Birthday Organ Recital

Happy 69!

Whoopee!

Yeah right...

My friend who has been working his way back from his aneurysm/stroke told me about another colleague, a little older than both of us, who came up with an interesting name for the conversation that men of his/our age have maybe more often than we'd admit to.

He called it the "organ recital." You know, prostate, kidneys, hips, knees, eyes, brain, and (yep) pecker. Was it Shaw who said "youth is wasted on the young?" You have to start dealing with this stuff to start appreciating what it was like to not have to deal with it. This is not to diminish the experience of people I know in their thirties and forties who are dealing with limiting experiences like MS or the kind of diabetes that has to be carefully managed.

It's not all bad. Thanks to a cataract that was probably occluding 80% of my vision in one eye--amazing how we compensate, I hadn't noticed--I now have a new lens in that eye that corrects the astigmatism that it had as well. I can drive and watch a movie without glasses. I hear that hip and knee replacements offer similar improvements.

Alas, Viagra and Cialis do not effectively substitute for the libido of a seventeen year-old, but I'm not sure I mind. Being less focused on that organ has benefits for even those times when you are using it. I may not be the man I was, but I suspect I can be a better lover.

The one thing I find most annoying is how seldom I sleep through the night. Yes, I know, there are medications, but have you paid attention to the side-effects lists? Turns out that by choosing to stop taking Flomax, a medication often prescribed after treatment for prostate cancer, I may have made my lens replacement in that eye possible. Flowmax apparently effects the same kind of muscle tissue that is in the eye and would have made the kind of lens replacement I had much more difficult. So I'm not about to take something daily for the rest of my life "that should not be handled by women, especially women who are pregnant." The bathroom is only about ten steps away. I'm getting good at managing it while only waking up halfway.

I'm also not fond of what has happened to my metabolism. I spent most of my adulthood with a 32 inch waist at 170 to 175 pounds. I did not routinely exercise, though I was active, and I enjoyed cooking and eating. Without changing much of anything I bumped up ten pounds or so in the early nineties, and then added 25 in the last decade leaving me around 215 with a 40 inch waist. Not a figure to feel good about. We work out three mornings a week, but it takes fairly ruthless dieting to get it down to 205. Since I am the cook I am looking at ways to drop the input while keeping the flavor up enough to avoid the always hungry feeling. but I really don't want to make my life about not eating food.


But what we do know is that the clock will not get turned back.

Reading List

When I was coming of age the books that my contemporaries were carrying around were Hesse's "Siddhartha," "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand, and the really smart ones were packing "Being and Nothingness" by Sartre. I could never quite find the energy to work hard enough to understand existentialism, and what I knew of the self-justifying philosophy of Ms. Rand woke up my cynic. Why is it that high priests and priestesses almost always seem to have a philosophy or theology that justifies their oh so human pecadillos?

I was reading "The Alexandria Quartet" and "The Last Temptation of Christ." Something a little orthogonal as usual.

I understand Ms. Rand's rational egoism is back in vogue. Can we expect a reissue of "None Dare Call It Treason" anytime soon? Ooops. Sorry. I did say I was going to stay off of politics.

Sometimes it seemed like there were a limited number of stances toward the world:

• There's no hope anyway so let's all go get stoned.
• We know who the enemy is and we will destroy whoever we need to to root him out.
• Why can't we all just love each other and get along.
• No point in cooperation, life is just a game of FYB and I aim to end up on top.

There were more, of course, but the tension always seemed to be between the collectivist and individualist ones. I was on the collectivist side of things. Funny place for an introverted loner to be. I never could just suck up what I thought I believed in to be a joiner, but I thought that the only way out of things was with the help of others.

Now I'm looking at the shorter part of the journey in front of me. Despite having worked to finally have a meet companion to complete the journey with, more and more what I realize is that this is a journey I will finish alone. No mantras, no formulas, no social arrangements will change that. And there is a nagging thought that absolutely none of it matters.

Depressing? Really?

One of the members of my writing group made the comment last week that this blog is "kinda depressing."

Yeah, well, I guess it is a bit given the general topic. There's an arc none of us will escape. The inevitability of it can lead one to think that way. Or not.

I have been depressed. I can remember times when situational depression came close to disabling me. I know the signs. A lot of "procrasturbation," as one female comic put it, low energy, avoidance of engagement, a feeling of helplessness. Easy to fall into to that. I won't say it hasn't happened in the last 18 months or so. Back in the sixties that ennui had a more fashionable tinge. It was existential. Since the human potential era of the seventies and eighties it has been definitely not fashionable. After all one "creates" the experience of life that one has, and any of that "oh poor me" is just whining, dontcha know?

I get it. Have gotten it numerous times.

Right now I'm looking back at 18 months of unemployment.

(Okay, I have worked some part time, and been engaged in doing volunteer work; but the indignity of the bureaucratic questions required to make the weekly claim for unemployment does take an emotional toll. At least now most of it can take place between me and my computer screen. Twenty years ago I didn't even bother when I had first moved across country--from out of state with a large cash severance. The hoops seemed designed to make you feel like a shiftless bum for trying to collect. Now I'm counting pennies a bit even though I have healthy savings.)

I'm a little angry at being laid off a year ahead of my planned schedule. I'm very aware of my slow bodily decline, despite having pretty good health--some chronic arthritis I manage, a removed skin cancer cell or two, successfully treated prostate cancer. But I'm upright, mobile, still able to enjoy the things that please me like concerts and plays, fishing, travel.

Yeah, this is an inventory.

I remember a friend saying that she felt terrible some of the time because society sends the message that there is nothing so useless as an old woman. I think you could take the gender out of that statement. There's an element of "please disappear and don't be inconvenient for the rest of us" despite the fact that we are healthier longer and don't need to be dependent. And yes, that pisses me off. It should piss you off, too, because your clock is running as well.

Maybe what I am missing here is the issue that so many of my contemporaries have had to deal with--aging parents. I haven't seen the last decline up close, except that I kind of did when I was 17 and 28 when my parents died.

Well, still. I've got mileage left. Be damned if I'm going to go quietly.

So despite the darkness of all this, I don't think I'm depressed about it. Frustrated, a little angry, trying to figure out how to adjust, a little guilty that a younger wife still works, sometimes a bit worried about whether what I've saved will hold up, annoyed at the little ways my body betrays me now.

I am finding ways to be engaged in work that renews me and does something for others, even if I am not getting paid for it; and I'm back at teaching very part time, which has been enjoyable and does make a little money.

Depressing? Nah! Only if we let it be.

Warts—Curmudgeon Redux

Doing this kind of thing feels exposed. Yeah, I haven't attached my name to it so I am still sort of anonymous; but the small circle of friends who get it and read it know who I am and so I'm exposed to them anyway. It's not been without risk. One friend got kinda pissed at me about something I posted. That was not a happy moment for me either.

But here's the thing: without being in your face about it, I don't think this works unless I am at least truthful with the page, regardless of how that might make me look. And one does not have to be self-abegnative about it.

This year celebrates the twentieth with my spouse, though we haven't been married that long. That's about as long as I have been in a live with relationship with anyone. Funny that it doesn't feel like it has been that long. Sometimes it feels like just a very few years. It's whats in my currently available RAM and as a consequence tends to color my world,... a lot.

[In contrast some earlier relationships felt like they lasted a century when the reality was much different.]

My spouse makes friends. She makes lots of friends. She has gotten invited to a christening party by someone she met on a bus. Most of the people in our shared lives are people she made friends of.

I don't make friends. I have friends, but in each case it has taken some conscious effort to enable the relationship, either by me or the other. I'm just not an effusive connector. If I meet you once, I'll be lucky to remember your name even if I like you. More people know me than I know, and sometimes that's embarassing. I'm gotten pretty unashamed about saying, "Look, I'm sorry, but I don't remember who you are or where we met. Can you help me out?" When I have a place and a role to play, like a job where I work with lots of people, I'll remember names and things about the people.

I think she has more patience than me about people in general, which is really funny because of how often she doesn't seem to have much with me--patience that is.

I would like to think of myself as tolerant and generous and an all round good fellow; and I know I'm not. I have no patience for incompetence other than my own (funny thing about that), though I am actually a supportive and encouraging teacher and coach. In the crowd on the street I am full of (mostly negative) judgments. I talk to the television, angrily, especially about the fallacious PAC ads during campaign season, but also about the medication ads where the list of cautions and side effects takes half of the time to recite.

I'm not Eyore, but I'm pretty much a cynic about just about everything. I guess the way I figured the world was at a pretty early age, was that it was a kind of massive con job and threat, that if I wasn't on guard all of the time I was going to get taken advantage of, ripped off, cheated, etc. etc. Guess what? I got ripped off and cheated anyway. Vigilance may help but mostly I think it causes acid reflux.

So I'm a grump. I'm not an unpleasant mean grump. I can be taken out in polite company. Just don't expect me to be able to hold up for long when the room is full of people I don't know. And even among friends I can sometimes say some moody off-the-wall thing that probably puts people's teeth on edge. I'm sorry probably isn't good enough for that, and I am sorry. You'll never know how much and how embarassed I am. And it's no saving grace to be like the little girl with the curl if when you are bad you are horrid.

So it's pretty amazing to me that this woman loves me. Sometimes I don't believe it. It's a way of making things safer that actually doesn't work. There have been others. I didn't believe them either.

So maybe that's where this is leading me. I suspect that despite wanting to be liked myself, that I don't like others much until I get to know them (hard for me), and I really don't get that they like me much. I don't believe it. There's a connection there.

On Getting Laid Off at 67

In a way this whole blog is partly about this, but I haven't really looked at it directly.

I have been laid off three times in my career, and taken a separation deal once. The latter was my own choice and was a pretty sweet financial deal that let me relocate to Seattle at 48. The first layoff was expected as the job had been a temporary stepping stone when I was just a few years out of grad school. The last two were in my last two jobs when I was 61 and 67 respectively. Both were blows.

Age discrimination is a reality in employment. The people doing the initial screening are all in their twenties and thirties so that anyone over 55 looks like their parents to them; and you know what we all thought of our parents when we were that age. So you hear the word "overqualified" a lot, even when you are interested in doing the work for the money offered. It can be easy to end up angry all the time, especially when there is no evidence that the people we elect to help address things like the economy are interested in anything but their ideologies.

[Disclaimer: I have no interest in having this blog be about politics, and that last statement was not intended to represent a partisan position. It is just that I don't think any of them are doing their jobs.]

But back to being laid off. In both recent cases I knew it was coming. In one, the recruitment of a new executive enabled the execution of a political vendetta that had been simmering for a long time. I was only one of several people targeted. I did just happen to be the oldest. This kind of thing begets anger in any circumstance, but I was also scheduled for prostate surgery in a month, and compelled to smile at my assassin while he delivered a patronizing "Up in the Air" style, "this happens to everyone" speech. A twelve month plus job search landed me the last job I was laid off from.

It was supposed to be temporary to begin with but was extended into regular employment because the work they wanted took longer than they had planned before hiring me, and there were other things they wanted me to do once I was there. The 2008 meltdown impacted the company and they had to do some serious budget cutting. I was expensive, and old, and working on some things that while needing doing could be deferred, so I became part of an $18 million budget cut (something around 6% of the company's revenues).

It all makes sense. Even the political one was not entirely unreasonable and would have happened a few months later during a merger anyway. But what happens is you get pushed up against the whole idea that your worth is defined by your employment, and repeatedly informed that you're not worth enough for someone to even consider employing you. Might tend to make you angry, or depressed, or any number of other negative emotions.

I think that being my age and nominally of the age to retire may have made it a bit easier for me. I can play to the expectations of being a person of an age to retire. The problem is that I don't want to. I still have value to offer and knowledge that can make a difference.

The world of work makes a big mistake about this and it is going to be a bigger and bigger one as the baby boom generation reaches my age. All that talent and skill can make a difference. None of that talent and skill deserves to be thrown away. But as long as the opportunities they present to us are people killing full-time positions (nominally 40 hours a week but really 50 or 55) I can see why they would have reservations about us decrepit ones. But it's ridiculous. Competence and value doesn't dole out like piecework. There is no clock on wisdom or skill.

So I have found ways to bring my value to a game, if not the game. I do it with writing, with pro bono work, with keeping myself sharp by studying and reading.

I'm certainly not planning on holding my breath for the employment world to wake up.

Why I Fish

Truth? I am not a terribly avid flyfisher. My wife is much more driven to it, and I introduced her to it. But I do enjoy it.

Like a lot of "guy" things, the equipment intensiveness of it is half of the fun. My wife enjoys that as much as I do. This last trip she discovered a new type of fly floatant. We each have a small collection of rods, and each have a favorite. Mine is a delicate one weight that makes me feel like a champion caster.

I don't suppose I am really expert, but after 25 years of it, I am competent. I'm fussy about when and where I fish. Fair weather, reasonable temperatures, a stony bottomed stream that isn't too hard to get to are all requirements. It's nice to have a hatch going that I can recognize enough to find something similar on one of my boxes of flies.

I tie on with arthritic fingers and eyes still good enough to thread the hook eye and tie the special knot that secures the fly—five turns, through the bight and then through the loop, wet it before pulling tight on end, hook, and standing line (you have to use teeth as a third hand)—and then I step into the water. I fish dry flies. You can't get those lovely looped casts with the junk you have to tie on to fish nymphs. But sometimes I'll make the concession of tying on another fly behind the dry—a dropper that trails 12 to 18 inches behind the main fly.

Standing in cool moving water up to your knees or even a little higher is soothing. It seems to drain the tension out of me better than the best of massages. Then the prayer wheel like motion begins. Back cast to one o'clock, forward to ten. the line moves out behind and then extends in front in a long flat loop leaving the fly at the end a few inches above the surface to settle with the slightest break in the moving water. That's if I have done it right. I seem to get it about one out of every two or three times, and if I am settled into the easy zone of it, several times in a row, each one placing the feathered lure into a slightly different location.

If a fish rises to that very first cast, I am not likely to be able to set the hook. I'm not ready. I'm still settling in to the river and its rhythms, but if one rises there will be another. Yet it doesn't matter that much if I catch or how many or how big. It's nice to be successful that way, but the value of the moment has more to do with where I am and how it feels than it does with the "catching." One morning this last trip I took a very small brown trout in the Big Hole near a spot we like. I held the river's life in my hand to gently remove the hook and then released him to swim away with a flick of his tail. It felt good to be in the river again.

Flyfishing and the Night Sky

I was going to title this with Norman MacLean's "A River Runs Through It," but on reflection this seems a better choice. It's the last evening of our more or less annual trip to Montana, ostensibly to stand in water and flyfish, but it has become more of a general decompression, not that mr. semi-retired not quite old guy has the same needs to decompress. We've just had a delightful dinner with dear friends, one who I think is doing what she can to mentor my halting progress as a writer; the other a man who performed wedding vows with us some years ago.

On the way back to our little cabin I was thinking about my relationship with flyfishing and deciding to write something about it. I was setting up the laptop to write when my wife called me outside to look at the stars and something in that moment intersected. We don't see the stars in the city, at least not as many as one can see when there are not street lights or highway glare to hide them. And while I suppose one could cast a fly someplace in the city where I live, one is very unlikely to flyfish there.

But the stars and flyfishing intersect in another and more personal way.

Like many boys my age when I was growing up I had a fascination with the stars. This was well before Sputnik and the race to the moon—now 50-60 years behind us—so we learned about astronomy. One town I lived in when I was about 12 actually had a planetarium in the little local museum. It was free and I would go as often as I could. I knew the constellations and where to look for them. I knew about the double star in the bend of the Big Dipper, and the funny name of the star in Orion's shoulder, even where the tiny streak of light that was the Andromeda Galaxy could be found. I remember very little of it now, and sometimes forget to look up when there is an opportunity to see the stars.

My practice as a flyfisher is more recent, but for the record predates the release of the movie based on the MacLean book. My history with the idea of it goes back to about the same time as my fascination with the stars.

My father took me fishing when I was about nine or ten, but not flyfishing. Like most activities with him, it took place where alcohol was available in liberal quantities. In this case on a "deep sea" party boat with a liberally stocked cooler and a collection of men of similar mind as the old man.

Later when I was 13 or so and living in a small town in the South with my mother, I used to be fascinated with the strange light weight rods and reels in part of the fishing equipment section of the Western Auto store. I was there to buy a couple of pennies worth of fishing line and bobbers and hooks to use on a bamboo pole. My friends didn't know what the funny rods and reels were either. They coveted the spin casting gear at the other end of the display. But we both would take our bamboo poles, red and white plastic bobbers, and plain hooks to a local pond full of Blue Gills" and "Crappie." Someone would have dug worms or we'd catch grasshoppers in an adjacent field, and carefully concealing any squeamishness from each other, we'd bait our hooks with the live bait, toss the lines in and settle down to wait for a bobber to go under.

Fast forward thirty years. I was in a men's group and one of the men started talking about flyfishing. I asked him if he would teach me and some weeks later at a backyard barbeque he taught me the basics of casting. He was not particularly encouraging of my ability, which seemed odd to me, but a few weeks later I was on a trip to the "River of No Return Wilderness" in Idaho, and was determined to try.

In Boise the day before a float down the Salmon River I found a sporting goods store that carried fishing gear and asked a clerk for help. He sold me a basic rod and reel and all of the leaders and tippets and lures he thought I might need to get started. It wasn't much, but the key to it all was a comic book guide called The Curtis Creek Manifesto. It was an easy to follow encyclopedic guide to everything from how to tie the basic knots, to sneaking up on the wily trout techniques. I studied it in the hotel that night.

Later, on an upstream ride from the river to a mountain camp, the wrangler guide suggested a pool for me to try my luck in, and when I caught several small trout, showed me how to clean them and leave them on a stringer in the stream that night so we could have them for breakfast.

I don't keep what I catch anymore, but I still fish.

Tempus Fugit Redux

I remember when time seemed to take forever. The years of adolescence were a nightmare of slowness that felt like they would never end. College seemed to take aeons to finish. (It did take me 5 years.) My eleven years in the one company I loved seemed like a pretty long time.

My last twenty years has gone by in a blip, a moment hardly recognized or appreciated as it passed. Funny. That twenty years has seen me reach a financial solvency that would have been unimaginable the year I graduated from college. It has featured the most durable relationship with a partner. But it has been a blip.

I remember events from 20 or 25 years ago as if they were yesterday. From where i stand, it was yesterday.

So if you are a twenty something, don't worry. Things will speed up. It will all be over before you know it.

I do have a talent for depressing myself.

What comes to mind are names: C. M., 30s, would be priest killed with his family in a car accident; J. W., 30's, a mother, drowned in a car accident; G. B. 40s?, an unloved female colleague, suicide; B. M. 40s?, a friend of my wife's, suicide by pills and drowning; J. V., 50ish?, client and friend, suicide by gun;... My own mother and father should be on the list, gone at 46 and 53 or so. 

How many are we now? Going on 7 billion. I guess everything is all a matter of perspective.

On the Road

In the interest of full disclosure, you should know that I write these as the spirit moves me and I schedule them to be published ahead so that I'm not putting something up every day and I'm not going a long time between posts because the spirit has been off moving someone else. I've said this before but just wanted to make it clear again.

Today (which when this is published will be last week or the week before) I am looking out the window of a cabin toward the Pioneer Mountains, one of the series of ranges in southwestern Montana near the confluence of the headwaters of the Missouri river. We've come here to this area most years since the mid nineties. We've come to this cabin for the last three years. A small creek, tributary to the Beaverhead River runs by the front of it. The Beaverhead is a tromp through a couple of fields and over a couple of fences away. The formation which gives the river its name can be seen from the front porch of the cabin. Beaverhead Rock was what Sacagawea recognized as the summer campground of her people when she arrived here with the Corps of Discovery with Lewis and Clark.

After 24 years I am beginning to feel more like a westerner. I am still not, could not be, will never be wholly; but what is so is that these grand western scenes are feeling more like home to me.

I am a transplanted New Englander. It's where I was born and where I lived much of my adult life, and where I never thought I would leave once I found my way back to it. I went from Maine to the suburbs of New York City as a young child, living on Long Island and later in Connecticut. When my parents split up I went with my mother to Kentucky and what in my memory feels like ten years of hell, but in reality was only about four and a half. Kentucky may have been a "border state" but bible belt memories are long and they were still fighting the Civil War in the mid fifties. I was known as "Conneticutt" or "Conn" for short my first two years there, and worse in another one horse three church no movie theater town we moved to later. Getting back to New England with my father was a partial answer to prayers even if living with him and his drinking was less than ideal. I have no good memories of my time in Dixie.

From 1959 until 1987 I either lived in Boston and environs or within 60 miles of it. It's where I graduated from high school and where I went to college and my first round of grad school, and where I began what became my career. One son still lives there, his mother not far away. I never imagined leaving. My attachment to Boston survived an intense long distance relationship with a woman committed in the same way to New York City. What it did not survive was a work assignment that took me to Seattle, Washington.

In 1987 I began to spend a lot of time in Seattle, and in 1991 I moved there. I had fallen in love with the beauty of the place. It is one of those rare places in the world where snow capped mountains sit in sight of salt water. The city is ringed by the Cascades and the Olympics and lives in intimate relation with Puget Sound and its passages to the Pacific.

I will finish my life here.

It feels more right to me every year, even if I am not and never can be wholly a westerner. But it may be that no one really can. We are pretty much all immigrants here except for Sacagawea's relations, so none of us may be able to fully claim this place. But it does have a way of claiming us.

It happens in those days when Seattle's skies clear and the majesty of a 15000 foot mountain dominates the horizon (more often than the reputation, less often than some residents would want). It happens when you are standing in water casting a line and lose a strike because you are watching an eagle and an osprey dueling in the sky above. It happens when you get off the ferry at little Shaw Island for a short bike ride around the fifteen miles of the island. They may not be doing it now, but when I was there a few years ago, the ferry landing was "manned" by the women members of a religious order. For me it happens every time I drive over the pass from Idaho into Montana, and every time I come through the steep green cleft in the Cascades on the way home.

So I'm still on the road, but I do have a place.

The Inventory Looking Back

So my friend who had pointed me at the death/dying questions, and offered some of his insights to my inquiry, has insights aplenty to offer.

A couple of years ago, maybe a little longer, I called him after not talking to him for quite a while. He launched into the conversation by saying "You don't know what's happened, do you?" To which I said, "No, I guess I don't..." and I really didn't.

He had had an aneurysm at or just after a lunch meeting that would probably have killed him if he hadn't gotten immediate medical treatment. As it was he woke in the hospital to face the prospect of having to relearn to walk, talk, and just do the simple business of daily living. He's a few years younger than me and has always been a pretty impressive guy physically, and while he has a ways yet to go, his commitment to himself is to run and ski again.

What's interesting to me is that while dealing with this lemon that life handed him he has continued to make and sustain honest and mutually satisfaying relationships (like the one we have) and to engage life with his own inquiry about its meaning and value.

So just recently we had a brief version of the "I've been thinking about what kind of difference I have made" conversation, and we arrived at an interesting stopping point. (I won't say conclusion, because the question is still open.) I know if I look back at my life and work there are a lot of interesting, I think valuable, and in the longer view decidedly emphemeral things I have done. That dual career path, the organization redesign, the leadership seminar, etc. etc. were all good work, were all of some value to the organizations and people they touched, and none of it lasted beyond the next year's reorganization or my own moving on to a new role. The corporate world has the attention span of a two year old. Two of the companies where I did my best work don't even exist anymore.

Where we came out in the conversation is that it seems that it has been the small "touches" that probably are the things that have the most value and actually have endured in some way in the people touched. It's the small acts. It's about living in the day to day world as best you can.

Brains and Personality

I caught myself reacting with annoyance and, truth, some envy at a picture in the paper of some 40s something woman who was being promoted to a position of prominence in a major local company. She was laughing gaily, completely on top of the world. My reaction made me wonder whether the Thoreau quote shouldn't be about "the great mass of men [people] lead lives of quiet [seething with resentment.]"

Then I remembered a story told by one of my MBA profs, a kind of a joke.

"You see, there were these two worms in a shovelful of manure headed for the flower bed. Anyway, on the way, one of them drops off and falls between the cracks in the sidewalk. Over the next few months the one in the flower bed gets regular feedings, of well, you know, cow shit; and one day, all fat and happy, sets out for a walk. He's just coming by the crack in the sidewalk when this skinny, scrawny, bedraggled worm finds its way out of the crack."

"The sleek denizen of the flower bed says 'what happened to you?' and hears the sad tale of his shovelmate's travails. Then the scrawny one says, 'how did you...?' At which point his fellow puffs himself up and announces, 'Brains and personality!'"

Make of that what you will, but my read is that an awful lot of what happens to us in this life is pretty random. It is almost as if each of us is one instance in a cosmic experiment to see what turns out how given an infinitely variable set of inputs. And without getting into the politics of income disparity it is clear that some of the experiments get more loaded for success.

So back to my petty resentments. What I have to recognize is that for each instance that I might have that button pushed, there have to be tens, dozens, maybe hundreds of instances when my life and my station in it could have been the stimulus for someone else's resentment. Maybe my only issue with it is that I didn't get the promotion and visibility.

Alright, this is feeling pretty scuzzy. Envy isn't very pretty from any angle. Maybe the better place to be looking is at how I carry my own sense of entitlement around.