Between 1996 and early 2004 I was enrolled in a doctoral program and working on it part-time while I worked. My dissertation topic was "The Reconstruction of Masculine Identity in Midlife." I didn't finish, even though most of my research was completed because I was out of work and not prepared to pay another $15,000 for my last year, maybe more, and deal with the ever increasing bureaucracy of the program. I'd already lost six months early in my research when the chair of the committee that approved research plans delayed me because she couldn't be bothered to look up or ask a fellow faculty member what the term "bricolage" meant. It felt like throwing money away at a time I could ill afford it, and I do regret not finishing.
Not that it would have been civilization altering research or anything remotely like it. But I learned a lot and have taken away that value.
Basically it is this: to a very large extent, we are who we say we are. We are our narrative of ourselves. This is neither new nor earth shattering, but it is something that we don't have much in our consciousness.
A lot of the ubiquitous self-help literature and the human potential movement says something like this but they have it off a bit. The implication they like to forward is that you can declare something you want to be and then that will somehow magically "manifest" itself in your life. Okay, so let's see. "I declare that I am the world's greatest brain surgeon!" You betcha!
You are who you say you are, but that includes the subtext. So if you say out loud that you are a courageous man of integrity and underneath know that you are a timid lying weasel, well guess what shows up. If what you declare bears no relation to how you feel and think in the quiet of your mind, it isn't going to count for much in the narrative, which will include the subtext, like it or not.
Having done my own hours in 12 step work and various human potential and self-development workshops, I have to admit to making affirmations and doing all the stuff despite a certain skepticism. And, yes, it was helpful to me to get "out of my stinking thinking." But also true was that I couldn't will myself rich or a brain surgeon.
It is useful to look at one's own narrative of self and to see what can be cleaned up about it. Some aspiration as well as honesty doesn't hurt either, but you might check out what the subtext is. It can carry a lot of weight.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Monday, December 19, 2011
Remembering
I had occasion recently to remember something about someone famous I met when I was seventeen who is gone now and that led me into thinking about the people I have known who I was more or less close to who are no longer with us, as well as the well-known ones. I'm a sucker for that part of the Oscars where they memorialize the people who have passed in the last year. I'm enough of a film buff to feel that at least some of them have been in a way part of my life. But back to those who have actually been.
First the story about the person I met at seventeen. I was working at the Boston YMCA and had been involved, despite my relative youth, in resurrecting a chapter of a young men's organization called Phalanx. I was the program Vice President. The President was a man only a few years older who was a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor. Len got the opportunity to meet with and interview Malcolm X and he invited me to come with him. So one afternoon I spent three hours in a small conference room at the Y with Malcolm X and two of his associates while Len did the interview. It was during the time that Malcolm X was still with The Nation of Islam. Those three hours were quite the education. His assassination some four years later troubled me as much as some of the others of that decade that saw so many.
On the personal side, the first death of someone not a relative that I had known personally was Charlie M. I had met him when I was hanging around a coffee house in Boston's Back Bay writing and reading poetry for a free coffee. Charlie and Vinnie were seminarians at Boston College in the middle of a serious bender that started at New Year's and was still going as Easter Sunday rolled around. The woman I hung out with during those few months (some 9 years my senior) roomed with the woman Charlie spent time with and eventually fathered two children with. About five years later we heard of their deaths in a terrible car accident.
After that came Jan W. Her husband was a classmate where I first went to college and we all attended the same church. I had left the city to move up to New Hampshire when I heard of Jan's death when their car went off of Memorial Drive into the Charles River one winter night. Her husband and the children survived. The strangest small world event of my life occurred some 17 years later here on the west coast when I met the woman who had been his second wife for a time. I used to think of Jan often. She had been one of the most even keeled and level headed people I knew.
Another person I think about who has died is someone who may have made my life as it is possible; and since I had not stayed in touch, I did not know about his passage until years afterwards. During the year I went to live with my father I was enrolled in a really good public school, one that you had to test to get into. My French teacher was quite the character. He was referred to as Papa John by some of the kids. He had one of the very first VW bug cabriolets in the city and he used to load it with kids after school and drop them off at their various homes or bus stops on his way to his night job at American Airlines. The kind of positive personal relationships he had with students would probably not be allowed today, and certainly not what he did for me.
About halfway through the school year my father got a job (after being out of work for three years) in another city. John E. approached him with an offer that I could stay with him and finish the school year. John lived with and supported his mother. The second job was so that he could afford the insurance and save the resources she would need if something happened to him. I now suspect that John was in the closet--that he was gay--though he never gave me any reason to think so at the time. Nominally I was being given room and board to take care of walking the dachshund who had caused John's mother to get a broken hip the previous year. John was at work at his night job.
John E. was in my life a lot like the character Sidney Poitier played in "To Sir with Love." The first night in his house for dinner I learned how to eat an artichoke. When I was getting ready for Junior Prom, John took me and a classmate shopping, mostly for Mary S. to find a dress, but we went for a tux rental fitting as well. The expedition was an extensive lesson in manners and public decorum. "No, Mary. Proper young ladies do not smoke on the street."
A regret is that I never stayed in touch with him, but my excuse is that the next two or three years were the toughest of my life as I left the home that had become an alcoholic disaster area and set out to make it on my own. By the time a dozen or so years later that things in my life had stabilized I had no idea how to go about locating him. There was no internet white pages then--no internet at all. A few years ago I was able to find a record about him. It was a reference to his obituary. He had died in the mid eighties. He could not have been more than 55 or 60. So when I think of him I do try to think my thanks for that half year, That full year in that school was a real gift and may well have enabled some things that happened later.
The other person that comes to mind is someone whose death I only found out about last year. One of the first more serious relationships in my life was R. and she found me last year. We've exchanged a few emails but early on she told me that she thought she had found notice of Monte C.'s death in a west coast paper. Monte was one of my bosses when I worked in the Youth Department of the Y. He was African-American, incredibly well educated, and one of the best bosses I ever worked for. My most moving memory of him was when I came in to work one Saturday and he asked me if I had been home. I had not. That spring of my senior year I had often stayed away from home for days at a time. After one memorable drunken screaming scene in the main lobby of the Y while I stood in the doorway to the Youth Department, my father pretty much ignored my absences.
Monte said come with him. Our first stop was at the city hospital where my father was being detoxed from his third intentional overdose of pills in that one year--this time because when his employer had made him join AA, his lover had departed because "Edgar, you're just not any fun anymore." In the hospital my father didn't even look at me. Then Monte had me get back in his car and we drove out to a park by the river where we just walked. He didn't ask me to talk. He didn't say anything. We just walked. I remember that as being cared for in a way that my self-preoccupied alcoholic father was absolutely incapable of.
When I remember what life was like for me then, I think that John and Monte, and there were others, are all that was between me and being institutionalized, jailed, or dead before I was twenty. They may well have been. I only hope that in some small way I have given back in my life some of what I got from them.
First the story about the person I met at seventeen. I was working at the Boston YMCA and had been involved, despite my relative youth, in resurrecting a chapter of a young men's organization called Phalanx. I was the program Vice President. The President was a man only a few years older who was a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor. Len got the opportunity to meet with and interview Malcolm X and he invited me to come with him. So one afternoon I spent three hours in a small conference room at the Y with Malcolm X and two of his associates while Len did the interview. It was during the time that Malcolm X was still with The Nation of Islam. Those three hours were quite the education. His assassination some four years later troubled me as much as some of the others of that decade that saw so many.
On the personal side, the first death of someone not a relative that I had known personally was Charlie M. I had met him when I was hanging around a coffee house in Boston's Back Bay writing and reading poetry for a free coffee. Charlie and Vinnie were seminarians at Boston College in the middle of a serious bender that started at New Year's and was still going as Easter Sunday rolled around. The woman I hung out with during those few months (some 9 years my senior) roomed with the woman Charlie spent time with and eventually fathered two children with. About five years later we heard of their deaths in a terrible car accident.
After that came Jan W. Her husband was a classmate where I first went to college and we all attended the same church. I had left the city to move up to New Hampshire when I heard of Jan's death when their car went off of Memorial Drive into the Charles River one winter night. Her husband and the children survived. The strangest small world event of my life occurred some 17 years later here on the west coast when I met the woman who had been his second wife for a time. I used to think of Jan often. She had been one of the most even keeled and level headed people I knew.
Another person I think about who has died is someone who may have made my life as it is possible; and since I had not stayed in touch, I did not know about his passage until years afterwards. During the year I went to live with my father I was enrolled in a really good public school, one that you had to test to get into. My French teacher was quite the character. He was referred to as Papa John by some of the kids. He had one of the very first VW bug cabriolets in the city and he used to load it with kids after school and drop them off at their various homes or bus stops on his way to his night job at American Airlines. The kind of positive personal relationships he had with students would probably not be allowed today, and certainly not what he did for me.
About halfway through the school year my father got a job (after being out of work for three years) in another city. John E. approached him with an offer that I could stay with him and finish the school year. John lived with and supported his mother. The second job was so that he could afford the insurance and save the resources she would need if something happened to him. I now suspect that John was in the closet--that he was gay--though he never gave me any reason to think so at the time. Nominally I was being given room and board to take care of walking the dachshund who had caused John's mother to get a broken hip the previous year. John was at work at his night job.
John E. was in my life a lot like the character Sidney Poitier played in "To Sir with Love." The first night in his house for dinner I learned how to eat an artichoke. When I was getting ready for Junior Prom, John took me and a classmate shopping, mostly for Mary S. to find a dress, but we went for a tux rental fitting as well. The expedition was an extensive lesson in manners and public decorum. "No, Mary. Proper young ladies do not smoke on the street."
A regret is that I never stayed in touch with him, but my excuse is that the next two or three years were the toughest of my life as I left the home that had become an alcoholic disaster area and set out to make it on my own. By the time a dozen or so years later that things in my life had stabilized I had no idea how to go about locating him. There was no internet white pages then--no internet at all. A few years ago I was able to find a record about him. It was a reference to his obituary. He had died in the mid eighties. He could not have been more than 55 or 60. So when I think of him I do try to think my thanks for that half year, That full year in that school was a real gift and may well have enabled some things that happened later.
The other person that comes to mind is someone whose death I only found out about last year. One of the first more serious relationships in my life was R. and she found me last year. We've exchanged a few emails but early on she told me that she thought she had found notice of Monte C.'s death in a west coast paper. Monte was one of my bosses when I worked in the Youth Department of the Y. He was African-American, incredibly well educated, and one of the best bosses I ever worked for. My most moving memory of him was when I came in to work one Saturday and he asked me if I had been home. I had not. That spring of my senior year I had often stayed away from home for days at a time. After one memorable drunken screaming scene in the main lobby of the Y while I stood in the doorway to the Youth Department, my father pretty much ignored my absences.
Monte said come with him. Our first stop was at the city hospital where my father was being detoxed from his third intentional overdose of pills in that one year--this time because when his employer had made him join AA, his lover had departed because "Edgar, you're just not any fun anymore." In the hospital my father didn't even look at me. Then Monte had me get back in his car and we drove out to a park by the river where we just walked. He didn't ask me to talk. He didn't say anything. We just walked. I remember that as being cared for in a way that my self-preoccupied alcoholic father was absolutely incapable of.
When I remember what life was like for me then, I think that John and Monte, and there were others, are all that was between me and being institutionalized, jailed, or dead before I was twenty. They may well have been. I only hope that in some small way I have given back in my life some of what I got from them.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Inventory
I have in mind a couple of posts. Not sure what to tackle first so I think I'll let my stream of consciousness guide me.
I started this partly because of a conversation with a therapist after a blowup. He mused about whether I wasn't still experiencing the effects of transitioning from being employed to my then unemployment and potential immediate retirement. Since, I have landed some part-time work I enjoy and have gotten more comfortable with not being the major financial contributor to the household, and we seem to have adjusted the homekeeping duties to a more satisfactory balance. Since writing helps me to process things, it seemed to me that doing this blog would be useful. It has been, but obviously I have been slowing down in the last couple of months.
It's not that I am done with this current transition. I may never be, given that our society seems to treat the old as something to be thrown away or shuffled off out of sight. [Worth being angry about, that.] I think it is more that I am moving through it and have less struggle with it.
It is also a season that demands attention even though it also bring things up to remember and to inventory.
I'm fortunate. Whatever my complaints, I have to admit that I am fortunate. With someone I care about and who cares about me for the last twenty years and the foreseeable future, with whatever happened before that long gone--that's worth feeling fortunate about. My general health as well, especially when I know what some friends struggle with--two are working their ways back from brain injuries. I think what I have had to deal with is minor: chronic arthritis in my hands and feet dating from my late twenties, that I have now mostly compensated for; diverticulitis that only infrequently bothers me; not the best teeth in the world due to childhood neglect, but now well cared for and maintained; and about to get the second eye cleared of a cataract and the lens replaced giving me vision I haven't had for twenty years. The worst of it is the changes in plumbing operations since my treatment for prostate cancer--not embarrassing or debilitating, but mostly annoying. It's not a long list and it is none of it very serious.
Really, I'm looking at seventy next year and my mother died in her late forties, my father in his early fifties. Both had been ill for years before their deaths. Thanks to the encouragement of my spouse I am working out three mornings a week and while not in wonderful shape, I take no routine medications and my annual shows me within normal parameters. I have struggled with not smoking. After nearly fifty-five years I have been able to be off of the weed six months out of each of the last two years, and am taking another run at it that feels like it will stick--two months so far. My doc is encouraged and so am I.
Sometimes I think that my general good fortune at this point is something of a payback that I have earned. Whatever it is, I don't want to take it for granted.
I started this partly because of a conversation with a therapist after a blowup. He mused about whether I wasn't still experiencing the effects of transitioning from being employed to my then unemployment and potential immediate retirement. Since, I have landed some part-time work I enjoy and have gotten more comfortable with not being the major financial contributor to the household, and we seem to have adjusted the homekeeping duties to a more satisfactory balance. Since writing helps me to process things, it seemed to me that doing this blog would be useful. It has been, but obviously I have been slowing down in the last couple of months.
It's not that I am done with this current transition. I may never be, given that our society seems to treat the old as something to be thrown away or shuffled off out of sight. [Worth being angry about, that.] I think it is more that I am moving through it and have less struggle with it.
It is also a season that demands attention even though it also bring things up to remember and to inventory.
I'm fortunate. Whatever my complaints, I have to admit that I am fortunate. With someone I care about and who cares about me for the last twenty years and the foreseeable future, with whatever happened before that long gone--that's worth feeling fortunate about. My general health as well, especially when I know what some friends struggle with--two are working their ways back from brain injuries. I think what I have had to deal with is minor: chronic arthritis in my hands and feet dating from my late twenties, that I have now mostly compensated for; diverticulitis that only infrequently bothers me; not the best teeth in the world due to childhood neglect, but now well cared for and maintained; and about to get the second eye cleared of a cataract and the lens replaced giving me vision I haven't had for twenty years. The worst of it is the changes in plumbing operations since my treatment for prostate cancer--not embarrassing or debilitating, but mostly annoying. It's not a long list and it is none of it very serious.
Really, I'm looking at seventy next year and my mother died in her late forties, my father in his early fifties. Both had been ill for years before their deaths. Thanks to the encouragement of my spouse I am working out three mornings a week and while not in wonderful shape, I take no routine medications and my annual shows me within normal parameters. I have struggled with not smoking. After nearly fifty-five years I have been able to be off of the weed six months out of each of the last two years, and am taking another run at it that feels like it will stick--two months so far. My doc is encouraged and so am I.
Sometimes I think that my general good fortune at this point is something of a payback that I have earned. Whatever it is, I don't want to take it for granted.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
These Are the Days of Miracle and Wonder...
[Paul Simon, for anyone who doesn't remember "The Boy in the Bubble" from the Graceland album]
I keep looking at my temporal perspective. I think one of the odd things about being of an age is that your time sense about the recency of events changes. Things that seem like they happened yesterday are a decade or two in the past: e.g., the Clinton Presidency, the first Gulf War, my own move from East to West Coasts.
As a child, something that was "ten years ago" that did not happen in my awareness felt like ancient history. I was born during WWII but have no memory of it. The bits and pieces of being four or five I retain include passing through Penn Station after the war when travelling with my mother, learning of the death of my first dog, and one very incredible snowfall that was "over my head" [head was very close to the ground then...]. The Penn Station memory is very vivid and I'm pretty sure was from 1945 or 1946. The old station was demolished in 1962 or 63 and I had never travelled through it after that post war trip.
What is there is a distinct picture of high ironwork, almost lacy and delicate, and a great expanse of glass letting in light to the open concourse. It's a picture I am glad I have in memory.
Things that people coming of age take for granted didn't exist for most of my life. Makes me aware how someone with a few years can show up as an "old fogey." Things significant in my memory effectively never existed for someone in their twenties. I was a guest panelist for a group of students and mentioned a company I had worked for, one that had been the second biggest in its industry and one point in the Fortune 100 and 8th on the BusinessWeek market capitalization list, and I was met with blank stares. No one even knew the name of it. It was a hard shock about something I experienced as the best decade in my career.
Well, I'm not going to stop remembering, even if I risk being the irrelevant "old fogey." A lot of it is worth remembering. I wish more people did. Maybe we wouldn't keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over again.
I keep looking at my temporal perspective. I think one of the odd things about being of an age is that your time sense about the recency of events changes. Things that seem like they happened yesterday are a decade or two in the past: e.g., the Clinton Presidency, the first Gulf War, my own move from East to West Coasts.
As a child, something that was "ten years ago" that did not happen in my awareness felt like ancient history. I was born during WWII but have no memory of it. The bits and pieces of being four or five I retain include passing through Penn Station after the war when travelling with my mother, learning of the death of my first dog, and one very incredible snowfall that was "over my head" [head was very close to the ground then...]. The Penn Station memory is very vivid and I'm pretty sure was from 1945 or 1946. The old station was demolished in 1962 or 63 and I had never travelled through it after that post war trip.
What is there is a distinct picture of high ironwork, almost lacy and delicate, and a great expanse of glass letting in light to the open concourse. It's a picture I am glad I have in memory.
Things that people coming of age take for granted didn't exist for most of my life. Makes me aware how someone with a few years can show up as an "old fogey." Things significant in my memory effectively never existed for someone in their twenties. I was a guest panelist for a group of students and mentioned a company I had worked for, one that had been the second biggest in its industry and one point in the Fortune 100 and 8th on the BusinessWeek market capitalization list, and I was met with blank stares. No one even knew the name of it. It was a hard shock about something I experienced as the best decade in my career.
Well, I'm not going to stop remembering, even if I risk being the irrelevant "old fogey." A lot of it is worth remembering. I wish more people did. Maybe we wouldn't keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over again.
Friday, November 25, 2011
Was Durocher Right?
So what he said was "nice guys finish last."
I want to go at this a couple of different ways. One about some not so nice guys I have observed in my career, and one the more personal, because although I am sometimes "not nice," I think I am mostly a "nice guy."
There are three men I am thinking of who I would have to categorize in the "not nice" group. The general description would be something like "savage political infighters who seem to primarily seek their own advantage disregarding any negative impact on the company they work for or the people they work with."
One was a colleague in a place where I worked. He joined the company sometime after I did in a senior role in the same functional area I worked in. I put some effort into building a relationship but found him trying to sabotage my relationships with my client, blocking my access to information and resources, and disparaging my work to colleagues, and lying about it when I asked him about it. Could it be only me? Maybe, but one of the things I did with him was to take him on a float fishing. My guide's comment later was that he thought the guy was a "creep."
He was actually fired just before I left the company. But here's the thing. He had a job within weeks. In fact his resume is a list of positions seldom held more than three years, with some evidence of progressive advancement. As near as I can tell his LinkedIn profile for the time he was at the company where I met him is at least an exaggeration if not an outright fiction.
The other two I didn't know as well, but observing them I can see the same pattern--short stays with various companies, increasing responsibility with each move, and not much gap between employments. How do these guys get jobs? I suspect they lie, and then move on when caught or it doesn't work out, but each time they seem to parley great deals.
Personally I can't do that. I can't inflate the picture I sell of myself. Mostly I don't think anyone is a good as the blowhards seem to think they are, and I'd rather under-promise and over-deliver. Have I cost myself some money and opportunity? Am I too compliant? Too honest? Watching scoundrels make out while you feel like you have to struggle might tend you to thinking like that.
But I'm hardly "finishing last." I may not be wealthy, and we may be facing some belt-tightening as we age, but I think we'll be okay; and if we are not in the 1%, my guess is that we are in the 15% or 20%.
Maybe it is that nice guys just don't finish first because they are not willing to pay the price in integrity.
I want to go at this a couple of different ways. One about some not so nice guys I have observed in my career, and one the more personal, because although I am sometimes "not nice," I think I am mostly a "nice guy."
There are three men I am thinking of who I would have to categorize in the "not nice" group. The general description would be something like "savage political infighters who seem to primarily seek their own advantage disregarding any negative impact on the company they work for or the people they work with."
One was a colleague in a place where I worked. He joined the company sometime after I did in a senior role in the same functional area I worked in. I put some effort into building a relationship but found him trying to sabotage my relationships with my client, blocking my access to information and resources, and disparaging my work to colleagues, and lying about it when I asked him about it. Could it be only me? Maybe, but one of the things I did with him was to take him on a float fishing. My guide's comment later was that he thought the guy was a "creep."
He was actually fired just before I left the company. But here's the thing. He had a job within weeks. In fact his resume is a list of positions seldom held more than three years, with some evidence of progressive advancement. As near as I can tell his LinkedIn profile for the time he was at the company where I met him is at least an exaggeration if not an outright fiction.
The other two I didn't know as well, but observing them I can see the same pattern--short stays with various companies, increasing responsibility with each move, and not much gap between employments. How do these guys get jobs? I suspect they lie, and then move on when caught or it doesn't work out, but each time they seem to parley great deals.
Personally I can't do that. I can't inflate the picture I sell of myself. Mostly I don't think anyone is a good as the blowhards seem to think they are, and I'd rather under-promise and over-deliver. Have I cost myself some money and opportunity? Am I too compliant? Too honest? Watching scoundrels make out while you feel like you have to struggle might tend you to thinking like that.
But I'm hardly "finishing last." I may not be wealthy, and we may be facing some belt-tightening as we age, but I think we'll be okay; and if we are not in the 1%, my guess is that we are in the 15% or 20%.
Maybe it is that nice guys just don't finish first because they are not willing to pay the price in integrity.
Monday, November 21, 2011
The Cancer Card
This may not sit well with some of you who read this regularly.
The latest note on the Penn State mess is that Joe Paterno is "battling cancer." Sorry, Joe, but don't expect that to work for you. Men don't get sympathy when they play the cancer card. Doesn't happen.
In 2010 a little over 32,000 men died from prostate cancer, while there were over 217,000 new cases. A comparable statistic for breast cancer in women in 2007 was 40,000 deaths and 178,000 new cases. Not incomparable numbers. But here's the rub.
It seems to me that a lot more attention is paid to the latter. Yes, I know there are some issues about the level of social investment in women's health care and that some of that gets caught up on the ideological battles about Roe v. Wade. But there is no "Race for the Cure' for prostate cancer, no "wear pink for the cure." And operationally, experientially, I have seen where one gender gets to play the card but the other does not.
A group I was in was doing a radical reorganization and some jobs were going to be lost. There were say about a dozen or so women in the group and three men. All of the women were found jobs that they did not have to compete for, and much was made of "poor So-and-So," who had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and how something had to be found for her. One of the men, an African-American, was given a brand new "diversity" job which he left as soon as he found something else (can you spell "let's avoid a law suit?"), and the other two were left to scramble. I suppose it could be written down to "turn about is fair play" given the ways women have been treated in the workplace in the past and even today, but it seemed pretty off to me at the time. Still does.
A few years later after my own diagnosis of cancer and just as I was beginning treatment, I was laid off. I never brought it up. First, I knew it would make no difference in the instance, but I also knew that men don't get to play the cancer card.
All that said, I should say that I don't think anyone should. Many things can kill us. Many diseases can give us a death sentence, but then so can life itself ultimately. Yes, people deserve sympathy and care and support when they face that risk. But one form of disease is no more deserving of that attention than another, and frankly I'm getting a little tired of the way one does.
I don't know how helpful it is that we demonize cancer anyway. It's your own cells gone haywire and I'll bet it turns out that the aging of tissue has a lot to do with it. I don't think it will ever be completely eradicated, just as (thankfully) I don't think we will ever extend life indefinitely. Doesn't mean we shouldn't fight for our well-being. Just let's not make one life-threatening disease a poster child while ignoring others simply because of the groups they affect.
I'm a cancer survivor now--almost 8 years--but I don't think it should really be a big deal. My treatment has had some impact on my lifestyle, but I'm not 40 or 25 or 17 anymore either. It is what it is. That's all.
The latest note on the Penn State mess is that Joe Paterno is "battling cancer." Sorry, Joe, but don't expect that to work for you. Men don't get sympathy when they play the cancer card. Doesn't happen.
In 2010 a little over 32,000 men died from prostate cancer, while there were over 217,000 new cases. A comparable statistic for breast cancer in women in 2007 was 40,000 deaths and 178,000 new cases. Not incomparable numbers. But here's the rub.
It seems to me that a lot more attention is paid to the latter. Yes, I know there are some issues about the level of social investment in women's health care and that some of that gets caught up on the ideological battles about Roe v. Wade. But there is no "Race for the Cure' for prostate cancer, no "wear pink for the cure." And operationally, experientially, I have seen where one gender gets to play the card but the other does not.
A group I was in was doing a radical reorganization and some jobs were going to be lost. There were say about a dozen or so women in the group and three men. All of the women were found jobs that they did not have to compete for, and much was made of "poor So-and-So," who had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and how something had to be found for her. One of the men, an African-American, was given a brand new "diversity" job which he left as soon as he found something else (can you spell "let's avoid a law suit?"), and the other two were left to scramble. I suppose it could be written down to "turn about is fair play" given the ways women have been treated in the workplace in the past and even today, but it seemed pretty off to me at the time. Still does.
A few years later after my own diagnosis of cancer and just as I was beginning treatment, I was laid off. I never brought it up. First, I knew it would make no difference in the instance, but I also knew that men don't get to play the cancer card.
All that said, I should say that I don't think anyone should. Many things can kill us. Many diseases can give us a death sentence, but then so can life itself ultimately. Yes, people deserve sympathy and care and support when they face that risk. But one form of disease is no more deserving of that attention than another, and frankly I'm getting a little tired of the way one does.
I don't know how helpful it is that we demonize cancer anyway. It's your own cells gone haywire and I'll bet it turns out that the aging of tissue has a lot to do with it. I don't think it will ever be completely eradicated, just as (thankfully) I don't think we will ever extend life indefinitely. Doesn't mean we shouldn't fight for our well-being. Just let's not make one life-threatening disease a poster child while ignoring others simply because of the groups they affect.
I'm a cancer survivor now--almost 8 years--but I don't think it should really be a big deal. My treatment has had some impact on my lifestyle, but I'm not 40 or 25 or 17 anymore either. It is what it is. That's all.
Monday, November 7, 2011
Religion Redux Redux
As an unchurched Unitarian-Universalist I sometimes think about going back. There's a new congregation not far from us and we've even talked about visiting but never have.
There isn't a lot of glue in the denomination. There's no threat of eternal damnation. There's no promise of life hereafter in the sky, although what had originally distinguished Universalism and gave it its name was the belief in universal salvation. Not sure it ever meant what more fundamentalist denominations mean when they use the word, but there it is.
So there's no doctrinal drivers. There's a great effort to be inclusive however. Alas it doesn't quite work the way that some would have liked it to. The U-U church is predominantly white middle and maybe a little above middle-class. One urban church I belonged to wanted to recruit an African-American minister to be more attractive to members of the African-American community. At the time there were four in the whole denomination out of some few hundreds. They found one, hired him in a contentious process and then a few years later he left to become a Gestalt therapist. without changing the church's diversity more than a bit. So you could say even U-Us have a tough time practicing what they preach.
In the last church I was a member of there were a lot conversations about "community," and it seemed that "community" was something that was wanted. The same had been true in the previous U-U church I had been in, but both and the previous one tended to be riven from time to time around some issue that it seemed people could not be communal about. Sometimes it was politics. Yes, Virginia, there are politically conservative Unitarians. Sometimes the minister was not to some folks' liking. Sometimes it was an issue like the selection of an African-American minister. My wife belonged to one because she had found a "community" she could connect to, but left it rather quickly when her circumstances changed.
I've come to think that about the only glue that holds U-U congregations together is just that--community. And, interestingly, it is part of the glue that holds any congregation of any denomination together. A line is drawn around the periphery. Outside of that line is "them," and inside of it is "us." It is a yearning to be with someone like us, to validate ourselves by having others around us who agree with our beliefs and values. Quite human. But it also become the source of the contentions when it shows up that the agreement is not quite so thoroughly consonant as aspired to.
Given that beliefs and values can be radically different in a family (I've recently discovered that I am not the only Dad or brother with an immediate family member with oppositie social and political views), how can we expected a community of people drawn together in a church not to have differences?
And I guess what I want to ask is "why would we want that?" Its the differences we encounter that strike the growing edge and keep us vital. U-Us do try to be inclusive and welcoming of diversity, but I think fall short of even modest success. I end up wondering what the point is.
There isn't a lot of glue in the denomination. There's no threat of eternal damnation. There's no promise of life hereafter in the sky, although what had originally distinguished Universalism and gave it its name was the belief in universal salvation. Not sure it ever meant what more fundamentalist denominations mean when they use the word, but there it is.
So there's no doctrinal drivers. There's a great effort to be inclusive however. Alas it doesn't quite work the way that some would have liked it to. The U-U church is predominantly white middle and maybe a little above middle-class. One urban church I belonged to wanted to recruit an African-American minister to be more attractive to members of the African-American community. At the time there were four in the whole denomination out of some few hundreds. They found one, hired him in a contentious process and then a few years later he left to become a Gestalt therapist. without changing the church's diversity more than a bit. So you could say even U-Us have a tough time practicing what they preach.
In the last church I was a member of there were a lot conversations about "community," and it seemed that "community" was something that was wanted. The same had been true in the previous U-U church I had been in, but both and the previous one tended to be riven from time to time around some issue that it seemed people could not be communal about. Sometimes it was politics. Yes, Virginia, there are politically conservative Unitarians. Sometimes the minister was not to some folks' liking. Sometimes it was an issue like the selection of an African-American minister. My wife belonged to one because she had found a "community" she could connect to, but left it rather quickly when her circumstances changed.
I've come to think that about the only glue that holds U-U congregations together is just that--community. And, interestingly, it is part of the glue that holds any congregation of any denomination together. A line is drawn around the periphery. Outside of that line is "them," and inside of it is "us." It is a yearning to be with someone like us, to validate ourselves by having others around us who agree with our beliefs and values. Quite human. But it also become the source of the contentions when it shows up that the agreement is not quite so thoroughly consonant as aspired to.
Given that beliefs and values can be radically different in a family (I've recently discovered that I am not the only Dad or brother with an immediate family member with oppositie social and political views), how can we expected a community of people drawn together in a church not to have differences?
And I guess what I want to ask is "why would we want that?" Its the differences we encounter that strike the growing edge and keep us vital. U-Us do try to be inclusive and welcoming of diversity, but I think fall short of even modest success. I end up wondering what the point is.
Friday, November 4, 2011
Religion Redux
I was thinking about a couple of things the other day. One was about my relationship with the churches I attended after I discovered Unitarianism, or more correctly Unitarian-Universalism. The other was about the relationship of religion to our culture. This may end up being two separate pieces.
The latter item first.
When someone said to me "this is a Christian nation," it started me thinking. In a very real sense it is but not quite in the way he was suggesting, as in "Christian" to the exclusion of all others. People who propose this idea seem to me are in denial of quite a bit and captive of their very narrow view of history. Most are unaware that the "under God" phrase was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in the fifties as a defense against godless Communism. The Pledge itself is an artifact of the nineteenth century, composed in 1892 and formally adopted in 1942. "In God We Trust," coined in the Civil War era, was formally adopted as the official motto in 1956. Seems we adopt these things in time of war, hot or otherwise. reminiscent of the German "Gott mit uns," a motto used by their military that actually has a long imperial history going back to the Romans and Byzantines, and even the Hebrew "Immanuel."
The latest version of this kind of reactive cleaving to religious ritual or symbol in time of war is the now apparently mandatory singing of "God Bless America" during the seventh inning stretch of baseball games--a practice initiated after 9/11. I think I am as patriotic as the next person. I've studied the work of our founders, read their own words about what they were doing. I love this country, and I hate the mistakes she makes in my name. I've always wondered why we think singing anthems at professional sporting events makes us more patriotic or American. Though I do like that the practice compells hockey fans to have to listen to "Oh Canada."
The founding fathers were religious men but they were close enough historically to the religious wars and atrocities of England and the religious persecutions that drove many to settle here that they had the wisdom to avoid the idea of a state religion, although some states had established churches that both shaped their laws and were sometimes supported by taxation. The illegality of birth control in Connecticut until the sixties or seventies was an artifact of this.
Christianity does appear to have become the "state religion" of capitalism, however.
It works like this. Calvinist doctrine--the Puritan settlers of Massachusetts were Calvinist--says that there are those who are "elect" and those who are not; those who will receive salvation and those who won't; and that only God knows who they are. A kind of a cosmic lottery. Now very quickly those people who were successful Calvinists started to think that their success was evidence of their "election." Obviously if God makes me a success, I must be favored in his eyes.
They also had a little thing about having some kind of conversion experience to be covenanted with God and the church community. When people stopped having those so much they decided that there could be a "half-way covenant." If you were the child of someone who had had the conversion experience, you could be a full member. Member or not, elect or not, you were still expected to attend church regularly.
Anyway the apparent beliefs of the successful capitalist Calvinist merchants live on today in the apparent unflinching support of the wealthy by some not very well off believers of an unnamed political persuasion. In another forum one posted a lengthy justification that CEOs deserved their rewards because they obviously have talent and abilities beyond those of the mere lazy mortals who work for them. That view of executive compensation is as detached from reality as the Calvinist burghers' belief that they were elect was detached from doctrine.
Shock yourself. Pick out a half dozen or so publicly traded large companies and go look at the 10-K statements posted on the SEC website, Edgar. Look at the executive compensation and severance provisions. The basis for the numbers you will see are the decisions of crony boards based on surveys of "comparable" companies, usually selected to be larger and more successful. The result is a continuous ratcheting up of all executive compensation that has absolutely nothing to do with competence or performance. It is an adult version of "but Johnny's mother lets him do it."
The severances are obscene. Typically a multiple of annual compensation including bonuses, with accelerated vesting in stock and stock options, they state that they will be awarded even if termination is for cause (i.e., non-performance). Under these deals a CEO would practically have to be convicted of child-abduction to not get their payout.
So, yes, the religion of our Calvinist forebears lives on in statements like "Capitalism, God's way of sorting rich and poor."
Here's what I consider the highest irony. These are the same people fond of hurling the "Socialist" label around, but if you read the Gnostic Gospels you get a very different picture of Jesus and the early church than theirs. Helping the poor was the focus of the early church. Communal activities and meals were the rule.
Would be nice if indeed the nation was truly "Christian."
The latter item first.
When someone said to me "this is a Christian nation," it started me thinking. In a very real sense it is but not quite in the way he was suggesting, as in "Christian" to the exclusion of all others. People who propose this idea seem to me are in denial of quite a bit and captive of their very narrow view of history. Most are unaware that the "under God" phrase was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in the fifties as a defense against godless Communism. The Pledge itself is an artifact of the nineteenth century, composed in 1892 and formally adopted in 1942. "In God We Trust," coined in the Civil War era, was formally adopted as the official motto in 1956. Seems we adopt these things in time of war, hot or otherwise. reminiscent of the German "Gott mit uns," a motto used by their military that actually has a long imperial history going back to the Romans and Byzantines, and even the Hebrew "Immanuel."
The latest version of this kind of reactive cleaving to religious ritual or symbol in time of war is the now apparently mandatory singing of "God Bless America" during the seventh inning stretch of baseball games--a practice initiated after 9/11. I think I am as patriotic as the next person. I've studied the work of our founders, read their own words about what they were doing. I love this country, and I hate the mistakes she makes in my name. I've always wondered why we think singing anthems at professional sporting events makes us more patriotic or American. Though I do like that the practice compells hockey fans to have to listen to "Oh Canada."
The founding fathers were religious men but they were close enough historically to the religious wars and atrocities of England and the religious persecutions that drove many to settle here that they had the wisdom to avoid the idea of a state religion, although some states had established churches that both shaped their laws and were sometimes supported by taxation. The illegality of birth control in Connecticut until the sixties or seventies was an artifact of this.
Christianity does appear to have become the "state religion" of capitalism, however.
It works like this. Calvinist doctrine--the Puritan settlers of Massachusetts were Calvinist--says that there are those who are "elect" and those who are not; those who will receive salvation and those who won't; and that only God knows who they are. A kind of a cosmic lottery. Now very quickly those people who were successful Calvinists started to think that their success was evidence of their "election." Obviously if God makes me a success, I must be favored in his eyes.
They also had a little thing about having some kind of conversion experience to be covenanted with God and the church community. When people stopped having those so much they decided that there could be a "half-way covenant." If you were the child of someone who had had the conversion experience, you could be a full member. Member or not, elect or not, you were still expected to attend church regularly.
Anyway the apparent beliefs of the successful capitalist Calvinist merchants live on today in the apparent unflinching support of the wealthy by some not very well off believers of an unnamed political persuasion. In another forum one posted a lengthy justification that CEOs deserved their rewards because they obviously have talent and abilities beyond those of the mere lazy mortals who work for them. That view of executive compensation is as detached from reality as the Calvinist burghers' belief that they were elect was detached from doctrine.
Shock yourself. Pick out a half dozen or so publicly traded large companies and go look at the 10-K statements posted on the SEC website, Edgar. Look at the executive compensation and severance provisions. The basis for the numbers you will see are the decisions of crony boards based on surveys of "comparable" companies, usually selected to be larger and more successful. The result is a continuous ratcheting up of all executive compensation that has absolutely nothing to do with competence or performance. It is an adult version of "but Johnny's mother lets him do it."
The severances are obscene. Typically a multiple of annual compensation including bonuses, with accelerated vesting in stock and stock options, they state that they will be awarded even if termination is for cause (i.e., non-performance). Under these deals a CEO would practically have to be convicted of child-abduction to not get their payout.
So, yes, the religion of our Calvinist forebears lives on in statements like "Capitalism, God's way of sorting rich and poor."
Here's what I consider the highest irony. These are the same people fond of hurling the "Socialist" label around, but if you read the Gnostic Gospels you get a very different picture of Jesus and the early church than theirs. Helping the poor was the focus of the early church. Communal activities and meals were the rule.
Would be nice if indeed the nation was truly "Christian."
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Family Pictures--Second Batch
The pictures my brother sent are from my mother's family. A bunch had water damage but there are some good studio shots of her brothers and some snapshots of her sister.
I know less about her family so this won't be quite so long.
Her mother, Allie, was the longest lived of my grandparents, lasting into her nineties. Her husband had died when my mother was about sixteen or seventeen (yes, an echo of my own loss of my mother at the same age). There were five children.
Sam was the oldest and he and my mother were very close. She was just a year younger. He would come home from school and tell her everything so that when she started the next year, they promptly moved her ahead a grade. She ended up graduating from high school at about fifteen. Sam apparently lost an eye at an early age, something to do with sewing scissors, so of the three brothers, he was the only one to not serve in World War II.
Close meant writing letters then, and unfortunately none of those correspondences survive. My mother wrote letters to her siblings often. I can still recognize her hand when I see it. Sam lived in Florida and was an accountant. Oddly, I'm not aware that he had children, but he may have. I never met any nor did I meet him.
Then came my mother, Magdalene ("like Mary Magdalene in the Bible" she would say) and after her was Alfred (I think). Alfred was known as "Bozo" as a kid and was apparently something of a cutup. There was an often told story about how he nearly cut his foot off chopping a skunk out of a tree stump. Cut off his foot or not, it seems the craziest of stunts. He had huge standout ears and a great smile.
He served in the infantry in the Pacific during the war, participating in three or four landings. He came home with what we would now call Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome and hid out for the better part of three years in the attic room of his mother's house. His mother would lock him in at night because she was afraid of him. Eventually he used his GI Bill benefits to get a degree in civil engineering, and with that in hand set off to see the world.
I remember a visit from him when I was about nine or ten. He had been in Brazil doing a mapping project prior to some highway construction. He brought my mother back a deep honey colored topaz in an emerald cut that was nearly an inch long. There were things for us kids and he played with us. He was a sweet engaging man.
He went off to travel some more and eventually met and married a Latina woman from Central America, and had three children. He settled outside of San Diego and I visited in the eighties. Raised a Southern Baptist, I suspect Alfred was as lapsed as his sister, but his wife was a Seventh Day Adventist and he willingly supported their upbringing in that religion.
Marian was the sister. She may have been older than Alfred. My image of Marian is what I thought of when I read the character "Hilly" in "The Help." One of the pictures we got from my brother shows her sitting movie star languorously on a divan in something that looks like a full length negligee. Another her son, Allen, is labeled "Allen in his new tux for Cotillion." She was apparently that kind of girl. She married in succession the two richest men in the town.
She always struck me as tightly wired and edgy. We stayed with her for a bit just after my parents separated. The story goes that she had a nervous breakdown in the late thirties maybe early forties and that her mother's response was to read the Bible to her. My mother apparently snagged her away and got her to treatment. I would not be surprised if it had been electroshock therapy, which was commonly used at the time. My sister reported that when she went back to live with Marian, that she was "starved." Quite probably an exaggeration, but Marian was notoriously stingy. When the youngest brother needed some help, she didn't participate.
Her son, Allen, became a mortician, I think partly at his mother's urging because of the income potential. Alas, the cotillion dreams were not to be realized as at some point in his young adult life Allen "came out." My sister, who had "come out" to me (significantly) on a Father's Day in 1978 used to see him often in the city where they both lived. Counting my father that makes three, and I'm not so sure about cousin Johnny.
The last child was son George, about ten years younger than my mother. He ended up serving on sub chasers in the Atlantic during the war and the Navy sent him to Dartmouth after the war. He ended up getting at least one graduate degree in Engineering, worked for the Air Force for a time until the work he was doing became part of NASA and he became a fairly senior manager in Huntsville. He would call every year during the holidays to catch up and was always advising me to get a job with a good company that I could stay with for a career. Not sure he appreciated the world that employment has become.
I miss his calls. He died only about three years ago about a year after Alfred and Sam. I knew him better than the rest because I lived with him for a while in the fifties. He married late, an older woman with two sons who were and apparently still are hellions. Thaddis died before him leaving him with a developmentally disabled son of their own in his twenties. He had another son with her as well. In his retirement he still went to the office for NASA liftoffs and played a lot of golf.
He was kind of a fussy man. He had some kind of digestive issues and Thaddis was always preparing him special things or watching out for what he ate in restaurants. But he had a playful streak. I remember him learning how and teaching us boys how to strike a match from a paper matchbook with one hand, "in case I ever lose a hand." It was easier before they moved the striking surface to the back. The irony--he smoked his whole life and Thaddis did not, but a form of lung cancer not related to second hand smoke is what took her.
When my mother was ill and was obviously going to end her days in nursing care, he stepped in. My brother went to live with him and he made arrangements for my sister and me. Maybe not the best arrangements but at least we would be with family such as it was. He then went around the state where we had lived cleaning up my mother's trail of debt. My father had paid no child support and we had lived for four years on her meager salary and credit. George was a mench. I know I never thanked him enough.
I know other families have similar fractures as mine but sometimes this feels like such a loss to me. In the eighties I did go around and visit a few of them, notably George and Alfred and their families. A few years ago my brother organized a Thanksgiving at George's. My wife and I couldn't go because things were tight and we had just been traveling expensively for my graduate program. My younger son went. I wish now that I had.
I think the estrangement has its root largely in my father's family. He had a problem early on. There was another oft told story of falling off of the train on the way home from prep school, often told along with the one about sister Nancy falling off of a porch after drinking "Zombies." Our culture clearly had something of a different relationship with alcohol in the forties and fifties, probably dating back to the end of prohibition. It was as if the whole culture was self-medicating. My parents had two martini evenings at home fairly frequently. They all avoided it and then Magdalene was stuck with it. Not surprised that she might have felt she got sold a bill of goods. He was a charming fellow. But his parents didn't deal with it at all, and his sibs except Nancy avoided him.
Physically closer to his family, we saw little of it, not that I would have wanted to have a relationship with Frank, and I wasn't any more comfortable with Nancy and her "boyfriends'" drinking than with his. Mother's family was spread over the continent and beyond and there was no money for travel. When I did finally see them as an adult, I was often a little uncomfortable and out of place, probably not as communicative and engaging as I might have been. In the end George's patience and duty was a little glue to keep me in touch.
Now my sibs are across continent. I have broken the connection fairly completely with my second life out here on the coast, and my sister isn't speaking to anyone anyway, while there are other things that keep my brother and me from having much of a relationship.
Bittersweet to think of them.
I know less about her family so this won't be quite so long.
Her mother, Allie, was the longest lived of my grandparents, lasting into her nineties. Her husband had died when my mother was about sixteen or seventeen (yes, an echo of my own loss of my mother at the same age). There were five children.
Sam was the oldest and he and my mother were very close. She was just a year younger. He would come home from school and tell her everything so that when she started the next year, they promptly moved her ahead a grade. She ended up graduating from high school at about fifteen. Sam apparently lost an eye at an early age, something to do with sewing scissors, so of the three brothers, he was the only one to not serve in World War II.
Close meant writing letters then, and unfortunately none of those correspondences survive. My mother wrote letters to her siblings often. I can still recognize her hand when I see it. Sam lived in Florida and was an accountant. Oddly, I'm not aware that he had children, but he may have. I never met any nor did I meet him.
Then came my mother, Magdalene ("like Mary Magdalene in the Bible" she would say) and after her was Alfred (I think). Alfred was known as "Bozo" as a kid and was apparently something of a cutup. There was an often told story about how he nearly cut his foot off chopping a skunk out of a tree stump. Cut off his foot or not, it seems the craziest of stunts. He had huge standout ears and a great smile.
He served in the infantry in the Pacific during the war, participating in three or four landings. He came home with what we would now call Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome and hid out for the better part of three years in the attic room of his mother's house. His mother would lock him in at night because she was afraid of him. Eventually he used his GI Bill benefits to get a degree in civil engineering, and with that in hand set off to see the world.
I remember a visit from him when I was about nine or ten. He had been in Brazil doing a mapping project prior to some highway construction. He brought my mother back a deep honey colored topaz in an emerald cut that was nearly an inch long. There were things for us kids and he played with us. He was a sweet engaging man.
He went off to travel some more and eventually met and married a Latina woman from Central America, and had three children. He settled outside of San Diego and I visited in the eighties. Raised a Southern Baptist, I suspect Alfred was as lapsed as his sister, but his wife was a Seventh Day Adventist and he willingly supported their upbringing in that religion.
Marian was the sister. She may have been older than Alfred. My image of Marian is what I thought of when I read the character "Hilly" in "The Help." One of the pictures we got from my brother shows her sitting movie star languorously on a divan in something that looks like a full length negligee. Another her son, Allen, is labeled "Allen in his new tux for Cotillion." She was apparently that kind of girl. She married in succession the two richest men in the town.
She always struck me as tightly wired and edgy. We stayed with her for a bit just after my parents separated. The story goes that she had a nervous breakdown in the late thirties maybe early forties and that her mother's response was to read the Bible to her. My mother apparently snagged her away and got her to treatment. I would not be surprised if it had been electroshock therapy, which was commonly used at the time. My sister reported that when she went back to live with Marian, that she was "starved." Quite probably an exaggeration, but Marian was notoriously stingy. When the youngest brother needed some help, she didn't participate.
Her son, Allen, became a mortician, I think partly at his mother's urging because of the income potential. Alas, the cotillion dreams were not to be realized as at some point in his young adult life Allen "came out." My sister, who had "come out" to me (significantly) on a Father's Day in 1978 used to see him often in the city where they both lived. Counting my father that makes three, and I'm not so sure about cousin Johnny.
The last child was son George, about ten years younger than my mother. He ended up serving on sub chasers in the Atlantic during the war and the Navy sent him to Dartmouth after the war. He ended up getting at least one graduate degree in Engineering, worked for the Air Force for a time until the work he was doing became part of NASA and he became a fairly senior manager in Huntsville. He would call every year during the holidays to catch up and was always advising me to get a job with a good company that I could stay with for a career. Not sure he appreciated the world that employment has become.
I miss his calls. He died only about three years ago about a year after Alfred and Sam. I knew him better than the rest because I lived with him for a while in the fifties. He married late, an older woman with two sons who were and apparently still are hellions. Thaddis died before him leaving him with a developmentally disabled son of their own in his twenties. He had another son with her as well. In his retirement he still went to the office for NASA liftoffs and played a lot of golf.
He was kind of a fussy man. He had some kind of digestive issues and Thaddis was always preparing him special things or watching out for what he ate in restaurants. But he had a playful streak. I remember him learning how and teaching us boys how to strike a match from a paper matchbook with one hand, "in case I ever lose a hand." It was easier before they moved the striking surface to the back. The irony--he smoked his whole life and Thaddis did not, but a form of lung cancer not related to second hand smoke is what took her.
When my mother was ill and was obviously going to end her days in nursing care, he stepped in. My brother went to live with him and he made arrangements for my sister and me. Maybe not the best arrangements but at least we would be with family such as it was. He then went around the state where we had lived cleaning up my mother's trail of debt. My father had paid no child support and we had lived for four years on her meager salary and credit. George was a mench. I know I never thanked him enough.
I know other families have similar fractures as mine but sometimes this feels like such a loss to me. In the eighties I did go around and visit a few of them, notably George and Alfred and their families. A few years ago my brother organized a Thanksgiving at George's. My wife and I couldn't go because things were tight and we had just been traveling expensively for my graduate program. My younger son went. I wish now that I had.
I think the estrangement has its root largely in my father's family. He had a problem early on. There was another oft told story of falling off of the train on the way home from prep school, often told along with the one about sister Nancy falling off of a porch after drinking "Zombies." Our culture clearly had something of a different relationship with alcohol in the forties and fifties, probably dating back to the end of prohibition. It was as if the whole culture was self-medicating. My parents had two martini evenings at home fairly frequently. They all avoided it and then Magdalene was stuck with it. Not surprised that she might have felt she got sold a bill of goods. He was a charming fellow. But his parents didn't deal with it at all, and his sibs except Nancy avoided him.
Physically closer to his family, we saw little of it, not that I would have wanted to have a relationship with Frank, and I wasn't any more comfortable with Nancy and her "boyfriends'" drinking than with his. Mother's family was spread over the continent and beyond and there was no money for travel. When I did finally see them as an adult, I was often a little uncomfortable and out of place, probably not as communicative and engaging as I might have been. In the end George's patience and duty was a little glue to keep me in touch.
Now my sibs are across continent. I have broken the connection fairly completely with my second life out here on the coast, and my sister isn't speaking to anyone anyway, while there are other things that keep my brother and me from having much of a relationship.
Bittersweet to think of them.
Friday, October 28, 2011
Family Pictures
[Warning--this is long and the first of at least two...]
Within the last couple of weeks we finally got around to hanging the pictures of family along the stairwell to the top floor. It's where we had them in the old place, and we had gone back and forth a bit on whether to do it here. In the end we decided to do it and we like the result.
Top to bottom it starts with my family antecedents, a great-grandfather and great-grandmother, my grandfather, my parents and then my children. Then comes the same kind of sequence of my wife's family and it ends with blended family weddings of our children, and finally the grandchildren. All various frames, different kinds of pictures, really nice.
Funny thing that I get a bunch of old pictures from my brother this week that he had found in a stored suitcase. These were mostly my mother's family. I think we will add a couple to the wall.
Made me think about family history and be aware that while I know some of it, I don't know much, and what I do know I ought to record. Here seemed like a good place. They are all gone now.
I'll start with the tribe on my father's side.
As the first-born grandson, I was named after my grandfather. In effect, my father's bid for his father's love. The old man was a doctor, a graduate of Johns Hopkins around the turn of the century. His wife "Daisy," was a diminutive woman of strong will. A DAR member, my salient memory of her was the time at five or six when I broke a china figurine bouncing a beach ball in her house. Not a fun memory. I'm not sure she was the loving mother or grandmother type.
Daisy and Harold had four children, and according to family stories she had four or five miscarriages before having her tubes tied to prevent further occurrences. They had Frank, then Nancy, then twins--my father Edgar and his sister Cynthia. Obvious practitioners of the right of primogeniture, they provided an Ivy League education and offered medical school to Frank, who had no interest. Frank married something of an heiress and ran a boatyard and lobster pots as well as a small farm in Maine and in the end did quite well for himself from selling off the family land. My father yearned to have gone to medical school but he got shipped off to boarding school instead of having a college education paid for.
Younger sister Cynthia was the princess. One of the pictures hanging on my wall is of the four of them in a posed shot. Frank in a suit and tie is in the center with Nancy in a dark dress leaning in almost tentatively from one side (I'd guess him to be early teens and her a bit younger). On the other side, Cynthia is seated crossed legged on a table almost odalisque style wearing a frilly white frock. My father, in a dark suit with knickers and a White Peter Pan collar with a bow, is seated in front.
Nancy has an almost haunted look, while Cynthia appears serenely confident.
Cynthia went on to marry one of her Swarthmore professors, while Nancy did nursing work with the Red Cross during the war and had a succession of men in her life until she married late to a merchant seaman. She seemed happy then until he predeceased her by a number of years. My father didn't have much good to say about "the drunk," however.
I think the whole family had issues with alcohol. Nancy and Edgar were out-and-out alcoholics. Drink lubricated every evening I spent with Cynthia and her husband, though I can't say I saw them really drunk, unlike my father and his older sister.
In-law relations struck me as more strained than most. My mother resented Cynthia, whom my father seemed to nearly worship. Sentences would begin "Cynthia says..." and my mother would seethe. I would hear the same line in my later teens when living with my father. He would call her whenever he had difficulty with me. Some years later after my moither and father were gone, when visiting Frank and his wife, Helen made a comment to the effect that "Maggie (my mother) thought she was getting the doctor's son...," implying that she was some kind of gold digger. Going to Helen and Frank's daughter's wedding, Mother complained about the cramped and shabby room we had for our five under the eaves of the Harriet Beecher Stowe house, while Cynthia and her husband and two children stayed in the family manse.
Some years later that daughter, about eleven years older than me, Cynthia--"Little Cynthia" in the family practice--told me about her father Frank. [An aside, my mother decided to use my middle name to call me by because she didn't want me to be "Little Harry" all my life--thanks, Mom.] I had taken my younger son down to meet her in Florida and had taken Aunt Nancy with us. Late one evening the two of them were very intent on trying to get me drunk, which I managed to resist, and then they proceeded to tell me how Frank had raped his younger sister Nancy when she was just fifteen, and had apparently tried to rape his own daughter at the same age. "Little Cynthia" was not so little and fought him off according to her. He had a long career as a serial philanderer, bragging of his conquests to his daughter and his wife. I guess she didn't have that much luck marrying the doctor's son either.
Frank had a son about a year younger than me. Johnny wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer but he seemed a happy go lucky kid with a lot of charm. At twenty-six Johnny blew his brains out with his father's shotgun in the middle of the living room of their brand new house. That's all I ever knew or heard about it.
When I was growing up we saw Nancy much more than any of the others. She lived in New York City and we were in the suburbs, so a couple of different ones of her men were also part of the gatherings. My mother at some point told me that she was very particular about cleaning up the bed linen Nancy used, that she was concerned about "diseases." Whatever. For the most part I think Nancy tried to be a good aunt and have a good relationship with us kids.
There were, however, none of my father's family to be seen or heard from after my parents separated and started the long march to a divorce. At the time divorce was very difficult in Connecticut where we lived. Adultery was the only basis, and it took five years. When my mother became terminally ill, it was her brother who stepped in and managed things, taking in my young brother, finding a place for my sister with his other sister, and sending me to live with my father in a two room apartment with his male "friend." When my father finally got a job--he had been seriously ill and then unemployed for two or three years--and was about to move us ("friend" included) to Boston mid-school year, a teacher stepped in and offered to let me stay at his house to finish my year. It was a real gift, because I was in a great magnet style school and Boston's public education system had seen far better days at that time.
I survived the year in Boston with my father and his "friend," Don. [I'm not being sarcastic about their relationship. They were lovers. It is just that my father never talked to me about it and never acknowledged the truth of it in my presence.] That summer I got a job and packed up and left. My mother had died in May and the last straw for me was being sent to the funeral to "bring back your sister and brother" to live with him. My mother's brother would have none of it, of course, so I got screamed at on my return for my failure to do as he had demanded. Yeah, like I was going to drag my younger siblings into this situation.
Christmas that year I was invited to celebrate with my father's new wife, Leone (#@!!???) and my sister and brother. I hitched to get there. It was well out in the burbs. The "friend," Don, had been discarded and in his place was a whiskey-voiced woman who had been my father's real estate agent in finding a home for his little family. They were separated a month later after racking up a $750 liquor bill. He was in the hospital having smashed through a glass front bookcase and raked his wrists. She had the two kids, since he had declared them wards of the state. They weren't very careful about foster parents in those days. My father was soon back with Don, and my sister was back with her mother's sister. The step/foster mother had made her miserable so that she would be left with my brother, then about nine.
During the year or two before I went back to live with my father, his father died and there was some serious infighting among the siblings about how to handle the inheritance and the land. Each was supposed to get something, but somehow Edgar and Nancy got pretty well squeezed out with Frank ending up with the lion's share and Cynthia getting the only thing she wanted, a cottage on the shore. My guess is that Edgar and Nancy were in such financial straits that Frank bought them out with lowball offers. Lovely people, just lovely.
I was pretty much estranged at that point. It was clear I could count on nothing from them and managed to start college a couple years after high school and then get accepted to a place where I got excellent scholarship help. However, on graduation I get this angry note from Nancy that started out with a congratulations and then launched into a bitter "now maybe you'll stop being so selfish and do something about your brother." Given how toxic they all were to each other this seemed highly ironic at best, and of course none of them had done a damn thing to help me.
Over the next couple of years I had to rescue my father from the floor of his apartment where his new "roommate" had left him after getting him drunk and then stealing his disability check. The first time we had to take him in and my wife had to lose some work as I was brand new in a job and could not. Cynthia came with her "help"--a package of three pairs of underpants while we were losing income. We got him placed in a nursing home, but he ended up not staying because he "wasn't like those people," and probably because he couldn't get a drink. Soon he was back with the new roommate and sure enough I get the call from Cynthia to go and get him. I said I could not. We had one child and another due any minute. She took him in but entertained me with repeated telephone calls that I "had to take him" and putting her husband on the line to cajole me. The two lines that stick were something about she "shouldn't have to deal with him again," [yeah, I knew all about that!] and "you have to take him. We have to go up to the cottage this weekend." To which I suggested it would be nice if my wife and I had a cottage to go to. End of any such conversation for a long time to come. What I did do was arrange with a lawyer pro bono to set up a conservatorship to receive his disability checks so the "roommate" couldn't pull that stunt again.
I think I only saw him once or twice after that before he died in the early seventies. The lawyer told me not to come to the hospital to see him, that he was in a coma and that the hospital might try to make me pay the substantial bill. I regret a little that I did not. His ashes were scattered at sea.
There are two pictures of my father on my wall. One shows him obviously at the tiller of a sailboat. The only piece of the boat that can be seen is the main sheet in his right hand as he gazes off to windward to see what's ahead. He loved to sail. Ironically he never taught me, but when I did learn I often thought of him when I had tiller in hand. He was proud that he had earned his first small sailboat by swimming the mile across and then back between the point and an island across the bay in the frigid Maine waters. He's a handsome and intent young man in the photo.
The other picture is of him in choirboy robes looking positively angelic. He had a pretty face with thick hair with a widow's peak as a boy. He had early male pattern baldness, so I often thank my mother's brothers for their genes. He had a beautiful voice and enjoyed using it. Mine is not so good or as trained but I have his habit of singing snippets of songs during the day. When my wife and I made an impromptu trip to New York a few years back to catch the Broadway revival of "South Pacific" it was, for me, a bit of a pilgrimage. The musical had been iconic for my parents and I can remember when I was in second or third grade seeing him perform "Nothing Like a Dame" with a men's singing group. He was good with his hands, doing delicate work on furniture and the like.
I realize now that while he made victims of his own children, he and his sister, Nancy, were victims in their own family. Sometimes I'm not sure what I feel or what to think that they are all gone now, but I am glad I have the pictures and glad I have them up on the wall to see.
Within the last couple of weeks we finally got around to hanging the pictures of family along the stairwell to the top floor. It's where we had them in the old place, and we had gone back and forth a bit on whether to do it here. In the end we decided to do it and we like the result.
Top to bottom it starts with my family antecedents, a great-grandfather and great-grandmother, my grandfather, my parents and then my children. Then comes the same kind of sequence of my wife's family and it ends with blended family weddings of our children, and finally the grandchildren. All various frames, different kinds of pictures, really nice.
Funny thing that I get a bunch of old pictures from my brother this week that he had found in a stored suitcase. These were mostly my mother's family. I think we will add a couple to the wall.
Made me think about family history and be aware that while I know some of it, I don't know much, and what I do know I ought to record. Here seemed like a good place. They are all gone now.
I'll start with the tribe on my father's side.
As the first-born grandson, I was named after my grandfather. In effect, my father's bid for his father's love. The old man was a doctor, a graduate of Johns Hopkins around the turn of the century. His wife "Daisy," was a diminutive woman of strong will. A DAR member, my salient memory of her was the time at five or six when I broke a china figurine bouncing a beach ball in her house. Not a fun memory. I'm not sure she was the loving mother or grandmother type.
Daisy and Harold had four children, and according to family stories she had four or five miscarriages before having her tubes tied to prevent further occurrences. They had Frank, then Nancy, then twins--my father Edgar and his sister Cynthia. Obvious practitioners of the right of primogeniture, they provided an Ivy League education and offered medical school to Frank, who had no interest. Frank married something of an heiress and ran a boatyard and lobster pots as well as a small farm in Maine and in the end did quite well for himself from selling off the family land. My father yearned to have gone to medical school but he got shipped off to boarding school instead of having a college education paid for.
Younger sister Cynthia was the princess. One of the pictures hanging on my wall is of the four of them in a posed shot. Frank in a suit and tie is in the center with Nancy in a dark dress leaning in almost tentatively from one side (I'd guess him to be early teens and her a bit younger). On the other side, Cynthia is seated crossed legged on a table almost odalisque style wearing a frilly white frock. My father, in a dark suit with knickers and a White Peter Pan collar with a bow, is seated in front.
Nancy has an almost haunted look, while Cynthia appears serenely confident.
Cynthia went on to marry one of her Swarthmore professors, while Nancy did nursing work with the Red Cross during the war and had a succession of men in her life until she married late to a merchant seaman. She seemed happy then until he predeceased her by a number of years. My father didn't have much good to say about "the drunk," however.
I think the whole family had issues with alcohol. Nancy and Edgar were out-and-out alcoholics. Drink lubricated every evening I spent with Cynthia and her husband, though I can't say I saw them really drunk, unlike my father and his older sister.
In-law relations struck me as more strained than most. My mother resented Cynthia, whom my father seemed to nearly worship. Sentences would begin "Cynthia says..." and my mother would seethe. I would hear the same line in my later teens when living with my father. He would call her whenever he had difficulty with me. Some years later after my moither and father were gone, when visiting Frank and his wife, Helen made a comment to the effect that "Maggie (my mother) thought she was getting the doctor's son...," implying that she was some kind of gold digger. Going to Helen and Frank's daughter's wedding, Mother complained about the cramped and shabby room we had for our five under the eaves of the Harriet Beecher Stowe house, while Cynthia and her husband and two children stayed in the family manse.
Some years later that daughter, about eleven years older than me, Cynthia--"Little Cynthia" in the family practice--told me about her father Frank. [An aside, my mother decided to use my middle name to call me by because she didn't want me to be "Little Harry" all my life--thanks, Mom.] I had taken my younger son down to meet her in Florida and had taken Aunt Nancy with us. Late one evening the two of them were very intent on trying to get me drunk, which I managed to resist, and then they proceeded to tell me how Frank had raped his younger sister Nancy when she was just fifteen, and had apparently tried to rape his own daughter at the same age. "Little Cynthia" was not so little and fought him off according to her. He had a long career as a serial philanderer, bragging of his conquests to his daughter and his wife. I guess she didn't have that much luck marrying the doctor's son either.
Frank had a son about a year younger than me. Johnny wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer but he seemed a happy go lucky kid with a lot of charm. At twenty-six Johnny blew his brains out with his father's shotgun in the middle of the living room of their brand new house. That's all I ever knew or heard about it.
When I was growing up we saw Nancy much more than any of the others. She lived in New York City and we were in the suburbs, so a couple of different ones of her men were also part of the gatherings. My mother at some point told me that she was very particular about cleaning up the bed linen Nancy used, that she was concerned about "diseases." Whatever. For the most part I think Nancy tried to be a good aunt and have a good relationship with us kids.
There were, however, none of my father's family to be seen or heard from after my parents separated and started the long march to a divorce. At the time divorce was very difficult in Connecticut where we lived. Adultery was the only basis, and it took five years. When my mother became terminally ill, it was her brother who stepped in and managed things, taking in my young brother, finding a place for my sister with his other sister, and sending me to live with my father in a two room apartment with his male "friend." When my father finally got a job--he had been seriously ill and then unemployed for two or three years--and was about to move us ("friend" included) to Boston mid-school year, a teacher stepped in and offered to let me stay at his house to finish my year. It was a real gift, because I was in a great magnet style school and Boston's public education system had seen far better days at that time.
I survived the year in Boston with my father and his "friend," Don. [I'm not being sarcastic about their relationship. They were lovers. It is just that my father never talked to me about it and never acknowledged the truth of it in my presence.] That summer I got a job and packed up and left. My mother had died in May and the last straw for me was being sent to the funeral to "bring back your sister and brother" to live with him. My mother's brother would have none of it, of course, so I got screamed at on my return for my failure to do as he had demanded. Yeah, like I was going to drag my younger siblings into this situation.
Christmas that year I was invited to celebrate with my father's new wife, Leone (#@!!???) and my sister and brother. I hitched to get there. It was well out in the burbs. The "friend," Don, had been discarded and in his place was a whiskey-voiced woman who had been my father's real estate agent in finding a home for his little family. They were separated a month later after racking up a $750 liquor bill. He was in the hospital having smashed through a glass front bookcase and raked his wrists. She had the two kids, since he had declared them wards of the state. They weren't very careful about foster parents in those days. My father was soon back with Don, and my sister was back with her mother's sister. The step/foster mother had made her miserable so that she would be left with my brother, then about nine.
During the year or two before I went back to live with my father, his father died and there was some serious infighting among the siblings about how to handle the inheritance and the land. Each was supposed to get something, but somehow Edgar and Nancy got pretty well squeezed out with Frank ending up with the lion's share and Cynthia getting the only thing she wanted, a cottage on the shore. My guess is that Edgar and Nancy were in such financial straits that Frank bought them out with lowball offers. Lovely people, just lovely.
I was pretty much estranged at that point. It was clear I could count on nothing from them and managed to start college a couple years after high school and then get accepted to a place where I got excellent scholarship help. However, on graduation I get this angry note from Nancy that started out with a congratulations and then launched into a bitter "now maybe you'll stop being so selfish and do something about your brother." Given how toxic they all were to each other this seemed highly ironic at best, and of course none of them had done a damn thing to help me.
Over the next couple of years I had to rescue my father from the floor of his apartment where his new "roommate" had left him after getting him drunk and then stealing his disability check. The first time we had to take him in and my wife had to lose some work as I was brand new in a job and could not. Cynthia came with her "help"--a package of three pairs of underpants while we were losing income. We got him placed in a nursing home, but he ended up not staying because he "wasn't like those people," and probably because he couldn't get a drink. Soon he was back with the new roommate and sure enough I get the call from Cynthia to go and get him. I said I could not. We had one child and another due any minute. She took him in but entertained me with repeated telephone calls that I "had to take him" and putting her husband on the line to cajole me. The two lines that stick were something about she "shouldn't have to deal with him again," [yeah, I knew all about that!] and "you have to take him. We have to go up to the cottage this weekend." To which I suggested it would be nice if my wife and I had a cottage to go to. End of any such conversation for a long time to come. What I did do was arrange with a lawyer pro bono to set up a conservatorship to receive his disability checks so the "roommate" couldn't pull that stunt again.
I think I only saw him once or twice after that before he died in the early seventies. The lawyer told me not to come to the hospital to see him, that he was in a coma and that the hospital might try to make me pay the substantial bill. I regret a little that I did not. His ashes were scattered at sea.
There are two pictures of my father on my wall. One shows him obviously at the tiller of a sailboat. The only piece of the boat that can be seen is the main sheet in his right hand as he gazes off to windward to see what's ahead. He loved to sail. Ironically he never taught me, but when I did learn I often thought of him when I had tiller in hand. He was proud that he had earned his first small sailboat by swimming the mile across and then back between the point and an island across the bay in the frigid Maine waters. He's a handsome and intent young man in the photo.
The other picture is of him in choirboy robes looking positively angelic. He had a pretty face with thick hair with a widow's peak as a boy. He had early male pattern baldness, so I often thank my mother's brothers for their genes. He had a beautiful voice and enjoyed using it. Mine is not so good or as trained but I have his habit of singing snippets of songs during the day. When my wife and I made an impromptu trip to New York a few years back to catch the Broadway revival of "South Pacific" it was, for me, a bit of a pilgrimage. The musical had been iconic for my parents and I can remember when I was in second or third grade seeing him perform "Nothing Like a Dame" with a men's singing group. He was good with his hands, doing delicate work on furniture and the like.
I realize now that while he made victims of his own children, he and his sister, Nancy, were victims in their own family. Sometimes I'm not sure what I feel or what to think that they are all gone now, but I am glad I have the pictures and glad I have them up on the wall to see.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Acting
During the last few years I have taken some acting classes at a local studio. It was partly to help me with my screenwriting and partly because I have enjoyed acting at earlier times in my life.
So I took a basic sequence of three courses that ended in a scene study course where we got to put on the scenes we had worked on in class. The teacher asked us in the first session or so what kind of character we would like to play. My response was pretty quick. I wanted to play a "bad guy," someone like the Roy Cohn character in "Angels in America." Well, when she handed out the scenes we would work on I was Roy Cohn. The scene was when we first begin to see that he is really sick and it is between him and the young Mormon lawyer. Roy is in bathrobe and slippers and cursing up a storm at his "dumb Mormon hick" young friend. It's the first part of the meltdown.
I was partnered with a young guy who worked at Microsoft. He had lots of energy and was very excited about the idea of acting. He'd even been cast in a small production locally that a friend of mine directed. Raj (not his real name) was apparently a little difficult to direct according to my friend. And when we worked together he always kept changing the blocking and positioning himself differently than what I expected.
A couple of things about acting. First of all it is not "pretending," it is acting or doing or being. It is about interacting and reacting. The simplest scene has been described to me as two people trying to get past each other to the exit on the other side of the room and at the same time trying to prevent the other from doing it. In my earlier basic scene study class I had been given the assignment to be a security guard in a museum at closing time trying to evict a student desperately studying a painting for her final paper due the next day. You get the idea. Real conflict, conflicting objectives. When actors are working on something like this, they work off of each other.
My partner and I worked assiduously to prep the scene. In our final class before performance we were all running our scenes for our teacher. When it was our turn we started out fine and at some point I ended up at a desk downstage right, and my dumb hick Mormon friend decides to wander way upstage just before I have a really critical line to deliver to him. If I do it, he has positioned himself so that I have to turn my back to the audience. I look at my teacher and say "I can't..." And she says to deliver the line to him and give it to the audience anyway. So I did. Face forward without turning at all, but with every thought I could muster, I shot the words at Raj standing ten feet behind me.
One of my classmates said later that she didn't think that could be done. The teacher had a few words for my acting partner before the performance next time and he went back to our original blocking.
I learned a couple of things. One was precisely what "upstaging" means. It's a quite literal term. But second that you don't have to let it happen and you don't have to confront it. You just have to find the way to work in that moment that gets the job done.
So I took a basic sequence of three courses that ended in a scene study course where we got to put on the scenes we had worked on in class. The teacher asked us in the first session or so what kind of character we would like to play. My response was pretty quick. I wanted to play a "bad guy," someone like the Roy Cohn character in "Angels in America." Well, when she handed out the scenes we would work on I was Roy Cohn. The scene was when we first begin to see that he is really sick and it is between him and the young Mormon lawyer. Roy is in bathrobe and slippers and cursing up a storm at his "dumb Mormon hick" young friend. It's the first part of the meltdown.
I was partnered with a young guy who worked at Microsoft. He had lots of energy and was very excited about the idea of acting. He'd even been cast in a small production locally that a friend of mine directed. Raj (not his real name) was apparently a little difficult to direct according to my friend. And when we worked together he always kept changing the blocking and positioning himself differently than what I expected.
A couple of things about acting. First of all it is not "pretending," it is acting or doing or being. It is about interacting and reacting. The simplest scene has been described to me as two people trying to get past each other to the exit on the other side of the room and at the same time trying to prevent the other from doing it. In my earlier basic scene study class I had been given the assignment to be a security guard in a museum at closing time trying to evict a student desperately studying a painting for her final paper due the next day. You get the idea. Real conflict, conflicting objectives. When actors are working on something like this, they work off of each other.
My partner and I worked assiduously to prep the scene. In our final class before performance we were all running our scenes for our teacher. When it was our turn we started out fine and at some point I ended up at a desk downstage right, and my dumb hick Mormon friend decides to wander way upstage just before I have a really critical line to deliver to him. If I do it, he has positioned himself so that I have to turn my back to the audience. I look at my teacher and say "I can't..." And she says to deliver the line to him and give it to the audience anyway. So I did. Face forward without turning at all, but with every thought I could muster, I shot the words at Raj standing ten feet behind me.
One of my classmates said later that she didn't think that could be done. The teacher had a few words for my acting partner before the performance next time and he went back to our original blocking.
I learned a couple of things. One was precisely what "upstaging" means. It's a quite literal term. But second that you don't have to let it happen and you don't have to confront it. You just have to find the way to work in that moment that gets the job done.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Robo Calls and Scam Artists
Maybe I should feel sorry for the folks who work in phone bank boiler rooms. I suspect many are just trying to eke out a living in these hard times, but I find myself more angry than sympathetic.
The robo calls you can hang up on but you can't make them stop coming. The ones with a live person on the other end you have to deal with if you want to ask them to stop calling, though I wonder how well that works.
Since I'm here a lot I get a lot of them.
Today I got one of the social engineering type. Supposedly my computer was sending messages that it was in some kind of distress and this firm (vaguely named "System Solutions") was calling to help me out. I could not get a name or a supervisor's name nor could I get a clear explanation of what the inquiry was about. The caller asserted that he had recently been in Redmond and in other ways implied that he was associated with Microsoft.
He tried to sound reasonable and when he began to ask me questions about my computer I asked if "my computer is sending you messages why don't you know all of this already?" He just had to check some things. Would I turn on my computer and check some things for him? Yeah right. I should have asked for his phone number and told him I'd call back, but I was too annoyed. A little web research on "System Solutions" and "scam" turned up this:
"A new scam has been making the rounds recently – scammers calling through the phone and posing as people from Microsoft, scaring victims into paying for bogus services and stealing their credit information. These fraudsters can be very persistent – so it's important to always be alert and informed."
It's a fearful time. Times like this and these people seem to crawl out of the woodwork. One of the damn robo calls was offering "to help with [my] IRS debt." Scare tactics all the way. You have an infected computer. You owe the IRS. And on and on.
It's enough to make me more of a curmudgeon than I already am.
The robo calls you can hang up on but you can't make them stop coming. The ones with a live person on the other end you have to deal with if you want to ask them to stop calling, though I wonder how well that works.
Since I'm here a lot I get a lot of them.
Today I got one of the social engineering type. Supposedly my computer was sending messages that it was in some kind of distress and this firm (vaguely named "System Solutions") was calling to help me out. I could not get a name or a supervisor's name nor could I get a clear explanation of what the inquiry was about. The caller asserted that he had recently been in Redmond and in other ways implied that he was associated with Microsoft.
He tried to sound reasonable and when he began to ask me questions about my computer I asked if "my computer is sending you messages why don't you know all of this already?" He just had to check some things. Would I turn on my computer and check some things for him? Yeah right. I should have asked for his phone number and told him I'd call back, but I was too annoyed. A little web research on "System Solutions" and "scam" turned up this:
"A new scam has been making the rounds recently – scammers calling through the phone and posing as people from Microsoft, scaring victims into paying for bogus services and stealing their credit information. These fraudsters can be very persistent – so it's important to always be alert and informed."
It's a fearful time. Times like this and these people seem to crawl out of the woodwork. One of the damn robo calls was offering "to help with [my] IRS debt." Scare tactics all the way. You have an infected computer. You owe the IRS. And on and on.
It's enough to make me more of a curmudgeon than I already am.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Give a Shout for the Underdog
It's as American as apple pie. "Let's drink to the hardworking people. Let's drink to the salt of the earth."
We like the underdog. I have a stronger tendency than most to root for the underdog. All it took was bootstrapping myself out of my toxic family situation and being a Red Sox fan for years.
Rant Warning
I said I wasn't going to talk about politics, and I'm not going to get into party politics, but at some level any public issue is political.
I've been watching the Occupy Wall Street with some interest. Back in the day I did a little demonstration time myself. While I get decidedly uncomfortable with some of the crazies that such events attract, this "movement," as it is beginning to be called, has more of a focus than some media would care to admit. Our local alternative paper published this link: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10?op=1
You might check it out. Some very interesting charts.
Another place to do a little research is on the SEC EDGAR website. You can read the annual corporate filings called 10-Ks. Pick a couple of random large coporations and when you are in the document search "executive compensation." What you find will make you ill or at least throw up your hands in despair. The provision for golden parachutes and the like pay out in the event of almost any termination, with the possible exception of criminal indictment, and pay out handsomely. Unlike the employee who don't get a raise unless they perform, the standards for executives is completely different--entitlement on a grand scale. Can you say "Let's loot this place and screw the little guy?"
Truth is while I am by no means wealthy, having been a wage slave most of my life, I am better off that the bulk of the 99%. I suspect our income even reduced as it is by my semi-retirement may be in the top third or quartile. I am one of those who almost made it to the "promised land" offered by America's so-called social mobility. I also still buy a lottery ticket every so often.
"The rich get richer" hasn't been truer since the Gilded Age, and there's no Teddy Roosevelt in sight. And some spend their energy trying to scare us about the bugaboos of big government and taxes when the really big dogs on the block are the Corporations which are now free to outright own Congress. Not that corporations are necessarily bad. I've worked for at least a couple that could be termed positively enlightened.
But the magician's sleight of hand has us focused on the ideological dialogue and how taxes are "stealing" and that any questioning of the way things are is "class warfare," and so on. Any suggestion that the tax burden should be distributed differently is met with cries of "socialism" and rants against "social engineering." I haven't quite gotten yet how DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) and "nation building" after at least one war we maybe should not have started in the first place isn't "social engineering" on a grand scale. But I guess maybe my "social values" is your "social engineering," and vice versa.
I keep wondering where all that "job creation" is that certain tax cuts were supposed to help promote. I keep wondering how the same people that trashed a lot of value in my retirement savings got a bailout AND huge bonuses.
I wouldn't want to be rearing children now. My parents could say with some truth that this was the land of opportunity, and that I would be better off than they were. I'm not so sure that my children can say that to theirs.
I grew up going to public school. I went to good ones and bad ones, twelve of them, and managed to get a fairly decent education. Of course at the time there were whole classes of people excluded from that system by race or being differently abled, but the experience and the quality of it seems different now from what I can see, and I think we all lose something because of that. I remember being at a university alumni luncheon where everyone was talking about the community they moved to in order to have their children in good schools, or the private school their young scholar attended. I made myself quite popular by saying something to the effect that "don't we all have a stake in a good public school system." (Please note the sarcasm.)
The so-called 99% are upset partly because the thing that extreme wealth confers is the ability to stack the deck in favor of themselves and their issue. They have access denied to the rest of us. As long as there was a chance that mobility could take us there, most folks probably didn't begrudge this. But the game of Three Card Monte is just about over and the illusion of mobility is wearing thin.
Maybe it never was a society based on fair play, but we thought it was. It's how we got sold the American Dream.
I've lived it and gotten a piece or two, but I think the door is closing. Something is broken and I, for one, see nothing on the horizon, that offers a hope of fixing it.
Sorry if this one seems so bleak.
We like the underdog. I have a stronger tendency than most to root for the underdog. All it took was bootstrapping myself out of my toxic family situation and being a Red Sox fan for years.
Rant Warning
I said I wasn't going to talk about politics, and I'm not going to get into party politics, but at some level any public issue is political.
I've been watching the Occupy Wall Street with some interest. Back in the day I did a little demonstration time myself. While I get decidedly uncomfortable with some of the crazies that such events attract, this "movement," as it is beginning to be called, has more of a focus than some media would care to admit. Our local alternative paper published this link: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10?op=1
You might check it out. Some very interesting charts.
Another place to do a little research is on the SEC EDGAR website. You can read the annual corporate filings called 10-Ks. Pick a couple of random large coporations and when you are in the document search "executive compensation." What you find will make you ill or at least throw up your hands in despair. The provision for golden parachutes and the like pay out in the event of almost any termination, with the possible exception of criminal indictment, and pay out handsomely. Unlike the employee who don't get a raise unless they perform, the standards for executives is completely different--entitlement on a grand scale. Can you say "Let's loot this place and screw the little guy?"
Truth is while I am by no means wealthy, having been a wage slave most of my life, I am better off that the bulk of the 99%. I suspect our income even reduced as it is by my semi-retirement may be in the top third or quartile. I am one of those who almost made it to the "promised land" offered by America's so-called social mobility. I also still buy a lottery ticket every so often.
"The rich get richer" hasn't been truer since the Gilded Age, and there's no Teddy Roosevelt in sight. And some spend their energy trying to scare us about the bugaboos of big government and taxes when the really big dogs on the block are the Corporations which are now free to outright own Congress. Not that corporations are necessarily bad. I've worked for at least a couple that could be termed positively enlightened.
But the magician's sleight of hand has us focused on the ideological dialogue and how taxes are "stealing" and that any questioning of the way things are is "class warfare," and so on. Any suggestion that the tax burden should be distributed differently is met with cries of "socialism" and rants against "social engineering." I haven't quite gotten yet how DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) and "nation building" after at least one war we maybe should not have started in the first place isn't "social engineering" on a grand scale. But I guess maybe my "social values" is your "social engineering," and vice versa.
I keep wondering where all that "job creation" is that certain tax cuts were supposed to help promote. I keep wondering how the same people that trashed a lot of value in my retirement savings got a bailout AND huge bonuses.
I wouldn't want to be rearing children now. My parents could say with some truth that this was the land of opportunity, and that I would be better off than they were. I'm not so sure that my children can say that to theirs.
I grew up going to public school. I went to good ones and bad ones, twelve of them, and managed to get a fairly decent education. Of course at the time there were whole classes of people excluded from that system by race or being differently abled, but the experience and the quality of it seems different now from what I can see, and I think we all lose something because of that. I remember being at a university alumni luncheon where everyone was talking about the community they moved to in order to have their children in good schools, or the private school their young scholar attended. I made myself quite popular by saying something to the effect that "don't we all have a stake in a good public school system." (Please note the sarcasm.)
The so-called 99% are upset partly because the thing that extreme wealth confers is the ability to stack the deck in favor of themselves and their issue. They have access denied to the rest of us. As long as there was a chance that mobility could take us there, most folks probably didn't begrudge this. But the game of Three Card Monte is just about over and the illusion of mobility is wearing thin.
Maybe it never was a society based on fair play, but we thought it was. It's how we got sold the American Dream.
I've lived it and gotten a piece or two, but I think the door is closing. Something is broken and I, for one, see nothing on the horizon, that offers a hope of fixing it.
Sorry if this one seems so bleak.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Time
Part of the reason I started posting these essays, if they can be called that, is the growing sense I have that there is a finite amount of time left me. That thought makes me look back at my experience to see what I can see and to think about it.
If you have been reading these you know that one of the questions that has been up for me has been about what difference I have made and the value I have added (or, I suppose, subtracted).
But I have also been aware that I have some thoughts simply about the passage of time itself, and of my subjective experience of it.
In my teens and probably into my early twenties it always felt to me as if time were crawling far more slowly that I wanted it to. The four years of high school felt interminable. The five of college almost as long. Looking back those periods seem to me the smallest of blips. The last twenty-some years I have spent in this new city, a place I would never have imagined ending up by the way, seems to have gone by in a rush.
Thinking of it another way, I remember thinking in the mid to late fifties that what had happened a mere dozen or so years before was ancient history. WW II was something you saw images of on "Victory at Sea," and even though I was born during it (265 days after Dec. 7, 1941--compare that to the normal human gestation period) it felt to me as a youngster like something from another century. Looking back the same amount of time now takes me to a figurative "yesterday" in my subjective experience--the end of the Clinton administration.
I guess it is a little like how a ski slope seems so much steeper looking down from the top than it does when you look up at it. The difference is twice your height, a matter of perspective.
Similarly, I can remember thinking of people much younger than I am now as "old," but people I know of that age now, or even a bit younger I tend to think of as contemporaries, and forget completely that they have no experience of things that are vivid for me, like JFK's election.
What's that line? "Time keeps on slippin', slippin', into the future..."
It is so highly subjective. Fascinating to me.
If you have been reading these you know that one of the questions that has been up for me has been about what difference I have made and the value I have added (or, I suppose, subtracted).
But I have also been aware that I have some thoughts simply about the passage of time itself, and of my subjective experience of it.
In my teens and probably into my early twenties it always felt to me as if time were crawling far more slowly that I wanted it to. The four years of high school felt interminable. The five of college almost as long. Looking back those periods seem to me the smallest of blips. The last twenty-some years I have spent in this new city, a place I would never have imagined ending up by the way, seems to have gone by in a rush.
Thinking of it another way, I remember thinking in the mid to late fifties that what had happened a mere dozen or so years before was ancient history. WW II was something you saw images of on "Victory at Sea," and even though I was born during it (265 days after Dec. 7, 1941--compare that to the normal human gestation period) it felt to me as a youngster like something from another century. Looking back the same amount of time now takes me to a figurative "yesterday" in my subjective experience--the end of the Clinton administration.
I guess it is a little like how a ski slope seems so much steeper looking down from the top than it does when you look up at it. The difference is twice your height, a matter of perspective.
Similarly, I can remember thinking of people much younger than I am now as "old," but people I know of that age now, or even a bit younger I tend to think of as contemporaries, and forget completely that they have no experience of things that are vivid for me, like JFK's election.
What's that line? "Time keeps on slippin', slippin', into the future..."
It is so highly subjective. Fascinating to me.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
"Put a Woman in Your Life..."
'enry 'iggins had it a bit right, but he mellowed beyond his soliloquy about how a relationship with a woman condemned one to be "rearranged" like the furniture.
There have been four women in my life with whom I have had what I would call significant relationships, other than my mother of course. Two of them I married. Two, I wanted to. There was another I married that I wouldn't put in the same group as the four who each, I think, made some big differences in my life.
The first was my first serious relationship and was someone from a very different background. I learned a lot from her about a different culture that had been hidden to me, and about family.
The second bore my children, a seriously significant change in my life, and one, that despite the occasional doubts and worries, I have no regrets about. She was a good mother and a better wife than I deserved. (It is possible that each of these women was in some way better than I deserved.) I think what I learned from her I had to learn afterwards. Buried in my own incompleted angst, I pretty much tried to suppress the crap out of her and reflecting back she had to have more dignity and more endurance than anyone should have had to in order to stay as long as she did.
The third was an intense three year long-distance relationship with a woman who was seven years my senior. Very successful, articulate, full of energy. A lot of the time I wondered what she saw in me. I wanted desperately for her to say yes to a marriage date, and it was a constant point of tension and difficulty during our last year or so. I think I learned what it was like to have someone in my life who would stand up to me and not accept what I tried to do when I was less than my best with her. But she had her own idosyncracies (as do we all) and was not about to surrender to any relationship. She had taste and style and contributed that to me in the little time we had together.
Then came my abortive second marriage, too soon, too very much on the rebound. My only saving comment is that I was probably a much bigger disappointment to her than she was to me. The divorce was vicious and financially damaging, and took longer than the marriage to unravel. I did learn something, probably to the chagrin of the woman who has been in my life for the last twenty years--not to trust the appearances of a relationship. I was living in Professor Higgins' nightmare.
I seem to have saved the best for last. We have many things in common and some really pleasing differences. Her extroversion is a delightful anodyne to my reclusive introversion. I think she is the smartest woman I have ever been with. Not one degree but she may be better read than 99.9% of the population. We both seem to recognize that it would not have worked for us had we met early on. We both had a lot of growing to do as adults before we could be fit for each other. So the timing, for once, was right.
I have a small regret that we have not had the high romance that I remember from earlier relationships, but I have come to think that may not be a bad thing. Robert Johnson ("He," "She," "We") writes in one of his books about "over the oatmeal" love--that simple daily appreciation that we are here and have each other in our lives.
I do sometimes wish I had more of the vigor of youth. Even a reasonably healthy "not quite so old guy" isn't what he was at thirty-five or forty, and we didn't meet until I was forty-eight. I sometimes think she might feel cheated by that.
What we've learned together is how to manage a good married life. Our tastes are blessedly similar. We pretty much blew the mind of a contractor redoing our old kitchen when we zeroed in on two choices for our granite counter top in about fifteen minutes. He'd planned at least an hour. And even when there are differences, we've developed some quick and simple ways to check where we each are and quickly come to a workable agreement. I'd like to think that my process skills are the bigger part of that, but I think her adaptability and willingness to engage may contribute more.
We've built a good life, with more yet to come.
There have been four women in my life with whom I have had what I would call significant relationships, other than my mother of course. Two of them I married. Two, I wanted to. There was another I married that I wouldn't put in the same group as the four who each, I think, made some big differences in my life.
The first was my first serious relationship and was someone from a very different background. I learned a lot from her about a different culture that had been hidden to me, and about family.
The second bore my children, a seriously significant change in my life, and one, that despite the occasional doubts and worries, I have no regrets about. She was a good mother and a better wife than I deserved. (It is possible that each of these women was in some way better than I deserved.) I think what I learned from her I had to learn afterwards. Buried in my own incompleted angst, I pretty much tried to suppress the crap out of her and reflecting back she had to have more dignity and more endurance than anyone should have had to in order to stay as long as she did.
The third was an intense three year long-distance relationship with a woman who was seven years my senior. Very successful, articulate, full of energy. A lot of the time I wondered what she saw in me. I wanted desperately for her to say yes to a marriage date, and it was a constant point of tension and difficulty during our last year or so. I think I learned what it was like to have someone in my life who would stand up to me and not accept what I tried to do when I was less than my best with her. But she had her own idosyncracies (as do we all) and was not about to surrender to any relationship. She had taste and style and contributed that to me in the little time we had together.
Then came my abortive second marriage, too soon, too very much on the rebound. My only saving comment is that I was probably a much bigger disappointment to her than she was to me. The divorce was vicious and financially damaging, and took longer than the marriage to unravel. I did learn something, probably to the chagrin of the woman who has been in my life for the last twenty years--not to trust the appearances of a relationship. I was living in Professor Higgins' nightmare.
I seem to have saved the best for last. We have many things in common and some really pleasing differences. Her extroversion is a delightful anodyne to my reclusive introversion. I think she is the smartest woman I have ever been with. Not one degree but she may be better read than 99.9% of the population. We both seem to recognize that it would not have worked for us had we met early on. We both had a lot of growing to do as adults before we could be fit for each other. So the timing, for once, was right.
I have a small regret that we have not had the high romance that I remember from earlier relationships, but I have come to think that may not be a bad thing. Robert Johnson ("He," "She," "We") writes in one of his books about "over the oatmeal" love--that simple daily appreciation that we are here and have each other in our lives.
I do sometimes wish I had more of the vigor of youth. Even a reasonably healthy "not quite so old guy" isn't what he was at thirty-five or forty, and we didn't meet until I was forty-eight. I sometimes think she might feel cheated by that.
What we've learned together is how to manage a good married life. Our tastes are blessedly similar. We pretty much blew the mind of a contractor redoing our old kitchen when we zeroed in on two choices for our granite counter top in about fifteen minutes. He'd planned at least an hour. And even when there are differences, we've developed some quick and simple ways to check where we each are and quickly come to a workable agreement. I'd like to think that my process skills are the bigger part of that, but I think her adaptability and willingness to engage may contribute more.
We've built a good life, with more yet to come.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Choice
Someone I know, who will go undescribed beyond that, has become a "Christian" rather late in life. I don't or wouldn't have an issue with that except that he has become fond of making pronouncements that he has fairly obviously introjected from his church or pastor if not a certain media outlet.
"This is a Christian nation."
Wince.
And "Being gay is not organic. It is a choice." Double wince. So what does "organic" mean, I ask?
"I'm being kind. It's more than just genetic. It is a choice."
And I'm thinking that if you have any gay friends I hope like hell you don't say that to one of them who spends more time in the gym than you do.
I've done a little research into the various studies and it is pretty clear to me that while there may not be a "gay gene," that there is a genetic component of some kind. Some of the studies of brothers where the frequency of homosexuality is higher among the younger brothers of older brothers suggests that there might be something in the hormonal transactions in the prebirth environment that has an influence. Boys get made in the womb as zygotes begin as female and a sequence of hormonal events connected to the XY chromosome creates boys. That is probably highly unscientifc and oversimplified, but that is what happens. A womb that has delivered boys is a different environment that one that has not. Of course nothing is as simple as nature or nurture and is much more likely to be nature AND nurture.
But my friend the "Christian" will have none of that.
I wish that believers could secure their own solace in belief and not feel so compelled to require that their beliefs be imposed on others. Seems to me that that hardly matches up with the message of Jesus' love for humanity. It's about controlling others--surely one of a human being's most fruitless wastes of time.
It seems to me that we have choices about how we behave, about how we treat others, about how we live up to or don't live up to our own aspirations.
What we don't have choices about is who we are.
Who we are, including our sexuality, is something we have to discover.
My "friend" believes the "homosexual lifestyle" is damaging and toxic. I wonder if his "Christian" life style wouldn't look damaging and toxic if he were a member of a hidden minority routinely castigated by a dominant majority, as well as assaulted and jailed for their "Christian" beliefs.
I alway have to end up asking why do heterosexuals feel so threatened? And I should limit that to heterosexual men. I don't hear the same things from women, never have. I suspect women appreciate more than they are willing to tell their believing men what it is to be oppressed and abused simply because of who they are.
Needless to say I can only stand one conversation with this person every few years. I'm done with it for a while now.
"This is a Christian nation."
Wince.
And "Being gay is not organic. It is a choice." Double wince. So what does "organic" mean, I ask?
"I'm being kind. It's more than just genetic. It is a choice."
And I'm thinking that if you have any gay friends I hope like hell you don't say that to one of them who spends more time in the gym than you do.
I've done a little research into the various studies and it is pretty clear to me that while there may not be a "gay gene," that there is a genetic component of some kind. Some of the studies of brothers where the frequency of homosexuality is higher among the younger brothers of older brothers suggests that there might be something in the hormonal transactions in the prebirth environment that has an influence. Boys get made in the womb as zygotes begin as female and a sequence of hormonal events connected to the XY chromosome creates boys. That is probably highly unscientifc and oversimplified, but that is what happens. A womb that has delivered boys is a different environment that one that has not. Of course nothing is as simple as nature or nurture and is much more likely to be nature AND nurture.
But my friend the "Christian" will have none of that.
I wish that believers could secure their own solace in belief and not feel so compelled to require that their beliefs be imposed on others. Seems to me that that hardly matches up with the message of Jesus' love for humanity. It's about controlling others--surely one of a human being's most fruitless wastes of time.
It seems to me that we have choices about how we behave, about how we treat others, about how we live up to or don't live up to our own aspirations.
What we don't have choices about is who we are.
Who we are, including our sexuality, is something we have to discover.
My "friend" believes the "homosexual lifestyle" is damaging and toxic. I wonder if his "Christian" life style wouldn't look damaging and toxic if he were a member of a hidden minority routinely castigated by a dominant majority, as well as assaulted and jailed for their "Christian" beliefs.
I alway have to end up asking why do heterosexuals feel so threatened? And I should limit that to heterosexual men. I don't hear the same things from women, never have. I suspect women appreciate more than they are willing to tell their believing men what it is to be oppressed and abused simply because of who they are.
Needless to say I can only stand one conversation with this person every few years. I'm done with it for a while now.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Religion...
The subtitle might continue... "Losin my..."
I was reared by a lapsed Southern Baptist and a fifth or sixth generation unchurched Unitarian. I don't think there's such a thing as a lapsed Unitarian. BOMFOG and all that--Brotherhood of Man, Fatherhood of God--and years of struggling with an almost doctrineless inclusivity, to remain one of the smallest of Protestant sects, yet claiming as their own five American Presidents. Small chance there will ever be another one.
My parents' solution to the what will we do about church for the children was to have us attend the closest more or less middle of the road Protestant churches. They were never much involved and we moved often enough so that in one place it was Methodist and another Presbyterian, until my parents split up and we moved with my mother to her hometown in Kentucky. Up until that time I had been a good student in Sunday School as I was in school. I remember winning a prize for memorizing the books of the Bible. I asked for and got a Revised Standard Version for my thirteenth birthday.
In her hometown we had to attend the Baptist church. Her mother expected it. This is the woman who explained that the racial slur was really "Nigra" and wasn't a slur at all, and had stood her other daughter who was having what was called then a "nervous breakdown" in a corner and read the Bible to her until my mother had spirited her away to a treatment facility. Aunt M remained a nut case for most of her life, marrying the richest two men in the town in succession, and when my sister came to live with her in desperation at 15 or 16, locking her in the basement and nearly starving her. Good Baptists all.
The Baptist minister ran the town. The sermons seemed interminable to me and I was at first mystified, later intrigued, and at last appalled by the "call." The call to be saved. What sealed it for me was seeing his sons go down to the altar for the laying on of hands on repeated occasions and knowing that they would be bending or breaking norms or laws as they saw fit as they tore a path of terror through the town. Seemed to me that this being reborn in Christ stuff was a free pass to be a shit to fellow human beings.
Yet something about church appealed to me. When we moved to another town I started going to the Methodist church which seemed more reasonable. It didn't have all the "Jesus Saves" crap. I hung out with the youth group, sort of fitting in, and enjoyed our forbidden jaunts to a roadhouse outside of the dry town where the kids would dance.
Going to live with my father, he suggested that I try a Unitarian Church when I was looking for a place to go. One of the good things he did for me. It was at least a place that encouraged you to think. At the time there was a great comparative religion curriculum for teens and I ate it up. The young people's group was copacetic and mellow and often lots of kind of crazy fun.
Later, I became pretty involved in my church as an adult, but Unitarian congregations are pretty idiosyncratic so I tended to drop in and out and for the last twenty years, mostly out. I don't like the congregational politics much and it's hard to avoid. "Liberal Religious" churches seem to be constantly battling with fracture and dissolution. I wonder if it is the same in the more orthodox ones.
My religious education wasn't complete until my first serious girlfriend who was Jewish took me home to visit her family which featured a VERY Orthodox grandfather. The girl and her mother coached me so that I could "pass" enough to prevent a major uproar. In the process I learned enough about Judaism to have a great appreciation for it. Twenty years after that during a tough transition in my life friends took me to services with their "Neo-Hassidic" Rabbi, a delightful and wise man.
I don't believe in a god even I can recognize. I remember sitting on a deck overlooking the Big Hole River in Montana a few years ago reading Dawkins and getting it quite clearly that the typical indocrination of children into a "faith" is child abuse. So in a way I can thank my parents for their casual compromise. I was exposed but not indoctrinated.
Yet for all that, I get that there is something there. I can't listen to a Bach Magnificat without being moved. I love the "Messiah." The music and art created out of that inspiration are some of the most beautiful things we can experience. And at the same time I have that thought I know that some of the world's most inhuman behavior has been in the name of religion. Even those acts by regimes that disavowed religion are in an odd reversal still about religion. And our world remains torn apart in the name of religion.
I hate the division that so many seem to want to make between the spiritual and the secular, as though one is bad, the other good.
I remember looking up at Michelangelo's ceiling. I should have been moved, but I had waited in a three hour line and was jammed hamhock to butt with a cattle-car-like crowd replete with hoards of Japanese tourists trying to take illicit photographs of it. So I wasn't moved. merely tired and annoyed. Yet in another almost as crowded gallery was nearly brought to tears by my first sight of Botticelli's "Primavera." The one religious (Michelangelo), the other with pagan antecedents. Go figure.
I grok connection. I get that that is what the driver is. We want to be connected. We want to be connected to each other. We want to be connected to meaning. We want, hoping for something we cannot know, to be connected to something bigger. To be simply human somehow seems not quite enough. We know... correction... I know I am not quite enough and have never been, at least not all by myself.
So is it at bottom about relationship?
I was reared by a lapsed Southern Baptist and a fifth or sixth generation unchurched Unitarian. I don't think there's such a thing as a lapsed Unitarian. BOMFOG and all that--Brotherhood of Man, Fatherhood of God--and years of struggling with an almost doctrineless inclusivity, to remain one of the smallest of Protestant sects, yet claiming as their own five American Presidents. Small chance there will ever be another one.
My parents' solution to the what will we do about church for the children was to have us attend the closest more or less middle of the road Protestant churches. They were never much involved and we moved often enough so that in one place it was Methodist and another Presbyterian, until my parents split up and we moved with my mother to her hometown in Kentucky. Up until that time I had been a good student in Sunday School as I was in school. I remember winning a prize for memorizing the books of the Bible. I asked for and got a Revised Standard Version for my thirteenth birthday.
In her hometown we had to attend the Baptist church. Her mother expected it. This is the woman who explained that the racial slur was really "Nigra" and wasn't a slur at all, and had stood her other daughter who was having what was called then a "nervous breakdown" in a corner and read the Bible to her until my mother had spirited her away to a treatment facility. Aunt M remained a nut case for most of her life, marrying the richest two men in the town in succession, and when my sister came to live with her in desperation at 15 or 16, locking her in the basement and nearly starving her. Good Baptists all.
The Baptist minister ran the town. The sermons seemed interminable to me and I was at first mystified, later intrigued, and at last appalled by the "call." The call to be saved. What sealed it for me was seeing his sons go down to the altar for the laying on of hands on repeated occasions and knowing that they would be bending or breaking norms or laws as they saw fit as they tore a path of terror through the town. Seemed to me that this being reborn in Christ stuff was a free pass to be a shit to fellow human beings.
Yet something about church appealed to me. When we moved to another town I started going to the Methodist church which seemed more reasonable. It didn't have all the "Jesus Saves" crap. I hung out with the youth group, sort of fitting in, and enjoyed our forbidden jaunts to a roadhouse outside of the dry town where the kids would dance.
Going to live with my father, he suggested that I try a Unitarian Church when I was looking for a place to go. One of the good things he did for me. It was at least a place that encouraged you to think. At the time there was a great comparative religion curriculum for teens and I ate it up. The young people's group was copacetic and mellow and often lots of kind of crazy fun.
Later, I became pretty involved in my church as an adult, but Unitarian congregations are pretty idiosyncratic so I tended to drop in and out and for the last twenty years, mostly out. I don't like the congregational politics much and it's hard to avoid. "Liberal Religious" churches seem to be constantly battling with fracture and dissolution. I wonder if it is the same in the more orthodox ones.
My religious education wasn't complete until my first serious girlfriend who was Jewish took me home to visit her family which featured a VERY Orthodox grandfather. The girl and her mother coached me so that I could "pass" enough to prevent a major uproar. In the process I learned enough about Judaism to have a great appreciation for it. Twenty years after that during a tough transition in my life friends took me to services with their "Neo-Hassidic" Rabbi, a delightful and wise man.
I don't believe in a god even I can recognize. I remember sitting on a deck overlooking the Big Hole River in Montana a few years ago reading Dawkins and getting it quite clearly that the typical indocrination of children into a "faith" is child abuse. So in a way I can thank my parents for their casual compromise. I was exposed but not indoctrinated.
Yet for all that, I get that there is something there. I can't listen to a Bach Magnificat without being moved. I love the "Messiah." The music and art created out of that inspiration are some of the most beautiful things we can experience. And at the same time I have that thought I know that some of the world's most inhuman behavior has been in the name of religion. Even those acts by regimes that disavowed religion are in an odd reversal still about religion. And our world remains torn apart in the name of religion.
I hate the division that so many seem to want to make between the spiritual and the secular, as though one is bad, the other good.
I remember looking up at Michelangelo's ceiling. I should have been moved, but I had waited in a three hour line and was jammed hamhock to butt with a cattle-car-like crowd replete with hoards of Japanese tourists trying to take illicit photographs of it. So I wasn't moved. merely tired and annoyed. Yet in another almost as crowded gallery was nearly brought to tears by my first sight of Botticelli's "Primavera." The one religious (Michelangelo), the other with pagan antecedents. Go figure.
I grok connection. I get that that is what the driver is. We want to be connected. We want to be connected to each other. We want to be connected to meaning. We want, hoping for something we cannot know, to be connected to something bigger. To be simply human somehow seems not quite enough. We know... correction... I know I am not quite enough and have never been, at least not all by myself.
So is it at bottom about relationship?
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Teaching Again
I'm teaching again.
A colleague from a company I worked for invited me to join her and some others teaching online for an East Coast university, fairly well known. I've taught before, but this is my first "virtual' teaching experience. It has been interesting. It's also been surprising how much I learn about my students even with the limitations of the medium. We have webcams but don't use them that much as basically it's just a head shot of the person who happens to be speaking at the time and not all of my students have cameras.
I'm doing it part-time, which is just fine with me. The prep takes time and it's taking some imagination and effort to create surrogate means to do the group process stuff that I used to do in live classes.
I have taught before, both part-time, and for a year, full-time. The full-time gig featured three classes a week, two sessions each, of 60 undergraduate students. 180 final papers to grade was a serious overload. And undergrads at the time seemed a little more difficult than the grad students I have now. I remember being stunned when student after student came in to negotiate grades. A sampling of the pitches:
"Coach says..."
"My father is giving the daughter who has the best GPA a car..."
"My car insurance rates will go up if I don't get a better grade..."
It would never have occurred to me to even try to negotiate a grade in college. I could usually figure out why I got what I got, took it as a lesson, and then moved on.
I do try to take the grade element out of the equation as much as I can as it seems to distort things. My objective is that we learn as a team and I ask them to help each other and share their results with one another. Some get it. Some don't. Student norms about competitiveness and collaboration are interesting to say the least. Not unreminiscent of the ways that people behave in the workplace.
Makes me wonder if we aren't losing the art of collaboration.
Personally, I have been reflecting on my own learnings in the process. I think I am more patient with students than I normally am. I know that I work at trying to make sure I understand them and what they are asking or talking about, It is probably a little disconcerting to some of them that I routinely ask at the end of each class what worked and what didn't, and make changes based on their input. I do a midcourse correction exercise and suggest that they could do the same with any team they work with. They've had some good ideas.
And yes, there are some who work the system. One of the features of the online tools we use is a log of how much time individuals, including me, spend in the course. This term I have two who have spent more time than I have in the course. I also have two who have been in it barely more than the actual class meeting time. The first two are doing very well in terms of the quality of their output. the latter two, not nearly so well. 一分耕耘，一分收穫 (Copy that into your Google search box.)
The classes have been very diverse. More women than men, at least a couple for whom English is a second language. I have had students born in the Ukraine, Jordan, and China, and probably a few other places I don't know about. I've had one active duty military who flew in for his first class from somewhere east of wherever you are reading this. My guess is they are mostly late twenties or thirty something. They're doing a Masters or certificate program for professional career reasons, for the most part.
One curious thing about teaching online is that with the exception of "Professor"--and I still cannot quite get used to being addressed that way--status differentials dependent on visual cues are minimized. I think it is one of the positives of the medium.
Gotta go get ready for today's class now...
A colleague from a company I worked for invited me to join her and some others teaching online for an East Coast university, fairly well known. I've taught before, but this is my first "virtual' teaching experience. It has been interesting. It's also been surprising how much I learn about my students even with the limitations of the medium. We have webcams but don't use them that much as basically it's just a head shot of the person who happens to be speaking at the time and not all of my students have cameras.
I'm doing it part-time, which is just fine with me. The prep takes time and it's taking some imagination and effort to create surrogate means to do the group process stuff that I used to do in live classes.
I have taught before, both part-time, and for a year, full-time. The full-time gig featured three classes a week, two sessions each, of 60 undergraduate students. 180 final papers to grade was a serious overload. And undergrads at the time seemed a little more difficult than the grad students I have now. I remember being stunned when student after student came in to negotiate grades. A sampling of the pitches:
"Coach says..."
"My father is giving the daughter who has the best GPA a car..."
"My car insurance rates will go up if I don't get a better grade..."
It would never have occurred to me to even try to negotiate a grade in college. I could usually figure out why I got what I got, took it as a lesson, and then moved on.
I do try to take the grade element out of the equation as much as I can as it seems to distort things. My objective is that we learn as a team and I ask them to help each other and share their results with one another. Some get it. Some don't. Student norms about competitiveness and collaboration are interesting to say the least. Not unreminiscent of the ways that people behave in the workplace.
Makes me wonder if we aren't losing the art of collaboration.
Personally, I have been reflecting on my own learnings in the process. I think I am more patient with students than I normally am. I know that I work at trying to make sure I understand them and what they are asking or talking about, It is probably a little disconcerting to some of them that I routinely ask at the end of each class what worked and what didn't, and make changes based on their input. I do a midcourse correction exercise and suggest that they could do the same with any team they work with. They've had some good ideas.
And yes, there are some who work the system. One of the features of the online tools we use is a log of how much time individuals, including me, spend in the course. This term I have two who have spent more time than I have in the course. I also have two who have been in it barely more than the actual class meeting time. The first two are doing very well in terms of the quality of their output. the latter two, not nearly so well. 一分耕耘，一分收穫 (Copy that into your Google search box.)
The classes have been very diverse. More women than men, at least a couple for whom English is a second language. I have had students born in the Ukraine, Jordan, and China, and probably a few other places I don't know about. I've had one active duty military who flew in for his first class from somewhere east of wherever you are reading this. My guess is they are mostly late twenties or thirty something. They're doing a Masters or certificate program for professional career reasons, for the most part.
One curious thing about teaching online is that with the exception of "Professor"--and I still cannot quite get used to being addressed that way--status differentials dependent on visual cues are minimized. I think it is one of the positives of the medium.
Gotta go get ready for today's class now...
Saturday, October 1, 2011
Resistance...
"When they poured across the border,
I was cautioned to surrender.
This I could not do.
I took my gun and vanished."
This one is going to be a little roundabout.
The text is from a song by Leonard Cohen, "The Partisan."
I had known his music but not him. Anyone who has listened singers from Jennifer Warnes to Johnny Cash has heard covers of his songs. I finally caught up because of a cartoonish super hero movie that came out two or three summers ago that used Cohen's rendition of one of his most covered songs, "Hallelujah!" for a love making scene. The movie wasn't particularly good, but the song caught me and I downloaded "The Best of..." album to my ipod and played it pretty much constantly for the next few weeks much to my wife's annoyance.
This week in the graduate class I teach online we were studying a case that featured issues around feedback and resistance, and I got into a conversation with one of my students about someone in a case she characterized as "stuck in his ways" and having to be coerced to perform, and by extension of course to a supposed many such unmotivated employees. I spent some time, I'm not sure very successfully, asking her to look underneath her diagnosis, to answer the question "why?"
So, as I have often done in my work, I myself began to reconsider the issue of resistance. I remember reading many years ago an article by someone well known in my field to the effect that "there is no such thing as resistance," that what we experience as resistance is actually a rational response to change that brings with it the prospect of loss. While I think this was mainly a device to do the same thing I was trying to do with my student--consider the causes of what we see as resistance--I do remember the article as a useful thing to keep in mind in such instances.
Of course in any serious consideration of the idea, one has, I think, to look to the laboratory at hand, one's self, to do the inquiry justice. Which led me this morning to think about the song quoted above. Nominally a narrative tale of a partisan in "resistance," it seems to me a very useful allegory for the self in resistance.
"When they poured across the border,..."
When I get assaulted by feedback dissonant with how I experience myself... when my borders/boundaries are penetrated by criticism...
"I was cautioned to surrender..."
A more conservative and cautious voice inside of me says to give up to it...
"This I could not do...."
But ego, good old ego, says "no." For preservation of self, I cannot do that...
"I took my gun and vanished...."
Which is one way certain to avoid the penetrating event and not have to deal with it. I think of how often I may have done that. Probably lots more than I want to admit... taking my gun and vanishing.
Interestingly, later in the song comes this line:
"... the frontiers are my prison..."
This is, I think, the consequence of being unable or unwilling to take what our environment and the people in it tell us about us and consider it and integrate it. The self cannot grow and its frontiers/boundaries become our prison.
Saturday morning with 11 months to go to 70...
I was cautioned to surrender.
This I could not do.
I took my gun and vanished."
This one is going to be a little roundabout.
The text is from a song by Leonard Cohen, "The Partisan."
I had known his music but not him. Anyone who has listened singers from Jennifer Warnes to Johnny Cash has heard covers of his songs. I finally caught up because of a cartoonish super hero movie that came out two or three summers ago that used Cohen's rendition of one of his most covered songs, "Hallelujah!" for a love making scene. The movie wasn't particularly good, but the song caught me and I downloaded "The Best of..." album to my ipod and played it pretty much constantly for the next few weeks much to my wife's annoyance.
This week in the graduate class I teach online we were studying a case that featured issues around feedback and resistance, and I got into a conversation with one of my students about someone in a case she characterized as "stuck in his ways" and having to be coerced to perform, and by extension of course to a supposed many such unmotivated employees. I spent some time, I'm not sure very successfully, asking her to look underneath her diagnosis, to answer the question "why?"
So, as I have often done in my work, I myself began to reconsider the issue of resistance. I remember reading many years ago an article by someone well known in my field to the effect that "there is no such thing as resistance," that what we experience as resistance is actually a rational response to change that brings with it the prospect of loss. While I think this was mainly a device to do the same thing I was trying to do with my student--consider the causes of what we see as resistance--I do remember the article as a useful thing to keep in mind in such instances.
Of course in any serious consideration of the idea, one has, I think, to look to the laboratory at hand, one's self, to do the inquiry justice. Which led me this morning to think about the song quoted above. Nominally a narrative tale of a partisan in "resistance," it seems to me a very useful allegory for the self in resistance.
"When they poured across the border,..."
When I get assaulted by feedback dissonant with how I experience myself... when my borders/boundaries are penetrated by criticism...
"I was cautioned to surrender..."
A more conservative and cautious voice inside of me says to give up to it...
"This I could not do...."
But ego, good old ego, says "no." For preservation of self, I cannot do that...
"I took my gun and vanished...."
Which is one way certain to avoid the penetrating event and not have to deal with it. I think of how often I may have done that. Probably lots more than I want to admit... taking my gun and vanishing.
Interestingly, later in the song comes this line:
"... the frontiers are my prison..."
This is, I think, the consequence of being unable or unwilling to take what our environment and the people in it tell us about us and consider it and integrate it. The self cannot grow and its frontiers/boundaries become our prison.
Saturday morning with 11 months to go to 70...
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Siblingenlied...
The various relationship between siblings fascinate me. I've always envied folks who have great loyal relationship with their brothers and sisters. Yet from the small sample I know about, that is less common than I might have expected. I am somewhat estranged from my three years younger sister and eight years younger brother. Not that we had a lot going for us. We were split up to the four winds when I was 16 and reared in diffrent circumstances, none of which were particularly wonderful.
I was apparently seen as the one who "escaped" first and somewhat resented for it. In later years I became a surrogate for my alcoholic father and that certainly didn't help much. You want evidence? Consider the Father's Day call where my sister came out to me even putting her partner at the time on the phone to me without much by way of introduction. That was pretty classic, as she often did things when we were growing up designed to provoke a reaction. I suspect that this time she was disappointed in the lack of disapproval. For a while she and my brother were close but some kind of meltdown occurred when he and his third wife were staying with her and now they don't speak. I don't know much more than that, except that since my brother became a christian he has decided that his sister "really isn't gay because she's not in a relationship." This is a smart man, believe it or not.
For his part my brother and I have an off again on again relationship which seems to flower between his marriages. The second wife actively interceded in my efforts to stay in touch with him, keeping my letters away from him and intercepting phone calls and not putting him on the phone even when I could hear him in the background. "Blood doesn't count," was her line. Best time I had with him during that relationship was at my younger son's wedding when they arrived late and a few sheets to the wind. My wife kept her busy while I had a chance to talk to my brother. New wife has some struggles of her own and he has been hammered by successive bouts of unemployment and underemployment that have left him pretty resentful in general. Hard to figure out how to relate.
My own sons seem to be beginning to get along. They certainly have little reason to. Unknown to both parents the older one spent much of his school years being bullied and rather than asking for help decided that that entitled him to abuse his younger brother and threaten worse if parents were told. Maybe they will get to a place where they can depend on each other in need.
My wife's sons struggle as well, though there is an issue with alcohol for one of them that tends to introduce a kind of bipolarity in the relationship. Her relationship with her siblings is mixed, also the oldest, she was born in a family where sons counted more than daughters and had paid a heavy price as a result. Could be ethnic culture, but we have a daughter-in-law of the same ethnicity who has brothers who would die for her and are intensely loyal and protective.
I guess families are really a mixed bag, a spin of the roulette wheel with extra double zeroes. We have friends with children who are close and fun together and all round decent kids. My mother's siblings did a lot to help each other out throughout their lives, while my father's were a toxic alcoholic brew of antipathy and resentment.
Just musing on this. It has been on my mind for some reason.
I was apparently seen as the one who "escaped" first and somewhat resented for it. In later years I became a surrogate for my alcoholic father and that certainly didn't help much. You want evidence? Consider the Father's Day call where my sister came out to me even putting her partner at the time on the phone to me without much by way of introduction. That was pretty classic, as she often did things when we were growing up designed to provoke a reaction. I suspect that this time she was disappointed in the lack of disapproval. For a while she and my brother were close but some kind of meltdown occurred when he and his third wife were staying with her and now they don't speak. I don't know much more than that, except that since my brother became a christian he has decided that his sister "really isn't gay because she's not in a relationship." This is a smart man, believe it or not.
For his part my brother and I have an off again on again relationship which seems to flower between his marriages. The second wife actively interceded in my efforts to stay in touch with him, keeping my letters away from him and intercepting phone calls and not putting him on the phone even when I could hear him in the background. "Blood doesn't count," was her line. Best time I had with him during that relationship was at my younger son's wedding when they arrived late and a few sheets to the wind. My wife kept her busy while I had a chance to talk to my brother. New wife has some struggles of her own and he has been hammered by successive bouts of unemployment and underemployment that have left him pretty resentful in general. Hard to figure out how to relate.
My own sons seem to be beginning to get along. They certainly have little reason to. Unknown to both parents the older one spent much of his school years being bullied and rather than asking for help decided that that entitled him to abuse his younger brother and threaten worse if parents were told. Maybe they will get to a place where they can depend on each other in need.
My wife's sons struggle as well, though there is an issue with alcohol for one of them that tends to introduce a kind of bipolarity in the relationship. Her relationship with her siblings is mixed, also the oldest, she was born in a family where sons counted more than daughters and had paid a heavy price as a result. Could be ethnic culture, but we have a daughter-in-law of the same ethnicity who has brothers who would die for her and are intensely loyal and protective.
I guess families are really a mixed bag, a spin of the roulette wheel with extra double zeroes. We have friends with children who are close and fun together and all round decent kids. My mother's siblings did a lot to help each other out throughout their lives, while my father's were a toxic alcoholic brew of antipathy and resentment.
Just musing on this. It has been on my mind for some reason.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
The Universe Doesn't Give a Sh*t!
Here we go--from the mundane to the ertzatz sublime.
In one of those big public workshops someone was whining about the tsouris in his life and the trainer said, "The stars don't care. Look up at the sky when you leave tonight. Ask if the stars care. They don't." It was sort of a shocking moment and I sat there thinking, "He's right. The universe doesn't give a shit."
Later on doing some academic work in semiotics, the meanings of things, and narrative studies it anchored for me.
The meaning we make is the meaning we make. That's all there is.
That could seem bleak, but it doesn't feel that way to me. It informs my beliefs and politics and how I try to live in the world. If that's all there is then shouldn't we be doing our damnedest to make what we do have during our short tenure mean something? If that's all there is why don't we work together to make things better for each other?
I used to have a list on my office wall. I still have it on my computer. It was Sheldon Kopp's ‘A Partial Register of the 927 (or was it 928?) Eternal Truths’ from his book "If You Meet Buddha on the Road, Kill Him." I won't reproduce it here. You can find it in multiple places on the web. But there are a few of the 43 items he listed that bear and are worth repeating anyway.
We make our meaning. If you have to have a big father figure in the sky to give you meaning, fine; but either way you and I are not likely to be having this conversation in the hereafter. If you are right, I'm pretty sure to be in that other place. If I am, we will be quietly decomposing and giving up our atoms to the universe, which doesn't give a shit, remember?
I heard a beautiful man give a sermon once entitled, "If Thine 'I' Offend Thee..." in which he played with the biblical passage about plucking out the offending "eye." He told us to look around the room. That for some of us we would only pass this way once, we would only intersect with the person next to us once. He suggested that letting our 'I' get in the way of making the human connection that was possible in the moment called for "plucking it out."
So I guess this post is about ego. The arrogance of ego is an overwhelming force in our interactions with one another that we could well do without. Even if the stars don't care, it would make our world a better place.
Now, just where is that rock?
In one of those big public workshops someone was whining about the tsouris in his life and the trainer said, "The stars don't care. Look up at the sky when you leave tonight. Ask if the stars care. They don't." It was sort of a shocking moment and I sat there thinking, "He's right. The universe doesn't give a shit."
Later on doing some academic work in semiotics, the meanings of things, and narrative studies it anchored for me.
The meaning we make is the meaning we make. That's all there is.
That could seem bleak, but it doesn't feel that way to me. It informs my beliefs and politics and how I try to live in the world. If that's all there is then shouldn't we be doing our damnedest to make what we do have during our short tenure mean something? If that's all there is why don't we work together to make things better for each other?
I used to have a list on my office wall. I still have it on my computer. It was Sheldon Kopp's ‘A Partial Register of the 927 (or was it 928?) Eternal Truths’ from his book "If You Meet Buddha on the Road, Kill Him." I won't reproduce it here. You can find it in multiple places on the web. But there are a few of the 43 items he listed that bear and are worth repeating anyway.
- We have only ourselves, and one another. That may not be much, but that’s all there is.
- How strange that so often it all seems worth it.
- We must live within the ambiguity of partial freedom, partial power, and partial knowledge.
- All important decisions must be made on the basis of insufficient data.
- Yet we are responsible for everything we do.
- No excuses will be accepted.
- You can run, but you can’t hide.
- It is most important to run out of scapegoats.
- We must learn the power of living with our helplessness.
- The only victory lies in surrender to oneself.
- All significant battles are fought within oneself.
- You are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.
- What at do you know … for sure … anyway?
- Learn to forgive yourself, again and again and again and again…
We make our meaning. If you have to have a big father figure in the sky to give you meaning, fine; but either way you and I are not likely to be having this conversation in the hereafter. If you are right, I'm pretty sure to be in that other place. If I am, we will be quietly decomposing and giving up our atoms to the universe, which doesn't give a shit, remember?
I heard a beautiful man give a sermon once entitled, "If Thine 'I' Offend Thee..." in which he played with the biblical passage about plucking out the offending "eye." He told us to look around the room. That for some of us we would only pass this way once, we would only intersect with the person next to us once. He suggested that letting our 'I' get in the way of making the human connection that was possible in the moment called for "plucking it out."
So I guess this post is about ego. The arrogance of ego is an overwhelming force in our interactions with one another that we could well do without. Even if the stars don't care, it would make our world a better place.
Now, just where is that rock?
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Typos...
I suppose this could be a paradigm for life in general, but it comes up because I seem to catch typos in these posts after they have been posted, usually when they show up in an email from a reader. Sometimes I think they are as persistent as bed bugs. I found one that had been hiding out in my LinkedIn profile for at least a year, and had even escaped a public review of the post at a workshop where my profile had been used as an example. Spell check doesn't help much and I think it tends to make you lazy about hunting them down. Besides, this blogger doesn't have one and when I do these in word and paste I don't like what happens to the font.
Usually I read them aloud, preferably to someone else, like my wife. She can also be a help in fixing something wacky I've written. Recently someone asked me for advice about writing her blog and this was one of the things I suggested. The other was about getting ahead of deadlines, self-imposed or otherwise by banking a few posts ahead. [BTW, my savings account is nearly depleted, so these may come a little less frequently.]
The reading aloud thing I got during my first job out of college. I was an "assistant to" an old PR guy at a bank. After he first spent several weeks evicerating my copy with a pencil and I started to get better, he would have me read what I had written aloud. I'd catch my own now less frequent gaffes when I did it. If he wanted to be a little snarky about something, he'd read them aloud, exaggerating my punctuation choices. Ouch! "I'm an anti-comma guy," he'd announce, when deconstructing one of my run on compound-complex sentences. He was a character. A gentleman C's Harvard grad in the late thirties, he'd served on the fast battleships in the Pacific as a Lieutenant Junior Grade. Having been trapped in an ammunition hoist at some point with live ammunition, he never took elevators. Fortunately our building was only nine stories. He had worked for a by then folded city newspaper and done a stint doing PR for Ford during the Edsel days. I remember feeling particularly pleased the day I got a piece of copy by him without a pencil mark or an argument.
For someone who got put in remedial reading in third grade, I started writing well by my high school years. College sharpened my skills. Two people should be acknowledged. One was my seventh grade English teacher. I don't know if they still teach kids how to diagram sentences, but she was a sentence parser par excellence. While I still get confused about the technical grammar lingo, I learned something from her about putting words together. My first year in college in one of those big education factory co-op schools--it was what i could afford--the basic English writing class they had was brilliant. It was brilliantly taught for my section by a young instructor who was absolutely committed to teaching it well. Basically, we spent our class time writing and then reading aloud what we had written. We might have been given a topic to think about or not, but we just wrote.
I got pretty good, to the point where one grad school prof used to tease me that he sometimes wasn't sure that I was writing brilliance or bullshit, but that whichever it was it was superbly written. My ability made me a little lazy about studying, because I knew in a pinch, that I could knock off a 1500 word paper in a sitting. I knew I was good at it, but I had no idea how good until I started reading student papers as an instructor. I really do wonder about our school system now.
Anyway, I started this with something to the effect that typos and finding escaped ones is a "paradigm for life." I'm not exactly sure where I was going with that, but it's something like this. We make little not very visible mistakes all the time, at least I do. Catching them before, during, or after making them takes some effort. It used to take a lot more in the days of typewriters and carbon paper. Our technology has made it easy to be sloppy because it has made things easy to fix. Bad habit for those mistakes that aren't in photons on a screen. I think I want to keep working at attending to this. You can do what you like, but for me, cleaning up after myself feels like the right thing to do.
Kind of a silly little musing, but there it is.
Usually I read them aloud, preferably to someone else, like my wife. She can also be a help in fixing something wacky I've written. Recently someone asked me for advice about writing her blog and this was one of the things I suggested. The other was about getting ahead of deadlines, self-imposed or otherwise by banking a few posts ahead. [BTW, my savings account is nearly depleted, so these may come a little less frequently.]
The reading aloud thing I got during my first job out of college. I was an "assistant to" an old PR guy at a bank. After he first spent several weeks evicerating my copy with a pencil and I started to get better, he would have me read what I had written aloud. I'd catch my own now less frequent gaffes when I did it. If he wanted to be a little snarky about something, he'd read them aloud, exaggerating my punctuation choices. Ouch! "I'm an anti-comma guy," he'd announce, when deconstructing one of my run on compound-complex sentences. He was a character. A gentleman C's Harvard grad in the late thirties, he'd served on the fast battleships in the Pacific as a Lieutenant Junior Grade. Having been trapped in an ammunition hoist at some point with live ammunition, he never took elevators. Fortunately our building was only nine stories. He had worked for a by then folded city newspaper and done a stint doing PR for Ford during the Edsel days. I remember feeling particularly pleased the day I got a piece of copy by him without a pencil mark or an argument.
For someone who got put in remedial reading in third grade, I started writing well by my high school years. College sharpened my skills. Two people should be acknowledged. One was my seventh grade English teacher. I don't know if they still teach kids how to diagram sentences, but she was a sentence parser par excellence. While I still get confused about the technical grammar lingo, I learned something from her about putting words together. My first year in college in one of those big education factory co-op schools--it was what i could afford--the basic English writing class they had was brilliant. It was brilliantly taught for my section by a young instructor who was absolutely committed to teaching it well. Basically, we spent our class time writing and then reading aloud what we had written. We might have been given a topic to think about or not, but we just wrote.
I got pretty good, to the point where one grad school prof used to tease me that he sometimes wasn't sure that I was writing brilliance or bullshit, but that whichever it was it was superbly written. My ability made me a little lazy about studying, because I knew in a pinch, that I could knock off a 1500 word paper in a sitting. I knew I was good at it, but I had no idea how good until I started reading student papers as an instructor. I really do wonder about our school system now.
Anyway, I started this with something to the effect that typos and finding escaped ones is a "paradigm for life." I'm not exactly sure where I was going with that, but it's something like this. We make little not very visible mistakes all the time, at least I do. Catching them before, during, or after making them takes some effort. It used to take a lot more in the days of typewriters and carbon paper. Our technology has made it easy to be sloppy because it has made things easy to fix. Bad habit for those mistakes that aren't in photons on a screen. I think I want to keep working at attending to this. You can do what you like, but for me, cleaning up after myself feels like the right thing to do.
Kind of a silly little musing, but there it is.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
A Random Rant of Sorts
I recently obtained a certification in my field that I had been avoiding getting for most of my career. I considered the process something of a racket, and having successfully achieved it, I still do. The certifying body charges a substantial fee for taking a multiple choice examination that is difficult, not because the content is particulary difficult, but because the question forms are purposely tricky, often with double negative wording and answers known in the prep groups as distractors.
Besides charging a substantial fee for the test, the same organization makes considerable money selling prep materials and courses, which one has to make use of because the exam is based on "the world according to [insert organization name]." It's all based on the models developed in the medical and legal professions, but I suspect as difficult as bar exams are supposed to be, they are not quite so mickey mouse. And I don't know for sure but I don't think the bar exams are proprietary products.
It's all done in the name of "certifying" that a given practitioner supposedly knows something about what he or she is doing. I can understand that, having spent much of my career in an allied "profession" that has no gating mechanism and has all kinds of people claiming that they are [insert acronym] consultants. As regular readers here are aware, I did a lot of human potential personal development in the seventies and eighties. It annoyed me no end when someone who had taken three weekend workshops would stand up and announce that "I am an [acronym] consultant.]" I spent two graduate programs and years of doing the work, and what they knew about the foundations and principles would have filled a small thimble.
I had someone I considered a friend, who was also a bit of a dilletante about any number of professional personas he assumed in his working life, announce one evening that he was an [acronym] consultant. I kept myself from going completely ballistic, but I demurred.
The cert exam in this allied field still seems to me a racket to make money for the organization. Saying that passing their tricked up test says that the certified person can actually do the work is like saying that someone that passes the written drivers test can actually drive. It may or may not be true, and it certainly says very little about the quality of their driving.
And I am annoyed that this practice is closing doors for me. Much of what I do involves working closely with people and coaching them about what they are doing. Well now there is a cottage industry of coaching "programs" and there is a "coaching certification," etc. etc. For the last two decades in professional networking meetings I have heard people who you probably would not want to have walk your dog announce how "coaching" was the cure for everything from acne to bad leadership skills, and I'm sitting there thinking how this activity was an integral part of my practice and wondering whether it was being co-opted by a mickey-d franchise operation. We now have "life coaches" and "retirement coaches," and a raft of others. And mind you "it isn't therapy" as they seriously assert. Not sure if it does not use the tools and principles of applied social psychology how it works exactly. Maybe we should change that old saw to "if you can't do, teach, and if you can't teach, coach."
I know there's a lot of snake oil being sold out there. And I know that it is sometimes hard to tell if the person who wants to work with you knows what they are doing or is a bs artist. Frankly, though, I don't think certification exams, especially proprietary ones, are going to get you out of that dilemma; especially if they are themselves more snake oil.
Rant over.
Besides charging a substantial fee for the test, the same organization makes considerable money selling prep materials and courses, which one has to make use of because the exam is based on "the world according to [insert organization name]." It's all based on the models developed in the medical and legal professions, but I suspect as difficult as bar exams are supposed to be, they are not quite so mickey mouse. And I don't know for sure but I don't think the bar exams are proprietary products.
It's all done in the name of "certifying" that a given practitioner supposedly knows something about what he or she is doing. I can understand that, having spent much of my career in an allied "profession" that has no gating mechanism and has all kinds of people claiming that they are [insert acronym] consultants. As regular readers here are aware, I did a lot of human potential personal development in the seventies and eighties. It annoyed me no end when someone who had taken three weekend workshops would stand up and announce that "I am an [acronym] consultant.]" I spent two graduate programs and years of doing the work, and what they knew about the foundations and principles would have filled a small thimble.
I had someone I considered a friend, who was also a bit of a dilletante about any number of professional personas he assumed in his working life, announce one evening that he was an [acronym] consultant. I kept myself from going completely ballistic, but I demurred.
The cert exam in this allied field still seems to me a racket to make money for the organization. Saying that passing their tricked up test says that the certified person can actually do the work is like saying that someone that passes the written drivers test can actually drive. It may or may not be true, and it certainly says very little about the quality of their driving.
And I am annoyed that this practice is closing doors for me. Much of what I do involves working closely with people and coaching them about what they are doing. Well now there is a cottage industry of coaching "programs" and there is a "coaching certification," etc. etc. For the last two decades in professional networking meetings I have heard people who you probably would not want to have walk your dog announce how "coaching" was the cure for everything from acne to bad leadership skills, and I'm sitting there thinking how this activity was an integral part of my practice and wondering whether it was being co-opted by a mickey-d franchise operation. We now have "life coaches" and "retirement coaches," and a raft of others. And mind you "it isn't therapy" as they seriously assert. Not sure if it does not use the tools and principles of applied social psychology how it works exactly. Maybe we should change that old saw to "if you can't do, teach, and if you can't teach, coach."
I know there's a lot of snake oil being sold out there. And I know that it is sometimes hard to tell if the person who wants to work with you knows what they are doing or is a bs artist. Frankly, though, I don't think certification exams, especially proprietary ones, are going to get you out of that dilemma; especially if they are themselves more snake oil.
Rant over.
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