Smart Rules: Canaries and Alligators

The trouble with everything costs something is that you can only experience one set of consequences: the decision tree branches, you pick one or the other, and the not-chosen branch dies quietly.  Schrodinger’s Cat, once examined, is either one or the other.  You don’t get to play both out.

I have a supervisor.  My supervisor finds me disrespectful.  I find him intellectually incurious, and therefore limited as a manager of people.  You have to be interested in perspectives other than your own to manage effectively.  His response to my perceived disrespect has been distinctly bullyish.  I spoke up for myself.  And here we arrive at the rule for being smart for the day:

Don’t write a check with your alligator mouth that is going to break your canary ass.

I’m not saying that’s where I am.  Everything costs something: speaking up in your own defense is expensive.  Keeping quiet comes with its own expenses, and the truth is that, more often than not, the person who makes a problem known becomes the problem child and not the person who caused the problem.  Speaking up makes people uncomfortable.  Everyone would rather you do the safe thing, the comfortable thing, and talk bad about the schmuck, wreak havoc with everyone’s morale, complain bitterly and quietly, and then find another job.  The clean answer, the direct answer, raising your hand and saying no, this isn’t going to go down like this…

Both options have their costs.  The one is up front and immediate.  The other is a bit like paying by credit card.  Sure, you think that paying a little bit over time is easier on your finances, but one day you wake up like most Americans with $15,000 on the Visa and 22% APR, wondering how you could have ever been so stupid and what on earth you have to show for the debt.

There is no clear answer here.  In my case, Schrodinger’s Cat is dead and I don’t know how things would have played out if I hadn’t stood up to the bully, because I did, and now I’m the problem child.

Everything costs something.  There are times when that is both a certainty and a comfort.  I would have been paying for this anyway… at least that’s what I tell myself.  Besides.  I’m not sure I was constitutionally capable of keeping my mouth shut.  So there is that to consider as well.

Canaries and alligators.  Make sure your back end matches your front end before you assert yourself.  That’s all.

The Living Dead

My sisters and I have a pact: drastic intervention is authorized if we ever sound like we’re turning into our mother.

So far, it’s just little things.  My eldest sister over uses the word moment.  I’m having a hard time coming up with an example, but when she does it, I cringe a little.  Because mom *really* overused moment.

I’ve heard my middle sister use “whatever whatever” before.  This is verbal DNA transferred directly from my mom, who got it from Mrs. B.

Hopefully, I’ve avoided the verbal tics.  I’m sensitive because I had an ex with the weirdest verbal tic I’ve ever come across.  He’d add “for going” or “for actual going” or “for actual going through” to the conversation and he didn’t know he did it.  I pointed it out, he denied, I started pointing it out every time he did it… he’d deny he’d just said it, but it’s the only time I remember him laughing without bitterness.  He broke the habit.  Eventually. Since then, I’ve tried to maintain awareness and avoid picking up the tics myself.

But never fear, she lives in me in other ways.  Wasting water, for example.  Nothing makes me crazier than letting water run with no purpose.  Fine.  If you’re trying to get the water to run hot.  Leaving it running while you’re brushing your teeth and not using it?  Maddening.

Okay, so I can take a kind of virtuous pride in that one.  Because really, who is justified in just running water because you can.  This next one, however…  it was gross on her and it is gross on me: fishing stuff out of my teeth with little awareness I am doing it.  Seriously.  I gotta fix that because it’s repulsive.

So far, we’ve managed to avoid the big issues.  Inability to see appropriate boundaries or respect them.  Selective memory about our failures.  A marked preference for appearances over reality.  Failure to take ownership.

We’re on the lookout, though.

Denial

The to-do list is full of tasks that are irrefutably final, yet I’m waiting for it to hit me.

I want to say that I did my crying while she was still alive.

There wasn’t a serious break-down standing in the room with her body.  Not saying it was tear-free to tell her mother that she was gone, but full-on break-down?  No.  And there was plenty of finality to be had in looking at her, touching her.

Picking up her ashes was fine as well.  Another item on the list of things that needed to be done.  No sense of catastrophe holding the five lb box that is left over when a body is burned at high temperatures.

Resolving her house is next on the list of things to do.  Aside from my all-consuming rage at having had someone else touch her stuff, I think I’m probably going to be the most pragmatic of the three of us.

Maybe this is my mother in me.  She loved her lists of things to do.  I tend not to write them down, but I go over an internal to-do list over and over again.  Wrap up the house.  Drive home.  Get here in time to do one more week at work.  And then a complete blank.  I have no idea what comes after that, but once it was clear that Mom was terminal, the list materialized:  See her through her passing.  Arrange to have her body cremated so we could separate the immediacy of the physical decay from the time we need to make the memorial happen.   Spend Christmas somewhere else.  Pick up her ashes and the pile of death certificates.  Welcome 2015.

Done, done, done, done, done.

The house, the drive, making it home for one more week of work, and then …

Mom died when she got to the end of her to-do list.  I don’t think it will be so dramatic for me.  But it occurs to me that I should watch out.  Once all the contingencies are taken care of, once the list is clear, then what?

A Day in the Life

Really, I just want to show off the hat and my dog…

http://www.ladiesdc.org/blog-categories/a-day-in-the-life-of-audrey-reid-

 

Halloween

It’s my favorite holiday.  Maybe it has something to do with the introduction Peter S. Beagle wrote to The Fantasy Worlds of Peter Beagle.  He talks about his appreciation for shape-shifters and actors and how that informs his writing.  (Go easy on me, I’m paraphrasing here.)  There’s something about the weather – chilly enough for layers – and the food (mulled cider!) and the leaves falling and the earlier evenings…  it is the first real celebration of being cozy.  Plus adults can get away with playing with their identities in a way that are typically out of reach.  At least if you aren’t heavily into cosplay.

But the holiday is also one of the glossed-over connections to the connections between western culture and its pre-Christian roots.

It is also a Christian construct.

I see a connection between the macabre celebration of the crucifixion of Christ (all that eating of his body and drinking of his blood) and Halloween.  We celebrate our fears on Halloween, trying them on and turning them inside out to make them safe.

To the Celtic progenitors of Western Culture, Halloween ended the old year.  So in that way, it was a celebration of the cycle of life, the past year dying on one night, only to be reborn the next morning.  Throw in some Roman conquers and the Catholic mission to turn the known world Christian, and the new year became the celebration of the dead saints (All Hallows Day) and the night before like Christmas Eve is to Christmas.*

Mix together the Christian weirdness about celebrating death; the human fear of death; regional traditions surrounding the day, each connected backwards in their own way to primitive cultural roots; generalized anxiety about change and social structure; rising and falling interest in mysticism; horror movies; dissatisfaction; longing for the opportunity to play… and you get Halloween in its current incarnation.  A mess of traditions blended together and appropriated in service of playing out our anxieties and bridging the gap between modern life and dirt.

Halloween is a dirty holiday.  It smells of decay and dirt; it smells of candy-laden loam.  Yum.

Ratwell and I were talking about costumes I could pull off in short order for some last-minute invitations to Halloween parties.  I threw out the option of dressing up as an ebola-stricken nurse.  He was horrified.  Lest anyone else also be horrified, let me add the disclaimer that it was an idea I wasn’t wedded to.  It popped into my head along with The Black Widow (because who doesn’t love black boots and a badass) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

This led us to a discussion about how the general population might see Halloween, what appropriations are acceptable and why, and why we dress up like we do.  I think Halloween serves a social function, allowing us to play with those things we fear the most.

Take the sexy <insert identity here> trope that so many women fall into.  If, as a society, we’re still nervous about women’s sexuality and insulting a woman’s sexual choices is still enough to discredit a woman entirely, it makes sense that women dress up as the thing they fear the most: a woman who puts her body on display deliberately, with confidence, with a sense of play, and simply because they can.

In this context, the Ebola Nurse costume is a legitimate choice: here is a common fear that the news is cramming down our throats.  Taking on that fear, owning it, playing with it is a way to disarm the fear.  Nothing deflates fear faster than play and humor.

Ratwell objected because, for a family with direct experience with ebola, drunken people carousing with a clumsy pastiche of a horrible illness, the whole thing might be painful.  “You wouldn’t dress up like a cancer patient, or an AIDS patient,” he says to me.

But why not?  Is it in bad taste?  I can see why it would be, and things like taste don’t need to submit to logic.

We uniformly agree that black-face and appropriations of racial minorities and stereotypes is (at the very least) in bad taste.  I saw somewhere in the news that a mock lynching scene was taken down by the authorities in Kentucky.   (You can google it, but don’t be surprised if it makes you sick to your stomach.)  I wouldn’t argue for the legitimacy for either of these activities fitting under the umbrella of re-appropriating our fears.  First, lynching is a blanket threat.  While it would be universally condemned, it is unfortunately still plausible that a lynching would take place in the US.  There is a direct link between Emmitt Till and Trayvon Martin.  There just is.  It isn’t funny, and it isn’t taking the fangs out of a cultural fear by mocking it.  Those fangs are still out and if that is a surprise to you, then you haven’t been paying attention.

(Digression: Mel Brooks managed to send up racism in Blazing Saddles in a way that feels like an authentic use of humor to turn a miserable aspect of culture inside out.  It’s been done elsewhere, but I can’t think of an acceptable scene satirizing lynching anywhere.  Correct me in the comments if I’m wrong.)

In the end, we were left with the conclusion that most people aren’t thinking about the philosophical or psychological underpinnings of their costume choices.  The boundaries of good taste are inconsistently applied: it is acceptable to appropriate the identity of a witch, even given the long history of witchcraft accusations being a weapon against women and burning at the stake.  It is acceptable to dress up as a drag queen, but it isn’t acceptable to dress up in the stereotype of a different race.  You can get away with pandemics and illnesses that are long-distant: a victim of the Plague would be acceptable, but a modern AIDS patient would not.

Halloween is a mess.

I don’t want to be misunderstood as arguing for equal opportunity offensiveness.  I do, however, find the shifting ground of taste fascinating.  Intellectually, I think it is dangerous to identify a subject as one that just can’t be discussed.  But socially, I’m okay with the idea that there are some things that just aren’t done, nor should they be.  Not even for Halloween.  Not even as a send up of our fears.

Personally, I’m wearing my devil’s horns and a Friday-appropriate outfit: I’m the devils’ dutiful daughter.  Unless you’re a die-hard Christian and uncomfortable with the whole concept of Halloween, I’m pretty sure I’m about as unoffensive as it gets.  Until I open my mouth that is.

* Here’s better reading on the history of Halloween.  http://www.paganspath.com/magik/samhain-history.htm

1918

We had a pandemic in 1918 – H1N1, then known as the Spanish Flu.  Between 3 and 5% of the population died, most of them healthy young adults.  The healthiest people died because they had the best immune systems.  It wasn’t the virus that got them, it was the full-on counterattack mounted by their immune systems that did them in.  Let’s look at that again:

The virus didn’t kill them, their body’s reaction to the virus killed them.

Kind of like how it isn’t the feeling that’s the problem, it’s your feeling about the feeling.

Just sayin’.

And before someone smarter than me starts explaining to me that this isn’t a universal lesson about viruses, and some viruses really are the problem and will kill you.  I get that.  The analogy still holds.  No one is saying to ignore the issues in your life.  Serious stuff is still serious, and requires the feeling and then some kind of decision about what you’re going to do to change your circumstances.  But we all have the feeling, then the feeling about the feeling.  The trouble is stopping there.

The feeling is the virus.  The feeling about the feeling is your immune system trying to excise that feeling.  Ideally, if you quit with the feeling about the feeling, accept the original feeling as it is, listen to the thing it is trying to tell you, and then use that information to come to some kind of a measured response that takes into account your values and purpose and addresses the thing the feeling showed up to tell you…  you’re in a better place than if you just get stuck between the feeling and the feeling about the feeling.

How to be a Nicer Person

Or how to stop being an asshole.

I keep thinking that it can’t be that hard not to be an asshole.  There has been a lot of stuff coming up about bullies and trolls on the various and assorted social media sites.  I’m lucky, in a way, because I have such a small (and generally like-minded) following that no one has ever been nasty to me in an online forum.  But I read about it happening to other people and for every death threat delivered in a comments section, I have the same thought: when did this become okay?  And how hard is it to just not be an asshole?  Clearly, it’s harder than I think it should be.

Step one: Recognizing if you’re an asshole.

If you have ever threatened someone’s life or physical safety or that of his/her family over an idea, a belief, a game, an opinion, a TV show, a tweet, an article, a religion…  Okay, let’s start again.  If you’ve ever threatened someone’s life, physical well-being, or that of their family (to include pets) you are an asshole.  The only possible exception is if you threaten (or cause real bodily harm to) someone who is in the act of harming you or someone else.  For example, the guy in Texas who beat the assailant of his child to death…  he is not an asshole.  If you are in the military fighting a war, you are not an asshole.  These are the only exceptions.

Losing your shit over things you are guilty of is another good sign.  Road rage over someone not using their blinkers when they change lanes, when you also don’t use your blinkers?  You might be an asshole.

If the only socializing you do consists of tearing other people down, you are probably an asshole.  If you are mean to people you don’t know just because you can get away with it, you are probably an asshole.   If you think someone reacting to offensive language by becoming offended is their problem, you are probably an asshole.

I’m sure I could come up with other symptoms, but that covers quite a bit of territory.

Step Two: Deciding you don’t actually want to spend the rest of your life being an asshole because, let’s face it, the world just doesn’t need any more schmucks.

Are you happy?  Do you have meaningful friends?  Do you have lasting relationships with members of the sex you are attracted to?  Do you feel an incipient longing to create something that lasts instead of just tearing everything down indiscriminately?  It may be time to recognize that you’d like to become a constructive human being.

Step Three: Developing compassion.

Oddly enough, this starts with your relationship with you.  Go easy on yourself.  Stop saying such horrible things about yourself when you make a mistake.  Take a deep breath.  Recognize that you are fighting a hard battle, and credit yourself for making it this far.  Then expand that circle of compassion outward a little.  That guy that just cut you off in traffic.  Probably doing the best he can with what he’s got.  The lady who can’t make up her mind in Starbucks: fighting a difficult battle and doing what she can to make it through.  That person you’ve never met on the internet with an opinion you disagree with.  Probably just wants to make the world a better place to the best of his ability.  Go easy on yourself.  Go easy on other people.

Step Four: Take nothing personally.

See, 99.999% of what other people do isn’t about you, it’s about them.  Unfortunately, this means 99.999% of what you do isn’t because so and so said thus and such.  Taking nothing personally goes hand in hand with taking absolute responsibility for yourself and your words.  No one can make you mad.  No one can make you anything.  You choose your reaction.  We’re all trying to make it through with a collection of challenges and difficulties that are uniquely our own.  We’re all generally so absorbed in our own concerns, we have a hard time seeing other people.  That goes for you too.  Notice it in yourself when you’re getting ready to fly off the handle.  Notice it in people who you disagree with.   Their feelings and how they handle them tell you about who they are, not who you are.  Your feelings and how you manage them tells the world who you are and says nothing about the person you are blaming for your reaction.

Step Five: If you would be mad if someone said it to your mother, don’t say it to anyone else.

I’m pretty sure that doesn’t need further explanation.

Step Six: find something you’d like to build, something that makes the world a better, safer place, and focus on that.

If you don’t like people, do something for animals.  Whatever it is, find a constructive place for your energy, something that benefits someone or something other than yourself.

 

 

That’s it.  Practice a little every day and eventually, you too can become a nicer person.  Just start with the no death threats thing, because the fact that someone has to say that out loud is just sad.

 

Word Strategy

Language is a tool.  We use it to arrange the world in our favor, to remember, to be remembered, to connect, to understand, to learn, to teach.   I have a hard time conceptualizing what being human would be like without language.  We’d be no more than amoebas bumping into each other.  Language is our only means of escaping the boundaries imposed by the macro-impermeability of our skin.

We use words to get what we want.  Or to try to get what we want.  But we tend to do it badly, because the words we are comfortable with, the words that make us feel safe, are not the words we mean.

The cafeteria in our building has gotten dismal, so I walked across the street for lunch.  I wasn’t there to see the sparking incident, but I got the aftermath: two grown men yelling at each other even as the distance between them increased, with one guy yelling behind him “you arrogant sonofa…” and the other waving his hand and saying “yeah, yeah, yeah.”

News flash:  when you start insulting someone, they stop listening.  If your point is to vent your annoyance, go for it.  If your point is to communicate something meaningful, you might as well keep your mouth shut because all of the incoming channels shut down as soon as the attack begins.

Think of every person in the whole world like their own little mobile castle, fully armed and prepared for siege.  They walk around with the gates half-open, but a guy standing behind them ready to pull up the bridge over the moat at the first hint of a threat.  Words are the emissaries you send across the space.  As long as those words feel safe, the gate stays open.  As soon as the words become threatening, the bridge goes up, the gates go down, and while you can certainly lob some doozies over the wall, and they can create some lasting damage when they land, you aren’t getting behind that gate again until you can prove that you’re safe.

In my professional life, I talk about the author’s obligation to avoid creating resistance.  As a writer, you create resistance when you make it painfully obvious to your reader that the voice they are hearing in their head as they read is not their own.  You do this in any number of ways – by breaking the rules of suspended disbelief; by having atrocious grammar or spelling errors; by ignoring the logic of the world you’ve created; trite language; making your reader feel stupid…  I’ve just realized that the list of ways to create resistance in your reader is impossibly long to document.

As a user of words, you have two choices: bump along as you were using the words you are comfortable with and confused as to why you aren’t getting through, or get strategic with the realization that, to get what you want, you’re going to get a lot further when the other party is receptive and the only way you can influence his/her receptivity is by doing your damndest to avoid creating resistance.  You’ve got to be willing to put the work into thinking about it, thinking about what you are comfortable saying, what you mean, and between the two, which is going to be easier to receive on the part of your conversational partner.

Is it manipulative?  Yes.  But everything we do is manipulative.  Manipulative doesn’t have to be a bad thing.  Besides, when in the midst of a relationship negotiation, saying what you’re comfortable with is as much of a manipulation as deciding you’re going to say what you mean.  If threatening to leave feels authentic, but you’re saying it because you want him to beg you to stay or because you’re terrified he’s going to say he wants to leave first…  well, that’s a manipulation.  So what happens if you kill the adversarial posture and say what you mean.  I’m hurt and I’m scared and I want to be connected to you.  Are you vulnerable?  Yes.  But no more vulnerable than when you were throwing word-bombs and hoping he’d hug you in response.  At that stage, it is going to hurt anyway.  You might as well say what you mean.

It’s like my uncle explained to my ex husband: you can be right or you can be happy.  You can use the word strategies that you are comfortable with (and most of us are comfortable with a defensive verbal posture) or you can set your comfort zone aside and say what you mean.  When it comes to love (of whatever variety), I think the connections are way too critical to risk.  Tell your truth as gently and as honestly as you can.  If you lose, you lose, but at least you lost on your best effort.  I think that’s better than losing on a half-ass attempt.  If you lose on half-assed, don’t you always wonder what you might have gained if you’d simply told the truth?

No regrets.  Whatever it takes to get to no regrets, do that.

The Philosophical Breakdown

There are certain places my philosophy breaks down entirely.

Like last night.  In the pool.  I was aiming for 1.5 miles.  I’m not the fastest swimmer in the world.  I’m pretty much built for endurance, not speed.  I’ve made my peace with this.  I don’t swim in the fast lane because, while I won’t stop and cling to the side to catch my breath at any point in the swim, I am not going to be breaking any records for getting from one end of the pool to the other.  I’m just going to keep going.  And going.  And going.  For all 45 laps.

And then this lady gets in the pool.  She wants to join a lane that already has two people in it, ending the split and beginning the rotation: up one side, down the other.  Which is fine.  All except for the part where I’ve done this with this lady before and she has a ruinous front crawl.  No joke, she swims like a rototiller and, like the machine, kicks up a lot of shit with not much forward movement to show for it.

I seriously contemplated drowning her.  Or being very, very mean.

Real Butter

Yesterday, I had reason to step foot in a health food co-op in pursuit of organic, free-range chicken.  Part of me loves the grocery stores that don’t sell coco puffs.  All those varieties of honey.  Tea that is going to save my life.   Incense.  Coconut milk.  Tofu hotdogs.  Real butter.

Okay, sarcasm aside, I’m super excited about real butter.

So I’m up and down the aisles, feeling virtuous about blue tortilla chips, and I make it to the vitamin aisle.  There is a supplement for everything.  And I’m turning in circles in this aisle, the ecologically sustainable lighting bouncing off of gleaming bottles, and beginning to feel fear encroaching.  Eventually, I figure out that I’m having the same problem with the store that I have with religion.  The message is that if you do the “right” thing, you can control your outcomes.

In religion, it is conformity to the scriptures that the culture chooses to emphasize.  Hate gay people, ignore the part that says you can’t eat meat and milk together.  No more cheeseburgers for you, my friend.  In political ideologies, if you just defend this aspect of our definition of freedom, then you will be on the right side of history and if we can implement the ideology across the board, then everything is going to be okay.

It’s all this fight against uncertainty.

And you can do the same basic thing in the aisles of your local health-food store.  Bee pollen.  Antioxidants.  Ayurvedic herbs.  If you just cut out enough stuff – partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, high fructose corn syrup, aluminum: and add in the right things – organic everything, a mysterious mix of herbs and vitamins, whatever.  Then you can control things like cancer, aging, wrinkles, Alzheimers.

I can see it.  Why wouldn’t you want to create the best possible conditions for yourself and your health as you move through life?  If you can just not eat off of aluminum and reduce your chances of getting Alzheimers, that makes sense to me.

But somehow, this ongoing fight against chaos and entropy does something horrible to my sense of balance.  Ideology, religion, health-obsession, they share this common assumption: if I do xxxx, then everything is going to be okay.  I want everything to be okay too, I really do.  But the luxury of believing that I have control over that is no longer available to me.  In that dichotomy between wanting to be correct enough to prevent disaster and the recognition that such things simply are beyond any of our control, I get nervous.  Really nervous.

Three chocolate bars and some eco-friendly laundry detergent later, I ran.  Can’t we just shrug our shoulders and admit that we don’t know and we aren’t in control, and you just do the best you can with where you are?

Oh, because pragmatism doesn’t sell stuff.  Only fear sells reliably.