Saturday, March 31, 2018

Lessons Learned




Still smarting from the aborted vacation.

My self-confidence is in tatters.  My yearning for change sours and burns for want of an outlet.  My courage and fortitude are acrid ashes at my feet.

Best, perhaps, to focus on lessons learned by the experience:

There is a certain amount of comfort in being alone among the familiar.

Guess if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look further than my own back yard. 

Sigh.

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Do-Over, Please?




I was looking over my stats earlier today, and just randomly clicked on a post that showed up in the stats feed.  It was from 2015...and it actually had comments on it!  I guess I thought that commenting on blog posts had gone out of fashion long before that.  

For some reason, people are SO allergic to posting comments on blog posts, that even if I post a link to a post on Facebook, they come...but they don't comment.  Or, if they DO comment, they do it on the Facebook post, not at the blog.  I CAN NOT understand that. Have they forgotten how to log in?  Are they AFRAID to log in?  Does it just take too much time to log in and then leave a comment?

I Just. Don't. Get. It.

In view of all the recent crappy revelations about Facebook and what they actually DO with the information you knew was not private (if you had a brain in your head) but had no idea what kind of nefarious--even treasonous--purposes for which it could be exploited...  Why can't we all take a step backward and go back to blogging?  

Yeah...I know.  It'll never happen.  

That boat done sailed...and nobody ever goes backward when it comes to technology.

More's the pity, because clearly social media have gone completely out of control, and there seems no way to close THAT Pandora's box.  Even if we could gather up all the evil spirits and ill humours that have escaped from it into the world at large over the past ten years. 

These days, there are only problems...and no solutions.  


Thursday, March 22, 2018

Goodbye Facebook?



How does one set the limits of one's community?  Especially within a medium over which one has only the slightest token control?

I have ridden the wave of social media, in my own small, contained way, from the days of its infancy.  By the turn of the 21st century, AOL was all the rage.  It was, in fact, one of very few avenues to the internet available to Mr. and Mrs. Joe Average Guy.  In 2003, AOL launched its very infant versions of social media.  

I started signing on to the internet through Aol in about 1998.  In 2003, I was in an extremely lonely and isolated place in my life; as low, I think, as I had ever been.  I filled pages upon pages with my maudlin angst...at once an historical record of the sad events of a terrible decade of my life, and an attempt to use pen and paper as a substitute for talk therapy.  When J-land started up that year, it was a natural place for me to...put myself "out there."  At the outset, I had no idea it was going to turn into a community.  But it did...and I really think it saved my life.  Or at least, my sanity.

J-land was only around for about 2 years when Aol chose to take its very popular social media to the next level--it added advertisements around the edges of the journal pages.  How infuriated we were!  There was a mass exodus of j-landers away from the "commercialization" of our little internet home.  How funny that seems now.  What in the world ever gave us the idea that WE "owned" that little space, or had any say whatsoever about what went on there?

I had a little cadre of steady j-land "friends."  I have to laugh, now, when I think of how incensed we were about the ads on our blogs.  Some quit the neighborhood altogether, never to be heard from again.  Then, Aol closed j-land for good in 2008.  So, the whole span of that time of community and emotional support lasted a little less than 5 years.  Why, then, is it so branded on my psyche that I STILL miss it?

Most of my j-land friends, however, eventually popped back up on Facebook.  They missed the community of social media, I guess, enough to swallow all the things about Facebook which were EXACTLY the things we railed against at Aol j-land. 

So...here we are.  Fifteen years down the road of social media, all thinking we are so smart and so with-it to have claimed our little spaces on Facebook.  Up until the run up to the election of 2016, we had all told ourselves that we could manipulate the medium to serve our personal needs--whether it was to stay in touch with distant family, or reconnect with friends from our past, or communicate with current co-workers or neighbors, or advertise our small business for free. 

But as the dark political divisions in our country were highlighted and widened by social media, I think we began to get the inkling that we were playing with fire.  That this gigantic network that reached into the homes and hearts of so many Americans of diverse geography, lifestyles, ideologies and faiths had fallen into the hands of forces that could and would manipulate public opinion for their own nefarious purposes.  Ultimately putting us at war with each other. 

All for financial gain.  Someone is getting rich on this stuff.  Maybe a lot of someones.  But not Mr. and Mrs. Joe Average American.  No.  We are the pawns.  We are the puppets.  We are the masses to be manipulated in whichever direction the guy with the most money can point us.

Recent revelations about the extent to which foreign powers trafficked in and manipulated American social media have proven the Machiavellian depths to which this dark game of power and control have gone.

A friend of mine deleted his Facebook page after the Cambridge Analytica bombshell.  He said he felt like he needed to do this as a "public service."  

I'm inclined to go in that direction myself.  But...

I'm having a really hard time cutting that umbilicus. 

Facebook is my last, weak connection to my j-land "friends."  The folks who flit past my posts and click "like" if something strikes their fancy.  The same folks I used to interact with on a deep and personal level (or so I thought) on a nearly daily basis.   

If I leave Facebook, I say a permanent goodbye to 95% of the people "in" my life.

And I'm not sure I have the guts to do that.  Yet.

Am I a sap?  Am I just the kind of person that nefarious forces count on to continue their work of tearing apart the fabric of American society?

I don't know.

I have to do some real thinking about all this.             

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Disaster




So, I went on my vacation.  Pulled up my big girl panties, made my motel reservations, packed my gear, gassed up the car, and headed east.  All stoked up for a real adventure.  Not mad at anyone, or resentful, or sad, or desperate.  Trying to bask in the warm glow of joy and peace.

Three hours into my solitary adventure, piloting the van across the flat, featureless high desert of central Oregon, I looked out the windows...and had a Grand Mal anxiety attack.  Out of the blue, for no reason I have since been able to come up with. 

I have been having these attacks since just after I was married.  They seem to have something to do with my stepping out of my comfort zone and embarking upon something completely new and foreign.  Marriage was, apparently, one of those things.  Evidently, so was driving away from my solitary, protected little life in the valley, and up onto the vast, flat-from-horizon-to-horizon, plain of the high desert. 

During these attacks, I temporarily lose myself.  I suddenly feel as if I've been dropped into a completely different universe...I come dangerously close to losing my concept of who I am or what my life is...as if I've been living an alternate existence, and my actual reality is trying to break through into the one I'm in. I can't look in a mirror during these spells, because I have this sense of not recognizing myself.  It's like I'm falling, but not into a hole.  More like into a boundless space where I will just...spread out in the air and disappear.  It scares the crap out of me, every time. 

Over the years, I've learned to physically turn away from these attacks, connect with something familiar within my line of sight, grab onto it and turn my back on the feeling of...not knowing who I am.  It works.  But driving across the bright, empty plain, away from everything familiar, I couldn't find enough of anything to grab onto to keep from falling.  I very nearly lost myself.  It scared the shit out of me.  I was rattled and shaken for two days afterward. 

It was just too hard to get myself back to a place where I could enjoy the adventure, after that.  Even though the feeling and immediate fear finally abated, I was scared to death it would happen again...because it had come at me from out of the blue the first time.  So I just couldn't explore the open, boundless beauty of the high desert alone. 

After three days, I canceled the rest of my trip and headed back to the valley, familiarity, and safety.

I feel like such a failure.

I've always known that fear and anxiety are my constant companions; and, in fact, they have been rearing their ugly heads with greater frequency as I get older. 

In a way, I guess I believed that heading out on an adventure motivated by joy and surrounded by peace, I would also be charting a course away from fear and anxiety. 

They sure proved me wrong.

Apparently, strong negative emotions are the best way for me to conquer fear and anxiety, and accomplish anything at all.  Anger, sadness, loneliness, frustration...these are the clubs I use to beat back the fear so I can move in any direction at all. 

Which is why this has been the story of my life.

Who knew?

Saturday, March 17, 2018

What Does "Better" Look Like?



This started out as a comment on a friend's Facebook post.  The original post shared the above essay.  My friend's lead-in comment basically dissed the practice of "walk-up" described by the writer---which is good.  But then she went on to say she believed we could combat school shootings by teaching our kids to be "better" to each other--which just...makes me crazy.  

I have to shake my head and sigh when the topic of school bullying comes up.  People seem to want to wring their hands and wonder, what is wrong with our kids today?  Really?  Kids are not raised in a vacuum.  Where do we think they learn that behavior?

All this "encouraging kids to be better"  and "walk up and include others," etc.  What are we thinking?  I read an article the other day that called this "victim blaming," and I can't say I disagree.  As if it's the kids' fault that angry white males are storming into schools with weapons of war and shooting kids to bits.

First of all...tell me: how does this theory apply to Sandy Hook?  The victims were six and seven years old.  I'm sure they were not yet bullying each other enough to make one of them grab a gun and shoot up the place.

Second of all, this line of thinking puts all the responsibility on the students, and none on their parents or our society in general.  One only needs to go on Facebook and read comments on a controversial article to see what has become "normal" behavior as far as interactions between adults in this country.  We bully, we call names, we threaten, we throw sarcastic and disrespectful comments at each other with impunity.

Originally, that behavior took place on the internet because it was a place of anonymity--you could put your demons on full display, because nobody knew they were yours.  Over time, people stopped caring whether their comments were anonymous or not.  

And now, we have taken it to the next level--we act this way to each other in public, and on live visual media, not caring who sees us or who knows.  Up to and including our President--the person who theoretically personifies our national character--and his itchy Twitter finger.   

American society has completely normalized rude, confrontational, hateful, tribal behavior: aka  "bullying."

So...how are we to teach kids to be better when WE are not "better"?

Friday, March 9, 2018

Making the Trip


So now, it's separate vacations.  A promised Christmas present birding trip to eastern Oregon was precluded by Job #1.

Our usual time of year for these trips is January...but the Universe must have known that we were both going to be debilitated by the flu for most of that month, so we had decided on March.  Way back in December, we chose March.  

Come time to make the arrangements, and suddenly, March was not okay.  All kinds of work shit--suddenly takes place in March!  And if we'd chosen April I'm sure THAT is when the work shit would have occurred.  THAT is how it goes.  That is how it has gone since 1994.  I think I have FINALLY made my peace with it.

We, of course, had to have The Argument about it.  I asked him point blank if he really wanted to make this trip.  Yes or no.  His answer, "Well, we said we were going to go..."  I'll take that as a "no."

His final answer was, "If you really want to go and waiting (until what...hell freezes over?) is not an option, then you should go."

Ok.  I bloody well will.

And HE will be going back to Illinois to visit his family in August. 

But, as I said in my last post, I don't want to make decisions based on, "Fuck you, then!" anymore.  I want to choose to take action in the light of peace and joy.  That is what I'm endeavoring to do here.  Making a choice to do something I REALLY want to do, which happens also to be something I know he does NOT want to do.  And that is okay. 

Today, I made my hotel reservations, and got new tires put on the van.  Went to Bi-Mart and picked up a bunch of little travel-size stuff for the trip.  I'm really going to do this!

I get a little wistful when I think that I would like SOMEone to share my trip with...someone who gets excited about the same things I do.   Husband is not that person.  And when I try to imagine what it would look like to make new friends at this late stage in my introverted life...I just can't wrap my head around that.  A sad little voice keeps whining in my ear, "But won't it be lonely, out there by yourself...no one to share it with?"

I'll let you (and the whiney little voice) in on a secret. 

There are times when I DO feel lonely, when the weather is bad and I'm stuck at home trying half-heartedly to play "domestic engineer"...housecleaning has never been at the top of my list of favorite activities...(or even anything I would choose to do without a gun pointed to my head.)  But the past month or so, I've been busting away from that ball and chain, and spending more and more time out in nature with my camera, just me.  

A couple of weeks ago, I spent an incredible afternoon with a huge flock of snow geese, Sandhill cranes and various ducks.  They came up to the road so close I could almost touch them.   The cacophony was magical.  I have not felt so happy, so loved, so cherished...so much a part of something larger than myself...for a VERY long time. 

So...  Lonely?  Ha!  I don't think so. 






Wednesday, March 7, 2018

A Change of Motivation


 


I'm a pretty old dog, and often when I think I've come up with a new way of looking at things, I find that it's not new at all.  I'll go back and look at my writings of five or ten or even twenty years ago, and find that I've been wrestling with the same issues and coming up with the same "epiphanies" for my entire adult life.

But I think I have actually come up with something new in the past couple of days.

Looking back on my life as an introvert "doer," I see that my motivation for "doing" is almost always negative.  I'm angry, I'm frustrated, I'm hurt, I'm embarrassed, I'm overmatched.    So I hitch up my big girl panties, turn on my heel and head toward something...else.  It seems to take a hefty smack of fury, sadness or self-loathing to get me going.  And since I so excel at all those negative emotions, I don't stay in one place for very long. 

As an introvert, I don't have a big circle of friends and acquaintances.  But I do tend to drag the few other people in my life--my husband, my family--in my wake.  Which is sometimes a good thing, because without me dragging them around, they probably wouldn't do anything.  But, lately, I have come to understand that I'm just TIRED of that whole dynamic.  I need to do what I would like to do, and allow everyone else to do the same.   

I don't want to be angry anymore.  I don't want to be sad, or frustrated.  I want to choose a goal through the light of peace and joy, and then chart a course for it.  If someone wants to come along, that's fine.  But they don't have to.  And it has to be okay if they don't want to.  I have noticed that I have a habit of assigning negative attributes to the people in my life who don't want to do whatever I am doing. 

I am particularly that way with the husband.  And that is not something I can continue to do, in light of my fresh understanding that I need to get a life and allow him to have his.  My attitude can no longer be, "Fuck him.  I'm going to do this anyway!"  It has to be, "Wow!  Here is something I really would like to do.  And I can!"  ...with no negative reflection upon any other person or his/her choices in life. 

Positive motivation.  That's my new goal.  I need to learn how to move forward in happiness and joy. 
 

Monday, March 5, 2018

Venting


In October of 1976, two young, slightly counter-culture suburbanites--a 20-year-old man and a 21-year-old woman--bound themselves together for life…or until such time as the union became untenable.  I distinctly remember throwing in that caveat…because otherwise I don’t think we could have pulled it off.  Forever just seemed too much to promise, unconditionally.  So we gave ourselves an out. 

But, as it has unfolded, forever seems to be exactly what we committed to, because…here we still are.  Forty-one years and counting.  Has it been the stuff of fairy tales—“happily ever” and all that?  Definitely not.  Has it been what I hoped for, or even what at any given time I thought it was?  Not even close.  Has it been the best I could have realistically expected?  Probably.  The mere fact that we are still in each other’s lives after all these years is way more than I should ever have counted on, had I really thought about it forty years ago. 

We jumped into the marriage contract without ever going beyond just that---marriage.  Eternal couplehood.  Two halves of a whole.  We never made the transition to the next logical step:  family.  Turns out I am infertile, and was not willing to go through the tortures of the damned to combat it…as if we could have afforded that, anyway.  Adoption was never really an option, either.  I worked 50 hours a week until I was 40.  You don’t bring a child into that.  Who knows how our lives would have been different, how our marriage would have ultimately panned out, if we had done the usual thing and brought children into the mix?

And beyond that…well, 20 years in was when our relationship stopped growing and started fraying around the edges.   What caused binding to halt and unraveling to commence? Hard to say, but I have my theories.  Financial circumstances played a large and ugly part.  In late 1994, I lost the job which had kept me challenged and sane for eight years (which seemed a long time, in those days) and which, at the time, was more than half our income.  Only a few months later, my sister declined into the final stages of her terminal illness, and passed away in May of the following year.  Needless to say, that was a terrible time.  And things didn’t get any better for many years.   

Through all that, the husband…kind of stood aside and watched.  Because HE had, in that same time frame, at 38 years old,  latched on to a “real” white-collar job that paid “real” money that might actually support us some day; good thing, I suppose, because I have not held a job for more than eighteen months in a row since.  In the way of many good baby boomer men, he believed the best support he could offer was financial...nose to the grindstone, keep bringing home the paycheck, and everything else will sort itself out eventually.  And, of course, work serves as a good excuse NOT to become too tangled in the emotions surrounding…anything.  Not that he wasn’t freaked out that my half of the household income had evaporated (and that my former employer reneged on its promise not to stand in the way of my collecting unemployment in exchange for my resignation…)  So, buzzing in the not-so-background of the worst time of my life was the constant drone of “Get a job!  Get a job!”  Not all of that pressure came from him…but enough of it did that I felt dismissed and unsupported by the one person I had thought would be my staunchest ally.  Turns out, emotional support is not his strong suit. 

And so we headed toward the turning point in our marriage…the point at which we ceased being two halves of a couple and became two individuals bound together by…what?  The fact that we’d been together half our lives and wouldn’t have known how to BE any other way?  I attended my sister's death, half a continent away; and returned home to a place a hundred miles from the family with whom I longed to share my grief.  My parents were aging quickly, and recent experience had driven home the fact that they could be gone all too soon.   We had moved to Portland in order for me to accept a promotion with my now ex-job.  I wanted to go home.  I wanted to be with my family.  I wanted to tuck my tail between my legs and slink backward in time, to a place where I had been, if not happy, at least busy and engaged.  And we all know how well going backward works.

The husband was not ecstatic about going back. By now, he had been with his big-boy, white collar job (hereafter to be known as Job #1) for almost three years, and change is never his thing, anyway.  Still, he made arrangements to go back to the job he had left when we moved to Portland.  He had it all set up.  We sold the house...we picked out another one back home.  "We" were all prepared to make the jump (backward.)  Until Job #1 decided that they couldn't do without him.  Made him an offer he couldn't refuse.  He cast his lot with them and has never looked back.

So...I moved back home.  He took an apartment in PDX, paid for by Job #1, and came home on weekends, driving a truck also provided by Job #1.  The original arrangement was for him to be in PDX Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, and work from home on Fridays and Mondays.  Theoretically, that would have meant that we would be together more than we were apart.  But it never worked out that way.  Any time Job #1 crooked its little finger, he would extend his stay up north.  Eventually, OUR relationship boiled down to a mostly weekend thing.  Valentine's Day, my birthday, our anniversary all happened at "bad times," when he couldn't possibly tear himself away from his Portland office and work from the home office they had provided for him...so we could maybe at least go out to dinner or something. 

That was the turning point.

That began the second half of our marriage.  The half where we would now concentrate on learning how to live separate lives, but still be married.  As opposed to the first half of our marriage, which was an exercise in leaving behind our separate identities and becoming half of something bigger.  Which, I have to say, was never a walk in the park for me.  I often struggled to retain bits of myself...to not lose myself entirely in the becoming of half a couple.  Seems like just when I finally relinquished the struggle, because there was so little of myself left to cling to, I had to turn around and make a desperate grab for what was left.  Because the other half of the couple had loosed the ties and attached them securely to his new priority:  Job #1.

I found work in Eugene.  I went to community college classes.  I worked in my garden.  I spent time with my parents.  With my sisters.  With my niece and nephew. 

Fifteen months after I moved "home," my dad was diagnosed with stomach cancer.  He died four months later.  Meanwhile, my mother disintegrated, physically and emotionally.  The prospect of life without the man who had been her rock and refuge for over fifty years held absolutely no attraction for her.  My family fell apart without the glue that had held it together for all those years.  My sisters and I went for each others' jugulars regularly while Dad was sick, and it only got worse after he died and we were charged with figuring out how to care for Mom.  For some reason, I bore the brunt of the frustration and the anger.  It utterly broke my heart, the heart that had not fully recovered from the death of my oldest sister less than four years previous.  Husband was...in Portland.  More and more.  And I was left to figure out life without my husband OR  my family. 

Eventually, "we" moved back to the Portland area, because my presence near my family no longer made any sense, and I couldn't live alone anymore.  I can't say I wasn't apprehensive about what kind of success the husband and I were going to have, trying to go back to being a couple again.  Turns out I never had to worry, because we never went there.  He never lessened his attachment to Job #1;  our "family," such as it was, was never again to be his priority...if it ever was.  He needed security, and I didn't provide it.  Job #1 did. All I provided, for several years, was an open, needy sore.  Can I really blame him for opting out?

Shortly after moving back in together, "we" started a small business--something that (I thought) had been a dream of ours for many years.  But in the end, he could not commit to it.  He would only engage with it when it didn't interfere with Job #1.  So it became largely MY responsibility, with the additional hassle of having to juggle a schizophrenic level of "I'm in...no, I'm out" emanating from the other half of the "partnership." 

After that, you would have thought I'd have known better than to try to up the ante...  But in 2006, when it looked as if the economic climate was going to spell the end for Job #1, "we" bought a restaurant.  Theoretically, this was to provide us with a livelihood and an income when his job went away.  Only, his job never went away.  And "our" incursion into entrepreneurship instead very nearly ended our marriage.  And what was left of my sanity.

Five years later, I walked away from that disaster alone...feeling a bit like a stuntman walking out of the flames of an action-movie explosion.  Only I was not as unscathed as those characters always seem to be as they stroll calmly and determinedly out of the inferno.  Husband still had....Job #1.  And I had a marriage hanging by a thread, and...not a whole lot else. 

Seven years later, husband still has Job #1. 

And I have a 2200 square foot house that for the last several years has suffered from deferred maintenance brought on by the crash of 2008 and the subsequent "lucky to have a job" economy; a broken down commercial building 100 miles away housing my precious licensed catering kitchen; a small business with a mostly disinterested part-time partner, a lot of time on my hands, and...not a whole lot else.

And retirement hurtling toward us like an express train.
So, from this position, we are supposed to step up and craft a plan for the third half of our lives "together."
It's no surprise I have no clue what that could possibly look like

I will probably be posting more of these types of long-winded whines, as we are currently in a place where he is farther away than usual, and I need to talk to...something.