I don't quite know how to categorize this post. Is it a "diary entry"? Kind of. Is it about politics? No, not really. Do I think you want to hear it? Maybe—it's certainly crazy enough to be funny, if you have the right sense of humor.
Is there any kind of important moral in it? I keep thinking there must be, but I haven't found it yet. So let's go with "crazy" for now.
Marie was here visiting for a few days, and we started talking about politics. In one sense this is not surprising: Marie has strong political convictions, and considers herself active in their defense.
But in another sense it was unusual, because normally I try to avoid discussing politics with her at all. The subject usually makes her angry, and she already spends too much time angry. When I introduced her to meditation in a simple way, the point was to cool the fires of her anger. So in general I don't think there's a lot to gain from re-stoking those fires.
The consequence, in turn, is that there are a lot of topics we can't discuss. I tend to think about politics intellectually (shocker, that), which means I am open to rethinking my positions and changing my mind when appropriate. And as it stands I can't really discuss those things with Marie, much as I would like to.
So as an experiment, I tried to ask her what she thinks about the Ukraine War, because I thought that would be the simplest and least problematic topic we could find in contemporary politics. I didn't necessarily think she would agree with my thoughts on it. But I did want to hear what picture she used to frame her thoughts, and I figured that we could discuss the war pretty dispassionately because it's not related to any domestic or intramural political dispute (such as abortion rights or Black Lives Matter).
Years ago I wrote a post on "The future of marriage" where I argued (among other things) that marriage does not have to be restricted to dyadic pairs—and, indeed, that "raising children is so much work that there is a good argument for spreading the burden among more than two people."
Well, I just saw the same suggestion in a recent webcomic, which makes me wonder if the idea is seeping out into the larger culture? Am I going to become—ever so improbably—a cultural prophet in my own time? Wow, who knew?
Several times in the last year, most recently in my post last night, I have described my marriage as a "punishment for my sins." (See also here and here. I use the phrase in another context here.)
But there is another possible explanation for my marriage besides this one. I'm reluctant to explain what I mean, because I find it embarrassing. But surely the time is long past when I should worry about anything like that, right? We're all friends here. Besides, none of you knows who I am in real life.
This afternoon I ran across an article someone posted on Substack, … umm … two days ago, called, "My 8 Best Techniques for Evaluating Character." You can find it here.
Self-understanding. Well, there is that.
And that's what I want to use this article for: to see how I answer its questions when I'm talking about myself. To see what the article says about me.
In what follows, I'll quote from the article, and then intersperse my own comments (indented). (In many cases the author introduces paragraph breaks that I ignore for simplicity.)
Five years ago, or a little more, Marie and I spent a little over a week vacationing in Greece. I meant to write about it at the time, but things got away from me. So I wrote two posts about it tonight.
I've posted them back in 2017 where they belong for the sake of continuity, so you can find them here:
I have a note here from … gosh, it looks like last summer. And it pulls together a number of related points. Some of these are things I have griped about here before; others, probably not. But they are all related in an interesting way.
Much of the time, I have trouble understanding what I need.
