Investing

The tv-to-person ratio in the house I’m living in is at about 2:1.   When not living in a roommate-situation, I don’t really pay attention to the TV.  It sits there forlorn and dusty waiting for movie night while I go along my merry way doing other stuff.  What that other stuff is, I don’t exactly know.

Recently, however, I find myself turning on HGTV while I’m in the kitchen, and have gotten sucked into love it or list it, a Canadian renovation/real estate porn show.  So there I was, sitting in the kitchen because I’d finished what I was there to do but I just *had* to know which apartment a nutritionist from Silver Spring was going to pick in Paris.

Wait.  Hunh?

And the thought came to me…  why am I investing my time in someone else’s life when there’s my own life that could use the investment.  So I turned off the TV and I’ll have to live the rest of my life not knowing which Parisian flat the lady chose.

Seriously.  Invest in your own life before you invest in the lives you see on TV.

ACMoore, Jo-Anne’s, and Michael’s

Has anyone ever heard a kid say “I want to be a PMP when I grow up?”

I’m pretty sure that’s never been said in the annals of childhood aspirations.

What is it that people really want to do with their lives?  All the people that are stumbling from work to home and back again, the professionally miserable class…  what do they really want?  They want to be artists and designers and writers and chefs and bakers and soap makers and potters.

What do these dream jobs have in common?  The result is every day things that get used.  Human-sized and shaped objects that are tangible and temporary (cupcakes get eaten, dishes get broken).

Nobody wants to be a PMP when they grow up.  Nobody wants to shuffle papers and wear a suit and spend 8 hours a day away from sunshine.  And herein lies the problem.  There are a lot of places that will pay you to be a project manager.  But if you want to be a cabinet maker, there’s only a small portion of the population who will choose to have custom cabinet work done when they could run off to Ikea and get a brand new kitchen, appliances and all, for the low, low price of $2,000.

The job market demands people to navigate the layers of complexity with varying degrees of success and a great deal of boredom and frustration.  It does not demand more makers of stuff.

But yet makers we are.  Take the success of the box stores full of components which you can buy at full retail price and put together in order to make other stuff which has no value to anyone but you.  Scrapbook mavens, I’m looking at you.  Why is that?  It isn’t because any single life is so scintillating that it requires a scrapbook a year.  We lived a long time without recording every minute detail of our lives in excruciating detail, complete with stamps and fancy scissors.  It isn’t the scrapbook that people want, it’s the connection between time and product; it’s having made something tangible.  The process of taking an idea from concept to reality.

What to do in the gap between who we are and what we do?

Drink.

Okay, maybe not drink.  It’s a big gap and it would take a lot of <insert your drink of choice> to fill it up.

 

What Are We Made Of?

It seems to me that we have a pretty rotten opinion of humanity, so long as we are talking about the general.  I don’t like poor people, except of course, for my maid.  (If you’re rich.)  I don’t like the rich, except for Richard Branson.  (Because, let’s face it, Sir Branson is just cool.)

In arguments about universal healthcare, I’ve seen people sucking down sodas and smoking a cigarette talking about how they don’t want to pay for someone else’s bad health choices.  The politicians want to eliminate welfare because they believe that someone accepting social assistance is going to mooch off of the system indefinitely, like it is only fear of starving that will convince some people to work.

Perhaps there’s a small portion of the population who will get a little help and coast.  What do I know?  Not that much.

However, I know a little more about welfare than I did a year ago.  Unemployment insurance payments aren’t technically welfare, but let’s face it.  I wasn’t going to work like good people do, and there was money coming in every two weeks from the state government.  Kind of like welfare.

Not one soap opera did I watch while I was unemployed.  What I did do was pay exorbitant prices for my meds.  I also made stuff.  I helped a couple of friends out with big personal projects.  I wrote a lot.  I wrote half of a book, published a short story, and published a 90,000 word book.

And the truth.  The absolute truth, which no one wants to admit, is that I was more productive and added more value to the world around me as an unemployed person than I am sitting in an office formatting tables on a manual no one is ever going to read.

My father, my wonderfully flawed father, spent most of the last year eating government cheese.  In that year he brokered a deal that, if I were at liberty to explain, would strike just about anyone as being a big step forward not just personally, but in the big picture too.

This fear that we all seem to be carrying around (and I have it too) that someone is always trying to take something from us; this defensive posture over our sovereign right to occupy the space we happen to be in at any given moment, no matter where we are… what would happen if we gave people the benefit of the doubt?  Would we be proven wrong more often than we were proven right?

An Allergic Reaction

CNN recently ran an opinion piece about depression and suicide in America.  Apparently, you’re more likely to kill yourself than you are to die in a car crash.

Nice to know that the rigorous safety standards for car design are working…

Sorry.  The sarcasm doesn’t turn off for depression and suicide.

So the author’s opinion was that we need integrated services where doctors prescribe antidepressants and are backed up by mental health professionals.  The author notes that patients often do not avail themselves of therapy because insurance rules about therapy are complicated and convoluted and often include limits on exactly how often you can see a mental health professional.  It would also seem that we’re poised for depression to become the third most prevalent reason for Americans to be on disability.

Let’s think this through.

I’ll start with a nitpick.  Since there are a lot more of us, it stands to reason that  the number of us with mental balance issues would also go up.  That’s issue number one.  If 1/100 people have brain chemistry that doesn’t support them being blissed out, and you go from 100 people to 100,000 people, you’re going to have a hundred-fold increase in the incidences of depression.  Not that this is a good thing, mind you, just that in dealing with breathless statistics, it’s important to look at the proportions.

But more to the point, let’s talk about how other health issues are addressed.  If you have lung cancer, your doctor is going to want to know if you smoke or work in a coal mine before he starts treatment.  If you smoke, he’s going to want you to quit.  No matter how many tumors the doctor pulls from your lungs, if you go right back into the coal mine, your prognosis ain’t great.

Sickness is your body telling you something is wrong.

I don’t buy that depression is 100% an imbalance in serotonin.  Sure, tweaking your brain chemistry can help overcome the worst of the symptoms.  Insomniacs often find that a glass of wine helps them sleep at night.  Symptom relieved: problem not always solved.

I’m all for treating depression through chemistry and therapy.  I’ve been diagnosed with dysthymia, which, according to Wikipedia is a mood disorder and is also known as neurotic depression.  I’m on medication.

Here’s the thing.  I don’t think I have a mood disorder.  I think I’m having a healthy reaction to the fact that we live in a scary, fucked up world.

Now, the scary part isn’t new.  Humans evolved to manage danger, or at least when the danger was clear cut.  There’s either a lion there or not.  You’re either scared appropriately or you’re back to hunting for raspberries or antelope.  Now we have these nebulous fears that call up the same adrenal fight or flight response, but are never really there and never really gone.  I have a former boss trying to sabotage me.   There’s nothing to fling an arrow at or to run from, there’s just this ever-pending decision by a faceless someone who will either clear my name and turn the allegation back on the originator; or to take away the credentials that allow me to work in the arena I’ve called a career for 10 years.   That’s fucked up.

Which I observe with as little adrenaline as humanly possible.

Even so, my self-medication didn’t begin with the confirmation that someone is honestly out to get me.

(Digression: why is it the people who are so convinced that someone is out to get them the first people to actively pursue the infliction of harm on someone else?  I don’t care enough to try and ruin someone else’s life, therefore I don’t automatically assume that is what someone is trying to do to me.  People are weird.)

No, my self-medication began around the time I realized that the 8 hours a day I was spending in the working world were, for the most part, pointless and productless (I was writing a manual for an air traffic control system at this time).

We are not made for factory work, whether that factory produces cars, advertisements, software, standard operating procedures, clothes, or phones.   The white collar world is as much of a factory as the place that used to produce the Ford Model T.   If you want the justification for that, go read Shop Class as Soulcraft.  (Actually, go read it anyway.)

We are built for connections, both to our daily activities and to each other.  But who among us is living that way? (Don’t talk to me about a nudist colony or any other commune because I’m not interested.)

Instead, we do work that doesn’t connect with anything meaningful (and most of us don’t find money meaningful, we find survival meaningful.  If we could survive without money, don’t you think we’d all be doing stuff that contributed to our happiness?  I sure as hell would.)  We live in narrow prisons and don’t know our neighbor’s names until they’re in the news for dying inside their little box and seeping through the floor.

We mind our own business so effectively that our neighbors can have three young women imprisoned inside a dilapidated old house, beating the crap out of them and systematically raping them, and no one notices.  Hell, you’ve got a kidnapped young woman in LA who was living in the back yard and not once made a connection to help by simply looking over the fence.

The world is fucked up and it’s getting progressively more fucked faster than our brains can evolve.   I know, I know.  Unfucking the world is going to be harder than it looks, even if prevention is better than the cure.   But we certainly aren’t going to slow down the fucking process until we start acknowledging that the world we’ve created is fucked.

And before you go to a conservative christian glorification of the 1950′s as a bastion of family values and glowing mental health, I’m not buying that as an answer.  The sickness was incubated in the industrial revolution and accelerated in the post-war prosperity.  If a return to the Bible circa 1953 were an answer, don’t you think we’d have done that already?  Most of us like integration and equality and the results of the social upheaval of the 60′s and 70′s, and are looking forward to the day when equal rights for the LGBT community are added to our list of civil rights accomplishments.

So… with the easy answers discredited, do you want to know why depression and suicide are at staggering levels?

We.

Don’t.

Belong.

Here.

Medication might make us swim for longer, but that’s like taking the lung cancer out of a patient who is still smoking.

And for my fellow depressive neurotics, let me be the first to assure you that you are having a perfectly healthy allergic reaction to a horrifically toxic environment.  Your medication is the equivalent of Claritin or Allegra: it’s just that you’re allergic to BS  instead of cats and pollen.

Father’s Day

It’s a little early, but I want to talk about my Dad.

My Dad is one of the smartest guys you’ve never heard of.  Seriously smart.  The kind of smart that forgets to zip up his zipper and tie his shoes.  The kind of smart that forgets how many times he’s explained a particularly complex theory, and starts in at the beginning every time he has a conversation with you.

Growing up, I lived in dread of hearing “Now.  Let’s take that to its full and logical conclusion.”  Because whatever I’d just proposed (more freedom with the car, later curfew, big party, etc.) was just going to be broken down to its third and fourth order effects.  Once he got there, whatever it was that I wanted just wasn’t going to happen.  I hated it at the time.  God, Dad.  Why do you have to worry about what it means three months from now?  But as an adult, the drive to think further is a secret source of pleasure.

When I was about 13, I made matching dresses for myself and the little girl I babysat.  The dress was anything but stylish — blue plaid flannel, as I recall.  But I did it right.  I mean, really right.  I matched the plaids, I turned the facings so no raw edges showed, I hand-stitched the hem.  If you don’t sew, this won’t seem like that much of an accomplishment; but at 13, I’d made my Dad proud of me.  Not the dress explicitly, but by knowing the difference between right and half-arsed, and choosing to do it right.

My mom was detailed like that too, but for different reasons.  For my mom, right was about external approval and what other people thought.  Dad was indifferent to external judgement.  Right was an internal hunger.

He taught me how to hang wallpaper, and his faith that I could do it was both unjustified by experience (I’d never hung wallpaper before – I was 14) and complete.  He told me the basic theory; told me what to be careful about; handed me a drywall spatula and cautioned me that it could nick the wallpaper if I wasn’t careful;  and let me at it.

He taught me to pay attention to plumb walls and shoddy workmanship.  He taught me to see.

Dad was the first one that pointed out to me that raw intelligence was not an asset in the pursuit of happiness, nor was it a determining factor in success.  In fact, being happy often gets in the way of both happiness and success.  Being smart means knowing how dumb you really are when compared with all the things there are in the world that could be known and understood.  Being smart means being acutely aware of how wrong you can be.  No, success is built out of daring, determination, and a blissful ignorance of (or indifference to) all the things that could go wrong.  And smart is a liability, because seeing through the bs in a world that is made of little substance and much style makes everyone else REALLY uncomfortable.

And I watched the consequences of that too.  Like the time my Dad was in the room with a bunch of suits and uniforms, all the way up to 2-star officer types – I don’t remember if it was generals or admirals – and explained to them how their pet project was a waste of time and energy because it was going to cost a lot of money and it wasn’t going to do what they wanted it to, but if they did this project instead, it would give them a return on investment that exceeded the project they proposed, it just didn’t happen to be quite as sexy.

Yeah.  Generals and Admirals don’t like being told they are wrong.  My Dad was right of course, but right doesn’t always equal follow on business.

For as much as he (correctly) believes that his ability to out-reason most people is more of a liability than an asset, he’s also carried with him an incredibly tensile optimism about what might happen tomorrow.  Somehow, setbacks never set him back for too long.  It’s never been just a saying for him: tomorrow really is a new day and it’s always full of all that could possibly happen.  I don’t know if it’s been a choice or a habit or a quirk of personality, but those possibilities have always been opportunities in his mind, never problems.

The past ten years have been full of setbacks, including a year with no contracts to sustain his business and many truly lean months where the financial margin of error was razor-thin.  In that time, he’s managed his anxiety in much the same way that I manage mine: by making things.  ”I’m going to go make sawdust,” he announces to the room.  By the time he comes back, he’s filthy and full of a new avenue to reach his goal.

And this week, he got two parties to sit down at a table.  It’s taken him ten years to pull this feat off, but it is the beginning of a project that matters.  I mean, really matters.  Not just today.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s effing brilliant today.  But it doesn’t stop there, because the third and fourth order effects are brilliant too.  It solves a problem.  A real time problem for several different entities and it solves it in a way that is ultimately constructive.  There’s no pushing the problem down for a generation or two.  There’s nothing short-sighted here.  It’s elegant, it’s simple, and it matters.

That’s my Dad.  His fly might be gaping wide, but he’s the smartest guy you’ve never heard of.

**I want to tell you something else about my Dad.  He got diagnosed with MS a few years ago, and the doctors filled him up with all kinds of terror about the possible origins of MS.  One of the things they said to him was that they didn’t know how MS was acquired.  They also told him he couldn’t give blood anymore.

Now, my Dad is one of the rare people in the US that doesn’t have antibodies to any variety of the herpes virus.  That puts him in a group of people that make up less than 20% of Americans.  So when he went to donate blood, he knew that his donation was quite likely to be whisked off to save an infant.  He put the uncertainty about where the MS came from and the fact that he couldn’t donate blood together and came to the conclusion that might have unwittingly given a child MS.

I’ve seen him cry twice.  Once was standing in front of his parents graves.  The second time was over the idea that he might have given a baby MS.  He cried harder over the latter than the former.  His grief wasn’t about what a serious diagnosis meant for him and his future (he’s one of the lucky ones, he’s had a pretty mild form of MS), he cried for children he’d never met.

That’s my Dad too.

Dunce

I fear that I’m just not that bright.

With a frequency that borders on horrifying, I get to the end of a conversation with someone and think I have no idea what just happened.  I mean, there were words exchanged, words that ought to convey some kind of meaning, but I walk away just as confused as before as to what I am expected to do next.

And other times, I am using perfectly functional words and the other side of the conversation just stares at me blankly.

When using track changes, the comments are essentially a conversation with the author and other reviewers.  If you want to change the content just go ahead and insert your text.

There are some things for which we lack words.  Love, for example.  Hallmark (God bless them, they really aren’t as twee as you’d think) has used up all the words and turned them into flabby couch potatoes incapable of moving themselves, let alone anyone else.  That thing fighters call “heart” which is really code for staying on your feet when out-weighed, out-reached, and out-punched.  Alice’s muchness, which is kind of the same thing and lives in the same neighborhood as umami or, as Neal used to say, divine fire.

And then there are other things which submit docilely to the English language and used to represent something.  Borrowing from one of my two internet stalkers,* I offer up this gem:

Negative schedule variance.

Um.  Hunh?

I know what each of those words mean all by themselves, but collectively I’m lost.

Not really.  I mean, I know we’re talking about being late, with as much distance put between the bearer of the bad news and accountability as humanly possible.

So is the problem that I’m just a dunce?  I think it might be, because I had an hour long meeting today and I left it convinced that I must be missing something.  My only other option is that no one else has noticed how, like in every other aspect of our lives, our language is slipping away from any notion of the concrete, real, tangible, or solid.

Also:

If normal is what the majority of the rest of the people around you are doing, then who’s crazy in the insane asylum – the doctors or the patients?

*Don’t worry, I hold you both in the highest of bemused affection.

Truly, the Outer Limits of Philosophy

Verizon.

Verizon, which calls me up to remind me that I haven’t returned the equipment for which they promised to send a UPS box for.

Verizon, which has an unfindable address on their website, just in case you want to drive to BFE Virginia to drop off your equipment to get them to stop calling you.

Verizon, which has a phone number alongside that unfindable address, which goes to their wireless store, a location which does not accept equipment.

Verizon, where the employees at their wireless stores are cheerful and offer to connect you to their customer service line.

Verizon, where the customer service line will randomly hang up on you after you wait an eon to speak to someone.

Verizon, where the customer service line will lose you on hold indefinitely.

Verizon, which will never ever ever again enjoy my business.

I generally avoid anger.  I don’t like being angry.  I have conversations with myself about everyone doing the best they can with what they’ve got.  It didn’t work today.

So I’m going to sit down and breathe into my stomach and hope that the bile eases up.