That The North You Find Will Be True
Every Child Loses Something a Whole Life Can't FulfillOne day I'd like to be
As mature as my son who is twelve and a half
And this tall
And that's all I'd like to be
I visited my stripes across the line last weekend, and between our arrival at a kid-friendly science center and getting corralled into an hour-plus of Petals Around the Rose by precocious volunteers, there was a tense moment when he asked me to play a couple of games with him and I demurred. He was understandably annoyed, and I tried and failed to explain what bothered me about it. Later that night, cuddling and talking, it came up again and made perfect sense to him when I explained it. "My problem is with-"
"Microfriending," he finished for me. "You don't like being microfriended."
I grinned wider than Antarctica. That is exactly it, and he's the first person who I think has grokked it.
Put it this way. I've had people try to teach me card games, get me to solve riddles, play Whack-a-Mole, clap along as they sang, or answer a simple question, and been really put off by it - hurt, angry, withdrawn, really put off - because they put me, explicitly or not, in a position of subservience. At clubs, or at a meeting of the fucking Rotarians or Toastmasters, were I to go, I am likely to be a wallflower, and I've been scared to so much as peep at a boss at worthless jobs where getting fired would've been a blessing. I've also stood in front of an auditorium and told the people there, in a confident voice, some of my deepest secrets (for academic purposes; that was Nick's gig), and I threatened to sue my school and got them to implement a policy change that could've gotten them in trouble with a bishop, but I was scarier than the Church, and I've moved around the country with next to no assets on a wing and a prayer and found it exciting and great, and a few weeks ago my friends and I were the most flamboyant fetishists at the Cuff and we pwn3d the dance floor.
The difference is that in the latter cases I chose to do something, and did it myself, on my terms. No one goaded me. No one made me feel as if my own volition were an afterthought, that the matter was already decided. No one took away my right to decide, my right to act.
I kind of wish I'd had the words for this when I was with Paul, but then, I don't think he would've gotten it anyway. Not then. And then, sometimes I'm a real bastard for underestimating people, and maybe he's one of my worst victims. I don't know.
I was psychologically screwed early on, by the Vatican or by dumbass teachers or by mere circumstance or pin the blame where you will, but I was tossed in a ditch and they shoveled excrement on me and told me that was my place, and when in a rage I finally broke free of all that, it was not without scarring. There is part of me that won't ever be told, "Here, little boy, this is how to do it." Hence the aversion to microfriending and its cousin, unsolicited advice. I'm a big boy; I've learned to ask for help when I need it, but otherwise I fiercely resist it. This is a weakness and a character flaw, and one that I know better than to make a sustained effort to uproot. Some flaws are so serious, or contrariwise so superficial, that one may reasonably try to alter or eliminate them, but some are embedded deep and are quite manageable. Maybe you've tried to uproot an old, old tree. And maybe you eventually decided to grind the stump to mulch and build a flower bed over it instead.
While Stripes was holding me and coming to an understanding and we were talking about it, my mind flashed to this quotation from Ryan Maluski in The Indigo Children:*
Exactly.
Incidentally, we took in a night at a comedy club and I became the straight man for the (American, sorta ironically) comic. His running gag was lowbrow and tired and, bluntly, despicable. It was about a "retard." (I don't consider the term, unless used intelligently as a verb, any better than "the N word.") But the gag allowed him to look at the empty table in front of us and ask, "Not drinking tonight?"
"No," I replied.
"Oh, they're back in the kitchen trying to find a sippy cup for you."
My huge grin in reply was a mystery to everybody but the cub next to me. Fittingly, I was wearing a Catholic schoolboy hoodie (the most comfortable sweatshirt I own) over my Astolpho wolf cub shirt.
Inflection
The Ghost of Coonmas Future can learn things from his past:"You have arrived at your life's first great point of inflection, like that weightless moment when a ball tossed high into the air is neither rising nor falling. It can be sickening and a great joy at the same time. It is an interesting moment in life that will quickly be gone. I hope you can enjoy it for what it is."
"You are now ready to move onto (as my cousin Ed so eloquently advised me upon graduation) new stages of consumption."
"I'm about to leave for my last Russian class. Grades have been in for a couple days, but that's not the point. Perhaps I can make a statement to whatever ghosts of the past and future might be listening..."
Damn right. I did the same thing for my last Internetworking class. Show up and be the different one. Learn to learn. Do things that matter because they matter.
I've recently thought often of my college days, how all-nighters were common, how surreal things were, though not as surreal as high school. The surreality reminded me what was important, and what wasn't, and I probably should have more of that in my life here. I'm not a mass but damn if there isn't banality about. Too many things have gotten more efficient with my head.
Politics of Nations Got Me DownK: why doesn't life come with save points?
Q: For real!
I created a Facebook profile, basically as a social experiment after Nick told me about people he'd run into there.
When I logged in the first time, I was not as horrified as I thought I would be. I was more horrified. But in that dispassionate sort of way you reserve for chicken cullings rather than human genocides.
I saw tons of notices about "networks": this friend is a member of that network, so-and-so is in these six networks, networks here, networks everywhere! Reliably doing its quotation-fetching thing, my mind threw at me, from John Taylor Gatto:We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. School is a major actor in this tragedy, as it is a major actor in the widening gulf among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism, we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and who sleep upon the streets.
High-school acquaintances and IRL friends are easy enough. Tell me, what's the protocol when a random, local, apparently cute boy makes you a "friend?" Surely there's some evolved protocol for this sort of thing? It is like LJ, or more like a bar, or on the third paw like a coffeehouse (a real one, not a Seattle one)?
Leave Me Your Stardust To Remember You By
More than half the people I know have quit or will soon quit their jobs, and several people I know have quit and, in some cases, may begin other romantic relationships. I am in .5 to .75 of these groups. It's a crazy time. The universe, or just our neighborhood of it, is playful in early 2008.
In that context, I think about opportunities, in terms of career and in terms of love. I still have trouble understanding the Off Switch. For many boys, it's like Data's switch: when it needs to be deactivated, you just deliver a good whack to the proper part of the lymph system, and all entangling alliances cease to have power or meaning, save the one that will be carried over into a monogamous relationship. As I often try to make clear, I've got nothing against monogamy. I think it's cute and honorable and amazing. It's the trappings and the implementation that leave me sometimes staring, mouth agape.†
Except it's not that I don't "understand" in the sense that I can't empathize. I've been there, after all. I've done as much damage with the Off Switch as anyone. I've learned enough humility to know I probably have it in me to do it again, too. My lack of understanding is not a problem of empathy but of sympathy; which is to say, I've been there, but I have carefully avoided being there again, and have done so because I've had the desire and the requisite convictions. If you can shut off whatever things you have had going, what does it say about those things? What does it say about you?
The polite thing to say is that cultural conditioning is strong. And it is.
He Lives In You"The safest and most suitable form of penance seems to be that which causes pain in the flesh but does not penetrate to the bones, that is, which causes suffering but not sickness."
- Ignatius
I love the premise of Unapologetic Genius, which is, in part:Life doesn’t have to be about struggle and suffering. It can be about learning to expand, learning to accept, learning to love learning all kinds of lessons.
We want you to stop apologizing for what comes easy for you. Use what comes easy for you. Use your genius to make the hard stuff easier.
That is truly revelatory for me. Honest to goddess, the notion that life doesn't have to (more specifically: shouldn't) be about struggle and suffering was new to me last year. And I still have to remind myself often that it's okay to do things that work rather than things that hurt, that it's okay to use the easy way especially if it's also the best way. God this stuff takes a long time to learn. To burn in. To learn and believe.
Truly now is a time and a place between.
* It's a pseudoscientific book, but Ryan's essay is haunting. If your brain is screwy in any of the same ways mine is, you should find the book and read what he wrote and wonder how he got inside your head. The marginalia from when I read it when I was 17 or 18 reflect the reactions I have taking it off the shelf again now.
† Haha! I didn't even mean it that way.
As mature as my son who is twelve and a half
And this tall
And that's all I'd like to be
I visited my stripes across the line last weekend, and between our arrival at a kid-friendly science center and getting corralled into an hour-plus of Petals Around the Rose by precocious volunteers, there was a tense moment when he asked me to play a couple of games with him and I demurred. He was understandably annoyed, and I tried and failed to explain what bothered me about it. Later that night, cuddling and talking, it came up again and made perfect sense to him when I explained it. "My problem is with-"
"Microfriending," he finished for me. "You don't like being microfriended."
I grinned wider than Antarctica. That is exactly it, and he's the first person who I think has grokked it.
Put it this way. I've had people try to teach me card games, get me to solve riddles, play Whack-a-Mole, clap along as they sang, or answer a simple question, and been really put off by it - hurt, angry, withdrawn, really put off - because they put me, explicitly or not, in a position of subservience. At clubs, or at a meeting of the fucking Rotarians or Toastmasters, were I to go, I am likely to be a wallflower, and I've been scared to so much as peep at a boss at worthless jobs where getting fired would've been a blessing. I've also stood in front of an auditorium and told the people there, in a confident voice, some of my deepest secrets (for academic purposes; that was Nick's gig), and I threatened to sue my school and got them to implement a policy change that could've gotten them in trouble with a bishop, but I was scarier than the Church, and I've moved around the country with next to no assets on a wing and a prayer and found it exciting and great, and a few weeks ago my friends and I were the most flamboyant fetishists at the Cuff and we pwn3d the dance floor.
The difference is that in the latter cases I chose to do something, and did it myself, on my terms. No one goaded me. No one made me feel as if my own volition were an afterthought, that the matter was already decided. No one took away my right to decide, my right to act.
I kind of wish I'd had the words for this when I was with Paul, but then, I don't think he would've gotten it anyway. Not then. And then, sometimes I'm a real bastard for underestimating people, and maybe he's one of my worst victims. I don't know.
I was psychologically screwed early on, by the Vatican or by dumbass teachers or by mere circumstance or pin the blame where you will, but I was tossed in a ditch and they shoveled excrement on me and told me that was my place, and when in a rage I finally broke free of all that, it was not without scarring. There is part of me that won't ever be told, "Here, little boy, this is how to do it." Hence the aversion to microfriending and its cousin, unsolicited advice. I'm a big boy; I've learned to ask for help when I need it, but otherwise I fiercely resist it. This is a weakness and a character flaw, and one that I know better than to make a sustained effort to uproot. Some flaws are so serious, or contrariwise so superficial, that one may reasonably try to alter or eliminate them, but some are embedded deep and are quite manageable. Maybe you've tried to uproot an old, old tree. And maybe you eventually decided to grind the stump to mulch and build a flower bed over it instead.
While Stripes was holding me and coming to an understanding and we were talking about it, my mind flashed to this quotation from Ryan Maluski in The Indigo Children:*
Exactly.
Incidentally, we took in a night at a comedy club and I became the straight man for the (American, sorta ironically) comic. His running gag was lowbrow and tired and, bluntly, despicable. It was about a "retard." (I don't consider the term, unless used intelligently as a verb, any better than "the N word.") But the gag allowed him to look at the empty table in front of us and ask, "Not drinking tonight?"
"No," I replied.
"Oh, they're back in the kitchen trying to find a sippy cup for you."
My huge grin in reply was a mystery to everybody but the cub next to me. Fittingly, I was wearing a Catholic schoolboy hoodie (the most comfortable sweatshirt I own) over my Astolpho wolf cub shirt.
Inflection
The Ghost of Coonmas Future can learn things from his past:"You have arrived at your life's first great point of inflection, like that weightless moment when a ball tossed high into the air is neither rising nor falling. It can be sickening and a great joy at the same time. It is an interesting moment in life that will quickly be gone. I hope you can enjoy it for what it is."
"You are now ready to move onto (as my cousin Ed so eloquently advised me upon graduation) new stages of consumption."
"I'm about to leave for my last Russian class. Grades have been in for a couple days, but that's not the point. Perhaps I can make a statement to whatever ghosts of the past and future might be listening..."
Damn right. I did the same thing for my last Internetworking class. Show up and be the different one. Learn to learn. Do things that matter because they matter.
I've recently thought often of my college days, how all-nighters were common, how surreal things were, though not as surreal as high school. The surreality reminded me what was important, and what wasn't, and I probably should have more of that in my life here. I'm not a mass but damn if there isn't banality about. Too many things have gotten more efficient with my head.
Politics of Nations Got Me DownK: why doesn't life come with save points?
Q: For real!
I created a Facebook profile, basically as a social experiment after Nick told me about people he'd run into there.
When I logged in the first time, I was not as horrified as I thought I would be. I was more horrified. But in that dispassionate sort of way you reserve for chicken cullings rather than human genocides.
I saw tons of notices about "networks": this friend is a member of that network, so-and-so is in these six networks, networks here, networks everywhere! Reliably doing its quotation-fetching thing, my mind threw at me, from John Taylor Gatto:We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. School is a major actor in this tragedy, as it is a major actor in the widening gulf among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism, we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and who sleep upon the streets.
High-school acquaintances and IRL friends are easy enough. Tell me, what's the protocol when a random, local, apparently cute boy makes you a "friend?" Surely there's some evolved protocol for this sort of thing? It is like LJ, or more like a bar, or on the third paw like a coffeehouse (a real one, not a Seattle one)?
Leave Me Your Stardust To Remember You By
More than half the people I know have quit or will soon quit their jobs, and several people I know have quit and, in some cases, may begin other romantic relationships. I am in .5 to .75 of these groups. It's a crazy time. The universe, or just our neighborhood of it, is playful in early 2008.
In that context, I think about opportunities, in terms of career and in terms of love. I still have trouble understanding the Off Switch. For many boys, it's like Data's switch: when it needs to be deactivated, you just deliver a good whack to the proper part of the lymph system, and all entangling alliances cease to have power or meaning, save the one that will be carried over into a monogamous relationship. As I often try to make clear, I've got nothing against monogamy. I think it's cute and honorable and amazing. It's the trappings and the implementation that leave me sometimes staring, mouth agape.†
Except it's not that I don't "understand" in the sense that I can't empathize. I've been there, after all. I've done as much damage with the Off Switch as anyone. I've learned enough humility to know I probably have it in me to do it again, too. My lack of understanding is not a problem of empathy but of sympathy; which is to say, I've been there, but I have carefully avoided being there again, and have done so because I've had the desire and the requisite convictions. If you can shut off whatever things you have had going, what does it say about those things? What does it say about you?
The polite thing to say is that cultural conditioning is strong. And it is.
He Lives In You"The safest and most suitable form of penance seems to be that which causes pain in the flesh but does not penetrate to the bones, that is, which causes suffering but not sickness."
- Ignatius
I love the premise of Unapologetic Genius, which is, in part:Life doesn’t have to be about struggle and suffering. It can be about learning to expand, learning to accept, learning to love learning all kinds of lessons.
We want you to stop apologizing for what comes easy for you. Use what comes easy for you. Use your genius to make the hard stuff easier.
That is truly revelatory for me. Honest to goddess, the notion that life doesn't have to (more specifically: shouldn't) be about struggle and suffering was new to me last year. And I still have to remind myself often that it's okay to do things that work rather than things that hurt, that it's okay to use the easy way especially if it's also the best way. God this stuff takes a long time to learn. To burn in. To learn and believe.
Truly now is a time and a place between.
* It's a pseudoscientific book, but Ryan's essay is haunting. If your brain is screwy in any of the same ways mine is, you should find the book and read what he wrote and wonder how he got inside your head. The marginalia from when I read it when I was 17 or 18 reflect the reactions I have taking it off the shelf again now.
† Haha! I didn't even mean it that way.