Answers

Still looking for time to blog. I have motivation these days. Until then, will have to just repost my latest musing:

In the quiet of my nights, between 2-year old “tuck tucks”, spousal good-nights, and 8-month old early-a.m. cries, I spend a part of my “alone” time praying. Between work deadlines, familial heath concerns, and some sort of mid-life-crisis-level fear of death, it’s often hard for me to hear answers these days. But life is not always about answers. It’s about the dialogue we share, the fears we admit, the failings we face. It’s about the strength we share, the joy we find, the truth we seek, and the integrity we hold. May we all hold each other up as we seek our own answers. If it takes a village to raise a child, then it takes a universe to keep us “old folks” from falling down.

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Do what you want if it makes you happy…

…..but what do you do when it makes someone else miserable?

How much do you compromise your own ambitions when it conflicts with shared ambitions? 

On the other side of the coin, what do you do if your shared ambitions are stymied by one person’s personal setbacks?  Do you fret and ask that person to focus on your shared goal?  Or do you support that personal goal because, as part of a couple, you should support each other individually in all things?  Do you support that stalled personal goal to the detriment of your shared goal?  For how long? 

Ponderous, man.  Really ponderous.

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Save the Best for Last? Or First?

I feel like tonight’s blog is going to be a little rambley.  Buckle up and follow my train of thought!

I love me a good box of See’s Candies nuts and chews.  If you’re going to give me a variety of See’s Candies, might as well make it nuts and chews.  In general, I don’t like solid chocolate.

Isn’t it funny the things our loved ones remember and don’t remember about us?  I think chocolate is a wonderful gift for any occasion.  And I appreciate any gifts from my hubby.  But sometimes I have to laugh because he still sometimes forgets I don’t like solid chocolate.  So, the box of fancy truffles may be the best in the shop, but chances are it will sit on our snack shelf for weeks as I push the pieces around trying to magically turn one into a caramel.  At Halloween, dear Sweetie will eat the mini 3 Musketeers while I happily munch on Snickers and Babe Ruths.  What the heck is nougat anyway? 

Speaking of things our loved ones forget – I joke about the fact that my work is such that most people can’t explain what I do for a living.  Sometimes it makes me feel a little sad to listen to someone try and explain me to someone new.  “She…..uhhhhh…….she works as a…..she does…….well, she’s smart!”  Sometimes it makes me feel a little under-appreciated.  Then, I realize that I can’t properly explain the work of several people that I know.  Mostly people who work in different IT positions.  Several of Sweetie’s friends who are trained engineers but whose job titles no longer contain just (or much) engineering.  And I realize no disrespect is intended of course.  It just goes to show if you don’t really know an industry that well, you can’t keep track of all the jobs within it.  And most people just are not that into California environmental regulations.  No biggie.  I quiz Sweetie every year or so and he has gotten pretty good at providing a quick synopsis of what I actually do. 

Anyway.  Chocolate.  Don’t like solid chocolate.

But a good box of See’s Candies nuts and chews has many choices that I will quickly inhale.  Ohh….sweet butterscotch.  Come to Mama, walnut square.  It used to be that I would pick my way around the box and save my favorite pieces for last.  And that would most likely be the dark butterchew or the scotchmallow.  mmmmm…..

This year, after Christmas I tore open the See’s Candies box from Sweetie’s grandfather.  I poked around a little bit.  And then I went straight for the scotchmallow.  Bit into that chocolate, caramel, marshmallowy goodness and savored it for all of five seconds before devouring the rest of the piece.

I thought to myself – What happened to that good old fashioned restraint and expectation? 

And then I thought – Why did I always save my favorite piece for last anyway?

Did I appreciate it more because I had to wait for it?  No.  Did I feel like I was building some strength of character by withholding my favorite chocolate from myself?  Not really.  Did I want my final impression of that box of chocolates to be the best it could possibly be?  Surely that is not reason enough?

I couldn’t really come up with a good answer.  I still can’t.  If I’m going to appreciate a good scotchmallow, I’m going to appreciate it if it is first out of the box, or last. 

Was that too many two letter words in a row?  It reminds me of one of the placards that my old high school english teacher used to keep on the wall.  Something about 10 two-letter words to live by – “If it is to be, it is up to me.”

Sorry – I’m drifting.  I probably need to sleep after last night’s “it’s 5 a.m. and I haven’t slept a wink yet” fiasco.

Sooooooo……why do we do it?  The old phrase “Save the best for last.”  What practical purpose does it serve?  Other than to make your current choice feel better about itself?  What good does it do the chooser?  Do we continue to do it as we get older?  And if we don’t, don’t you think it would make old people less crotchety?  Or is there some law of diminishing returns on choosiness?  Maybe there is a brief period of bliss where we have what we want, then we get a little older and realize we chose all the best goodies and are left with the buttercream with cherries and there’s nothing left to look forward to but yelling at your cat and scaring small children. 

What do you think?  Should we always save the best for last? Or first?

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The Underappreciation of Stoicism

Ahh, the poor stoics of the world. 

They don’t get much attention in comparison to many others.  The whiners of the world complain loudly and bitterly and many people feel bad for them often and annoyed by them on occasion.  The truly depressed cause people to worry about them, sometimes more so when they are quiet and go into retreat mode.  The angerballs have no problem venting and diverting attention to themselves.  Even the chronically happy are duly noted and either praised or scorned.  Loudly.

But the stoics?  The ones who rarely get overly happy and excited during the good times?  The ones whose complaints during bad times are barely a blip on the radar?  Who talks about them?

I think about this as I stay with my mom and remind myself of some of her ways.  Now, it is true that she has never been a patient woman.  When I was a child, I dreaded the annual (yeah – we only did this once a year) trip for new shoes with my mother because unless I miraculously both fit into and loved the first pair of shoes I tried on, I was subject to some vocal complaints and downright huffiness.  And yes, she does have a couple of chronic ailments – her bad feet probably being the most painful for her.  But, put aside her impatience and anything directly related to that and what do I see?  A very stoic woman. 

When I think about her ability to put up with discomfort, I am impressed.  She just doesn’t like to be down for the count.  She will get pneumonia and then try to get back to work as soon as possible until ordered home by the HR watchdogs.  Walk into the living room after her nephew accidently breaks one of the few delicate things she has on display?  She tells him it is ok and proceeds to clean it up.  Live alone after Dad dies?  She tells me she is not lonely and is doing ok (mostly, I think, because Big Sis and her family are so close).  She may mention her foot pain right after she gets home from work after standing on her feet all day, but she doesn’t spend all her time moaning about it. 

OK, so she told me she screamed and cursed pretty loudly when she dislocated her shoulder and had to be driven to the emergency room by my Big Bro.  Cause, hey — dis.located.shoulder! Anything milder than that and barely a peep from her. 

I thought about myself the other day and how I spend about five minutes in the company of my old co-worker and already I’m whining about my lower back pain.  How I can be vocal about the less-than-stellar things going on in my life.  And I think how long and loudly I lament any sickness that causes pain and discomfort.  Goodness know Sweetie probably wants to spike my soup with NyQuil to get me to shut up.  And I wish I could be more like my mom in that regard.  Less with the whining.  More with the moving on.  Less with the worrying and more with the action.   

How many people praise the stoics?  How many check up on them on a regular basis?  How many really appreciate their nature given the amount of energy we expend on the more dramatic people in our lives?   They are the unsung heroes of the friend and family trees.  They shouldn’t have to jump up and down for attention.  And it shouldn’t be so hard for the rest of us to emulate them a little more.  I’m not talking about repressing feelings or tuning out.  I think that I am not talking so much about stoicism as “indifference” but more as the Stoics themselves practised their philosophy.  From Wikipedia (hush, this isn’t a scientific paper, I can cite wikipedia):

Stoicism was a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium  in the early 3rd century BC. The Stoics considered destructive emotions to be the result of errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of “moral and intellectual perfection,” would not undergo such emotions.  Stoics were concerned with the active relationship between cosmic determinism and human freedom, and the belief that it is virtuous to maintain a will (called prohairesis) that is in accord with nature. Because of this, the Stoics presented their philosophy as a way of life, and they thought that the best indication of an individual’s philosophy was not what a person said but how he behaved.

That doesn’t sound too bad, does it?  Am I missing something?  Maybe a philosopher or historian can enlighten me.  All I know is, I admire my mom greatly.  I just need to remember to tell her more often.

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Is your joy tinged with jealousy?

There are some feelings I consider wasted emotions. 

I suffer from some of these wasted emotions and I don’t mind talking about that.  Worry is probably my biggest wasted emotion.  I’ve wasted time, energy, good relations (temporarily mostly), and lots and lots of sleep worrying about things.  Worry, on occasion may lead to something productive.  If, for example, I manage to write out and complete a to-do list to ease my stress.  Or, if I spend extra time or attention with someone I care about because I am worried about them.  There are many ways that worry can become worthwhile.  But, I freely admit that I’ve spun myself into circles with needless useless wasted worry.

Insecurity is another wasted emotion I am constantly dogged with.  Too often Sweetie bears the brunt of this wasted emotion and it is awful.  Simply awful.  You would think by now that all my insecurities where my husband are concerned would be gone and we wouldn’t be weighed down by it.  But no, it rears its ugly head time and again and I am still trying to learn to discipline my own thoughts to banish insecurity forever.

Thankfully, there is one (what I consider) wasted emotion that I don’t tangle with too often: envy/jealousy.*  Maybe my brain just figured out that I’m wasting enough energy on worry and insecurity.  Or maybe I’m just not wired for jealousy.  (Have they figured out what parts of the brain these emotions come from? I need to finish reading my Destructive Emotions book.)  But throughout much of my life, when I have been handed good news by people I know, I manage to process it through my brain without the filter of jealousy kicking in.  Or maybe – like that lesson I learned the hard way with my sister and talking about people behind their backs – I learned a long time ago that envy can be ruinous not just to me, but to my relationships.  Sitting here writing about it – I distinctly remember a conversation I had with one of my best friends in high school.  She was so happy about something concerning her family and I remember making some biting comment alluding to how much money they had.  I was sort of happy for her but I do believe that my own jealousy made me snarky and mean.  She called me on it.  Literally.  She called me up and told me how much that hurt her (or maybe she passed me a note….I’m forgetting).  I agonized over it because I felt so bad and I knew she was right.  And I think because of my obvious envy – among other things – our friendship took an unrecoverable slide.

It’s interesting how some particularly painful experiences can shape my behavior for years after.

All I know is – I didn’t feel jealous of one of my best friends in high school when she got a boyfriend – something I very much wanted.  I felt like so many stupid young boys didn’t appreciate her enough and was glad that someone finally did.  I didn’t even feel envious of friends who got loads of attention from different guys in college.  Sure, I would feel miserable for myself for being single and feeling so unattractive for so long.  But there was (as far as I remember) no major encore of my high school Snarky Jealousy.  I stopped worrying altogether at the grades my friends were getting when mine nose-dived.  I don’t begrudge my friends material happiness.  And I’ve never stood beside a loved one on her wedding day feeling lonely for myself – I’ve been too dizzyingly happy for her. 

So maybe I’m just over-aware when I see the destructive trail that jealousy leads people on.  As far as wasted energy is concerned.  Sure, I understand a bit of envy here and there.  But it strikes me in particular when people are jealous of their own loved ones.  When that envy swamps what should be a shared joy, I think it is such a tragedy that someone ends up spending more time feeling bad for his/herself than happy for someone else.  What happens when someone is greeted by a loved one with news of new love, happy family, new children, bigger paycheck, job recognition, or some other joy?  Do you feel joy?  Or do you end up feeling sad?  And does that one moment of good news lead to countless moments of feeling loneliness, loss, bitterness, rage, or worry?  And how is someone supposed to feel when they share good news and know that it makes someone else miserable? 

I recently commented on someone else’s blog about how I enjoy getting Christmas letters from people and I don’t understand why some people hate them so much.  People who revile them call them “brag letters” and maybe their hatred comes from constant jealousy.  But my letters are what they are.  The year my uncle died I think I just wrote a long poem.  When my father died I told people my father died.  I wonder if my jealous friends and family members enjoyed that particular letter more than my others.  Who knows.  I hope not.

In any case, I’m left again feeling I don’t have a proper solution.  I just hope that people can learn to separate their own disappointments in life from the joys of others.  Especially from others you claim to like, or love.  We spend so much time concentrating on ourselves.  At the least, we should be able to afford other people sincere happiness when it is due.  They say the word jealous comes from the Low Latin zealous and from the Greek word that meant zeal in a good way – like emulation, ardor, zeal – with a root connoting “to boil, ferment” or “yeast.”  I just keep thinking how the word ends in “lousy,” which is pretty much how it makes you feel.

What if we could learn to turn our negative “jealous” back into positive “ambition?”  If we must feel the pangs of envy for someone else, can we bend it into achievement and use that energy to help us work harder to fulfill our own goals?  At the end of the day, think how bad you feel when you hear insincere congratulations when you yearn for shared joys.  How crappy it is to get criticism instead of praise?  Why do that to someone else?  Even if you don’t express it out loud.  If you want to be selfish at all, spend the energy on yourself and figure out how to get closer to some semblance of that other person’s joy.  Then share some good news and see how people’s faces and voices light up in celebration.  Savor those sincere congratulations.  Sometimes they are hard to come by.

I snagged this picture from HERE, where there are also a few good words about jealousy.

*There are differences in the etymology of these two words.  Maybe I should be focusing on Envy, which seems to have a more negative connotation than jealousy.  For now, I’m sticking with jealousy and I figure you understand the point.

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Living on the Edge

I’m not a downtown kind of girl, I’ve figured out.

I thought about this as I drove down the hill to go grocery shopping the other day.  I hate traffic.  I’m don’t think I’m unusual in this dislike.  Haven’t heard a lot of people lately who mention “Oh, I was stuck in this nice bit of traffic yesterday.  It was quite pleasant.”  The saving grace in that situation is, of course, good music.  If I’ve managed to stow a couple of good CDs in the car, a longer car ride can be quite bearable.  Of course, I’d prefer a long car ride along the coast, or up Haleakala to the Kula Lodge for some nice breakfast.  That sort of thing. 

Speaking of music, here’s a song to keep you company during this blog trip.  I like this:

So, what have I done?  I’ve found a new route to Costco that involves driving about a mile in the opposite direction, then going down the hill, then driving back towards town.  If traffic in town is light, my new route is about the same time.  If traffic in town is heavy, I save myself a bit of time.  But that doesn’t matter to me as much as the bliss of LESS traffic.  I don’t use this route for the grocery store (yet) because it would really be out of the way.  But it’s been so much nicer to drive past sugar cane and empty fields instead of track homes and the mall.

Because, about a mile away from my house, I’d be in the middle of sugar cane fields.  When I look up at the sky at night, I see stars.  I live on the edge of town.  And, as I thought to myself on the way to Costco, I realized that I’ve lived near the edge of towns my whole life.  Granted, most of my life has been spent in relatively small towns.  I think I’ve mentioned that – growing up, even though I technically lived in “town,” the area across from my home was grape fields.   I climbed the tree in my back yard (a lot) and on a clear day, I could see the Sierra mountains.  If I got in my car, I could be in wide open fields in two minutes. 

I went away to college to an Ag school in the middle of ag land.  Not hard to get away to open fields from anywhere in town.  Even when I lived in the dorms, I was close to empty fields.  I lived on the west edge of town.  I lived on the east edge of town (at least, it was the edge of town back then.  There’s a few extra miles of homes to the east nowadays.)  I lived on the south edge of town. 

Even when I made my way to Sacramento, I still managed to find a neighborhood on the edge of town.  Some days, after a bad day at work or a heartbreak of some kind, I would get in my car and seek solace in wide open space.  And that wouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes from my home.  I visit friends who live in Sacramento neighborhoods who are socked in by suburban development.  You get off the freeway and have to drive another 15 to 20 minutes through crowded streets to find their home.  I sometimes think that if I lived in those areas, I would suffocate.  If I were to climb up to the top of my roof (another thing I used to do quite often) and could not see open space in at least one direction, any distress I felt would just be multiplied.  I guess you could call it my “Heidi Syndrome.”  Take the simple country girl and stick her in the middle of a city and she wilts.  She wanes.  She weakens.   I am half Swiss.  I need my alps.

It’s not that I don’t like a good city.  OK, I don’t actually like many cities.  I love San Francisco.  That may be it.  I just need to be able to clear my head in open air.  And since I don’t often know when the need to clear my head will arise, I guess I have this instinctive need to be near open space.  Maybe it stems from my girlhood plans to run away from home.  That plan involved the mountains and my bike.  It was going to be a long ride, but I knew I had to get up to the hills.  I’ve had many recurring dreams over the years that end in me running as hard as I can towards hills and trees for solace.  I don’t know what I will find.  But the search for peace of mind always seems to start there.

I don’t know where our next move takes us.  Right now, Sweetie and my #1 and #2 choices are both fairly small-townish.  It will be easy to be near trees, hills, and open space in both these spots.  Who knows.  We could end up somewhere else.  I could suck it up and thrive in a boxed-in, artificially-lighted, urban home.  I could survive away from the edge.

If I own a helicopter.

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Why is it that….

…

ok, explain this one to me – you have a fitted sheet for your bed. This is the one that goes on the bottom that is elasticy and it fits the mattress and doesn’t move around (for you guys who have never made a bed. ha! sorry).

Unless your bed is perfectly square, your mattress – and your fitted sheet – is longer on one side than the other.

So, there you stand….with fresh sheets….ready to make your bed….and you got a fitted sheet in your hand. And you have a mattress. Sheet. Mattress. Four sides. Four corners. You grab a corner of your fitted sheet, you aim for a corner of your mattress. You slip it on. You pull the side to the other corner.

Four corners. Four sides. Two sides lengthwise. Two sides widthwise. Statistically speaking (which I hate doing – having almost flunked upper level stats in college), you have a 50-50 chance of matching up the right corner of your sheet to the correct corner of the bed.

50-50. 50%. A one in two chance of success.

Why is it that, in all my days and years of making a bed – I NEVER MATCH THE RIGHT CORNERS?! Never. Not ever. Even when I stretch the sheet out to gage which is the long side. Even when I reach for the corner of the mattress and think “Uhh ohhh…you’ve made the wrong choice! Abort mission! Re-start! Re-do! Computer, end program!” and I switch corners…..only to be wrong AGAIN. I’m always wrong. Why is that?

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The things we do not hear

Are you surprised, sometimes, by the things that people *don’t*hear?

 

It’s why I hate it when people walk past you and say “How are you?” without slowing their gait or even looking at your face. It’s why I avoid asking people this question if I don’t have time to hear the answer. What’s the point really, if there is no real interest behind the question? I don’t need people to feign politeness for my behalf. If you’re busy or distracted, that doesn’t usually bother me. I’d rather know that up front.

 

Sometimes, in conversations with friends, we say things to each other that never really register with the other person. Oftentimes, it’s something that is less-than-positive with regards to ourselves. But do you ever walk away, or hang up a phone thinking that part of the conversation was inadvertently screened out by the other person? Like you had two completely different conversations?

 

There are several reasons. Sometimes, someone is genuinely distracted and just doesn’t hear. I’ve had that experience when even a good friend will ask “How are you?” and I express something negative. She told me that was great, until she caught herself and realized I didn’t say anything good, let alone great.

 

Other times, people are so caught up in their own negatives that they filter out everyone else’s bads because they have too much on their plate. Or they think they do. They listen to what you have to say, then wander off the subject and never return. Having spent years living with other women, I find this to be the case many, many times. We are very supportive of each other when our own plates are clear. But once we feel that our negatives outweigh someone else’s, we sometimes just tune out. Not that we don’t care. We just feel that our own problems are more pressing.

 

Other times, it seems that people have an opinion of your situation, and their outlook is much more rosy. I’ve said the same bad thing over and over to people and have had them say “Oh, but [the situation] is just fine.” They have determined that the situation *is* fine, and nothing I say about it will sway them. Or really, maybe they desperately want it to be fine because any alternative is much too complex to deal with. That’s a tough one. I’ve been in that situation, and sometimes I have helped a good friend face a hard problem head-on. Even if it meant literally weeks and months of working it out. Sometimes, I’ve tried to make myself scarce, thinking “I don’t know how to make this person feel better, and there may be someone better able to help.” Is that a little chicken-shit of me? Yes, I’ve had those moments. And sometimes I’ve been an idiot and completely missed that there was a problem at all. Ack!

 

What’s a good solution? I’m not entirely sure. I’ve had situations where I feel that my own plate is too full and I know I am less responsive to other people. Sometimes, I find it’s best to avoid everyone for a while to recharge my own batteries. I know my own fuse is short or my own attention is distracted. Because, when I am talking to someone I care about, I try my hardest to actually listen to what he or she is saying (unless, of course, I’m calling to tell them something really really bad). I admit all the time if I am helpless to offer much in the way of advice, but I still try and listen. It somewhat amuses me that some people sometimes do not hear what I say out loud.

 

Oh wait. That’s not amusement I was feeling…

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