Google just tried to lock me out

It's a good thing that it's late and I'm tired and drunk or I'd be way more upset than I am.

I just had to restart my computer because I couldn't get my fucking email to open, and there was something in there I wanted to post here.

And in that amount of time Google decided it had never seen me log in from this computer before. So it challenged me: not just what is my password, but what is my recovery email?

Turns out that Google is confused, and thinks that my primary email is really my recovery email and vice versa.

But the upshot is that for several minutes I was locked out of this account and didn't know if I could ever get back in. What would I do to prove my identity, after all? It's not like I have a driver's license in the name of Hosea Tanatu. God in heaven, what would I do if Google got really persnickety? How would I get back in?

I hate this.

And I think I'd better go public. Shit, at least that way I can retrieve my data, even if they block my ever logging in again.

I'm really scared and angry.
  

Wife's premonition

I'm sitting in a hotel in Faraway City (or close enough), and I've spent a week here for work. I fly home tomorrow. But I've been collecting things to post here.

A week or so ago, I was home and Son 1 went to spend a few days with Wife. On the whole he says she's doing better ever since she stopped drinking … enough better that it's no longer difficult or crazy for him to spend time with her. So that's good.

And he's still looking for work. He recently got turned down for a job that he thought he had a lock on. Maybe this is because job hunting is a lot harder than it looks (been there, done that) or maybe it's because this particular job would have required moving a long ways away from home for a job that couldn't have paid his bills. I told him, if I'd been hiring for that job I would never have hired him just because of that reason alone.

At the same time there's a job a lot closer to home that he really wanted, but a couple of months ago they weren't hiring anybody. Suddenly he has heard from them that maybe they can hire after all. We'll see.

Anyway, he told me that while he was at Wife's she told him about a premonition she had had. I think he found the whole thing embarrassing, because he slid off the topic almost as soon as he brought it up. And really, both boys are kind of embarrassed that Wife has premonitions. But she swears by them. She has had them all her life. She had one shortly after meeting me that she would marry me (for whatever that's worth); and the first thing that attracted her to Wicca was that it gave her room to believe in her own premonitions where other more conventional religions (so far as she understood them) did not.

Her premonition was that Son 1 would get this job nearer to home -- it's about an hour's drive from my apartment, or a bit less -- and that while working there he would meet his future wife.

No sooner did he tell me this than Son 1 covered his traces with a lot of reasons that of course it was absurd. But I'm writing it here to record it. (Not all of Wife's premonitions have worked out, but there's no way to keep score if you don't record them and then check later.)
 

Dreaming of Inga

[To be clear, I am writing and posting this in late June, 2020. I was looking through some old notes of mine, found this -- with its date -- and wondered why I'd never posted it here. So here goes.]

It was a few months ago that I got back in touch with Inga, and last night I dreamt that I was visiting her and we were interacting in the casual way of lovers. In fact when I thought about it (in the dream) I had very clear memories of visiting her not long after getting back in touch, and of our ending up in bed together. [This absolutely never happened in real life!] The memory was so clear that as I drifted back and forth between sleeping and waking I had a lot of trouble being sure what was really true.

And when I finally did remember the reality, I was disappointed. Not so much missing the sex itself, but the warmth and closeness and joy.
  

Movie meme, 6

This will be quick, but I found a note to myself stored as a Draft post and if I flesh it out I can hit "Publish". In fact, I rewrote most of it independently as "Movie meme, 5" but I left out one identification. This post fills that gap. It's not terribly critical, because this is someone I don't interact with much these days, but FWIW.

The last five contributions were here, here, here, here. and here. And the next addition follows below.

Dale: Mark Hamill

Here again the similarity is partly physical. Dale really looks like Luke Skywalker. When he was young, he looked like the young Luke; nowadays he looks a lot more like the old Luke.

But also, Dale has always been a kind of fresh-faced, innocent, regular guy. I'm not sure how else to describe it. And when we were all kids together and played "Star Wars", Dale always played Luke. (He used to try to cast me as C3PO, which I think in retrospect wasn't exactly a compliment.)

That's as many as I have figured out so far.
 

Zen and promiscuity (Thoughts on Wife)

In Sangha these days we are reading Tim Burkett's Zen in the Age of Anxiety. This means that after we meditate we spend half an hour or so in dharma study: reading aloud half a chapter or so and then reflecting on it. And today's chapter was about sex.

On the whole Burkett's message is very sex-positive, provided you don't get wrapped up in craving or any of the other bad mental spaces that Buddhism is supposed to free you from. There's one brief obligatory reference to sex being unhealthy if it's not in the context of a "committed relationship"; but he says enough other favorable things about casual or recreational sex that this one paragraph cannot be any more than a formalistic hommage to the Buddha's Third Precept or some kind of politically-careful ass-covering.

But craving is still bad, and so he draws a distinction between casual or recreational sex (which he regards as benign, on the one hand) and what he terms "promiscuity" (which he identifies with craving and therefore deplores, on the other). And when I read his remarks on promiscuity, my ears perked up:

Promiscuity is associated with carelessness and indiscriminate, obsessive behavior. Or, promiscuity may be a manifestation of neediness. When a person is promiscuous, there's often an underlying emotional issue that is being avoided. The close association between promiscuity and suffering should not be overlooked.

 

If we use sex to mask our insecurity or loneliness, then we feel cut off from everyone. If promiscuity is concealing an underlying fear of intimacy, then we are using sex to avoid commitment. Or maybe it's the opposite extreme: we are promiscuous because no one fits our vision of an ideal partner. Both extremes are fear-based, and both diminish the intrinsic joy of sex.

You may remember that I started this blog, over eleven years ago, because I was troubled and baffled by Wife's serial infidelities, and because I needed a place where I just just come out and say "My wife has had all these lovers and I don't get it." But I think that Burkett may explain it all, right here.

"Neediness"? Wife is incredibly needy, and was throughout our marriage. Even back when she was excitingly high-functioning in some respects, she was still very needy in others.

"Underlying emotional issues"? That's easy: think of the depression, the bipolar disorder, the borderline personality disorder, the profound self-hatred and sense of victimization.

"Suffering"? Wife has always suffered, more or less continuously, both physically and mentally. Whatever else I have said about her, I have never denied that. For many years I hoped that if I only loved her hard enough I could make it all better, but no such luck. And there were only a few things that brought her temporary surcease. Victory did, but victories were few and far between. Alcohol did, until it made her moody and morose and even more miserable than when she started. And the dance of flirtation did. Orgasm did. Not so much with me, but that gets to the next point ....

"Underlying fear of intimacy"? Surely that is why she always had better sex with strangers ... why her romances inevitably decayed over time until her lovers wanted nothing to do with her nor she with them. Because intimacy means exposing yourself for others to see, and she hated letting anyone else see her. She hated letting me watch her come. And I think this is because she hated who she was; and exposing herself to others meant letting them see -- in her eyes -- how hateful she really was. (She felt deep pain whenever I would tell her I found her beautiful.)

"No one fits our vision of an ideal partner"? I think for Wife the "ideal partner" would be someone who made her stop hurting. But nobody else can make us stop feeling that kind of hurt, not in the long run. So no one fits that vision. Simple as that.

It's amazing how much he packed into how little space here.
  

If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?

Browsing Twitter over lunch today, I clicked on a link that lead to a link that lead … you know how it goes … to an article here about the role of intelligence in determining success: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-12-22/if-you-re-so-smart-why-aren-t-you-rich. The article suggests that intelligence really doesn't count for nearly as much as personality. "He [economist James Heckman, whose results are being explained here] found financial success was correlated with conscientiousness, a personality trait marked by diligence, perseverance and self-discipline."

Bullshit.

If he'd left it at "correlated with personality" I might have gone for it. But conscientiousness? Sorry. Any proposed theory has to take account of counterexamples. Therefore it's obvious that intelligence (as measured in school) doesn't cause riches, because there are people (like me) who looked smart enough in school but aren't rich. But by the same token, I've always gotten high marks for conscientiousness. So where are my millions? (Say, maybe the world owes me something …!)

Really in my case it's pretty simple. I have intelligence and conscientiousness, but I lack courage. Further, the deficiency of courage makes it hard for me to pick a direction and follow it. I am much more comfortable working on what I stumble into. And when I do hold my nose and dive into something, it can look less like courage than recklessness -- my marriage to Wife, when I knew it was going to be really difficult -- was one of these.

I advanced this theory to Marie a while ago too, and she agreed. That in both our cases, we have far more talent than courage and therefore we have wound up doing anonymous things instead of setting the world on fire. Commencement speakers who urge you to shoot for the stars can blow it out their ears.

“There was still real affection”

I'm really tired so this will have to be short. But I was talking with Son 1 over dinner about my marriage to Wife, and one of the things I told him was, "It may not have been visible in the 2010's, but back in the 1980's we were really in love with each other."

Son 1 chuckled at the reference to the 1980's, because he wasn't born till 1996. But then he added, "Up until after the two of you went to Paris together, there was still real affection that I could see." 

I told him that our trip to Paris was in many ways a high point of our marriage. But then I thought ... my God but he was an observant kid! Wife and I went to Paris in the summer of 2007, when Son 1 was not quite 11 years old. And yes, up through that trip I know that I still made a point of being demonstrably affectionate to Wife. I'm glad he saw it, and I hope his little brother (Son 2) did as well. 

Shortly after that trip, Wife began to get emotionally involved with Boyfriend 5. That December I started this blog. In the spring on the next year, Wife paid Boyfriend 5's electrical bill. And from there it spiraled inexorably down. Five years on, in May 2013, I moved out. 

Son 1 was right about the timing. Good for him. Really — bloody well good for him.

   

   

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