EveDestiny's Vox

Outside Tolerances

The human body is a biomechanical device. This image appeals to me, dovetailing so well with conventional parameters of self-care. And indeed, we are just like any other machine: power it, maintain it, repair it, sometimes scrap it.

American culture in particular is truly lousy at optimum biomechanical care. We undervalue it as a concept ("No pain, no gain"), denigrating listening to the body ("Only quitters quit") while simultaneously plugging wholly worthless panaceas as restoratives (night after night on the couch in front of the TV, drinking too much, smoking, driving the Right Car, etc.). It never surprises me that we drop dead en masse of heart failings, gut failings, brain failings. What do we expect, when we treat our bodies as if they were disposable?

Female human body

But what of failings of what I call the "anima?"  I borrow that term from both the Jungians (altho I view it more personally than they do with their "collective unconscious") and Latin, where it means "animating force." Some religious believers would call it the soul, although I suspect most would object to my supposition that it can be less than perfect, that it can fail. Yet it seems absolutely logical that anything affiliated with the body is as capable of disease and abuse as any other "part," whether it can transcend this mortal coil or not. Let's be candid: what the body does affects this mysterious essence, whether we like it or not. Whether it's the love the body falls into, the alcohol the body abuses, the legs the body breaks in a fall or the back that breaks in a car crash. All affect the soul. (I'll use "soul" instead of "anima," since it's the more common term.)

If we can put a man on the moon, I don't understand why we can't take the soul's temperature. (Or why we can't cure the common cold, for that matter, but I digress.) Why can't we more clearly check it for fitness? Is it running a fever? Does it have chronic fatigue syndrome? Us humans, with our oh-so-large brains, can't seem to properly grasp the soul in concept, much less give it proper attention on how it's holding up. We have to guess at it: do I feel blue? Am I tired too much? Have I stopped caring about things that used to be important to me? Do I have any will to keep living?

Even finding a visual representation of this mysterious, crucial component of every sentient human is frustratingly difficult. Go ahead -- Google images for "soul" or "souls" and see what little pops up. The closest folks seem to come is to liken it to the heart. But that's separate and clearly different, with its own set of functions and purpose. Yet we give our "hearts and souls" away to lovers and sports teams and gods and jobs and devils. We talk about "soul searching," but usually we mean "deep thinking" when we use that phrase, confusing the soul with the mind. We say that eyes are "windows to the soul," but we mean something emotional when we invoke that image, and again it seems to confuse the heart with the soul.

We have an art history chock-full of misleading imagery to blame for this confusion, so let's go ahead and blame Memling and Guariento and Raphael and the rest for that enduring muddle. Maybe because we have been so remiss in giving the soul an image that we can wrap our heads around, we have also been remiss in defining the ways we could give our souls the proper care and feeding required for real contentment, true satisfaction.

Swamped_canoe

I suspect my own anima is ailing, but since I can't stick a thermometer in it, I guess at its lack of fitness by how unwieldy it has become. If mine were a boat, it is swamped, full to its gunwales. The slightest wave threatens to put me under for good. I no longer know for sure if I'm hanging onto it, or if it is merely stuck to me.

So I float well outside my tolerances and deploy countermeasures: I try to stay in sunny, still water. I avoid the dramatists, the Cling-ons. I dog-paddle away from the Users and the Slick. I ask the occasional dry, boated passerby for assistance, if they can give any. And I try not to swallow too much water when I take a wave in the face.

While I have slowly exhumed the why's of my soggy soul, what I don't know is how to remedy the inundation, how to "pump it dry," to use the flooded basement term. And since I can't check it into a hospital, I am frequently at a loss at what to do for it. Except to tread water. And bail.

The Lies We Tell

I've heard the book The Things They Carried (Wiki) is outstanding; the gist of the eponymous short story -- that what soldiers were allowed to carry into battle said more about them than words might have. (I don't know that I will ever agree with that truncation of communication ... to me a well-thought-out statement, verbal or written, is worth a proverbial tonnage in gold.) Seems to me that, much more than the contents of pockets or emotions kept locked within hearts and minds, if I were to infer information about someone, I'd be far more inclined to believe what the lies people tell say about them than anything else.

Whatever a person feels moved to "spin?" A person feels moved to hide. And what a person feels moved to hide? Well. That right there is the truth, or as close to it as you'll get from someone who runs from anything that's not carefully groomed and spun and inserted to complete a picture, no matter how fake.

Recently, I've gotten a lot of negative reinforcement around truth, and the telling of it, and about Truth as a general precept of a life well-lived -- that larger ideal, a sense of honesty that we all "say" we value but in fact most spend a great amount of time obfuscating and dodging. I have found that not many people really desire the truth, and a far smaller subset of that actually deserve the truth. You see, anyone supposedly following the "golden rule" but telling layer after layer of thick lies? That person must clearly desire to be lied to.

People don't want to be told the truth if it's not sanitized, plasticized, and modulated. They don't want to hear they are  overweight. They don't want to be told that they are sedentary couch potatoes just like their parents and thus they will likely die of the same ills that felled the parents. They don't want to hear that others find them obnoxious and do not believe the endless stories they tell. They don't want to know that their spouse doesn't love them anymore, and they are the only ones who apparently don't realize this. They don't want to know that the preacher has faults, the boss is stealing, that their children are thieves or on dope. If the truth is unpleasant, then by all means, lie to them. Because there is no reward for telling the truth. There is no pat on the back for trying to help someone extract their heads from the sand or from their own asses. Oh no -- once accustomed to breathing dark, rank air, people seem to grow comfortable with it. They are "fine." Don't mess up the pretty, fragrant la la land they got so flexible in order to reach.

Unfortunately for me, I prefer truth. Unvarnished, unspun truth. Don't spin facts to me; don't try to spin me. I dislike bullshit, and I dislike bullshitters even more, and lately I find my life replete with both. It seems bullshitting is endemic to the human condition! Which makes me even more alien for working hard to avoid liars, to avoid lying to others, or be party to group-fakery.

So here's a head's up -- if you make it a regular practice to lie to the people in your life? You aren't going to be in mine much longer. The odds suggest that you will eventually lie to me, or worse -- you already are.

One lump or two?

We got back in late February from a week's vacation in Nashville, TN. It's a surprising city: part grown-up and part ... something else, but it's making an attempt to outgrow its previous incarnations, and for that I am impressed.

Contextually, I'm no longer "from" the South. While I was raised in Arkansas, I spent the better part of a decade in Connecticut (where I also earned my bachelor's degree) in my mid-20's, and now I've been in the Pac Northwest for going-on-a-decade, and between those two sojourns I've lost most of my Southern accent and *all* of my Southern weirdness. (Well, maybe not *all.* I'll muse some other time on the Southern culture and its gothic tendrils.)

Pretty much all up and down the West Coast, it's not remarkable to be anything different from "straight." In Oregon, where I currently reside, a same-sex couple can be Mostly Married, at least in the state. (The Feds still discriminate against same-sex couples, though, so all you Homophobes can at least celebrate that.) I can kiss my wife (married in Toronto in 2004, so yes, I can call her my 'wife,' I have the marriage license to prove it -- but then, we'd also qualify as common law spouses after nine years together, yes?) in public and hold her hand, and if anyone looks twice at us, I'm not aware of it. When we dine out, there's never any question about whether or not we are "together;" we act and behave just like any other married couple at any other table in any other restaurant in any other city or state. I can't remember the last time I was asked "separate checks?" by a local server.

Then comes a visit to Nashville. Every single establishment, save one (which was in the most progressive part of town and the most sustainably modeled -- local, organically-provenanced food), inquired as to the number of checks at our Table of Two.

Really? I'm thunderstruck. Sure, we weren't macking on each other, tongues in ears or throats, but we touched and held hands. Hell, we even fed each other off our plates. On more than one occasion we told the server we were going to share a dish. We wear matching wedding bands, since, you know, that's what married people usually do. So why the assumption that we might not be paying together?

Some optimistic, idealist reader out there is going to say, "Oh, now, come on. It's easier to inquire as to how many checks than to assume one." And I'll agree with you. In which case, the server with Any Damn Clue will ask "Same check?" NOT the "Two checks?" we got almost every single time we dined out.

Pretend, for a moment, that you go out to eat with your significant other and you are not gay. Or paint this example with any random male and female dining together. Whether they are in a couple or not, how will the server ask about the way the check should be totaled? He or she will almost universally ask -- "Same check?" Or "One check?" Because gods forbid you suggest two people Might Be Gay and Paying on the Same Check when in fact they are Straight! <gasp! choke!> Quelle horreur! The affront! The slur! To suggest someone is more than merely friends, to suggest they are ... gay.

Please.

I challenge anyone to test this hypothesis: that American Culture, especially from Fresno east to NYC, and maybe even beyond, will make the Blind, Bland, Boob assumption that two people of the same gender dining out will not be a couple. Because heaven forbid you call someone GAY when they aren't.

This kind of blinkered-thinking and the inherent disrespect in conveys makes me want to crack some heads. Will that be Two Lumps? Or just One?

The Crying Game

I write this now, after the waiting ended, but not that long ago I was on tenterhooks (@ Dictionary.com).

I'd applied to a coveted MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program in creative writing. At Vanderbilt. One of the hardest to enter programs in the U.S. Fully-funded, it's in the top 50 writing programs, and they take three - THREE - fiction writers each year. This year 615 applied.

The odds were against me, but at the time, hope sprang eternal. And as the deadline to apply came and went, as the responding silence to my application grew heavy like the gray-green air before an ugly summer storm, I tried to make that silence be something it ultimately wasn't -- approval. Acceptance. Validation. I began to daydream about what it would be like to devote every day to writing. To interact with English professors who revered the language and story-telling the way I do, which is with something similar to incandescent religious fervour. I thought about the community I'd join there in Nashville, of the fellow writers I'd meet and influence, and who would also influence me. Of the English classes I could go on and teach with my Masters degree ... it seemed easily within reach. All could commence as soon as that letter of acceptance arrived.

The echoing wait grew oppressive, and I searched the web with fear and longing, seeing posts from others about receiving phone calls already, acceptance calls that were so personal and intimate. It made my hand-wringing treks to the post office for an acceptance letter all the more sad. And still I waited, for some kind of notice that I was in. Or I was out.

Getting the rejection email was a bit like having a door shut quietly but firmly at the end of a heated argument with someone you love. They stop talking and leave the room, and you sit there staring at the door, white noise between your ears where your brain ought to be. It seems strangely final; the emotion behind it is worrisome. Was that closing click of door latch and wood the end of something you can't retrieve? Was this exchange something ruinous and forever hurtful? It felt like existing for the briefest whisper in time inside a vacuum, with all of the oxygen sucked -- easy-peasy -- from the lungs, without as much as a whimper or a jostle. It just -- wasn't going to happen. And that was that.

I could start breathing again. Sooner would be better than later.

My inner critic already knew I'd never make it in, so my exterior reaction was pretty placid. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained," I blustered, as I turned my face to the rainy window, its damp sketch of raindrops like the tears on my face. I couldn't dash them away fast enough, couldn't put the futility of such a silly pipe dream away quickly enough to pretend I'd never done it. Never tried.

How does one wear this kind of failure? It's not a failure to dream; for that I give myself some credit. But to long for it? To allow myself to truly wish on the star? It seems childlike and foolish now -- a crying game for the naive.

Toxic (Crop) Circles

Free -- finally -- of the Salt Mine as of March 1st, it struck me that two profoundly nasty people in my recent experience actually came into my life via my first tour at the Salt Mine a few years back, not long after I'd moved to the Pacific Northwest. And the connection of such a nasty place and such nasty people made me wonder if the New Age types, with their "energy vortexes" and "bad karma" aren't at least loosely onto something.

One of my more annoying or endearing traits (you, dear Reader, get to decide for yourself) is my tendency to nickname things. If I really like you? You will get a nickname, or more likely several. If I loathe you? Unfortunately I'm also inclined to nickname you. So fuck and alas, those of you who know me can't really use the nickname thing as a bright-line test about my affections. Sorry about that.

The good news is that the Loathed group usually gets pretty negative monikers. It doesn't take an astrophysicist to discern that if I call you "Harpy," I'm not your biggest fan. And these two gentlemen I refer to above, they got the names Smarm and Pinch. See? No degree in higher physics required. I was very much *not* a fan of either.

Pinch came into my life first. A flaming queen, he was all broad gestures and dramatic, declarative statements. I don't begrudge anyone the right to let their Gay Flame burn bright, but this was egregiously over the top. He also has a huge chip on his shoulder about apparently every facet of his existence. He doesn't think he is smart enough, thin enough, cute enough, rich enough -- nothing is enough. I assume this drives his Palpable Personality. He and I got along well enough, in the superficial, "I'm tolerating you because I work with you" way, until I went to work at a local organization *he* apparently wanted to work for, but his (1) lack of college degree, and (2) HUGE and highly visible shoulder chip, clearly kept him out of the running for the job I got. Then they hired another accountant to work beneath me, a position that *also* required a college degree, and for some reason this job requirement escaped him, and he became Scorn Personified and hated my existence on this planet because I wasn't able to help him get hired. He wrote letters to the paper about the "discriminatory practices" of my new employer; he talked about me negatively to other people. Toxic Nutter: party of one.

Enter the Smarm (short for "smarmy"). Ironcially, he too was a stereotypical Gay Archetype. Mr. It-Better-Be-Kenneth-Cole-or-It-Can't-Be-Worn-on-My-Body. He name-branded *everything,* insisted on high-priced hotels whenever we traveled with him, he name dropped, he preened, he put on airs. He was Insufferable. But he could be entertaining at times, and hey -- everyone's got some tic or quirk, so I put up with him. Until he fell in with Pinch and somehow the two of them bonded in their noisome hatred of everyone who isn't Them, and that was just the limit of my endurance.

I met both of these men at the Salt Mine. Both of these men were self-myopic, superficial, attention hogs. They revolved around each other, and themselves, and no one else. In fact, a passerby would be drawn into the gravity well these two Death Stars created in their unusual affinity. In retrospect, I have to wonder what other nasty people are lurking in the fetid halls of that soul-sucking place I called the Salt Mine. And can such places draw in people with similar negative auras? Normally I think this kind of thinking is silliness. That doesn't change the fact that I think the Salt Mine *deserves* Pinch and the Smarm. Toxic crop circles seem to be fitting reservoirs for these two Rodents of Unusual Size (see a scene from "The Princess Bride" for "ROUS's" at YouTube).

Price Per Pound: in bone? Blood? Teeth-grinding frustration?

$90 for 10 pounds.

That's what Delta Airlines wanted to charge us tonight for being 10 pounds over their 50 pound per bag limit. Of course, that was just one of two bags. The other bag was only 28 pounds. "Can we apply the shortage on one bag to this heavier one?" Nope.

So the oblivious "I guess I can't give a shit about your customer experience, I just collect a paycheck " counter clerk encouraged us to move clothes from one bag to the other. Forcing other customers to continue to wait in line while we played Musical Baggage. Pass me the panties. Here, stow the tampons in your carry-on. Oh, but you can't carry on the hairspray. It's more than 3 ounces!

He suggested that we should have brought a third bag. Really, Einstein? That you'd have charged me $30 for, mind you, AND which would have forced us to somehow maneuver THREE bags a person through clotted parking garages, mass transit, surly traffic at the curb, and in long queues waiting to check the fucking thing. That is such GREAT customer service! Baggage wrangling plus hurry-up-and-wait! Brilliant!

The physics of this shift-the-panties proposition defy any attempt at logic. We were carrying THE SAME WEIGHT. They just want it distributed into various bags. Which makes it harder on the customer. They are already shafting us with per bag fees now, in addition to the cost of the seat. Already making us jostle for seats on over-booked flights. No meals. Can't carry your own water. SERIOUSLY, airlines? You wonder we left you in droves after your planes were flown into buildings? You treat your customers like cattle on the one hand, and pack horses on the other.

Wouldn't it make more sense to give a total weight limit? Presumably their concern is WEIGHT, after all. It can't be space in cargo, since two bags will take up more room than one. Where is the logic? Where is the concern for the customer, who pays the fares that line the pockets of the CEO and the shareholder? Where is the fucking capitalist drive in such a hare-brained scheme? I can fly to Europe for a MONTH, with the requisite baggage for a trip of that length, and not pay a single baggage fee. What, the laws of physics don't apply in Europe? Crossing the Atlantic somehow makes everything ... lighter? Oh, don't get me started on that.

I consider a new rule: no trips that aren't feasible by car. Fuck the environment. Fuck the common experience of folks sharing space and a trip's experience. I want the peace and quiet of my own car, with my own music, where I can bring whatever luggage I want to stuff into my car, and I can go at my own pace without rushing to make the gate closure and then sit on the tarmac for who knows how long. Or be bumped because some airline in their infinite care and concern for the customer sold my seat to three people. Last one to the check-in counter is a rotten egg!

The real rotten egg is, collectively, the airlines. With Neanderthal thinking like this? They all deserve to fail. Just like the Detroit automakers. And good riddance.

Want to know who to fly to avoid the absurd Pass the Panties game? Baggage Charges by Airline - US
(at http://www.airfarewatchdog.com/blog/3801089/airline-baggage-fees-chart-updated/)

A New Petty Low

I've spent the last four weeks working as a contractor for a company that makes big, gas-guzzling vehicles. It's been a treasure. I've been calling it The Salt Mine, out of affection, of course.

First, they told me I should put my hours on a sticky note and put it on the corner of my desk. So people would know when I was supposed to be in my chair. Then they told me I could only have a 30 minute lunch. Then I sat in my cube for a week without any computer access, because in spite of them knowing for three weeks before my arrival that I would be there, no one bothered to request sign on info far enough in advance for me to actually have it until a week after I'd been there. Sitting in my cube. Watching dust collect. Oh, I did clear out the 47 voicemails that the last occupant had left (a person who still works for the company, just down the hallway in fact). They were calls from vendors who had not been paid. SINCE AUGUST. The voicemails went back TO AUGUST.

In week two, they told us we couldn't park in the parking lot anymore; we'd have to find parking "in the neighborhood." A muddy, former train-track alley was offered, so I parked there. For a week, until I got a tow notice on my car.

In week three, the very helpful Help Desk helped delete every email I'd received, after my in-box became so full it kept crashing my computer. Even after deleting every email, my system was still wobbly and continued to crash on and off for a week, since no one on the other end of the phone, at the very helpful Help Desk, was listening to my issue. They kept setting up archives ... to run next week. I need it to run NOW. Finally, a nice little IT geek who was REAL and in the FLESH finally sat down in front of my wobbly, tweaked-out mail box, and in 10 minutes he fixed what others on the phone had massaged and flailed at for a week. I baked him a thank-you cake.

In the meantime, of course, every vendor who'd corresponded to me and sent me copies of their unpaid invoices ... now had to be told to send them again. The love they felt for me was palpable. I'm still a bit singed from that round of grumpiness.

On a Friday a couple of weeks ago, I went in to work to find my desk had been pilfered. Someone had shoved some shelves over, rifled though my papers (and there were stacks, nay, drifts of them, after only a couple of weeks -- they are really not cutting edge, did I mention that?). And this same mischief-maker had -- inexplicably -- stolen the cup of pens I'd put on my desk. This was no glamour cup. It was a humble coffee cup, taken from their own kitchen cabinets and filled with pens from their own supply cabinet. What the fuck, right? Well, after my manager "insisted" that I report the theft, a day or so later, I found the cup. Shoved into the corner of my cube, out of sight behind some things that sat in the corner from the last sad sack of shit who worked there. A single blue ballpoint pen was missing from it. Only one other person in the office uses those pens, a fact I noticed after the only pens one could find were felt tip. I'd scooped up the ballpoint after it was laying on the copier, abandoned. That one pen had been taken. Nothing else. A lesson to me for using someone's pen? Perhaps.

I spend my days being harassed by vendors who demand payment, who for some reason haven't been paid in months. It's certainly not my fault; I've been there less than a month. None of them have been told that their accounts were being moved to servicing in a new location. None of them were told that the old staff who used to handle their accounts were "just contractors," and they were being let go. They are all cranky, frustrated, and all-too-willing to take our their Pay Me Now frustrations on whoever picks up the phone. So I don't answer the phone.

And then they send emails! Great scathing diatribes that threaten credit holds and legal action. It's a lovely, supportive environment.

When I'm not being screamed at or menaced by vendors, I'm hounded and dogged by employees, who cause senseless fire drills about bills that are not even DUE YET. I'm fielding boatloads of emails -- literally hundreds a week -- from vendors who have not been paid in months. And an employee wants me to dance and jitter over a bill that's due on Friday? When it's Tuesday?

One of my fellow contractors is from India. Her name is different but not impossible to pronounce it. I pronounce it easily enough, and I'm from Heart of Hickville, Arkansas. Yet no one else in this department seems to even bother to TRY to pronounce it right. They add syllables. They abbreviate it. They wave their hands and sigh in frustration as their stupid tongues trip over the consonant in the middle of her name. It is not that hard. Oh, what a paradigm of cultural sensitivity, this place I'm earning my paycheck.

In addition to not paying other vendors, this company also hasn't been paying the vendor that's providing my services. So my company -- let's call them Clueless & Co -- calls me and asks me to "see what I can do to get them paid." Clueless & Company is right here in town, but rather than send a rep from Clueless over to build a better relationship with their client, Clueless instead makes me the bad guy, instead asks me to set up collection conference calls with the employees I sit across the hall from.

I am surrounded by classy professionals on this gig -- in and around the Salt Mine.

Yesterday, the department's manager failed -- again -- to show up for a regular weekly "crisis management" conference call. She was on-site, yet again in another meeting that ran late. (It runs late a lot.) But instead of shooting me an email on her handy-dandy laptop, she just no-showed. And when she finally DID show up, she was aggravated  with me for not using her conference code to initiate the call. For an agenda I have no visibility to. I guess she thought maybe we'd just chat amongst ourselves and trade recipes? Watch that dust collect again?

Was "mind-reader" in the job description? I should get paid more for that, right?

Today was the icing for my cake. Since I don't take that 30 minute lunch they so generously offer, and since I don't take any break to speak of, and since I am a professional who knows how to multi-task, I use my smart phone -- to check email before meetings, to keep in touch with my spouse, to check in on friends. It saves me using the traditional phone, and it's hell of a lot more quiet and private. It also lets me check on the status of my grandmother, via emails from my mother. (My grandmother is having mini-strokes, and she needs near-constant supervision.) Today, the same manager who can't be bothered to come to her meetings (on time or at all) or communicate with her staff, asked me "why I text so much. I carry my phone everywhere. Am I in or out?"

Excuse me?

Dear Stupid Manager: if you'd take three minutes to find out anything about me, you'd know that my background and my work history qualify me to be YOUR boss. I earned my CPA certificate. I acquired my accounting degree with honors. Who among your staff even has a college degree? I have spent the last 20 years earning my own keep, growing a pretty challenging career, and I know how to manage my time and my work load. I don't need you to micro manage me. I don't need your petty, brainless employees hall-monitoring my every move. It seems to me, Stupid Manager, that your people don't have ENOUGH TO DO, if they have time to fret over what I'm doing and not pay attention to their own work load.

P.S. I quit.

Another dollar

I go back to the salt mines on Monday. Today was my last day of unemployed freedom. I wish I could say I spent it productively, but I fear all I did was the usual trouble-mongering, more opening of mouth and inserting of foot, at which I'm so talented. I should get paid for doing that! I bet I could set records.

I should have been drinking tea and reading and staying out of other people's way. Will I never learn?

So bid me a good journey, readers. And hide rope, sharp objects, and weapons that shoot bullets. I assure you I shall leave deeply etched gouges as they drag me to the doors by 8 a.m.

A Deed's Punishment

No good deed goes unpunished. Clare Booth Luce

Educated collegiately in the state of Connecticut as I was, I know a good bit about Clare. She served as a Congressional rep for that state -- ironically, perhaps, since she was famously conservative and Connecticut has been more liberal historically than she was personally. That said, she was a formidable woman, a virulent "anti-Communist," and quite before her time concerning her personal life (she was divorced before it was conscionable, and it did not derail her career as a journalist or politically) and her career in general.

Clare has the pleasure of saying what may be the phrase I repeat more often than any other. I may utter these words regarding "good deeds" many times in a single day. Perhaps because I often (1) commit good deeds, or make the attempt, only to regret it, or (2) talk myself out of good deeds because I know they will go unnoticed, unappreciated, or be the means to make me regret what I've done.

I will never understand the motivations (or lack thereof) of mankind. For example: we claim to care about a cause, vigorously waving a banner of that cause, feeling noble and righteous in the waving of said flag, and then turn and gainsay and backtrack and cause consternation and trouble in the ranks of that cause. Does the species pause to say -- ever -- "How is my behaviour helping this cause I love so much?"

No. Seems we don't ever collectively take that pause and think critically about ourselves. Cuz that kind of probing questioning of self would require some measure of self-awareness, and when has THAT ever been a common trait in our intellectual makeup? Oh, no, we are much better known for laying waste to things, leaving scorched earth and detritus in our wakes, making things political and about "turf" instead of just fighting a good fight or doing what's really best for the most, or what is consistently logical. We have created countless fables to encourage ourselves to do better than this, to "mind the logs in our own eyes before fussing with the mote in our neighbor's," and yet still ... we flail, we flog, we flagellate. We make messes instead of progress.

I've spent entirely too much time in the last year trying to figure out how to extricate myself from such misguided collaborations with the Clueless. It makes me wish I could better identify those who've done the work and figured out how to be Of Use instead of Of Useless. It's too often a guessing game, where I try to surmise a person's commitment or prowess based solely on manifested behaviours. It's never so easy as just being able to ask, "Do you have any damn idea what you are doing? Do you LISTEN to yourself? Do you ever bother to ask yourself if you even know why you are doing x, y, or z?"

For whatever reasons, thankfully I don't seem to need to be reminded too often of Why I'm Here, of why I care about a movement I get involved in (and how best to help it flourish), of why I like or dislike something or someone. Why don't people know themselves better? Why don't we do better as a species about seeing ourselves and how we interact with the world? Is it that hard to know ourselves? (I am certain that Pythagoras, and by extension Socrates, and a whole lineage of Delphic Oracles are rolling in their graves over the dearth of "knowing thyself.")

Perhaps the reason is ignoble, just simple, silly habit -- we just spend so much time blowing sunshine up everyone else's ass that we don't even notice when we start blowing it up our own.

It is ... alive!

Every great once in a while, usually about once a decade -- say every 7-8 years or so -- I go through this unearthing process. It feels akin to digging something up out of the ground -- a corpse, if you will -- and reanimating it. Often, it is a component of myself that was not yet awakened; other times, it seems to be a facet of myself that was buried or smothered, some wrinkle of myself with which I lost contact. It's about time for one of these chrysalis transitions, and I have been hard at work on it for the last couple of years.

Nietzsche wrote (in Twilight of the Idols), "What does not kill me, makes me stronger." On the heels of a harsh year, in a difficult decade (I came out of the proverbial "closets" as a lesbian, then a bisexual, and then an atheist; I ended a marriage, began another marriage, relocated across the country, and considered moving to another country), this treasured saying by a treasured hero is all the more probative. Because too often it is correlative -- what is hard to endure will build your character. If, of course, it does not kill you.

Character as a concept entrances me; I sit around contemplating it a good bit. And my reference to Frankenstein above is a great analogy to some of my thoughts about character : one cannot judge it merely on its face, or "by its actions" as is tritely presumed; it is frequently a permutation of various inputs and stimuli and contexts, and it morphs. The monster was believed "monstrous" only by appearance at first; it was not until later that his actions came to fit what was expected of him, e.g., monstrous. That silly business about "good" character being "solid" or non-malleable is pie-in-the-sky horseshit. Ponder a man and his high brow opinion of character, that one of good character would never steal -- a fairly universal "Thou Shall Not" -- then starve him or his family and watch him become a very adept thief.

But I digress. Character is much like beauty; it's in the eye of the beholder. What one person will laud, another will denigrate. For instance, truth is a pretty highly valued indicator of a person's character, yet "telling the truth" is catnip only to those that value it; it is death itself to those that live truly deep-seated pretenses. ("Pretense" is a polite euphemism for "lie.") Practically any contrasted extremes of moral "absolutes" will bear out this rather incongruously contradicting juxtaposition. So much for absolutes, eh?

So when I try to be thankful for the hard knocks that have come my way -- the heart breakers, the dream crushers, the bad news and the scoundrels who have mucked around in my life -- I have to revisit what my character goal IS. Because the only way to really successfully live life fully is to have some general idea of where one would like to end up. And unlike the convenience of navigating by map, which does not change as it lies in the hand (or on the GPS, natch), character mapping is subtle and mercurial. Exceedingly malleable, my character shifts most often when exposed to the gravitational pull of another's influence. Not that many people are magnetic to me -- hence the "happens every 7-8 years" cycle.

Ironically, that's about how often the seasons change on Saturn, my favourite planet -- every 7½ years. The planet resonates with me, so quirky and large. Of the planets in our solar system, only Jupiter is larger or spins faster. Saturn's description, compositionally, reminds me of myself as well -- diaphanous, a gas giant composed of temperature shifts so extreme they show up as bands in the planet's appearance. It has no distinct line of demarcation between its surface and its atmosphere -- akin to my own approachability ... one never knows when one actually gets beyond my skin. Despite it's nebulous construction, rumors persist about a hot, rocky core. The analogies are endless for me: the multitudes of satellites, its unique seven rings, its incredible gravitational pull.

In Greek Mythology, Cronus (and his son, Zeus, both were later afilliated with Saturn in astrology) was one of the Titans. He ate his children to prevent himself from being dethroned as the King of the Gods. Until Rhea, his wife, tricked him into swallowing a stone when Zeus was born. In astrology, Saturn is associated with father figures, with restriction and limitation. It supposedly brings structure and meaning to the world, with its representation of knowing the limits of time and matter. It reminds about boundaries, responsibilities, and commitments, and bring definition to lives. Ultimately it should flag awareness for the need for self-control. (My love of mythology lead me to a love of astrology which lead me to a love of astronomy which lead me to a love of science. Neat, right?) Source: Saturn in the Zodiac

As I dig up and reanimate on my 7-year timetable, I think about Saturn and its symbolism for limits. I have made a lifetime of transgressing limits. (One cannot break the rules if one does not know what the rules are, after all.) I muse on my next iteration, my next monumental shift in character, and I get ever more deeply lost in rumination and expectation. I know I've been focused outwardly for years now, when I should have been fighting the better fight and turning my energy inward. 

I think, repeatedly, of Frankenstein: the deranged doctor and the misunderstood monster.

 

It's Alive!

Sometimes I feel the insane doctor, cobbling together things that should not be joined together, firing them with life and movement, only to have them murdered as the abortive creations they are. Other times, my sympathy with the monster is replete -- just trying to figure it out and come fully alive, but scaring the children and disturbing the Normals and being hunted down and destroyed for my trouble.  

 

Whether I am god-complex-addled scientist or monstrous creation, one of the things I'm doing again for my Better Self is what you read right now -- blogging. It is a version of the rather intensive journaling I do every single day. No embellishment -- I write three to four pages every single day about what is in my head, reviewing how things impact me, how I want to be in the world. For this blog, I choose a stand-out issue -- a "trigger," so to speak -- that seems to encapsulate either a theme or an overarching opinion or some pearl on a string of larger contemplations I'm in the midst of formulating. Or digging up, graveyard style.

I'm looking for resonance, wherever I find it. It keeps me grounded. Be it in cycles of growth and birth/rebirth, planets, rhythms, botanicals, kindred spirits, haunting music, lyrical poetry, incredible trips, delicate secrets. Because I do not know when I will not be here anymore, and I want to make the most of my limited time here.

So. Welcome, 2010. I'm alive. Anyone else?

Reference sourcing: NASA - Saturn, Seven-Year Cycles