ages tend to track in families, across generations?  That is to say, we all know that some people start young and some start older.  But the children of people who started young... do they also start young?  The children of people who start older... do they also start older?  And if so, why?

What got me thinking along these lines was my realization of just how personally conservative Son 1 and Son 2 are.  I'm not talking about politics here, but about behavior.  They dress like teenagers, God knows they eat like teenagers, they listen to loud music, they are Internet-savvy (far savvier than I am), they download TV shows to watch for free, they leave their stuff lying around in a jumble, and they don't do laundry often enough ... all these things I expect.  But underneath that teenage-textured surface I think I can detect a level of real reserve -- almost fastidiousness -- about what they do with their bodies.  Son 2 won't drink.  Son 1 sometimes talks as if he'd like a beer now and then, but the one time (I know of) when he had a chance to drink himself silly he spent the night looking after his friends instead.

And somehow I just have a feeling it will be the same with sex: that they will be cautious and standoffish -- tempted, maybe, but not letting it go any farther than that until they are really ready.

For what it's worth, my answers to the two questions up at the top of this post are "almost 20" and "almost 22".  I was really shy, sometimes to the point of being priggish.  At the same time I was frustrated by the straitjacket of abstemiousness that my shyness confined me to.  Part of me wanted to burst out as a libertine, but I was too terrified ever to do so in reality.  So I watched my friends drink and smoke and fuck -- nurse hangovers, get sick, suffer broken hearts, flunk the occasional class "for personal reasons" -- and I quietly envied them.  I think they sometimes envied me what they imagined to be the calm in my life; I know I envied them the anguish and tumult in theirs.

I can't really read my sons' minds.  Maybe their fastidiousness is just that.  Maybe it's shyness, like mine was.  Maybe they suffer the same anxiety I did, or maybe not.  I can't tell.  And strictly speaking I suppose it is possible that one or both of them has already lost his virginity but managed to do it with such stealth that nobody ever found out.  But somehow I don't think so.  And somehow I won't be surprised if they are close to 20, or older, before that day finally comes.

For what it is worth, my father was around 20 when, as a nervous young GI who wanted everyone to think he was suave and sophisticated, he lost his virginity to a prostitute in Paris.  My mother was younger -- I think maybe 18 -- but I'm pretty sure that she lost it to my father, back before they were married.  (But it was the 1950's, so they got married soon thereafter.)

And this raises the next interesting question: if there is a commonality through the generations, what causes it?

I never discussed this kind of thing with the boys, so it's not because I taught them something consciously.  But could I have taught them an attitude subconsciously?  I suppose so.  That's probably how most attitudes get taught.  But when?  How?  What did I think I was doing at the time?  I have no idea.

Does anybody know whether shyness is hereditary?  A quick look on Google suggests that opinions differ (I found yes, no, and maybe), but I freely admit I spent no more than five minutes on the whole search.

It's a puzzle, and I wish I understood it.    

Blogging at work, part 2

You've heard that there are supposed to be three famous Chinese curses, right?  (Wikipedia says they appear to be apocryphal.)

• May you live in interesting times.
• May you come to the attention of your superiors.
• May all of your dreams come true.

Every job I've ever held, I've had a problem with the second one.  I talk about it here.  At this point even my boys joke that this is part of the price of being a Tanatu, of belonging to our family: anywhere you go, and anything you do, you are going to stand out.  Obscurity is not an option.

A couple of hours ago I posted a blog article at work, one that I talk about here.  And just now I have received an automated e-mail telling me that the president of our division just posted a comment on it.  He starts off, "Well written. I think we need to do both!  I understand that this is easier said than done, but I also see...." and then the rest of his answer devolves into management happy-talk.  Which I would expect.  Of course he's going to say we need to do both.  If I asked senior management to make a clear strategic business decision between having our cake and eating it, I'd probably get the same answer ... at least in a public forum.

What I didn't expect was to be seen quite so high, quite so fast.  The Internet is an amazing tool.

"May you come to the attention of your superiors" ....

Blogging at work

You remember that a while ago I explained that my company has been trying to push a culture makeover.  They've taken this to really significant lengths: one of the most striking is that they have set up their very own in-house social networking system and encourage us all to use it.

This morning I was browsing through it and came upon somebody's post about how we had to become more agile.  It was slightly more interesting than the normal run of most of these exhortations -- exhortations which largely seem to rely on the principle that if you repeat the word "agile" often enough it will make you a better company.  What was more interesting was to watch my own reaction: I thought I might have something to say in reply, but I really didn't know what I thought about his post ... so I started writing.  One thing I have learned how to do after six-plus years writing this blog is to dive into a topic, explore it for a few paragraphs, and figure out what I think about it in the process of typing.  It's a useful skill, I guess.  For what it is worth, I did revise this before posting it on one of the internal blogs, but not to change the conclusion.  All I did was to improve the wording, take out needless words, and generally make it punchier.

I'm not sure this counts as a productive accomplishment today, but I sure had fun. 

Just for the sake of leaving a record that I really did write something today (the two posts from earlier were both written last night), I'll append it here.
__________

Almost a month ago, "John Doe" wrote a very interesting blog post about being agile, including some good references to the external literature.

One article he cited was by Andy Beal about "5 Reasons why being Agile is more important than being perfect".  At the end of this article, Beal identifies a couple of applications where he'd rather wait for the perfect solution than go with the fastest one (brain surgery and brakes).  But these exceptions don't contradict the main point.  It's all a question of what you want.

In the market this question has to be rephrased as "Who do we want to be?"  Since nobody gets to be a monopoly, there's always differentiation: this supplier is the cheapest, that one is the fastest, the other over there is the most reliable.  Which are we?  Traditionally [our company] has chosen to be reliable even at the expense of the other two.  And when you are making brakes -- or doing brain surgery -- that's the right choice.  But it's often not an agile choice.  So why do we care about agility now?

Two reasons. 

First, it's a useful corrective against the natural tendency of all organizations to fossilize.  Striving to be agile, we test all our structures and break down the ones that have become deadweight.

Second, the market itself is ever more agile.  "John Doe" writes about winning [a certain big account recently], and everybody will have another favorite example of his own [where our ability to be flexible for the customer won us some business].  In any market where technology is advancing, offerings change quickly and companies are either agile or left behind.

But nothing is free.  One cost of agile methods is that they are hard to scale.  Remember that our vision is to be everywhere, [selling] worldwide.  And one of our strengths is that we already have a worldwide scope, which gives us unparalleled reach and a massive manufacturing capacity.  Scalability matters to us.  So we have to ask, "Can we be agile and worldwide too? Or does agility force us to work like hundreds of small companies who all use the same brand name? Does leveraging our global scale efficiently force us, because of the sheer burden of planning and communication, to slow down and narrow our offerings?"

I don't know the answer.  I sure hope we can do both.  But doing both will require some creativity, and we have to remember that it won't just drop in our laps.  There is a challenge here for us to meet.

Rock concert

Sunday night I took the boys to a rock concert.  It was four hours long: Don Felder (formerly of the Eagles) opened, then Styx performed, and then Foreigner.  We were way up in the nosebleed seats.  The concert was loud, it ran late, and it was a lot of fun.  Two thirds of the way through, during the changeover from Styx to Foreigner, Son 2 said to me, "I don't know how much you paid for these tickets – but whatever it was, it was worth it."

 

I told him, "Actually I sold you into indentured servitude to pay for them."

 

He answered, "That's fine – it's still worth it."

 

By the very end, … well, I think they still enjoyed it but actually their feelings were a little more nuanced.  The audience had gotten steadily louder with each new performer, singing along when they knew the words and shrieking or squealing when they didn't, so that it was actually pretty hard to hear what Foreigner was singing.  (I murmured to Son 1, who was sitting next to me, "This is why the Beatles stopped touring.")  Also the boys knew most of the songs Don Felder sang, and a large fraction of the songs Styx sang, but not a lot of the songs Foreigner sang (other than "Cold as Ice" and maybe one or two others) … so they couldn't let memory fill in the gaps on those songs where the audience outshouted the performers.

 

Why did the audience get steadily louder?  I assume there were three reasons.  First, as the concert went on they just got more and more into it.  This is pretty basic.  Second, the concession stands were doing a brisk business in beer and wine all throughout the concert; so as it got later, the audience got steadily drunker and less inhibited.  Third, when Don Felder started singing we were still in daylight; by the time Styx wrapped up and was replaced by Foreigner, we were sitting in the dark of night.  That too helped to uninhibit the audience.

 

The boys don't drink – they are too young and on the whole they are pretty strait-laced – so they were critical of the audience for getting so toasted.  But they did allow that there were some advantages to nightfall.  A couple of rows in front of us was a young couple who spent most of the concert (when they weren't getting more beer) on their feet dancing … only their "dancing" seemed mostly to involve a good bit of caressing or groping each other's bodies.  I was amused by them, and I didn't realize that they made the boys uncomfortable; but later, when we discussed it, the boys told me that one good part about the coming of the dark was that they could no longer see these two.

 

I did try to explain – again, this discussion was all afterwards – "Guys, it's a rock concert. This kind of thing is normal."  Son 1 asked, "How many rock concerts have you been to, Dad?"  I admitted that I wasn't quite sure but the number was pretty small; but I added that these were things everybody knew.  Rock music was born as an ecstatic experience; the thing that differentiated it so starkly from so much of what went before was the raw and direct way it intoxicated the listener, just exactly like booze or pot or sex.  That's why so many moralists condemned it, for heaven's sake.  I reminded the boys that girls at Woodstock would take off their clothes and dance naked.  Not that I was there, of course.  I was just a kid during the Woodstock Concert.  And as for the boys, the Summer of Love is farther in the past on their calendars than the Reichstag Fire is on mine.  It is clearly, for them, a thing of legend.  But I was trying to make a point.

 

That so many in the crowd were aging hippies contributed to one other factor that made the boys nervous.  We were well into Foreigner's set when the woman on the other side of me – she must have been at least my age and probably older – grabbed my shoulder for support, leaned over, and shouted to me (there was no other way to make herself heard), "WOULD IT BOTHER YOU IF I LIT UP A JOINT? I'VE GOT TWO HIDDEN IN MY BRA."  What was I going to say?  "No"?  Come on, … it's a rock concert.  Of course I told her that was fine.  Then she asked "WHAT ABOUT YOUR BOYS?"  In retrospect I'm not sure if she was asking "Would they mind?" or "Do they want any?" but I told her not to worry about it.  So she did.  Everybody was standing and joining in the song (or at least the noise), so she sat down in the dark using the bodies all around her as a windbreak and fiddled with her lighter.  Several times, of course: it's a rare joint that lights on the first try.  I wasn't really watching her so I'm not sure quite when she got it lit … I think she handed it to her daughter … and then suddenly I felt her tug sharply three times on my sleeve to sit down and she offered it to me.

 

Of course she did.  That's what you do with pot … you hand it around.  It's just common courtesy.  And what did I want to do?  I had a fraction of a second to decide.  So I figured … gosh, it's been a long, long time since I had any of that.  Well over thirty years.  I'm not working in defense, or in any other industry where random drug testing is a credible threat.  So sure, hell , why not?  I had no intention of letting myself get fucked up, but I also knew that one or two puffs wouldn't do that.  So I sat down, took a puff, and handed it back to her.  I had another a few minutes later, and then that was it.  I figured I'd stop at two, and in any event she didn't offer more: she later said she had handed it to somebody else who never gave it back.  So much for common courtesy.

 

The boys didn't say anything about it directly, but I think I may have shocked them.  Actually when I took my second puff Son 1 chided me, "Hey, remember you've got to drive home."  Clearly he has never tried pot on his own or he would realize that two puffs, for someone my size, doesn't mean much.  And in all honesty I was never very good at sealing my mouth around a joint the right way to keep the smoke from escaping, so my two puffs probably got me almost none of the actual drug.  But yes, all that having been said, I think in fact they were shocked.  And we didn't have much time to discuss it, at any rate not in a natural way.  I suppose I could have jumped on the topic when we drove home but that would have sounded awfully defensive … and they would have been entitled to wonder, "What's he so defensive about? It must be worse than he's letting on."  The next morning, though, I had to go to work while they slept in; and that evening I drove them to stay with Wife for the week.  I suppose I'll have to look for a chance next week to bring the subject up in a natural way and talk about it. 

 

For whatever it is worth, they don't appear to have a really good sense for alcohol either, in the sense of understanding what the effect is of this or that amount.  There's a line of thought that would suggest this is a defect in their education; but on the other hand it's a little hard to persuade most people that the prudent and effective use of intoxicants is a valuable subject in which to educate youth.  I don't quite know where to go with this.

 

It's a little odd to think this, but in some ways I think they may be more conservative than I am even though I'm the one in his fifties who holds down a boring job while they are both teenagers.  I'll have to mull that for a while.

 

 

Out of practice

My meditation practice has gotten sloppy lately.  There was a while there, a few months ago, when I meditated half an hour a day or more, pretty regularly.  Lately it has been at best a lot less than that – fifteen or twenty minutes is doing well – and half the days last week I never meditated at all.  Maybe more than half.  Some of those days I just slept in and then had to get moving to get to work.  Other days I found myself sitting idly during the time I would have meditated – so far, so good – but thumbing through a book.  As a result, when I sat down with my sangha tonight for a twenty-minute sit, my mind was all over the place and it seemed like a long, long time.

 

I wonder a little bit, though, about this business of thumbing through a book.  Often I wasn't paying it much attention.  Generally I didn't bother to put on my glasses, and these days it is hard for me to read print without them.  (Getting old.)  And invariably it was something I had read before.  So while my eyes were running over the words and my mind was hearing them said, I wasn't putting a lot of effort into any of it.  I wasn't learning anything new, or having to follow a storyline.  I wasn't trying to figure out whodunit.  And so in a sense I was using the book as a tool for shifting into neutral and letting my engine idle.

 

I've treated books this way for as long as I can remember.  When I was applying to colleges, one of them asked for an essay on how I relate to books.  I still remember writing that I would pick up a book in an idle moment to thumb through it, then sink deeper and deeper into it until I would finally – if I let myself – become oblivious to the outside world.  What I didn't add is that the books I sank into in this way were books I had already read.  But they were.  I have always treated books as friends, or as comfortable places of refuge; and I revisit the same ones over and over.

 

Could this possibly be some kind of meditation practice after all?  Certainly it's not "pure" meditation, whatever that means.  The presence of the book, of the written text, does steer my mind in this direction rather than that one.  I'm not exactly being present with whatever arises.

 

What I am doing, though, is disengaging from the noise of the world, from its driving and shaping, its pushing and pulling, its desire and aversion and confusion.  When I enter the book I leave all that behind.  And because it is a book I already know, the demands it places on me are less: I don't have to feel that the book itself is trying to drive and shape me, because we're already friends so I know what to expect.  I know that the book will accept me as I am and that I can accept the book for what it is … because otherwise I would have picked up a different book.  So there is a lot of striving, fretting, craving, that I can just give up while I am in the charmed circle cast by the book.

 

It may not be meditation, but it is something kind of close.  In any event I'm not going to fret about not meditating.  Just pick myself up, climb back on my cushion, and do it again.  I do find it interesting, though, that this is yet one more behavior (like going out for long walks) which I developed all on my own decades ago, which turns out to have something in common with contemplative practice.  It's as if I needed meditation all my life, and had to make it up for myself during all the long years before I learned it from somebody else.

 

 

"I've *tried* to get rid of them!"

This is purely for the humor of it all, nothing more.

 

Son 1's university is planning several days of orientation for new students before classes start.  We'll drive him there in a few weeks (I think "we" in this case means me and Son 2), arriving on a Tuesday night.  The dorms open Wednesday, when he moves in.  I figured then we'd turn around and come home – hell, it's an eight-hour drive each way.  But reading the pamphlet I suddenly realized that they have "parent orientation" events planned through Friday afternoon, after which  -- they suggest most delicately! – it will be about time for the parents to get the hell out of town and let their children adjust to school.

 

Three days of parent orientation?  What in God's name can they possibly plan to tell us that requires we stick around for three days?

 

Well, I e-mailed them to ask, and I suppose I'll hear back in a while.  But in the meantime the boys and I looked at the pamphlet a little more closely and saw that it talked about helping parents adjust to their children being away from home for the first time.  Oh.  Right.  They've scheduled three days because they figure that we're all helicopter parents who can't bring ourselves to let go.  So they've got events for us to keep us out of the way of the students.

 

But honestly, Son 1 will do just fine without me there.  He even suggested that he could single out other new freshmen who look particularly beleaguered by their parents and try to help them cope: "Hey, man. I know how you feel. I been there. It's OK, you'll get through it."  Maybe he'll have a whole social circle set up by the time classes start the next Monday.

 

We also had visions of me going to one of the parent gatherings and addressing them all in something like this vein:

 

I'm just here to tell you that you don't have to worry about leaving your children here on campus while you go back home.  Kids are resilient.  They'll do just fine.  I know this for a fact, because even when you want to get rid of them, they keep coming back.  I know I've tried to get rid of mine, over and over, and nothing doing.

 

We sent the oldest one [that's Son 1] to Europe when he was just 10.  For two blissfully quiet weeks he was away, but then he came back.  So then we tried sending him away to boarding school for high school, more than two hours from home.  But every vacation, like clockwork, he came back unharmed.  Usually he brought a stack of unpaid bills with him, for excess snacks he'd eaten over the previous semester that the school had obligingly run up like a bar tab.

 

With his younger brother [Son 2] we realized we were going to have to step it up.  So first we sent him to Australia, where every indigenous life form except the koala bear is poisonous and carniverous.  He came back.  Next we sent him to Costa Rica, figuring he'd come down with, … oh I don't know … yellow fever or malaria or something.  He came back.  Then we sent him to India, with the fond thought that maybe he'd get eaten by a tiger, or stepped on by an elephant, or abducted by a yeti, or even just banged up in traffic.  But no, you guessed it … he came back.  Finally we sent him, too, away to boarding school – this time to a school way out in the middle of nowhere, where they have to chop the wood to build their own fires for heat, and where casually ignoring frostbite is a badge of honor.  But every vacation he comes back, three inches taller than he was six weeks before, hungry, and toting a big sack of dirty laundry.

 

Try as we might, we just can't get rid of them.  Our kids keep coming back home at regular intervals, safe and sound, despite our best efforts.  Yours will too.

 

Thank you.

 

Whaddya think?  Suppose it would go over well?

 

 

 

 

Voices of the boys

The other night we were discussing the custody schedule for the rest of the summer.

Son 1: So when do I go to college? And how do I get there?

Hosea: [Names a date in August.] I will have had both of you here since the previous Sunday, so I assume we'll work out how you get there from here.

Son 1: Son 2 also?

Hosea: Yes, he's with us both from the same time. [Discusses the logistics of getting Son 1 to college.] And then after that Son 2 stays with me for another week before going back to stay with Mom [Wife].

Son 2: How long am I there for?

Hosea: You're with Mom for one more week before going back to school.

Son 1: Oh, dude, I'm so sorry. [Grins.]

Son 2: Sorry for what?

Son 1: That you have to spend a whole week with Mom, by yourself. I'm sorry that I won't be there to absorb some of the impact.

Son 2: But it's always like I'm there by myself. If Mom is yelling or needing something, you never speak up. You're always stuck on the computer. I'm always the one that goes to help her. The only difference if you're gone is that I'll be able to use the computer some of the time ….

I think Son 2's complaints aren't literally true, since Son 1 cooks dinner there a good bit of the time.  What I found interesting was that staying with Wife is described as being such a burden.  I mean, I guess I'm not surprised, but I'm still getting used to hearing it.

__________

Of course it's not all roses at my end either.  Last night I made a dinner that neither of them would eat: it included boiled broccoli rabe – rapini – stirred in with pasta.  Too bad, I kinda liked it.  Oh well. 

__________

On the way back from collecting them from Wife's house, they asked to swing by our old house to see if the new owners had fixed it up any.  The differences were subtle, but there were a few. 
 

Son 1: And just think … if you and Mom had been able not to be totally wrong for each other, we could still be living in a house instead of driving back to your crappy apartment.

Later on they said something else in a complaining vein about my apartment.  I'm trying to remember … I think it was something about how I can't afford to live anywhere else.

Hosea: No, it's just that I prefer to spend my money elsewhere. On your tuition, for example. Or on art … that's why I was happy to buy you tickets to the upcoming rock concert. But I don't want to spend it on a big, fancy place to live.

Son 2: Actually I'm with you on that. I wish Mom would move into a smaller place, though I know she never will. But if she did, then maybe she could keep it clean ….