Is this okay? Is it really?
The number of people who say "yes, it's perfectly fine, lighten up" in the comments is truly astonishing. People? I meant men. The number of men who think that walking up to a random woman and kissing her without warning is completely acceptable...I simply can't believe it.
Ask Eva: most of my more, shall we say, "extreme" beliefs and behaviours have some grounding in childhood experience. I've said, for instance, that I never climbed a tree because I knew I would fall out of said tree and break my spine. That's true, as far as it goes. What you don't know is that I watched a kid at Cub camp do just that.
There was a really cool treehouse there. It had three, or maybe four levels, each one a good fifteen feet above the next, connected with makeshift wooden ladders. The view from the top was amazing. I know this because I climbed up there. Very, very carefully I climbed up there, with people laughing me all the way up.
The next day, Nameless went to climb up there himself. It had rained during the night and everything was still slick. He made the first step of the first ladder.
He didn't make the second.
His foot slid off the slippery wood at that exact crucial fraction of an instant when he had let go of the ladder to take his next step. He fell backwards with a grunt--not a yell, he was only a couple of feet off the ground, a grunt--and he landed flat on his back.
Not quite flat, as it turned out. There was this protruding rock, see. Barely enough to notice if you were scuffling along on the ground. If you fell on it just so, it would paralyze you for life.
Most people would view that as a one-in-a-million freak accident. Little Kenny viewed it quite differently. Little Kenny decided then and there that he would never climb anything ever again without a damned good reason.
------------
You're thinking I've gone way off topic. You're wrong. I just had to get up a head of writing steam, because what I'm about to write is very difficult.
1987
Grade nine. Oakridge Secondary School, London, Ontario
There is a hierarchy in high school. Everybody knows it. The 'minor niners' are at the bottom, almost without exception. When you are a member of a despised class of people, there is a very strong inclination to subdivide yourselves, to find the weakest among your number and prove that at least you're better than him.
I am, of course, him. I've been him since the first day of grade four, so it shouldn't be anything new or unexpected. Except it is. Because Oakridge kids are different.
No longer am I thrown into lockers, garbage cans, or toilets. Nobody has squashed my lunch, broken my glasses, or stolen my notebook...not that by now there's ever much in it. My notebooks were stolen so often the past two years that I've pretty much stopped using them entirely. No bullies here, not in the conventional sense.
What there are instead are snobs. Lots and lots and lots of them. I am judged inferior not because I wear glasses or because I weigh eighty pounds sopping wet but because my parents' occupations aren't up to snuff. I brown-bag my lunch every day...everyone else seems to buy theirs. The labels on my clothing are so, so wrong that I'd probably fare better showing up to school buck naked. By the standards of Oakridge S.S, I am a dalit--untouchable.
The shunning started pretty much the first day and it has continued, without exception. I have no friends. That's not unusual--I've had one over the last six years, three schools ago. He goes to Saunders now, and ironically, his parents decided after three years of close friendship that I wasn't his sort of people.
I'm nobody's sort of people now. This is made clear to me every day at lunchtime: the people at whatever table I choose to sit at get up as one and scatter to the four winds. It's unnerving: like I have some kind of super ultra mega leaf blower, or rather, four of them. This can't be just because I'm not as upper-crust as the rest of these people. I don't know why they treat me this way. I've tried asking. Once.
"If you have to ask, you'll never know."
Well, that's helpful. NOT.
So I sit in class and lose myself in the lessons. I go to band (I'm learning to play baritone, which is a small tuba) and I lose myself in the music. Then I go home and lose myself in my books, like always.
I'm lost.
February. Valentine's Day. Or rather, Friday the 13th. I was hoping to dodge the dreaded VD this year by virtue of it falling on a Saturday...but no such luck.
I hate Valentine's Day. I imagine lepers everywhere do.
You have to understand, I am a fully functional human male teenager. More than that: I never went through a "girls are icky" stage as a kid: from grade four or five on, if you were female and you shared a class with me, you shared a hell of a lot more than that with me in my imagination. I'm fifteen now and I seem to have hit what we may as well call Peak Boner. It's embarrassing as hell, all the more so since it's not like I'll ever get to do anything with it. I haven't so much as kissed a girl--for real--since third grade. And I kissed quite a few girls in third grade. I am, in short, hornier than the proverbial hoot owl.
To raise money for the United Way, the school is holding a kissing booth. [2015 Ken intrudes: you're going to have to believe me on this. I know it's not the sort of thing you can even imagine a school holding today, but I'm telling you: it happened.]
Twenty five cents a kiss...
Oh. this is, like, totally gnarly. I live in an apartment building almost next door to the school. There's a laundry room in our building. With washers and dryers. That take quarters. I happen to know where an entire roll of quarters is hiding.
There are three girls who volunteer to be kissed. Older girls, grades 12 and 13. I don't remember their names, any more than I remember the name of the kid who fell from the first rung of a treehouse ladder and became paralyzed. I do remember one of them was tall and willowy and seriously cute. The other two were lovely as well--even then, I wasn't picky as to physical type--but the tall girl had a smile that could melt steel. Or smelt it.
At first.
------------
I wasn't even halfway through that roll of quarters when the smiles were gone. I'd like to tell you I stopped then, but that would be a lie. I did stop when the tears showed up, but by that point I was almost out of quarters.
Those tears brought me up short: my elation turned to ashes in an instant. At first, those ashes smouldered...god damnit, can't they at least pretend a little harder? Then it finally dawned on me that all the other customers at the kissing booth had spent somewhere between a quarter and a dollar. I honestly hadn't noticed: I was too deep in a dream.
I withdrew in shame, and that shame intensified over the following days and weeks. Nobody needed to keep up the shunning charade: I started eating lunch in the music room, alone with a piano. Don't pity me: I earned every bit of my treatment that year, retroactive or not. Pity the nameless women, instead. They never asked for what I did.
I never did learn who those women were. I wanted, very badly, to apologize to them, but I also wanted, even more badly, to make sure they never saw my face again.
------------
And that was when I changed from your typical lusty teenage male to something a little harder to fathom: a guy who kept his every sexual attraction (he still had more than his fair share) firmly in check until he was absolutely, a hundred and fifty percent sure it wouldn't cause tears. After enough years of that I stopped feeling sexually attracted to random people, no matter how pretty they were.
Explains a lot, doesn't it?
I have carried that guilt with me for almost thirty years. If there's ONE day I could obliterate out of my entire life thus far, Friday, February 13, 1987 would be the day I'd pick without hesitation.
Is it any consolation to those women that I learned something from my despicable actions? I doubt it is. I wish I'd had the guts to apologize. I really do.
Monday, August 10, 2015
Friday, August 07, 2015
The Silly Season
We are in election mode.
My readership numbers tank whenever I get political. I understand that. Politics seems boring and irrelevant to a large number of people; to another subset of people, nothing I say is going to sway them from their candidate of choice. A third set already agrees with me, and...well, there is no other set.
So why bother?
Because like everything else, I take my politics personally.
I am a creator, a consensus-builder, and a rank idealist, that last to a fault. People have often called me naïve, and that's the one criticism that, for whatever reason, I'm able to shake off relatively easily. Sometimes my idealism backfires on me. Sometimes it doesn't. I still find it preferable to a philosophy of cold and cynical pragmatism.
I believe in power with, not power over; that people are fundamentally good (though often shortsighted) and that the word "profit" has more than one meaning. And furthermore--here's where the idealism comes out--I believe that governments ought to have a larger role in our lives than corporations do. I don't trust entities whose sole motive is to maximize short-term (monetary) profit at any cost, and the describes the vast majority of corporations.
Take the environment as an example. Corporations like to ignore the environment in which they operate, to the extent they can get away with doing so. The logic is sound from a purely economical perspective: externalizing your waste product costs, for example by, say, dumping your waste into the nearest river...well, it increases your profit margin, and it keeps the price lower for your customers. Win-win, right? No, not really. Because those costs you've dodged just get passed on to everyone who lives downstream. In Ken-world, governments would have, and use, the power to prevent this. In the real world, it doesn't happen near as often, nor to anywhere near, the extent that it should, and that is because corporations are larger than governments.
A similar effect is in play with wages. My blood boils every time I hear someone say that ___s make too much money. The statement is applied to everyone from (unionized) retail cashiers to teachers to factory workers. Strangely, I don't hear it applied to hedge fund managers.
Retail cashier pay at one of my former employers is capped at thirty cents an hour over the minimum wage. I know people who have been stuck at that wage for fifteen years. You can say that those people should go to school and make themselves more marketable, and I'll ask you: using what for money?
Teachers: there are so many misconceptions about what teachers do and how they're paid to do it that the people spouting off really aren't qualified to have an opinion. Besides, if you believe teaching is such a cushy job...why aren't you a teacher?
Factory workers: the unionized ones do quite well, the non-unionized ones tend to make minimum wage or close to it. Same, or similar job. But it's always that the union folks make too much, never that the others make too little. I have always found that perverse.
You know what minimum wage is? Minimum wage is "well, we'd pay you less, but regrettably the government says we can't." Again, keeping wage costs low looks good on paper. Until you realize that your minimum wage workers can't afford to buy the products you produce, or contribute in any other meaningful way to the economy. Henry Ford, nobody's left-winger, understood this implicitly. There are a few today who do as well...but not many. It's a race to the bottom, and we're all losing. Who can arrest it, or at least slow it? Surely not corporations. To turn a famous political quote on its head, corporations are not the solution, corporations are the problem.
From what I have written here, never mind what's in the rest of this Breadbin, it's pretty obvious I don't support our current government. The funny thing is, I don't doubt for a second that Prime Minister Harper truly believes he has the best interests of Canadians in hand and in heart. He comes from a place of conviction...enough of his government's been convicted, after all.
Sorry, cheap shot.
I truly do not understand how anyone can support the man. Even if you agree with every policy of his government, the way he enacts those policies should greatly offend you. There is literally zero room for any competing viewpoint....on anything. Particularly if that viewpoint comes from an educated person. He has muzzled scientists, crippled his government's ability to collect data (supposedly in the name of privacy, which he later abolished under C-51), and he proudly, even defiantly, flaunts the Constitution. He will not take questions from Canadians unless they have been thoroughly vetted...and no more than five a day of those. He's shut down Parliament twice to avoid sticky situations. He routinely hides completely unrelated legislation in huge omnibus "budget" bills. I can go on and on, but I'll stop here: His solution to criminal wrongdoing in the RCMP was to rewrite the law and make it retroactive.
That kind of behaviour is unacceptable in a leader...and I'd say that just as forcefully if it was a leader I had voted for myself. (Full disclosure: I did vote for Harper...once. I didn't like either of his predecessors much, either, and Harper initially campaigned on transparency and democratic reform. Ha. More fool I.)
The biggest problem in our country today, what really holds us back from getting anything done, is that if you disagree with me you're evil and if I disagree with you, I'm an idiot. What we need is someone who can work to bring differing viewpoints together.
I will give my endorsement closer to October 19th, which is an insanely long way off, yet. In the meantime I will try to keep the political chatter in the Breadbin down to a dull roar: people do seem to like my personal posts more. But please understand that for me, the political is personal.
My readership numbers tank whenever I get political. I understand that. Politics seems boring and irrelevant to a large number of people; to another subset of people, nothing I say is going to sway them from their candidate of choice. A third set already agrees with me, and...well, there is no other set.
So why bother?
Because like everything else, I take my politics personally.
I am a creator, a consensus-builder, and a rank idealist, that last to a fault. People have often called me naïve, and that's the one criticism that, for whatever reason, I'm able to shake off relatively easily. Sometimes my idealism backfires on me. Sometimes it doesn't. I still find it preferable to a philosophy of cold and cynical pragmatism.
I believe in power with, not power over; that people are fundamentally good (though often shortsighted) and that the word "profit" has more than one meaning. And furthermore--here's where the idealism comes out--I believe that governments ought to have a larger role in our lives than corporations do. I don't trust entities whose sole motive is to maximize short-term (monetary) profit at any cost, and the describes the vast majority of corporations.
Take the environment as an example. Corporations like to ignore the environment in which they operate, to the extent they can get away with doing so. The logic is sound from a purely economical perspective: externalizing your waste product costs, for example by, say, dumping your waste into the nearest river...well, it increases your profit margin, and it keeps the price lower for your customers. Win-win, right? No, not really. Because those costs you've dodged just get passed on to everyone who lives downstream. In Ken-world, governments would have, and use, the power to prevent this. In the real world, it doesn't happen near as often, nor to anywhere near, the extent that it should, and that is because corporations are larger than governments.
A similar effect is in play with wages. My blood boils every time I hear someone say that ___s make too much money. The statement is applied to everyone from (unionized) retail cashiers to teachers to factory workers. Strangely, I don't hear it applied to hedge fund managers.
Retail cashier pay at one of my former employers is capped at thirty cents an hour over the minimum wage. I know people who have been stuck at that wage for fifteen years. You can say that those people should go to school and make themselves more marketable, and I'll ask you: using what for money?
Teachers: there are so many misconceptions about what teachers do and how they're paid to do it that the people spouting off really aren't qualified to have an opinion. Besides, if you believe teaching is such a cushy job...why aren't you a teacher?
Factory workers: the unionized ones do quite well, the non-unionized ones tend to make minimum wage or close to it. Same, or similar job. But it's always that the union folks make too much, never that the others make too little. I have always found that perverse.
You know what minimum wage is? Minimum wage is "well, we'd pay you less, but regrettably the government says we can't." Again, keeping wage costs low looks good on paper. Until you realize that your minimum wage workers can't afford to buy the products you produce, or contribute in any other meaningful way to the economy. Henry Ford, nobody's left-winger, understood this implicitly. There are a few today who do as well...but not many. It's a race to the bottom, and we're all losing. Who can arrest it, or at least slow it? Surely not corporations. To turn a famous political quote on its head, corporations are not the solution, corporations are the problem.
From what I have written here, never mind what's in the rest of this Breadbin, it's pretty obvious I don't support our current government. The funny thing is, I don't doubt for a second that Prime Minister Harper truly believes he has the best interests of Canadians in hand and in heart. He comes from a place of conviction...enough of his government's been convicted, after all.
Sorry, cheap shot.
I truly do not understand how anyone can support the man. Even if you agree with every policy of his government, the way he enacts those policies should greatly offend you. There is literally zero room for any competing viewpoint....on anything. Particularly if that viewpoint comes from an educated person. He has muzzled scientists, crippled his government's ability to collect data (supposedly in the name of privacy, which he later abolished under C-51), and he proudly, even defiantly, flaunts the Constitution. He will not take questions from Canadians unless they have been thoroughly vetted...and no more than five a day of those. He's shut down Parliament twice to avoid sticky situations. He routinely hides completely unrelated legislation in huge omnibus "budget" bills. I can go on and on, but I'll stop here: His solution to criminal wrongdoing in the RCMP was to rewrite the law and make it retroactive.
That kind of behaviour is unacceptable in a leader...and I'd say that just as forcefully if it was a leader I had voted for myself. (Full disclosure: I did vote for Harper...once. I didn't like either of his predecessors much, either, and Harper initially campaigned on transparency and democratic reform. Ha. More fool I.)
The biggest problem in our country today, what really holds us back from getting anything done, is that if you disagree with me you're evil and if I disagree with you, I'm an idiot. What we need is someone who can work to bring differing viewpoints together.
I will give my endorsement closer to October 19th, which is an insanely long way off, yet. In the meantime I will try to keep the political chatter in the Breadbin down to a dull roar: people do seem to like my personal posts more. But please understand that for me, the political is personal.
Cord cut. Snip, snip.
The Breadner household has made the move away from satellite television and to Apple TV.
This move has been a long, long time coming: we're not what you'd call early adopters. Frankly, I wasn't sure it would ever come...for many years, Eva has been wedded to the convenience of one bill for all our media and telecommunications...and for just as long, there wasn't a simple option to access the shows she likes to watch.
Enter Netflix, and especially Crave TV and Shomi.
Between the three of them, plus a streaming site for my baseball and hockey needs, pretty much everything we'd care to watch is available when we want to watch it, commercial free, and...oh, hell, this is old news to you, right? You've saved yourself thousands of dollars over the years by cutting the Bell and Rogers out of your life.
We've had a great-great-grandfathered unlimited internet plan at a not-too-obscene price: we'd been told that having three services through Bell kept that Internet deal operative. We had four: a landline, our cells, the satellite, and the internet itself. When it came time to try and trim our monthly bills, preserving that internet deal was imperative. We could cut one service out and still be fine.
Most of you would cut the landline, I imagine. In this day and age, landlines seem to be redundant...I mean, hell, you can't even text on one. I'm still leery of killing mine. Cells are far too easily lost/stolen/forgotten/shattered/depleted to zero charge...hell, my little iPhone sucks power as if it's actually a washing machine. I think we'll get to the point where I'm comfortable with just my cell (and if you told me six months ago I'd say that, I'd have cheerfully informed you that you were full of shit)...but I'm not there yet and I won't be pushed.
Oh, yeah, and is it just me, or are cell phone charger cables a new cash cow for the industry? In this house they seem to work reliably for about a month. Maybe. Then there comes a day when you plug one in and nothing happens: ch-ching, another twenty bucks down the rabbit hole. Landlines don't have that problem. Just saying.
Thanks to Apple TV, we could save almost a hundred bucks a month cutting out satellite, and that's what we chose to do.
Bell doesn't make it easy. You're on hold indefinitely (probably because they're dealing with so many other people abandoning them)...and then when you try to leave, you're told you can't, not without paying some kind of penalty. As it turned out, either we misunderstood the three-services-gets-you-reasonable-internet thing or, more likely, they changed it. We were informed that cutting satellite would hike our internet bill by twenty bucks a month. This really pissed us off, but what can you do? It's communicated in such a way as to make you feel like you missed a few lines of fine print. For all we know, we did.
Still: saving eighty bucks a month and not missing anything. Until they start screwing with our Internet speed even more than they already do. We are severely throttled here: I have friends in Pittsburgh whose internet speed is roughly six times ours and so far as I can tell, we're paying about the same a month. It's pathetic....but it's part and parcel of being Canadian, I guess. Netflix still streams. For now. I fully expect at some point they'll throttle it to the point where you'll be forced to get their premium package in order to stream anything.
Anyway, Bell retention called us yesterday with a last-ditch effort to try to keep us in the satellite fold. They threw so many numbers and so much bafflegab at us, and they wouldn't give us a straight answer as to how much money we'd be paying them if we chose to accept any of their enticements. In the end we hung up in disgust. It sounded as if they were trying to give us the satellite for free at one point, which makes less than zero sense from their perspective. I'm sure there were untold snarls and traps in there designed to siphon ever more money out of our bank account.
I'm ready to ditch Bell entirely. Unfortunately, we can't do that until our cell phone contracts are up...and I just started one. They'll find a way to preserve their ridiculous profit margins at your expense. Trust me.
_______________
I am having trouble adapting to the new economy.
As I write this, I can look up and see what remains of my CD collection. I haven't listened to a CD in five years at least. The CD drive on my Mac mini is pooched and so is the under-cupboard CD player in the kitchen. The only other CD player I have access to is in Herbert the Pervert, our Hyundai Tucson (so named because his seats are shaped in such a way as to violate you as you climb into one). So far as I know, no CD has ever been played in Herbert.
Off behind me is our tiny DVD collection: three TV shows (Joan of Arcadia, Game of Thrones, and Saving Grace) and a handful of movies. It gets next to no use.
In front of me is my 64 GB iPod, about half full of music: mostly classical and French, with a smattering of many other genres. I'll admit to pirating some music...the stuff I can't find in the iTunes store. But usually I buy my music, dutifully sync it to my iPod...and then, more often than not, end up listening to it on YouTube anyway. I'm about to start the free three month trial of Apple Music, and in three months I suspect I'll be asking myself why I ever bothered to own music at all.
Upstairs there are at least a thousand books. They're going nowhere. I keep adding to them. And yet...sigh...give me five years and I just bet I'll have a tablet with an e-reader function...and I won't have to replace all my books because I'll just pay ten bucks a month for access.
Looking at this model from the outside, there's a lot to like about it. For the price of one or maybe two widgets a month, I can have unlimited access to all the widgets. If I was normally in the habit of purchasing anything close to one or two widgets a month, this seems like a no-brainer. But call me paranoid if you will: when you don't own the product but only access it, access can be restricted or withheld at any time for any reason. That's in all those end-user license agreements we all pretend to read. Things like this happen. And if you cross the U.S. border with certain e-readers, you'll find the content has been geo-blocked. I don't like that. At all.
I'm a cautious sort: always have been, always will be. I'm not one for headlong leaps into voids. I imagine that eventually, I will look back and scoff at myself...heaven knows it's happened many times already. I'm on record right here on this blog stating a whole bunch of absolutely insane objections to iPods. (Go back and read that one: it's entertaining.) Hell, I distinctly remember getting Internet access for the first time in 1991 and asking myself what I needed it for. Everything I want is on my computer already, why would I want access to other computers?
Dumbass.
This move has been a long, long time coming: we're not what you'd call early adopters. Frankly, I wasn't sure it would ever come...for many years, Eva has been wedded to the convenience of one bill for all our media and telecommunications...and for just as long, there wasn't a simple option to access the shows she likes to watch.
Enter Netflix, and especially Crave TV and Shomi.
Between the three of them, plus a streaming site for my baseball and hockey needs, pretty much everything we'd care to watch is available when we want to watch it, commercial free, and...oh, hell, this is old news to you, right? You've saved yourself thousands of dollars over the years by cutting the Bell and Rogers out of your life.
We've had a great-great-grandfathered unlimited internet plan at a not-too-obscene price: we'd been told that having three services through Bell kept that Internet deal operative. We had four: a landline, our cells, the satellite, and the internet itself. When it came time to try and trim our monthly bills, preserving that internet deal was imperative. We could cut one service out and still be fine.
Most of you would cut the landline, I imagine. In this day and age, landlines seem to be redundant...I mean, hell, you can't even text on one. I'm still leery of killing mine. Cells are far too easily lost/stolen/forgotten/shattered/depleted to zero charge...hell, my little iPhone sucks power as if it's actually a washing machine. I think we'll get to the point where I'm comfortable with just my cell (and if you told me six months ago I'd say that, I'd have cheerfully informed you that you were full of shit)...but I'm not there yet and I won't be pushed.
Oh, yeah, and is it just me, or are cell phone charger cables a new cash cow for the industry? In this house they seem to work reliably for about a month. Maybe. Then there comes a day when you plug one in and nothing happens: ch-ching, another twenty bucks down the rabbit hole. Landlines don't have that problem. Just saying.
Thanks to Apple TV, we could save almost a hundred bucks a month cutting out satellite, and that's what we chose to do.
Bell doesn't make it easy. You're on hold indefinitely (probably because they're dealing with so many other people abandoning them)...and then when you try to leave, you're told you can't, not without paying some kind of penalty. As it turned out, either we misunderstood the three-services-gets-you-reasonable-internet thing or, more likely, they changed it. We were informed that cutting satellite would hike our internet bill by twenty bucks a month. This really pissed us off, but what can you do? It's communicated in such a way as to make you feel like you missed a few lines of fine print. For all we know, we did.
Still: saving eighty bucks a month and not missing anything. Until they start screwing with our Internet speed even more than they already do. We are severely throttled here: I have friends in Pittsburgh whose internet speed is roughly six times ours and so far as I can tell, we're paying about the same a month. It's pathetic....but it's part and parcel of being Canadian, I guess. Netflix still streams. For now. I fully expect at some point they'll throttle it to the point where you'll be forced to get their premium package in order to stream anything.
Anyway, Bell retention called us yesterday with a last-ditch effort to try to keep us in the satellite fold. They threw so many numbers and so much bafflegab at us, and they wouldn't give us a straight answer as to how much money we'd be paying them if we chose to accept any of their enticements. In the end we hung up in disgust. It sounded as if they were trying to give us the satellite for free at one point, which makes less than zero sense from their perspective. I'm sure there were untold snarls and traps in there designed to siphon ever more money out of our bank account.
I'm ready to ditch Bell entirely. Unfortunately, we can't do that until our cell phone contracts are up...and I just started one. They'll find a way to preserve their ridiculous profit margins at your expense. Trust me.
_______________
I am having trouble adapting to the new economy.
As I write this, I can look up and see what remains of my CD collection. I haven't listened to a CD in five years at least. The CD drive on my Mac mini is pooched and so is the under-cupboard CD player in the kitchen. The only other CD player I have access to is in Herbert the Pervert, our Hyundai Tucson (so named because his seats are shaped in such a way as to violate you as you climb into one). So far as I know, no CD has ever been played in Herbert.
Off behind me is our tiny DVD collection: three TV shows (Joan of Arcadia, Game of Thrones, and Saving Grace) and a handful of movies. It gets next to no use.
In front of me is my 64 GB iPod, about half full of music: mostly classical and French, with a smattering of many other genres. I'll admit to pirating some music...the stuff I can't find in the iTunes store. But usually I buy my music, dutifully sync it to my iPod...and then, more often than not, end up listening to it on YouTube anyway. I'm about to start the free three month trial of Apple Music, and in three months I suspect I'll be asking myself why I ever bothered to own music at all.
Upstairs there are at least a thousand books. They're going nowhere. I keep adding to them. And yet...sigh...give me five years and I just bet I'll have a tablet with an e-reader function...and I won't have to replace all my books because I'll just pay ten bucks a month for access.
Looking at this model from the outside, there's a lot to like about it. For the price of one or maybe two widgets a month, I can have unlimited access to all the widgets. If I was normally in the habit of purchasing anything close to one or two widgets a month, this seems like a no-brainer. But call me paranoid if you will: when you don't own the product but only access it, access can be restricted or withheld at any time for any reason. That's in all those end-user license agreements we all pretend to read. Things like this happen. And if you cross the U.S. border with certain e-readers, you'll find the content has been geo-blocked. I don't like that. At all.
I'm a cautious sort: always have been, always will be. I'm not one for headlong leaps into voids. I imagine that eventually, I will look back and scoff at myself...heaven knows it's happened many times already. I'm on record right here on this blog stating a whole bunch of absolutely insane objections to iPods. (Go back and read that one: it's entertaining.) Hell, I distinctly remember getting Internet access for the first time in 1991 and asking myself what I needed it for. Everything I want is on my computer already, why would I want access to other computers?
Dumbass.
Thursday, August 06, 2015
Premature Capitulation
I'm back. Much sooner than expected. And for good this time.
Last week, I had an attack of despair. As usual, it came out of nowhere, for no discernible reason: there is nothing in my life remotely deserving of such a black emotion. Nevertheless, these attacks come on with disturbing regularity. All the happiness drains out of my world as if somebody pulled a plug. If if it goes on long enough, other things start to swirl down the drain as well: motivation first, then energy, and eventually, in a very real sense, my consciousness: I start living on autopilot, barely engaged with the world around me, with little sense of how I got so low and even less sense of how to climb out. And yet I always have climbed out, aided by kind words from friends.
I shouldn't need kind words from friends. Nobody should need them, and I loathe myself because I seem to. Even more so since they have a half-life of two or three weeks...even less when I sense rejection on any front.
I understand that happiness, energy and consciousness are self-sustaining in normal people. I wish I knew why they aren't in me. I suspect it's related to other things I am missing, namely direction and purpose. Why THOSE should be missing is something I've been circling around in this blog for the better part of a decade.
Oh, there have been many other reasons for writing this blog: to refine my thoughts on life and love; to share unorthodox views on both; to write out quotidian stress. But figuring out where my motivations lie, or indeed if I even have any, has been the unspoken raison d'être of the Breadbin since May of 2004.
Probably not a good idea to let my despair kill the Breadbin, just when I need the Breadbin most.
That attack was a bad one. Not the worst I've suffered--I had one last summer and another in February that were existential--but bad. And starting to get worse. I wasn't just going to shut down the Breadbin; I was trying to figure out a way to delete my Facebook account as well, without attracting undue attention. Like I say, I loathe myself when I get like that, and the last thing I want to do is go pity-fishing. Oh, here comes Ken around for his monthly ego-stroke. Like he's even got any reason to be depressed. What a whiny, needy waste of space that man is. It's strange, because deleting Facebook would rob me of most of my social connections...surely not a reasonable action for somebody feeling disconnected. But then very little about depression is reasonable.
As ridiculous as it sounds when the sun is shining, isolating myself completely comes with its own logic when the black clouds descend. I already feel isolated, so isolating myself is only stating what I feel to be true. And nobody really needs the burden that is Ken, depressed. I'm better off in a hole somewhere.
I even wrote about this the last time I wrestled with it. Rereading that, I can see the tendrils of my disease gripping between the lines. August was a bad, bad month for me.
Anyway.
I was struggling, trying hard to grasp positives, when -- as usual -- this time around it was a friend reminding me
you must realize there are people who love you and people who need you in their lives
that gave me a foothold in the murk. That's phrased as an imperative ("you MUST") and it reiterates the connections I have, connections that seem so tenuous when I can't see through the fogs.
Then I had a couple of great shifts at work, where my efforts were praised and promotions were spoken of.
Direction.
See, the thing that has masked my drift over the years is that I am internally motivated, at least when people are paying me to be. I don't do anything different in terms of work ethic at seven bucks an hour less than I was making two years ago. For the first time ever, I find myself working for a company that has noticed this and seems ready to help me exploit it, rather than exploiting me instead.
Now I have to fill out what appears at first blush to be a daunting Individual Development Plan. I admit to a fair bit of apprehension here: I'm pretty good at defining where I am. I've spent eleven years writing that out. I'm much less comfortable writing about where I want to go.
You see a lot of past in this here Breadbin. Quite a bit of present. Not very much future. Futures in my life have always been hidden. As a kid, I moved so damned often that I eventually couldn't look much past next Friday; I took a dead-end degree without any thought if what it might do for me, then dropped out in disgrace when I first got caught in the endless now of the internet. I aspired to stability--no more and no less.
I've got that. I've had that since I met Eva in 1999. We've been through and continue to go through life upheavals. Through it all we're building...something. I'm not sure of its final form, only that it will have one, and it will be multifaceted, because that's what both of us are.
But stability without strategy is stasis. It's like that woman who had sex in a swamp, did you hear about her? She's apparently six months stagnant now.
Having achieved stability, I was happy for many years, with only minor nigglings of what now? that I forcefully suppressed. If I was thinking what now, it meant I wasn't happy with my lot in life, right? And I was. Very much so. What would I change? We were living comfortably...not ostentatiously, but we'd gotten to the point where we could afford a real vacation every other year or so...just perfect for curious people who are nevertheless homebodies. Keep me in books and internet and my material comforts are pretty much taken care of. I've always felt as if I had much more love to give, and even that has begun its own process of being addressed. Until I lost my last job, life was damn near idyllic.
Of course, there's a straw man in that paragraph. It is possible to be perfectly content with your situation and still want more. More responsibility, more chances to make a difference. And not to put too fine a point on it, more remuneration. The perks of my current job are exceptional; the pay is very, very ordinary.
And I am anything but content with nights, as I have said. While it's true that they're only as isolating as I let them be, it's also true that the amount of effort required to overcome that isolation is often overwhelming. You live on a different, darker plane of existence from everyone else.
I'm told I'll have to live with nights for a bare minimum of another eighteen months to two years. That's fine. My first career goal is to get myself to a place where I can afford to take the dollar an hour pay cut that foregoing nights will cost me.
The more I work in this environment, the more I feel I can bring to the table as a manager. Most of our staff are treated like five-year-olds and only a few of them deserve to be: I think it's a contributing factor to an insanely high turnover rate. I would be different, because one talent I have is recognizing people's strengths and weaknesses: playing to the former and working with people to address the latter. And I have found numerous opportunities for departmental improvement that have not been addressed by my superiors, probably on the grounds that I'm still green.
But I'm not. While I'm new to this company, I have many, many years of running my own department under my belt: even though 'manager' has never been a part of my official title, I've thrived under managerial responsibility. I know what works and what doesn't.
And if there's any way I can work this
into my professional development, I'm going to try to do it. My store manager is Québécois: that can't hurt.
A promise to my faithful readers: If I go a long period without posting, it will be because I am busy living, not busy being sulky. I am seeking pharmaceutical help, to that end.
--Ken
Last week, I had an attack of despair. As usual, it came out of nowhere, for no discernible reason: there is nothing in my life remotely deserving of such a black emotion. Nevertheless, these attacks come on with disturbing regularity. All the happiness drains out of my world as if somebody pulled a plug. If if it goes on long enough, other things start to swirl down the drain as well: motivation first, then energy, and eventually, in a very real sense, my consciousness: I start living on autopilot, barely engaged with the world around me, with little sense of how I got so low and even less sense of how to climb out. And yet I always have climbed out, aided by kind words from friends.
I shouldn't need kind words from friends. Nobody should need them, and I loathe myself because I seem to. Even more so since they have a half-life of two or three weeks...even less when I sense rejection on any front.
I understand that happiness, energy and consciousness are self-sustaining in normal people. I wish I knew why they aren't in me. I suspect it's related to other things I am missing, namely direction and purpose. Why THOSE should be missing is something I've been circling around in this blog for the better part of a decade.
Oh, there have been many other reasons for writing this blog: to refine my thoughts on life and love; to share unorthodox views on both; to write out quotidian stress. But figuring out where my motivations lie, or indeed if I even have any, has been the unspoken raison d'être of the Breadbin since May of 2004.
Probably not a good idea to let my despair kill the Breadbin, just when I need the Breadbin most.
That attack was a bad one. Not the worst I've suffered--I had one last summer and another in February that were existential--but bad. And starting to get worse. I wasn't just going to shut down the Breadbin; I was trying to figure out a way to delete my Facebook account as well, without attracting undue attention. Like I say, I loathe myself when I get like that, and the last thing I want to do is go pity-fishing. Oh, here comes Ken around for his monthly ego-stroke. Like he's even got any reason to be depressed. What a whiny, needy waste of space that man is. It's strange, because deleting Facebook would rob me of most of my social connections...surely not a reasonable action for somebody feeling disconnected. But then very little about depression is reasonable.
As ridiculous as it sounds when the sun is shining, isolating myself completely comes with its own logic when the black clouds descend. I already feel isolated, so isolating myself is only stating what I feel to be true. And nobody really needs the burden that is Ken, depressed. I'm better off in a hole somewhere.
I even wrote about this the last time I wrestled with it. Rereading that, I can see the tendrils of my disease gripping between the lines. August was a bad, bad month for me.
Anyway.
I was struggling, trying hard to grasp positives, when -- as usual -- this time around it was a friend reminding me
you must realize there are people who love you and people who need you in their lives
that gave me a foothold in the murk. That's phrased as an imperative ("you MUST") and it reiterates the connections I have, connections that seem so tenuous when I can't see through the fogs.
Then I had a couple of great shifts at work, where my efforts were praised and promotions were spoken of.
Direction.
See, the thing that has masked my drift over the years is that I am internally motivated, at least when people are paying me to be. I don't do anything different in terms of work ethic at seven bucks an hour less than I was making two years ago. For the first time ever, I find myself working for a company that has noticed this and seems ready to help me exploit it, rather than exploiting me instead.
Now I have to fill out what appears at first blush to be a daunting Individual Development Plan. I admit to a fair bit of apprehension here: I'm pretty good at defining where I am. I've spent eleven years writing that out. I'm much less comfortable writing about where I want to go.
You see a lot of past in this here Breadbin. Quite a bit of present. Not very much future. Futures in my life have always been hidden. As a kid, I moved so damned often that I eventually couldn't look much past next Friday; I took a dead-end degree without any thought if what it might do for me, then dropped out in disgrace when I first got caught in the endless now of the internet. I aspired to stability--no more and no less.
I've got that. I've had that since I met Eva in 1999. We've been through and continue to go through life upheavals. Through it all we're building...something. I'm not sure of its final form, only that it will have one, and it will be multifaceted, because that's what both of us are.
But stability without strategy is stasis. It's like that woman who had sex in a swamp, did you hear about her? She's apparently six months stagnant now.
Having achieved stability, I was happy for many years, with only minor nigglings of what now? that I forcefully suppressed. If I was thinking what now, it meant I wasn't happy with my lot in life, right? And I was. Very much so. What would I change? We were living comfortably...not ostentatiously, but we'd gotten to the point where we could afford a real vacation every other year or so...just perfect for curious people who are nevertheless homebodies. Keep me in books and internet and my material comforts are pretty much taken care of. I've always felt as if I had much more love to give, and even that has begun its own process of being addressed. Until I lost my last job, life was damn near idyllic.
Of course, there's a straw man in that paragraph. It is possible to be perfectly content with your situation and still want more. More responsibility, more chances to make a difference. And not to put too fine a point on it, more remuneration. The perks of my current job are exceptional; the pay is very, very ordinary.
And I am anything but content with nights, as I have said. While it's true that they're only as isolating as I let them be, it's also true that the amount of effort required to overcome that isolation is often overwhelming. You live on a different, darker plane of existence from everyone else.
I'm told I'll have to live with nights for a bare minimum of another eighteen months to two years. That's fine. My first career goal is to get myself to a place where I can afford to take the dollar an hour pay cut that foregoing nights will cost me.
The more I work in this environment, the more I feel I can bring to the table as a manager. Most of our staff are treated like five-year-olds and only a few of them deserve to be: I think it's a contributing factor to an insanely high turnover rate. I would be different, because one talent I have is recognizing people's strengths and weaknesses: playing to the former and working with people to address the latter. And I have found numerous opportunities for departmental improvement that have not been addressed by my superiors, probably on the grounds that I'm still green.
But I'm not. While I'm new to this company, I have many, many years of running my own department under my belt: even though 'manager' has never been a part of my official title, I've thrived under managerial responsibility. I know what works and what doesn't.
And if there's any way I can work this
into my professional development, I'm going to try to do it. My store manager is Québécois: that can't hurt.
A promise to my faithful readers: If I go a long period without posting, it will be because I am busy living, not busy being sulky. I am seeking pharmaceutical help, to that end.
--Ken
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
The End of the Line?
Have I said too much? There's nothing more I can think of to say to you...
But all you have to do is look at me to know that every word is true.
--Tim Rice, "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina" (from Evita)
Over fifteen hundred posts. Well over a million words. Over eleven years. The idea well is running dry.
Barring some major life or world event, there will be no post here for the foreseeable future.
I want to thank everyone who has been along for the ride. I'm very grateful to have had such discerning and supportive readers. Love to each and every one of you.
--Ken
But all you have to do is look at me to know that every word is true.
--Tim Rice, "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina" (from Evita)
Over fifteen hundred posts. Well over a million words. Over eleven years. The idea well is running dry.
Barring some major life or world event, there will be no post here for the foreseeable future.
I want to thank everyone who has been along for the ride. I'm very grateful to have had such discerning and supportive readers. Love to each and every one of you.
--Ken
Sunday, July 26, 2015
UP NORTH
Just back from what felt like a flying visit Up North. Capitalization, as always, intended.
I haven't been up there in a year, which is entirely too long. First there was the job search--and looking for a job is a full time job--and then there was, well, the job. No holidays 'til I've been there a year, and I'm working extra shifts to boot.
Eva hasn't been up there in entirely too longer. In her case it was Georgia-Peach nailing her down. We loved our Peach to, ah, peaches, but she was a handful even at home.
And Tux...Tux hasn't been to Daddy's Daddy's house in almost nine years. For most of that he was being a big brother to the Peach. Now, approaching the other end of a long and happy life, Tux once again found himself going for a long, long CAR-RIDE.
We left right after a rough night shift, and we realized at precisely the point at which it was too late to turn around that we had forgotten Tux's leash. This didn't worry me as much as it might have: Tux is a border collie/Lab mix and he's stayed in his yard even when Daddy inadvertently left the gate open and swore up and down he'd never tell a living soul that he did it and so now he's writing it instead.
I tried to sleep in the car, and even succeeded for about half an hour or so. Which honestly surprised me. My bed doesn't move: I don't normally sleep in things that do. Not to mention it was as bright as a sunny day, it being, you know, a sunny day and all.
And so we arrived at Rose Point on the Magnetawan River. My dad had a house built here more than twenty years ago and I still have a case of house-envy every time I see it. When I say the house is "on" the river, I mean it: run hard enough through the living room window, oriented just so, and you'll hit water, especially when the river is as high as it is this year.
Here's the view from the deck, looking downriver:
And here's the view from the dock, looking upriver:
...but my favourite view is right across the river:
You'll notice it's a bit...dark. That's because it's 5:40 in the morning in these pics. Even when I'm not on a night shift schedule, I make a point of getting up before the sun and gazing at the Crown land across the river. There is absolutely no sign of humanity's existence over there. It's all too easy to lose yourself in a ten thousand year old daydream, drifting over the flat calm, listening to the wind soughing through the trees, floating along with the loon...
...drifted off there. Dad's dock is my happy place, the place I invoke when I'm meditating, a pocket of calm in a chaotic world.
Here, let's shed some light on the subject, and maybe add some human interest.
There's Eva flanked by Ken Breadner père et fils. And below is my Aunt Dawna and Barry:
So wonderful to see you both. Thank you for taking time to catch us when there wasn't much time to catch us.
There's Jessie chewing on Tux's pencil.
Tux was a VERY GOOD BOY for the whole trip. Didn't go off the property, got along just fine with Jessie (and Laddie who lives next door)...and couldn't figure out why passing boats should be barked at.
Eva, having a tubby
Ken, deep in The Lies of Locke Lamora, with Tux doing his best to reduce the local bug population (he even managed to "GET THE BUG' a few times...)
I did my best to stay up...my best wasn't good enough. I ended up taking long afternoon naps both days and sleeping parts of the nights. It sucks that I was coming off the last of seven straight night shifts, with (at least) four more of them now...thank you, Dad and Heather, for being so understanding.
And for spoiling us rotten. Marinated slabs of pork one night, absolutely delectable prime rib the next, mashed potatoes both nights...yumtacular.
I even got to see my dad's friend Monty Flindall, the man my brother was named for...haven't seen him since our Destin, FL trip in 2007. Now that was a flying visit.
We left at 6:00 yesterday morning and were home by 10. Back to life, back to reality...
Thank you so much, Dad and Hez, for everything. It won't be another year that passes, okay?
--with love from Macaw and Lady Macaw
I haven't been up there in a year, which is entirely too long. First there was the job search--and looking for a job is a full time job--and then there was, well, the job. No holidays 'til I've been there a year, and I'm working extra shifts to boot.
Eva hasn't been up there in entirely too longer. In her case it was Georgia-Peach nailing her down. We loved our Peach to, ah, peaches, but she was a handful even at home.
And Tux...Tux hasn't been to Daddy's Daddy's house in almost nine years. For most of that he was being a big brother to the Peach. Now, approaching the other end of a long and happy life, Tux once again found himself going for a long, long CAR-RIDE.
We left right after a rough night shift, and we realized at precisely the point at which it was too late to turn around that we had forgotten Tux's leash. This didn't worry me as much as it might have: Tux is a border collie/Lab mix and he's stayed in his yard even when Daddy inadvertently left the gate open and swore up and down he'd never tell a living soul that he did it and so now he's writing it instead.
I tried to sleep in the car, and even succeeded for about half an hour or so. Which honestly surprised me. My bed doesn't move: I don't normally sleep in things that do. Not to mention it was as bright as a sunny day, it being, you know, a sunny day and all.
And so we arrived at Rose Point on the Magnetawan River. My dad had a house built here more than twenty years ago and I still have a case of house-envy every time I see it. When I say the house is "on" the river, I mean it: run hard enough through the living room window, oriented just so, and you'll hit water, especially when the river is as high as it is this year.
Here's the view from the deck, looking downriver:
And here's the view from the dock, looking upriver:
...but my favourite view is right across the river:
You'll notice it's a bit...dark. That's because it's 5:40 in the morning in these pics. Even when I'm not on a night shift schedule, I make a point of getting up before the sun and gazing at the Crown land across the river. There is absolutely no sign of humanity's existence over there. It's all too easy to lose yourself in a ten thousand year old daydream, drifting over the flat calm, listening to the wind soughing through the trees, floating along with the loon...
...drifted off there. Dad's dock is my happy place, the place I invoke when I'm meditating, a pocket of calm in a chaotic world.
Here, let's shed some light on the subject, and maybe add some human interest.
There's Eva flanked by Ken Breadner père et fils. And below is my Aunt Dawna and Barry:
So wonderful to see you both. Thank you for taking time to catch us when there wasn't much time to catch us.
There's Jessie chewing on Tux's pencil.
Tux was a VERY GOOD BOY for the whole trip. Didn't go off the property, got along just fine with Jessie (and Laddie who lives next door)...and couldn't figure out why passing boats should be barked at.
Eva, having a tubby
I did my best to stay up...my best wasn't good enough. I ended up taking long afternoon naps both days and sleeping parts of the nights. It sucks that I was coming off the last of seven straight night shifts, with (at least) four more of them now...thank you, Dad and Heather, for being so understanding.
And for spoiling us rotten. Marinated slabs of pork one night, absolutely delectable prime rib the next, mashed potatoes both nights...yumtacular.
I even got to see my dad's friend Monty Flindall, the man my brother was named for...haven't seen him since our Destin, FL trip in 2007. Now that was a flying visit.
We left at 6:00 yesterday morning and were home by 10. Back to life, back to reality...
Thank you so much, Dad and Hez, for everything. It won't be another year that passes, okay?
--with love from Macaw and Lady Macaw
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
Ashley Madison
NOTE TO READERS: I apologize for the paucity of blog topics lately. I had a long blog written about INSIDE OUT, the movie, and deleted it when I realized that there are better and much more succinct reviews out there by the dozens. Go see it. Twice. It's that good.
Then I had a blog written about work, and it crossed some lines. (No worries, I enjoy my job and I'm doing well there, but there are some things, as there are in any job, which make me want to scream. I vented, then realized publishing my vent might be a colossal mistake, so I deleted that too.)
Now we have Ashley Madison.com being hacked, and it shoved forward a post I was going to make next month. I PROMISE that whatever the next blog is about, it won't be love and relationships, okay?
-------------------------
Thirty-seven million would-be adulterers.
One in five residents of Ottawa.
I wonder if they're clenching just a little right now.
I want to get this right out front where nobody can miss it. I DO NOT SUPPORT CHEATING. Ever. No matter what. Are you not getting enough sex? Are you not getting the right kind of sex? Are you bored and looking for an adventure? Here are your options:
1) SUCK IT UP. Lots of people do this, you can too. Communicate: if that doesn't get you anywhere (and sometimes it doesn't ), consider just dealing with it. You can still have your fantasies, and some fantasies (trust me) shouldn't be realities.
2) BREAK IT UP. Then again, some fantasies should be. But do your spouse a favour before you act on a fantasy: remove him or her from the harm that acting on it WILL do.
3) BRING IT UP. Hey, if your relationship is strong, you're not going to invoke divorce by asking. You never know, your spouse might actually say sure. Even if not, it might jump-start the serious discussion you need to have if you're actually considering cheating. If you can't casually bring up the possibility, my contention is that your relationship isn't as strong as you think it is. More on this in a second.
4) FUCK IT UP and cheat. He/she will find out--all it takes is one little argument with your fling and you're sunk. And if you cheat, I'm not at all sorry to say, you are a jerk who deserves everything that will happen when your partner does find out.
Now, the disclosure that Ashley Madison.com--a site whose whole purpose is infidelity--has thirty seven millions members suggests to me that there are a hell of a lot of people who only pay lip service to monogamy. Again, I am not defending adultery. However, there is no denying it happens. A lot. Given that fact, it might be worth talking about ethical alternatives.
WHY DO PEOPLE CHEAT?
It's a given that people who cheat are unhappy in their relationships. Like most unexamined "givens", this one is not necessarily correct. Up to three quarters of cheating husbands said they did not have "lots of marital problems" prior to their affair in one study; more than half said they were happy with their wives. Here's something similar about cheating women: 67% claim to be happily married, and NOT ONE had any desire to leave her husband.
For both genders (and both genders cheat roughly as often) the primary reasons for infidelity are the same: sexual dissatisfaction, emotional dissatisfaction, or just plain boredom. It's important to note that many people in otherwise happy marriages are sexually dissatisfied. Emotional dissatisfaction is harder to square (to me) with happiness in a marriage, but far from impossible: there are, after all, more than enough people who lack the tools to give their partners emotional validation...which doesn't mean they don't love those partners, or that they aren't loved in return. And boredom is--let's face it--near universal.
These are excuses, not reasons, to cheat. There is no justification for deceiving your partner. (Am I making myself clear, here?) See my four options, above...and let's zero in on #3. If you are one of those cheaters, or would-be cheaters, who is happily partnered, that's the one you want.
I've had a couple of people ask me, in the wake of the polyamory-themed posts I've been putting out, how exactly to get into this. One of them has been cheated on and another is thinking about cheating, and I warned both of them that polyamory is virtually impossible if you're coming into it without complete trust in your partner.
Despite the popular misconception that polyamory is a license to cheat, really, the only thing polyamory and cheating have in common is the presence of an 'extra' partner or partners. Polyamory is fundamentally about trust and communication, and cheating undermines both, often fatally. (Again: many people cheat because it's less scary than talking about their relationship...sad, really, because 'talking about your relationship' should be the default position.) Basically, before you can transition from cheating to polyamory, you must own up to the affair--no shifting the blame, no "if you were more ____, I wouldn't have done this" (that's the mark of an unhappy cheater that should have chosen option 2). No relationship was ever saved by adding people to it.
If you're one of those "happy cheaters"...odds are pretty good you won't be so happy when your mate finds out. And if you claim to be polyamorous in your defence, I will find you and strangle you. If you have already cheated, in other words, it is almost certainly too late.
If you are thinking you might be cut out for ethical non-monogamy. the first thing to do is to figure out what sort best suits you. There are several different kinds. Most of the varieties cited here I'd call variants of polyamory, but there's also swinging and the catch-all 'open relationship' that tend to center primarily on sex. If you're craving sexual variety in an otherwise strong relationship, that might be your best option. If it's (additional) emotional validation you're looking for, that's more the polyamory end of the spectrum. And I would caution you: loving more than one person is easy. Most people can do it. What's harder, for most, is allowing their partners the same. Mono/poly relationships do exist and can work...but it takes a truly extraordinary amount of effort on both parts. The monogamist has to come to terms with a whole different mode of thinking; the polyamorist has to make even more of an effort than usual to bridge what can be a yawning chasm of emotional expectations.
Step 2 is step 3 up there: bring it up with your partner. If you can't do this, I'm sorry to say, but your options are restricted to sucking it up or breaking it up. Ethical non-monogamy and especially polyamory involves lots and lots of honest communication. Much of it, ideally, should take place before additional partners enter the picture. Eva and I discussed this, on and off, for almost fifteen years before we finally jumped. Not saying it takes anything like that long, but you have to build your relationship up good and strong.
Of course, this is assuming your partner is amenable. Many won't be, and than you're back to sucking it up or breaking it up. But if the door is open a crack, you're looking at lots and lots more communication before you do anything. You need to talk out various scenarios to get a handle on what makes you jealous and how you might process your jealousy (because unless you are some sort of superhuman, you will feel it).
The single best resource for open relationships of any kind is a book called Opening Up, by Tristan Taormino. I used to correspond with Taormino through the USENET newsgroup alt.polyamory back in the early nineties. Her book is an excellent primer on the different kids of ethical non-monogamy, what's involved in each, and how to start out.
An alternative is The Ethical Slut, by Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt. This leans a little bit more poly, but at the same time it's as if it's written by your earth motherly aunt: highly entertaining. I was personally put off by a rather evangelical tone, but if you can get past that there's a lot of good advice in here.
And of course there's More Than Two by Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert. A link to their website is in my sidebar and has been since about thirty seconds after I finished their book. It's truly a goldmine of practical relationship-building and it's the only polyamory-themed book I've read that I believe monogamous people would get a lot out of.
Those two steps will keep you going for quite awhile. I'm at keneva1@sympatico.ca...feel free to email me if you have any questions. You will find me sympathetic, wise (I hope) and highly discreet.
I'll tell you this: nobody's going to hack me.
Then I had a blog written about work, and it crossed some lines. (No worries, I enjoy my job and I'm doing well there, but there are some things, as there are in any job, which make me want to scream. I vented, then realized publishing my vent might be a colossal mistake, so I deleted that too.)
Now we have Ashley Madison.com being hacked, and it shoved forward a post I was going to make next month. I PROMISE that whatever the next blog is about, it won't be love and relationships, okay?
-------------------------
Thirty-seven million would-be adulterers.
One in five residents of Ottawa.
I wonder if they're clenching just a little right now.
I want to get this right out front where nobody can miss it. I DO NOT SUPPORT CHEATING. Ever. No matter what. Are you not getting enough sex? Are you not getting the right kind of sex? Are you bored and looking for an adventure? Here are your options:
1) SUCK IT UP. Lots of people do this, you can too. Communicate: if that doesn't get you anywhere (and sometimes it doesn't ), consider just dealing with it. You can still have your fantasies, and some fantasies (trust me) shouldn't be realities.
2) BREAK IT UP. Then again, some fantasies should be. But do your spouse a favour before you act on a fantasy: remove him or her from the harm that acting on it WILL do.
3) BRING IT UP. Hey, if your relationship is strong, you're not going to invoke divorce by asking. You never know, your spouse might actually say sure. Even if not, it might jump-start the serious discussion you need to have if you're actually considering cheating. If you can't casually bring up the possibility, my contention is that your relationship isn't as strong as you think it is. More on this in a second.
4) FUCK IT UP and cheat. He/she will find out--all it takes is one little argument with your fling and you're sunk. And if you cheat, I'm not at all sorry to say, you are a jerk who deserves everything that will happen when your partner does find out.
Now, the disclosure that Ashley Madison.com--a site whose whole purpose is infidelity--has thirty seven millions members suggests to me that there are a hell of a lot of people who only pay lip service to monogamy. Again, I am not defending adultery. However, there is no denying it happens. A lot. Given that fact, it might be worth talking about ethical alternatives.
WHY DO PEOPLE CHEAT?
It's a given that people who cheat are unhappy in their relationships. Like most unexamined "givens", this one is not necessarily correct. Up to three quarters of cheating husbands said they did not have "lots of marital problems" prior to their affair in one study; more than half said they were happy with their wives. Here's something similar about cheating women: 67% claim to be happily married, and NOT ONE had any desire to leave her husband.
For both genders (and both genders cheat roughly as often) the primary reasons for infidelity are the same: sexual dissatisfaction, emotional dissatisfaction, or just plain boredom. It's important to note that many people in otherwise happy marriages are sexually dissatisfied. Emotional dissatisfaction is harder to square (to me) with happiness in a marriage, but far from impossible: there are, after all, more than enough people who lack the tools to give their partners emotional validation...which doesn't mean they don't love those partners, or that they aren't loved in return. And boredom is--let's face it--near universal.
These are excuses, not reasons, to cheat. There is no justification for deceiving your partner. (Am I making myself clear, here?) See my four options, above...and let's zero in on #3. If you are one of those cheaters, or would-be cheaters, who is happily partnered, that's the one you want.
I've had a couple of people ask me, in the wake of the polyamory-themed posts I've been putting out, how exactly to get into this. One of them has been cheated on and another is thinking about cheating, and I warned both of them that polyamory is virtually impossible if you're coming into it without complete trust in your partner.
Despite the popular misconception that polyamory is a license to cheat, really, the only thing polyamory and cheating have in common is the presence of an 'extra' partner or partners. Polyamory is fundamentally about trust and communication, and cheating undermines both, often fatally. (Again: many people cheat because it's less scary than talking about their relationship...sad, really, because 'talking about your relationship' should be the default position.) Basically, before you can transition from cheating to polyamory, you must own up to the affair--no shifting the blame, no "if you were more ____, I wouldn't have done this" (that's the mark of an unhappy cheater that should have chosen option 2). No relationship was ever saved by adding people to it.
If you're one of those "happy cheaters"...odds are pretty good you won't be so happy when your mate finds out. And if you claim to be polyamorous in your defence, I will find you and strangle you. If you have already cheated, in other words, it is almost certainly too late.
If you are thinking you might be cut out for ethical non-monogamy. the first thing to do is to figure out what sort best suits you. There are several different kinds. Most of the varieties cited here I'd call variants of polyamory, but there's also swinging and the catch-all 'open relationship' that tend to center primarily on sex. If you're craving sexual variety in an otherwise strong relationship, that might be your best option. If it's (additional) emotional validation you're looking for, that's more the polyamory end of the spectrum. And I would caution you: loving more than one person is easy. Most people can do it. What's harder, for most, is allowing their partners the same. Mono/poly relationships do exist and can work...but it takes a truly extraordinary amount of effort on both parts. The monogamist has to come to terms with a whole different mode of thinking; the polyamorist has to make even more of an effort than usual to bridge what can be a yawning chasm of emotional expectations.
Step 2 is step 3 up there: bring it up with your partner. If you can't do this, I'm sorry to say, but your options are restricted to sucking it up or breaking it up. Ethical non-monogamy and especially polyamory involves lots and lots of honest communication. Much of it, ideally, should take place before additional partners enter the picture. Eva and I discussed this, on and off, for almost fifteen years before we finally jumped. Not saying it takes anything like that long, but you have to build your relationship up good and strong.
Of course, this is assuming your partner is amenable. Many won't be, and than you're back to sucking it up or breaking it up. But if the door is open a crack, you're looking at lots and lots more communication before you do anything. You need to talk out various scenarios to get a handle on what makes you jealous and how you might process your jealousy (because unless you are some sort of superhuman, you will feel it).
The single best resource for open relationships of any kind is a book called Opening Up, by Tristan Taormino. I used to correspond with Taormino through the USENET newsgroup alt.polyamory back in the early nineties. Her book is an excellent primer on the different kids of ethical non-monogamy, what's involved in each, and how to start out.
An alternative is The Ethical Slut, by Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt. This leans a little bit more poly, but at the same time it's as if it's written by your earth motherly aunt: highly entertaining. I was personally put off by a rather evangelical tone, but if you can get past that there's a lot of good advice in here.
And of course there's More Than Two by Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert. A link to their website is in my sidebar and has been since about thirty seconds after I finished their book. It's truly a goldmine of practical relationship-building and it's the only polyamory-themed book I've read that I believe monogamous people would get a lot out of.
Those two steps will keep you going for quite awhile. I'm at keneva1@sympatico.ca...feel free to email me if you have any questions. You will find me sympathetic, wise (I hope) and highly discreet.
I'll tell you this: nobody's going to hack me.
Tuesday, July 21, 2015
Have I been doing it wrong?
Why not accept the conditionality of love? Why not adopt an idea of love where it's historic and contingent and evolves with another, based on the things the person does and what they are?
Because, if love really is unconditional, if it isn't going to depend upon and respond to the person, then the person isn't doing anything to grow, nurture, cultivate, earn, or flow into your love. The only thing that person is is a target for the love, a recipient for you to love. It might seem wholesome and good to love someone this way, but since they really don't have anything to do with how the love unfolds, then it's really all about you and how you feel.
If someone can do nothing to earn a love, they soon come to disregard its worth. Cheap grace doesn't make sinners into saints. But if love is something we earn and shape and cut and nip and grow, then we see its worth and the reward from our efforts. I guess I'm saying maybe "unconditional" isn't always the best form of love. It might not even be worth the cost.
Redditor 'polusplanchnos, having read my last post and one other
Well, that hit me where I live.
All my life I've heard that unconditional love is a divine and not a human trait. All my life I've heard, and come to hold, it as an ideal. All my adult life I've tried to emulate it as best I could.
I'm not there yet. Not even close, really: unconditional love, as far as I'm concerned, is what Jesus was alleged to have said on the cross. I'm no longer religious, in large part because I can't bring myself to believe in an "unconditionally loving"God Who judges, let alone condemns, let alone damns for eternity. But forgiving people who are killing you...that's love without condition.
But I'm trying. I'm perfectly okay with unrequited love: love as much as I do, as strongly as I do, and you kind of have to be. What still hurts -- a lot -- is when that love is reciprocated in some measure, and then withdrawn. It leaves me questioning everything, wondering where the truth lies. (Give me truths and don't spare the harshness: I'd much rather hear bitter truths that shred my soul than candy-coated lies.)
What stung the most in the above message was "it's really all about you". I don't mind telling you I had a little panic attack reading that the first time. It brought my past back in all its sour glory: a past in which everything was All About Me. I hurt people back then, acting childishly, kidding myself into thinking I was "living in the moment" and doing anything but. If everything I've resolved to do since is actually more of the same...
It's possible...probable...that I haven't defined my terms properly.
The older I get, the more I recognize that people are loveable, and the more loveable people I recognize. But it occurs to me that I need to put some qualifiers on 'unconditional' here: it does not mean indiscriminate. I don't love everybody...there are quite a few people I viscerally dislike. It's actually qualities or traits that I love, as I have said many times here: the physical is unimportant, within reason.
Those qualities: empathy and compassion; honesty; intelligence; humour; inner strength. Those are common qualities, but all of them together are relatively rare. I keep finding people, though, that have those qualities in spades. And so I love them. In whatever capacity is allowed. No more...but no less, either.
Of course it's more rewarding when that love is returned. Given a choice, that's the choice I'd make, every time. But I don't have that choice.No matter how much I love you, I can't make you love me, and wouldn't if I could. Possession isn't love, and neither is coercion.
Is there anything you have to do to earn my love? Yes, actually, there is. Be you. That doesn't mean be the you I fell in love with, because people grow and change. It means be who you are: a loveable human being full of empathy, compassion, honesty, intelligence, humour and inner strength.
And bear in mind that sometimes your empathy and compassion will fail you; sometimes you may be economical with the truth (studies have shown people tell an average of between ten and twelve lies a day); sometimes you'll do stupid things, sometimes you'll have no humour in your world at all; and sometimes, oh sometimes you'll feel weak. We're human: we fall down, we can struggle to get up again. I WILL LOVE YOU ANYWAY.
There's a category error here, I think. Contrary to popular belief, love is NOT "shaped and cut and nipped and grown". The expression of that love may go through all of those changes--but the love itself is a constant. If I wanted to get all spiritual on you, I'd say it was the background hum of the universe. Since I don't want to do that, I'll just say that everyone I've ever loved, I still love. Sometimes, in the interests of love, it's been necessary to sever ties. But as I said above, possession is not love. Whether you look through a microscope or a telescope, you're going to see marvels.
Do you know everyone you ever swore you'd love for life?
I don't know them anymore
I know their names, I'd recognize them on the street
and I don't love them
--Barenaked Ladies, "Maybe Katie"
Just another lyric that doesn't reflect love as I know and understand it...
If someone can do nothing to earn a love, they soon come to disregard its worth. Cheap grace doesn't make sinners into saints. But if love is something we earn and shape and cut and nip and grow, then we see its worth and the reward from our efforts. I guess I'm saying maybe "unconditional" isn't always the best form of love. It might not even be worth the cost.
Redditor 'polusplanchnos, having read my last post and one other
Well, that hit me where I live.
All my life I've heard that unconditional love is a divine and not a human trait. All my life I've heard, and come to hold, it as an ideal. All my adult life I've tried to emulate it as best I could.
I'm not there yet. Not even close, really: unconditional love, as far as I'm concerned, is what Jesus was alleged to have said on the cross. I'm no longer religious, in large part because I can't bring myself to believe in an "unconditionally loving"God Who judges, let alone condemns, let alone damns for eternity. But forgiving people who are killing you...that's love without condition.
But I'm trying. I'm perfectly okay with unrequited love: love as much as I do, as strongly as I do, and you kind of have to be. What still hurts -- a lot -- is when that love is reciprocated in some measure, and then withdrawn. It leaves me questioning everything, wondering where the truth lies. (Give me truths and don't spare the harshness: I'd much rather hear bitter truths that shred my soul than candy-coated lies.)
What stung the most in the above message was "it's really all about you". I don't mind telling you I had a little panic attack reading that the first time. It brought my past back in all its sour glory: a past in which everything was All About Me. I hurt people back then, acting childishly, kidding myself into thinking I was "living in the moment" and doing anything but. If everything I've resolved to do since is actually more of the same...
It's possible...probable...that I haven't defined my terms properly.
The older I get, the more I recognize that people are loveable, and the more loveable people I recognize. But it occurs to me that I need to put some qualifiers on 'unconditional' here: it does not mean indiscriminate. I don't love everybody...there are quite a few people I viscerally dislike. It's actually qualities or traits that I love, as I have said many times here: the physical is unimportant, within reason.
Those qualities: empathy and compassion; honesty; intelligence; humour; inner strength. Those are common qualities, but all of them together are relatively rare. I keep finding people, though, that have those qualities in spades. And so I love them. In whatever capacity is allowed. No more...but no less, either.
Of course it's more rewarding when that love is returned. Given a choice, that's the choice I'd make, every time. But I don't have that choice.No matter how much I love you, I can't make you love me, and wouldn't if I could. Possession isn't love, and neither is coercion.
Is there anything you have to do to earn my love? Yes, actually, there is. Be you. That doesn't mean be the you I fell in love with, because people grow and change. It means be who you are: a loveable human being full of empathy, compassion, honesty, intelligence, humour and inner strength.
And bear in mind that sometimes your empathy and compassion will fail you; sometimes you may be economical with the truth (studies have shown people tell an average of between ten and twelve lies a day); sometimes you'll do stupid things, sometimes you'll have no humour in your world at all; and sometimes, oh sometimes you'll feel weak. We're human: we fall down, we can struggle to get up again. I WILL LOVE YOU ANYWAY.
There's a category error here, I think. Contrary to popular belief, love is NOT "shaped and cut and nipped and grown". The expression of that love may go through all of those changes--but the love itself is a constant. If I wanted to get all spiritual on you, I'd say it was the background hum of the universe. Since I don't want to do that, I'll just say that everyone I've ever loved, I still love. Sometimes, in the interests of love, it's been necessary to sever ties. But as I said above, possession is not love. Whether you look through a microscope or a telescope, you're going to see marvels.
Do you know everyone you ever swore you'd love for life?
I don't know them anymore
I know their names, I'd recognize them on the street
and I don't love them
--Barenaked Ladies, "Maybe Katie"
Just another lyric that doesn't reflect love as I know and understand it...
Saturday, July 18, 2015
'conceal, don't feel'
for a single day
tie your dominant hand
behind your back
you can't use it
you can't miss it
you can't even remember it is there
and live your life as normal
do not complain
they will not understand
they are all one handed after all
at the end of that day
you will know
my every day.
sometimes
i forget myself
and unshackle that hand
flex it
and use it
the freedom is
freedom
i can lift great weights
carry huge burdens
build cathedrals
i can do
what i was born to do
for a time
eventually
it is always noticed
that i have an extra hand
freak they see
freak they say
freak i feel
various punishments are proposed
exile behind great walls
amputation with rusty saws
and worse
in the end
out of self preservation
and shame
i tie my dominant hand
behind my back
and move on
tie your dominant hand
behind your back
you can't use it
you can't miss it
you can't even remember it is there
and live your life as normal
do not complain
they will not understand
they are all one handed after all
at the end of that day
you will know
my every day.
sometimes
i forget myself
and unshackle that hand
flex it
and use it
the freedom is
freedom
i can lift great weights
carry huge burdens
build cathedrals
i can do
what i was born to do
for a time
eventually
it is always noticed
that i have an extra hand
freak they see
freak they say
freak i feel
various punishments are proposed
exile behind great walls
amputation with rusty saws
and worse
in the end
out of self preservation
and shame
i tie my dominant hand
behind my back
and move on
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
Happy Anniversary, Eva and Mark
This post will take you through the looking glass.
Well, I kinda figure quite a few of my posts do: I'm not normal, as you've surely figured out by now. But even so, it's not every day you run across a blog post from a husband wishing his beloved wife and her boyfriend a happy anniversary.
Here's one.
As much as I would like to simply wish Eva and Mark a great day and a better year ahead and leave it at that--you know, the way you do with any couple celebrating an anniversary--a post like this regrettably has to have a whole lot of me in it. I hope there comes a day when that's not true...it'll be around the time that Hallmark starts selling cards for metamours. But for right now, my newer readers (and probably more than a few of my older ones as well) are trying to wrap their heads around what they're reading here...and likely thinking some pretty uncharitable thoughts in the process.
It's okay. I've had my manhood questioned, vigorously, all over the place over the past year. Often with disgusted, derogatory and degrading terms, words infected with so much hatred they would paralyze me if I bothered to really hear them. People hate what they don't understand. I get it.
I, however, understand what all three of us are doing, here. That's kind of the point of polyamory. There are no secrets, no sneaking around, no deceptions.
Which isn't to say I know everything about Eva and Mark. Actually, I don't know very much at all. I know enough to know that Mark is good for her and she is good for him; that both of them are strengthened in each other's presence; that they love each other. You can say the same things about Eva and Ken, of course...which is why, in the end, those things are all I really need to know.
Naive? I should feel threatened? Think of this from Mark's point of view. Eva and I have sixteen years of history. I live with her, he doesn't. I am fully integrated into her life in a way that he is not. I could, in theory, suddenly demand they never see each other again. Not that I'd ever do such a thing, ever...but I could.
Who should feel threatened, again?
The answer, of course, is neither of us. The whole notion that the existence of one relationship threatens another is a holdover from monogamous, scarcity-minded thinking. Oh. I suppose it's within the realm of the possible that, years down the road, relationships may be re-jigged somehow...but don''t hold your breath. None of us have plans along that line, nor will we if and when other partners join the mix on one side or the other.
But Ken, what if they...?
Doesn't really matter what follows the ellipsis there...they've probably done it. I'm still here, Eva's still here, Eva and I are still here. Oh, I will admit to some but what if they thinking at the outset...when there was still only an us and before there was a they. I wrote it all out in a document I entitled 'The Only Way Out Is Through' and the act of writing it helped me understand that in many ways there would not be a they, only a bigger us.
Note that evolution in my thought came before Mark did and long before I even began to consider what a bigger us would look like. (That's a lifelong consideration when you walk this road.) It didn't settle entirely smoothly into place...it's kind of a wholesale change of brain, and there have been and will continue to be growing pains. At first I was prone to the
But Ken, what if he's a better ______ than you are?
jitters. Once my hindbrain shut up about those, I was able to sit back and actually look at that question and how stupid it is. What if, indeed. It goes without saying he's better than me at any number of things. Just as I'm better than him at any number of other things. Did I, or did I not, just get finished writing a blog about my disdain for competition? In reality, there is no "better". There is only different.
So how is Mark different?
He's a retired massage therapist, very deeply spiritual. Where my spirituality is cerebral and idealistic, his is tactile and grounded in realism. He has a hard-earned patina of world-weariness that matches Eva's in many ways. He's had an interesting life, full of higher highs and lower lows than I have experienced. He's very close to his brother; I don't have one.
It's not really worth it to dwell on differences, as far as I'm concerned. Mark and I are also similar in many respects: we're both compassionate, empathic, intelligent and deep people who highly value the genuine. A dear friend of mine paid me the ultimate compliment a few months back when she said "there's no room for plastic in your world". I believe the same is true of Mark. None of this should be a surprise: Most people are attracted to a set of qualities. The more of those qualities you can find in your life, the better. That sentence is probably the strongest endorsement for polyamory I can come up with. Well, that and "too good not to share". Which is how I feel about Eva, and how she feels about me.
Hell, Mark and I are broadly similar physically.
It's not hard to respect the guy. It's not hard to value somebody who values Eva so highly. It's especially not hard to admire his consideration as he embarks on his first poly experience. He's been very careful not to appear to be treading on me in any way. In the end, I can't not care for anyone who cares for Eva, or whom Eva cares for herself.
This is, incidentally, my second. Poly experience, I mean. I haven't spoken much about the first one, which I would file emphatically in the "learning" drawer. That's for another day. I'm learning through this one, too. Difference being this time we're all on the same page.
It's a balancing act, right? No they, a bigger us. One of the guiding principles behind successful polyamory is allowing each relationship to find its own level. In order to do this, speaking specifically to our situation, it is important for me to ensure Mark has a say...just as it's important that he ensures I do, and just as both of us must consider Eva. There's the same give-and-take that there is in successfully monogamy, just split among more people. Is it complicated? Sometimes, yeah. But so long as you keep the One Commandment of Relationships, it's not really as complicated as you might think.
You know what the One Commandment of Relationships is, right? THOU SHALT NOT BE A DICK?
Now, people are probably wondering what each of us gets out of this arrangement. More to the point, what I get out of it...I mean, it's pretty clear what Eva gets, and reasonably clear what Mark gets, but me? I have no other partners of my own, not to the extent Eva does. So what's in it for me? I'll tell you.
I don't have to be all things for her. I never did, of course. But now I don't have to feel guilty for refusing to pretend. (There's no plastic in my world, remember?) I'll leave "things" to your imagination, though to be honest many of them are quite pedestrian. Our tastes in movies and television barely overlap. She cycles through interests like a disco ball, some of which I share, some of which I don't. Again, I neither have to pretend nor feel bad for not trying to.
I don't have to have husband mode on high 24/7. That looks beastly, sitting there bald-faced. I love my wife dearly, as should be obvious: just as much as you love your spouse. If you're honest with yourself, though, I bet you'll get the appeal of being able to power down at intervals, again without actually depriving your beloved of anything.
I get Mark's perspective. That's important, no matter what it covers. Mark sees Eva with different eyes, and he has different, valuable ways of seeing the world.
And of course, I have the opportunity to reach out and love someone, or someones, who could use my love...this isn't a triangle; a fourth line has yet to be drawn, is all. In the meantime, I get to improve my communication, my processing of emotions, and my compersion. In short, it's making me a better husband and a better person.
So thank you, Eva and Mark. Happy anniversary. May you have a lovely day, and a better year.
Well, I kinda figure quite a few of my posts do: I'm not normal, as you've surely figured out by now. But even so, it's not every day you run across a blog post from a husband wishing his beloved wife and her boyfriend a happy anniversary.
Here's one.
As much as I would like to simply wish Eva and Mark a great day and a better year ahead and leave it at that--you know, the way you do with any couple celebrating an anniversary--a post like this regrettably has to have a whole lot of me in it. I hope there comes a day when that's not true...it'll be around the time that Hallmark starts selling cards for metamours. But for right now, my newer readers (and probably more than a few of my older ones as well) are trying to wrap their heads around what they're reading here...and likely thinking some pretty uncharitable thoughts in the process.
It's okay. I've had my manhood questioned, vigorously, all over the place over the past year. Often with disgusted, derogatory and degrading terms, words infected with so much hatred they would paralyze me if I bothered to really hear them. People hate what they don't understand. I get it.
I, however, understand what all three of us are doing, here. That's kind of the point of polyamory. There are no secrets, no sneaking around, no deceptions.
Which isn't to say I know everything about Eva and Mark. Actually, I don't know very much at all. I know enough to know that Mark is good for her and she is good for him; that both of them are strengthened in each other's presence; that they love each other. You can say the same things about Eva and Ken, of course...which is why, in the end, those things are all I really need to know.
Naive? I should feel threatened? Think of this from Mark's point of view. Eva and I have sixteen years of history. I live with her, he doesn't. I am fully integrated into her life in a way that he is not. I could, in theory, suddenly demand they never see each other again. Not that I'd ever do such a thing, ever...but I could.
Who should feel threatened, again?
The answer, of course, is neither of us. The whole notion that the existence of one relationship threatens another is a holdover from monogamous, scarcity-minded thinking. Oh. I suppose it's within the realm of the possible that, years down the road, relationships may be re-jigged somehow...but don''t hold your breath. None of us have plans along that line, nor will we if and when other partners join the mix on one side or the other.
But Ken, what if they...?
Doesn't really matter what follows the ellipsis there...they've probably done it. I'm still here, Eva's still here, Eva and I are still here. Oh, I will admit to some but what if they thinking at the outset...when there was still only an us and before there was a they. I wrote it all out in a document I entitled 'The Only Way Out Is Through' and the act of writing it helped me understand that in many ways there would not be a they, only a bigger us.
Note that evolution in my thought came before Mark did and long before I even began to consider what a bigger us would look like. (That's a lifelong consideration when you walk this road.) It didn't settle entirely smoothly into place...it's kind of a wholesale change of brain, and there have been and will continue to be growing pains. At first I was prone to the
But Ken, what if he's a better ______ than you are?
jitters. Once my hindbrain shut up about those, I was able to sit back and actually look at that question and how stupid it is. What if, indeed. It goes without saying he's better than me at any number of things. Just as I'm better than him at any number of other things. Did I, or did I not, just get finished writing a blog about my disdain for competition? In reality, there is no "better". There is only different.
So how is Mark different?
He's a retired massage therapist, very deeply spiritual. Where my spirituality is cerebral and idealistic, his is tactile and grounded in realism. He has a hard-earned patina of world-weariness that matches Eva's in many ways. He's had an interesting life, full of higher highs and lower lows than I have experienced. He's very close to his brother; I don't have one.
It's not really worth it to dwell on differences, as far as I'm concerned. Mark and I are also similar in many respects: we're both compassionate, empathic, intelligent and deep people who highly value the genuine. A dear friend of mine paid me the ultimate compliment a few months back when she said "there's no room for plastic in your world". I believe the same is true of Mark. None of this should be a surprise: Most people are attracted to a set of qualities. The more of those qualities you can find in your life, the better. That sentence is probably the strongest endorsement for polyamory I can come up with. Well, that and "too good not to share". Which is how I feel about Eva, and how she feels about me.
Hell, Mark and I are broadly similar physically.
It's not hard to respect the guy. It's not hard to value somebody who values Eva so highly. It's especially not hard to admire his consideration as he embarks on his first poly experience. He's been very careful not to appear to be treading on me in any way. In the end, I can't not care for anyone who cares for Eva, or whom Eva cares for herself.
This is, incidentally, my second. Poly experience, I mean. I haven't spoken much about the first one, which I would file emphatically in the "learning" drawer. That's for another day. I'm learning through this one, too. Difference being this time we're all on the same page.
It's a balancing act, right? No they, a bigger us. One of the guiding principles behind successful polyamory is allowing each relationship to find its own level. In order to do this, speaking specifically to our situation, it is important for me to ensure Mark has a say...just as it's important that he ensures I do, and just as both of us must consider Eva. There's the same give-and-take that there is in successfully monogamy, just split among more people. Is it complicated? Sometimes, yeah. But so long as you keep the One Commandment of Relationships, it's not really as complicated as you might think.
You know what the One Commandment of Relationships is, right? THOU SHALT NOT BE A DICK?
Now, people are probably wondering what each of us gets out of this arrangement. More to the point, what I get out of it...I mean, it's pretty clear what Eva gets, and reasonably clear what Mark gets, but me? I have no other partners of my own, not to the extent Eva does. So what's in it for me? I'll tell you.
I don't have to be all things for her. I never did, of course. But now I don't have to feel guilty for refusing to pretend. (There's no plastic in my world, remember?) I'll leave "things" to your imagination, though to be honest many of them are quite pedestrian. Our tastes in movies and television barely overlap. She cycles through interests like a disco ball, some of which I share, some of which I don't. Again, I neither have to pretend nor feel bad for not trying to.
I don't have to have husband mode on high 24/7. That looks beastly, sitting there bald-faced. I love my wife dearly, as should be obvious: just as much as you love your spouse. If you're honest with yourself, though, I bet you'll get the appeal of being able to power down at intervals, again without actually depriving your beloved of anything.
I get Mark's perspective. That's important, no matter what it covers. Mark sees Eva with different eyes, and he has different, valuable ways of seeing the world.
And of course, I have the opportunity to reach out and love someone, or someones, who could use my love...this isn't a triangle; a fourth line has yet to be drawn, is all. In the meantime, I get to improve my communication, my processing of emotions, and my compersion. In short, it's making me a better husband and a better person.
So thank you, Eva and Mark. Happy anniversary. May you have a lovely day, and a better year.
Monday, July 13, 2015
Competition
This statement is increasingly indicative of my overall life's philosophy. And it's one big reason why I don't feel like I belong in most settings.
Our entire civilization is predicated on the notion that if there are winners, there must be losers. This is so axiomatic that it goes unquestioned and usually unnoticed. It's just the way it is. The winners bask in glory; the losers pick themselves out of the dust and try harder next time. At least in theory. In reality, the losers often simply give up, especially if the losing is constant.
To our credit, we've begun to notice this. We've tried to do something about it, by making everyone winners: the gold medal for showing up. We've stopped keeping score (officially) in kids' games. Some schools have even stopped giving out marks. Which is ridiculous. The world outside your precious snowflake's bubble is harsh and unforgiving, and it's full of competition. Sooner or later, no matter how much you try to shelter him, your child will burst forth in that world, full of self-confidence with an ego polished to a glossy sheen...and fall flat on his face and shatter.
Human beings have an amazing ability to respond to problems in precisely the wrong way. Either we double down on the behaviour which caused the problem (the monkey trap) or we misdiagnose the problem entirely. In this case, we've taken the latter approach with the biggest problem our world faces, and we've done it with everything.
THE BIGGEST PROBLEM OUR WORLD FACES
is competition. Or rather, the worldview that encourages competition. For everything. For money. For resources. For some notion of supremacy.For love..
Money Makes The World Go Round. Lip service is paid to the ideas that "the best things are free" and that "money does not buy happiness", but at heart, most people don't believe this. If they did, the world would be a different place.
A study has shown that at $75,000 a year, people are about as happy as they're ever going to get. (It's worth noting that there were two separate happiness scales used in this study: "day to day contentment" (which is self-referential), and "life assessment", which gauges your life in relation to the lives of your friends and neighbours. We just can't avoid competition, it seems, as poorly as it serves us. What matter that someone is richer than you? There will always be someone richer than you, not to mention many, many people a very great deal poorer.
That day-to-day contentment is my definition of happiness. And in terms of day-to-day contentment, $75,000 is the optimal number. Income beyond that is superfluous, and a great deal of income beyond that is often destructive. (The lives of the .001% are empty and lonely in most cases, as hard as that may be for the rest of us to believe.)
I'm not going to suggest that everybody on earth should be $75,000 a year and no more. I am going to suggest that nobody should make less.
This is preposterous, isn't it? It's like I'm some sort of communist utopian pinko radical...I mean, the only way to bring about this vision is to take money from people who have earned it (like hedge fund managers and CEOs of failing corporations) and just outright give it to lazy good-for-nothing...
...human beings.
What price a human life? I think seventy five grand is chump change, really, no matter what life we're talking about. Take care of the basics, which seventy five grand does, and people are free to pursue their dreams without having to devote their every waking moment to the exigencies of day to day existence. Imagine what people would be able to accomplish if they could devote themselves to accomplishing things beyond keeping a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs. Think of the world we could create.
And it's not as if you couldn't earn more if you wanted to. God knows there's enough of it. The banks print trillions out of thin air, after all.
There are a few billion people on this planet for whom seventy five grand is riches beyond dreams or avarice. Strangely (to our Western sensibilities), many of these people would consider themselves happy...on both scales. But let's set the threshold at $75K anyways. Again, it's not like that much money doesn't exist.
I know, this is anathema to everything our society holds as accepted wisdom. People have to deserve money. They have to earn it. If you just give people money, they'll spend it on trivial stuff, right?
Probably wrong, in many if not most cases. But even if not...so what? It's not your money. You've got your own money. Why do you care what other people spend their money on?
Now you're going to tell me that the prices of everything will just shoot through the roof. Well, yeah. It's patently obvious that you can't just snap your fingers and poof! all seven billion people earn $75K a year. For one thing, there aren't enough goods and services for the legions of formerly destitute people to consume and use...not at any price. Something like this would have to be phased in very gradually. And so it is phasing itself in even as we speak. Just not in the way you might think.
This globalized made-in-China-costs-less-than-made-down-the-road craziness is an anomaly in human history, made possible by burning up a few million years of stored sunlight at an absolutely ferocious rate. I firmly believe that we are seeing the last cheap oil we'll ever see right now: within two or three years, if not sooner, I predict we'll be back to where the price was before the plunge...and in ten to fifteen years, oil will likely be scaling new heights in price. The reasons for my prediction are beyond the scope of this blog. Suffice it to say that it takes more and more energy to extract oil. In 1850, the equivalent of one barrel of oil's worth of energy inputted yielded you somewhere between 80 and 150 barrels of oil. Latest figures are between thirty and forty barrels returned and they are declining every year. Long before the energy return/energy invested ratio reaches one to one, oil will cease to be economical, which means it will cease to be a meaningful presence in our world. I'll be safely dead by that time and so will you, dear reader...but your grandkids might not be and their grandkids almost certainly won't be.
This sounds like a depressing sidetrack. It's neither. I believe that a huge simplification of...well, everything...is just starting to get underway. It's going to be chaotic at times. More than chaotic, really: people very much like to preserve the status quo, especially when they're the ones whose quos involve a high status. Unfortunately (for them), they're not going to have a choice. Natural laws are a bitch.
What I'm saying is that as time goes on, we're all going to be earning less and less in real dollars. That seventy five grand is going to be utterly meaningless, eventually...and people will be a lot happier for it. Maybe, just maybe, we'll get through the coming storms with a new vision of how the world ought to be. I'd like to think the words "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH" will actually get to meaning something.
There is enough, you know. There's enough money to hand out $75K to everyone on earth--and enough real wealth to actually back that up. There's enough food. Nobody should be going hungry on this planet. There is enough water.
There is definitely enough love. If you take the competition out of it, there's more than enough love.
Sunday, July 12, 2015
Kensplaining
"Women's faults are many,
Men have only two:
Everything they say...
and everything they do."
--Anonymous, that most prolific and profound of poets
There are a bevy of columnists at The Globe and Mail whose work I make a point of reading every week. The best of them, interestingly, are women: Tabatha Southey, Elizabeth Renzetti...and Margaret Wente.
Wente is a polarizing figure. She went (ha-ha) through a little plagiarism scandal three years ago, when she stole a sentence from an Ottawa Citizen column; her employer disciplined her, but kept her on staff. I for one am grateful. Her politics are miles and miles away from mine and many of her columns leave me slack-jawed with blood boiling, But I'm not one to live in an echo chamber and how else can I buttress my own beliefs without exposing them to opposition?
I was going to do a blog on "mansplaining"--wow, Chrome's spell-check doesn't even flag that word anymore--and was trying to find a hook to hang its hat on when I opened up the paper to find this column. Voilà. Hat hook located.
I got accused of 'mansplaining' last night when I offered my perspective on something, and it rankled me: the term seems to have so much hatred imbued in it Welp, my knee jerked. Best never to answer a woman's question ever again. I didn't write that, though. Instead I apologized for any offense I may have caused. What can I say, I might be a man, but I'm Canadian.
It seems to me that accusing someone of 'mansplaining' is the quickest way to shut a conversation down. Testosterone not allowed here. It reminds me of the feminization that ran rampant both on and off campus when I was in university. One feminist group wanted to rename the History Department ("Herstory")...this was the same group that said 'chairperson' wasn't gender-neutral because a 'son' is male. Shortly after I ran screaming from that fiasco, I found the 'Womyn's Music" section of an HMV in Toronto: what? are men not supposed to listen to this stuff?
Maybe I internalized too much of that kind of twaddle and that's why my penis eventually retracted. Because Wente's column proves I'm actually Kendra.
MEN GET TO THE POINT, she says, and usually I don't. Eva has a little wheels-are-spinning-on-black-ice gesture to let me know to quit my babbling and actually say something meaningful. (Of course, if she flat-out asks me to start a conversation, my mind goes instantly blank. Random conversation-starters bubble up: no, we just talked about that last week...nope, she doesn't give two shits about that...nope, even I'm bored by this topic and I haven't even brought it up...) But if by some miracle my tongue does start flapping, it flaps at both ends.
And asking people out for lunch or what have you? I'm even more terrified of looking pushy than Wente claims woman are.
MEN DON'T HOLD GRUDGES
Uh, yeah we do. Or at least I do. I try not to, but they're like acid sometimes. I'm better than I was, mind you. I used to assume that anyone who hurt me meant to do it. Eventually I realized it was maybe more productive to view myself as overly sensitive, and work on that. Now I can usually tell when the slight isn't intentional. The ones that are, though...they burn for a year or longer.
MEN EXTERNALIZE THEIR FAILURES
Nope. I tend to externalize my successes. My failures are mine alone.
But seriously. If I succeed at something, I had help and support to do it. Nobody's out there sabotaging my failures. This is one of many so-called "manly" traits that disgust me.
MEN ARE FOCUSED AND PERSISTENT
...which is why I'm a published writer who has accomplished every life's goal he's set for himself.
That's sarcasm, by the way.
It's true that I am not a multi-tasker. But I'm also neither focused nor persistent. My focus drifts all over the place, and especially with mechanical tasks, I will throw in the towel before it's even been handed to me.
MEN HAVE NO PROBLEM BEING ASSERTIVE
I've met one person -- a woman -- who is undeniably less assertive than I am. Everybody else, of either gender, I'l fall right in behind. It's not that I'm weak, I don't think. It's a byproduct of a lack of focus and discipline. I just...don't...care overmuch. I'm easily pleased, and not much for confrontation. Assertive? Not me.
MEN ARE LESS COMPLICATED THAN WOMEN
Whew. Maybe I am a man, after all.
Men have only two:
Everything they say...
and everything they do."
--Anonymous, that most prolific and profound of poets
There are a bevy of columnists at The Globe and Mail whose work I make a point of reading every week. The best of them, interestingly, are women: Tabatha Southey, Elizabeth Renzetti...and Margaret Wente.
Wente is a polarizing figure. She went (ha-ha) through a little plagiarism scandal three years ago, when she stole a sentence from an Ottawa Citizen column; her employer disciplined her, but kept her on staff. I for one am grateful. Her politics are miles and miles away from mine and many of her columns leave me slack-jawed with blood boiling, But I'm not one to live in an echo chamber and how else can I buttress my own beliefs without exposing them to opposition?
I was going to do a blog on "mansplaining"--wow, Chrome's spell-check doesn't even flag that word anymore--and was trying to find a hook to hang its hat on when I opened up the paper to find this column. Voilà. Hat hook located.
I got accused of 'mansplaining' last night when I offered my perspective on something, and it rankled me: the term seems to have so much hatred imbued in it Welp, my knee jerked. Best never to answer a woman's question ever again. I didn't write that, though. Instead I apologized for any offense I may have caused. What can I say, I might be a man, but I'm Canadian.
It seems to me that accusing someone of 'mansplaining' is the quickest way to shut a conversation down. Testosterone not allowed here. It reminds me of the feminization that ran rampant both on and off campus when I was in university. One feminist group wanted to rename the History Department ("Herstory")...this was the same group that said 'chairperson' wasn't gender-neutral because a 'son' is male. Shortly after I ran screaming from that fiasco, I found the 'Womyn's Music" section of an HMV in Toronto: what? are men not supposed to listen to this stuff?
Maybe I internalized too much of that kind of twaddle and that's why my penis eventually retracted. Because Wente's column proves I'm actually Kendra.
MEN GET TO THE POINT, she says, and usually I don't. Eva has a little wheels-are-spinning-on-black-ice gesture to let me know to quit my babbling and actually say something meaningful. (Of course, if she flat-out asks me to start a conversation, my mind goes instantly blank. Random conversation-starters bubble up: no, we just talked about that last week...nope, she doesn't give two shits about that...nope, even I'm bored by this topic and I haven't even brought it up...) But if by some miracle my tongue does start flapping, it flaps at both ends.
And asking people out for lunch or what have you? I'm even more terrified of looking pushy than Wente claims woman are.
MEN DON'T HOLD GRUDGES
Uh, yeah we do. Or at least I do. I try not to, but they're like acid sometimes. I'm better than I was, mind you. I used to assume that anyone who hurt me meant to do it. Eventually I realized it was maybe more productive to view myself as overly sensitive, and work on that. Now I can usually tell when the slight isn't intentional. The ones that are, though...they burn for a year or longer.
MEN EXTERNALIZE THEIR FAILURES
Nope. I tend to externalize my successes. My failures are mine alone.
But seriously. If I succeed at something, I had help and support to do it. Nobody's out there sabotaging my failures. This is one of many so-called "manly" traits that disgust me.
MEN ARE FOCUSED AND PERSISTENT
...which is why I'm a published writer who has accomplished every life's goal he's set for himself.
That's sarcasm, by the way.
It's true that I am not a multi-tasker. But I'm also neither focused nor persistent. My focus drifts all over the place, and especially with mechanical tasks, I will throw in the towel before it's even been handed to me.
MEN HAVE NO PROBLEM BEING ASSERTIVE
I've met one person -- a woman -- who is undeniably less assertive than I am. Everybody else, of either gender, I'l fall right in behind. It's not that I'm weak, I don't think. It's a byproduct of a lack of focus and discipline. I just...don't...care overmuch. I'm easily pleased, and not much for confrontation. Assertive? Not me.
MEN ARE LESS COMPLICATED THAN WOMEN
Whew. Maybe I am a man, after all.
Thursday, July 09, 2015
Tuesday, July 07, 2015
Aftermath
I would like to thank those people who have come forward with unqualified love and support for Eva and I in the wake of my last blog. Several folks have disclosed that they, too, suffer from mental illness and are medicated for it. It means a lot to both of us that we are not alone. Of course we knew that, but there is always a difference between knowing and experiencing.
Not everyone has been supportive, alas: there are people who don't believe in mental illness, or don't believe Eva lives with it, or that her situation is anything to be concerned about. That's fine: we expected that too. In the end, Eva chooses -- wisely, I think -- to heed the advice of the many qualified professionals treating her, complemented, and yes, at times superseded by her own knowledge of her own mind and body.
Answers to a few questions we have fielded:
1) There is no injectable version of the drug she takes, or anything similar. It would be great if there were, but there isn't.
2) Eva is taking dangerous levels of her drugs because of the malabsorption effect of the surgery. And this too much is not enough any more. She is strongly leaning towards discontinuing the medication...which is itself dangerous. Eva has already suffered discontinuation syndrome when her body stopped accepting her drug, and trust me, it wasn't pretty. Going off of it entirely is a frightening prospect. She has been told it may involve lengthy hospitalization in her case. But the alternative -- taking more than triple the recommended dosage and still not getting the proper effect -- is untenable.
It's not withdrawal in the sense of, say, kicking heroin: her drug is not addictive. It has to do with changes in brain chemistry. And in the case of her medication, missing a single dose can and does cause serious problems. Tapering very gradually is the only way to do this...and bear in mind again that as far as her body is concerned, she's not getting enough as it is right now. She's getting all the side effects you would expect with a near overdose, and very little of the actual "front" effects!
3) Would she have had the bariatric surgery if she had known this would be the end result? It's difficult to say at this point. You can't minimize -- ha ha -- the 200 or so pounds she has lost, the amazing amount of energy she gained (and will hopefully get again), the not having to take any insulin (after having been on a pretty high dose of that)...and numerous other positive effects. I shudder to think what her arthritis would be doing if she were still Eva-squared. She might be wheelchair-bound at this point.
So there are positives, lots of them, even still. And we choose to view this...situation...with her drugs as not a result, but a process. As I said when this first started to show..."it will be all right in the end. If it's not all right, it's not yet the end".
4) We will be careful. And we know, and appreciate more than you know, that there are many people who have our backs. Thank you to all of you. We love you so much.
Ken and Eva.
Not everyone has been supportive, alas: there are people who don't believe in mental illness, or don't believe Eva lives with it, or that her situation is anything to be concerned about. That's fine: we expected that too. In the end, Eva chooses -- wisely, I think -- to heed the advice of the many qualified professionals treating her, complemented, and yes, at times superseded by her own knowledge of her own mind and body.
Answers to a few questions we have fielded:
1) There is no injectable version of the drug she takes, or anything similar. It would be great if there were, but there isn't.
2) Eva is taking dangerous levels of her drugs because of the malabsorption effect of the surgery. And this too much is not enough any more. She is strongly leaning towards discontinuing the medication...which is itself dangerous. Eva has already suffered discontinuation syndrome when her body stopped accepting her drug, and trust me, it wasn't pretty. Going off of it entirely is a frightening prospect. She has been told it may involve lengthy hospitalization in her case. But the alternative -- taking more than triple the recommended dosage and still not getting the proper effect -- is untenable.
It's not withdrawal in the sense of, say, kicking heroin: her drug is not addictive. It has to do with changes in brain chemistry. And in the case of her medication, missing a single dose can and does cause serious problems. Tapering very gradually is the only way to do this...and bear in mind again that as far as her body is concerned, she's not getting enough as it is right now. She's getting all the side effects you would expect with a near overdose, and very little of the actual "front" effects!
3) Would she have had the bariatric surgery if she had known this would be the end result? It's difficult to say at this point. You can't minimize -- ha ha -- the 200 or so pounds she has lost, the amazing amount of energy she gained (and will hopefully get again), the not having to take any insulin (after having been on a pretty high dose of that)...and numerous other positive effects. I shudder to think what her arthritis would be doing if she were still Eva-squared. She might be wheelchair-bound at this point.
So there are positives, lots of them, even still. And we choose to view this...situation...with her drugs as not a result, but a process. As I said when this first started to show..."it will be all right in the end. If it's not all right, it's not yet the end".
4) We will be careful. And we know, and appreciate more than you know, that there are many people who have our backs. Thank you to all of you. We love you so much.
Ken and Eva.
Thursday, July 02, 2015
Please read this.
Note to my readers: this post is several WEEKS in the writing. More effort has gone into this than any other post I have written in ten plus years, by far. You can trust that every word herein has been thoroughly vetted and put in place with the fullest of intentions; that every feeling expressed here has has been fully examined and found authentic; and that every statement is as true as it can be under the circumstances.
If you know me, if you care about me--if you know Eva, even if only as an abstraction, and care about her on any level--I implore you to read this post.
-----------
There is so much we don't understand about the human mind and the mechanisms and maladies behind its malfunction. And it seems to be human nature to fear what we do not understand. That fear--which might helpfully be abbreviated "False Evidence Appearing Real"--is not helpful, particularly when it ends up being directed at a suffering human being. Trust me, he is dealing with more than enough fear of his own. Coping with the effects of yours on top of his own may be impossible.
Many people have lamented that mental illness is contextualized completely differently from physical ailments.
The fresh hell of it is, the comic above only scratches the surface of the stigma against mental illness, and how that stigma manifests, even from medical professionals who should know better.
Let's consider my beloved wife, Eva, who is mentally ill.
Not many people suspect that, I'd wager. Fewer still know it for a certainty. That's because learning someone is mentally ill in any way often changes formerly friendly attitudes into distant and even hostile ones. You learn to be exceptionally careful in whom you confide a truth like that. You're putting your life in their hands.
When it comes to Eva, until very, very recently, nobody could have imagined she's been living with mental illness for much of her adult life. She has always been the epitome of competence, even when her confidence sagged. In its proper state, her mind is quite simply the most functional and elegant I have ever encountered: supremely analytical, highly compassionate and respectful of other points of view, able to entertain multiple conflicting accounts and synthesize them into a coherent consensus. It's a mind I am in awe of, no less because it requires medication to function properly.
I am not the only one to feel this way. Eva has repeatedly climbed ladders, earned multiple professional designations, proven herself in every position she has been in over her life...all the while creating deep, lasting friendships and -- always and forever -- learning new things each and every day. There may be people who dislike my wife -- I can't imagine why -- but I believe everybody who knows her respects her.
Now here I am, her loving husband of fifteen years, coming forward with a revelation that could cost her a great deal of that respect. Why?
Because circumstances have revealed her illness all by themselves. Because that revelation is causing, for the first time in her afflicted life, serious disrespect and disruption. Because the injustice behind that is heaping pain on what is already a very painful existence for her and -- at a remove, to be sure -- for me. Because the situation she finds herself in, through absolutely no fault of her own, needs recognition. Because there are thousands...no, millions...of people walking around with similar problems in their presents or futures: people you know, people you respect, people you love dearly...and they, too, deserve to keep every last bit of that admiration, respect, and love. Indeed, people with mental illnesses deserve more of all three, in my considered opinion. If I don't come forward and explain some of the whys and wherefores behind what has appeared to be a precipitous and unexplainable decline in my wife's functional abilities, people will draw conclusions of their own. Wrong conclusions, hurtful conclusions, conclusions even more wrong and hurtful than the truth.
THE TRUTH
Eva has been medicated for mental illness longer than I have known her. The nature of medications and mental illness both has necessitated occasional changes in dose and kind of medication, but medications themselves have been a constant.
She had bariatric surgery in November 2013, and for quite some time, for reasons nobody understands, she appeared to dodge many of the horrid side effects that plague bariatric patients. The weight melted off--very close to 200 pounds at this point--and until a few short months ago she was doing well. Better than well.
I talked about the decline in this post and my standard line has been that Eva's had trouble absorbing her medications, bariatric and otherwise, and "the otherwise is causing problems".
I didn't really understand what I was writing then. I still don't fully understand it now. But here's what I do understand: because of the malabsorption which is a permanent aftereffect of the surgery, she must take a considerably higher dose of her medications for them to have the same effect they used to. And her body does not know what to do with the excess.
The solution seems simple, doesn't it? Just go off the offending medication. Ah, if only life were that easy. There are two problems with that scenario. The first is that the medication in question--which again has been extremely effective in treating her disorder--is very powerful and would require lengthy hospitalization to discontinue. Which she would gladly undergo, except...that effective medication would simply have to be replaced by another, almost certainly less effective medication, which would be required in the same or even a higher dose, causing the same or even worse side effects. The other alternative is wean herself off the medication and live more intimately with her disorder...which needless to say has severe consequences of its own.
This is, needless to say, frustrating as hell. The drug she is on is now...NOW...contraindicated for the operation: if you are taking it, you can't have bariatric surgery because of precisely this outcome. They knew it was a concern, as evidenced by the verbal *and* written communication with our GP to ascertain that yes, Eva was on this drug and yes, she was stable.
Was.
This is where I lose my mind just a little bit. WHAT THE %^&* DOES EVA'S STABILITY *BEFORE* THE OPERATION HAVE TO DO WITH ANY &*(ING THING AT ALL?! Given that, you know, *after* the operation they're going to HAVE to destabilize her by making her take three times as much medication?!
I'm not a litigious person, but there are times I just scream lawsuit. Eva's more sanguine--about this aspect, at least. Trial and error, she says, and sucks to be her, she was part of the error.
What has her up in arms is the "aftercare" supposedly provided by the bariatric clinic. We were happy this existed, on paper, before the operation: appointments liberally scattered through five years. It turns out that their chief--perhaps only--concern post-surgery is about the patient's weight. Anything else, including what Eva is now afflicted with, seems to be considered "not a direct result" of the surgery and thus not important. They're making an exception and allowing Eva to see a psychiatrist who is only supposed to be available to pre-op patients. They're letting Eva see this psychiatrist for ONE HOUR.
Oh, yeah, that'll help.
Meanwhile, Eva has severe osteoarthritis in both knees. This, like her mental illness, has been diagnosed. But now, suddenly, while the arthritis is still there, the pain in her knees is "actually" all in her head, according to a doctor I formerly respected who diagnosed her knees and who has been treating her mental illness for nearly our entire married life. It's all a result of depression, you see.
Depression is not what is afflicting Eva at the moment: I'd stake my watch and warrant on it. She is of course discouraged by and despairing of this turn of events, and upset that they are keeping her from her productive life. But actual, clinical depression, such as I have observed in others--one loved one who attempted suicide right in front of me springs vividly to mind--that's not what is affecting Eva, and certainly not Eva's knee. That a medical doctor, who diagnosed the arthritis, should spend a great deal of time talking to my wife as if she were a child, telling her "there's no logical reason" why she should possibly be feeling pain in her knee, ergo it's all in her head--" you know, I lack medical credentials. But my bullshit meter is quite finely tuned, and its klaxons are sounding.
To be clear: we are not denying Eva is mentally ill. How could we? She has been medicated for mental illness for years, and it took her bariatric surgery throwing those medications hopelessly out of alignment for her illness to really become noticeable to most people. What we are objecting -- strenuously -- to is the implication that, now that her illness is out in the open, it accounts for anything and everything ELSE that''s wrong with her.
And then there are the difficulties beyond dealing with mental illness and physical ailments, that 'the system' insists on heaping on those already suffering. There is the little matter of money: Eva's short-term disability will run out in a month and there is a yawning chasm of a waiting period until long-term disability kicks in. Two months of just my income.
Thank goodness I got a job when I did, or you wouldn't be reading this right now.
I'm not sure what the purpose of this waiting period is supposed to be. It appears to exist merely to ensure you are financially disabled, too. And while I get that people are supposed to have several months of salary put aside to deal with contingencies like this, reality for us--and for many others, I am quite sure--is that contingency funds either never existed or, as in our case, have been used up by other complications and crises.
We considered renting out a room in our house. We could do that, but there's no point: any money we make doing so will be clawed back dollar for dollar. Gotta keep the disabled poor.
In case anyone feels the way several doctors do about Eva and suicidal impulses--let me reiterate that she is not clinically depressed--she is NOT suicidal. At all. She also is not getting worse any more. She seems to have stabilized...which is good. But consider: when you're taking three and four times the recommended dose of medications, you are in uncharted waters. and who knows what lurks in them.
WHAT NEXT?
All of of this, all of this post to say three words.
WE DON'T KNOW.
Thank you for reading.
If you know me, if you care about me--if you know Eva, even if only as an abstraction, and care about her on any level--I implore you to read this post.
-----------
There is so much we don't understand about the human mind and the mechanisms and maladies behind its malfunction. And it seems to be human nature to fear what we do not understand. That fear--which might helpfully be abbreviated "False Evidence Appearing Real"--is not helpful, particularly when it ends up being directed at a suffering human being. Trust me, he is dealing with more than enough fear of his own. Coping with the effects of yours on top of his own may be impossible.
Many people have lamented that mental illness is contextualized completely differently from physical ailments.
Let's consider my beloved wife, Eva, who is mentally ill.
Not many people suspect that, I'd wager. Fewer still know it for a certainty. That's because learning someone is mentally ill in any way often changes formerly friendly attitudes into distant and even hostile ones. You learn to be exceptionally careful in whom you confide a truth like that. You're putting your life in their hands.
When it comes to Eva, until very, very recently, nobody could have imagined she's been living with mental illness for much of her adult life. She has always been the epitome of competence, even when her confidence sagged. In its proper state, her mind is quite simply the most functional and elegant I have ever encountered: supremely analytical, highly compassionate and respectful of other points of view, able to entertain multiple conflicting accounts and synthesize them into a coherent consensus. It's a mind I am in awe of, no less because it requires medication to function properly.
I am not the only one to feel this way. Eva has repeatedly climbed ladders, earned multiple professional designations, proven herself in every position she has been in over her life...all the while creating deep, lasting friendships and -- always and forever -- learning new things each and every day. There may be people who dislike my wife -- I can't imagine why -- but I believe everybody who knows her respects her.
Now here I am, her loving husband of fifteen years, coming forward with a revelation that could cost her a great deal of that respect. Why?
Because circumstances have revealed her illness all by themselves. Because that revelation is causing, for the first time in her afflicted life, serious disrespect and disruption. Because the injustice behind that is heaping pain on what is already a very painful existence for her and -- at a remove, to be sure -- for me. Because the situation she finds herself in, through absolutely no fault of her own, needs recognition. Because there are thousands...no, millions...of people walking around with similar problems in their presents or futures: people you know, people you respect, people you love dearly...and they, too, deserve to keep every last bit of that admiration, respect, and love. Indeed, people with mental illnesses deserve more of all three, in my considered opinion. If I don't come forward and explain some of the whys and wherefores behind what has appeared to be a precipitous and unexplainable decline in my wife's functional abilities, people will draw conclusions of their own. Wrong conclusions, hurtful conclusions, conclusions even more wrong and hurtful than the truth.
THE TRUTH
Eva has been medicated for mental illness longer than I have known her. The nature of medications and mental illness both has necessitated occasional changes in dose and kind of medication, but medications themselves have been a constant.
She had bariatric surgery in November 2013, and for quite some time, for reasons nobody understands, she appeared to dodge many of the horrid side effects that plague bariatric patients. The weight melted off--very close to 200 pounds at this point--and until a few short months ago she was doing well. Better than well.
I talked about the decline in this post and my standard line has been that Eva's had trouble absorbing her medications, bariatric and otherwise, and "the otherwise is causing problems".
I didn't really understand what I was writing then. I still don't fully understand it now. But here's what I do understand: because of the malabsorption which is a permanent aftereffect of the surgery, she must take a considerably higher dose of her medications for them to have the same effect they used to. And her body does not know what to do with the excess.
The solution seems simple, doesn't it? Just go off the offending medication. Ah, if only life were that easy. There are two problems with that scenario. The first is that the medication in question--which again has been extremely effective in treating her disorder--is very powerful and would require lengthy hospitalization to discontinue. Which she would gladly undergo, except...that effective medication would simply have to be replaced by another, almost certainly less effective medication, which would be required in the same or even a higher dose, causing the same or even worse side effects. The other alternative is wean herself off the medication and live more intimately with her disorder...which needless to say has severe consequences of its own.
This is, needless to say, frustrating as hell. The drug she is on is now...NOW...contraindicated for the operation: if you are taking it, you can't have bariatric surgery because of precisely this outcome. They knew it was a concern, as evidenced by the verbal *and* written communication with our GP to ascertain that yes, Eva was on this drug and yes, she was stable.
Was.
This is where I lose my mind just a little bit. WHAT THE %^&* DOES EVA'S STABILITY *BEFORE* THE OPERATION HAVE TO DO WITH ANY &*(ING THING AT ALL?! Given that, you know, *after* the operation they're going to HAVE to destabilize her by making her take three times as much medication?!
I'm not a litigious person, but there are times I just scream lawsuit. Eva's more sanguine--about this aspect, at least. Trial and error, she says, and sucks to be her, she was part of the error.
What has her up in arms is the "aftercare" supposedly provided by the bariatric clinic. We were happy this existed, on paper, before the operation: appointments liberally scattered through five years. It turns out that their chief--perhaps only--concern post-surgery is about the patient's weight. Anything else, including what Eva is now afflicted with, seems to be considered "not a direct result" of the surgery and thus not important. They're making an exception and allowing Eva to see a psychiatrist who is only supposed to be available to pre-op patients. They're letting Eva see this psychiatrist for ONE HOUR.
Oh, yeah, that'll help.
Meanwhile, Eva has severe osteoarthritis in both knees. This, like her mental illness, has been diagnosed. But now, suddenly, while the arthritis is still there, the pain in her knees is "actually" all in her head, according to a doctor I formerly respected who diagnosed her knees and who has been treating her mental illness for nearly our entire married life. It's all a result of depression, you see.
Depression is not what is afflicting Eva at the moment: I'd stake my watch and warrant on it. She is of course discouraged by and despairing of this turn of events, and upset that they are keeping her from her productive life. But actual, clinical depression, such as I have observed in others--one loved one who attempted suicide right in front of me springs vividly to mind--that's not what is affecting Eva, and certainly not Eva's knee. That a medical doctor, who diagnosed the arthritis, should spend a great deal of time talking to my wife as if she were a child, telling her "there's no logical reason" why she should possibly be feeling pain in her knee, ergo it's all in her head--" you know, I lack medical credentials. But my bullshit meter is quite finely tuned, and its klaxons are sounding.
To be clear: we are not denying Eva is mentally ill. How could we? She has been medicated for mental illness for years, and it took her bariatric surgery throwing those medications hopelessly out of alignment for her illness to really become noticeable to most people. What we are objecting -- strenuously -- to is the implication that, now that her illness is out in the open, it accounts for anything and everything ELSE that''s wrong with her.
And then there are the difficulties beyond dealing with mental illness and physical ailments, that 'the system' insists on heaping on those already suffering. There is the little matter of money: Eva's short-term disability will run out in a month and there is a yawning chasm of a waiting period until long-term disability kicks in. Two months of just my income.
Thank goodness I got a job when I did, or you wouldn't be reading this right now.
I'm not sure what the purpose of this waiting period is supposed to be. It appears to exist merely to ensure you are financially disabled, too. And while I get that people are supposed to have several months of salary put aside to deal with contingencies like this, reality for us--and for many others, I am quite sure--is that contingency funds either never existed or, as in our case, have been used up by other complications and crises.
We considered renting out a room in our house. We could do that, but there's no point: any money we make doing so will be clawed back dollar for dollar. Gotta keep the disabled poor.
In case anyone feels the way several doctors do about Eva and suicidal impulses--let me reiterate that she is not clinically depressed--she is NOT suicidal. At all. She also is not getting worse any more. She seems to have stabilized...which is good. But consider: when you're taking three and four times the recommended dose of medications, you are in uncharted waters. and who knows what lurks in them.
WHAT NEXT?
All of of this, all of this post to say three words.
WE DON'T KNOW.
Thank you for reading.
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
The Maple Leaf Forever
I don't think I can write a better Canada-themed essay than I did last year. I just want to say, for all its flaws, and there are many, this is a great country and I'm glad to call it home.
Instead of rehashing the tired, and quintessentially Canadian, theme of "what it means to be Canadian" (I don't see many Spaniards musing on what it means to be Spanish), I'm going to give you a musical compendium: Canadian songs that have had an impact on me.
There've been quite a few. CanCon rules came into effect the year before I was born, so I was fed a steady diet of Canadian music I wouldn't have heard otherwise. In today's globalized culture, we can debate CanCon until the maple leaves fall off the trees, but there's no denying it was a huge step up for Canadian bands, most of which really did deserve the recognition.
First up would be a song my Mom used to play when I was four and five years old...my first exposure to sad popular music, and the benchmark against which I have judged all sad songs since: Which Way You Goin', Billy?, The Poppy Family (1970). There have been sadder songs since: this one, for instance, sung four years later by Terry Jacks, who at one point was married to the singer of the previous song and whose guitar features in it. Or this one, which is Irish but which is sung here by the transplanted Canadian, John McDermott. I can't get through this one without a tear.
The first song I picked up by ear on the piano: Heart of Gold, by Neil Young...to this day the only Neil Young song I like. (This would be why: I can't hear Neil's voice without hearing Seán Cullen's.) One of the next songs I learned was Music Box Dancer, by Frank Mills...a man I got to meet and duet with, the highlight of my young life. Believe it or not, this instrumental piece went to #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1978. For many years, this was the song people thought of first when they thought of me: it's for that reason it was included in my wedding soundtrack.
When my stepdad came along in 1980, he brought his own music with him. He deeply mourned the death of John Lennon in December of that year, legitimizing something I already knew at eight years old: music has a deep and lasting effect far beyond the length of a song.
When John was in a good mood, or needed some energy, he cranked up Oowatonite, by April Wine, or Barracuda by Heart, a band Wikipedia claims is American. Much of Canada would dispute that, considering the band was officially formed here and found its first success here.
I didn't appreciate these two songs at first. You'll laugh, but disco was about the "hardest" thing I'd heard as a small child, and wailing electric guitars set my teeth on edge at first. My life has been characterized by a gradual expansion of musical horizons, such that I can appreciate some fairly heavy metal now. But back then I equated a driving beat and shrill guitars with violence, something I had a pathological aversion to.
The first, and to this day one of the very few, rock concerts I ever attended was Glass Tiger at Fanshawe Park in London. A group called Monkey See opened for them. The notable thing about that concert was that Eva was in the audience too. For all I know, I saw her. Somehow that wouldn't surprise me: we crossed paths a few times before meeting in early '99.
There's one Canadian song that I subconsciously change the lyrics to each time I hear it: Summer of '89 (oops, I did it again) byBritney Spe Bryan Adams. Here's my story...."standin' on your mother's porch/you told me that you'd wait forever/ ah, and when you held my hand/I knew that it was now or never..."
(It turned out to be "never". First romantic regret.)
University brought some new musical obsessions. The quartet of Canadian groups that meant the most to me were Spirit of the West -- this was not one of their hits, but it should have been -- Moxy Früvous, which I'm not going to link in light of their lead singer's alleged actions (and I really don't like having to put 'alleged' in there, either) -- and the Crash Test Dummies (who supplied me with this song I want played 'At My Funeral', not to mention my my first break-up song). And last but not least, the Barenaked Ladies, whose song What A Good Boy was my anthem for many years.
'I go to school, I write exams
If I pass, if I fail, if I drop out, does anyone give a damn?
And if they do, they'll soon forget
'cause it won't take much for me to show my life ain't over yet...'
My second break-up song--well, that one was played for me, at top volume, on repeat, from an empty room behind a locked door. Also Canadian. And damnit, this one's vicious. Had to leave the house after the third repeat: it still stings all these years later.
Two more icons of Canadian music I have to acknowledge have shaped my musical life. Here's a lesser-known song from Joni Mitchell, the lyrics of which are so very me apart from the gender. Credit Joni, too, for writing the single most profound, poetic song on life and love that I have ever heard. Joni is not doing well as I write this, and she has been in my thoughts and in heavy rotation in my playlists. She was ranked by Rolling Stone as the 72nd best guitarist in the history of rock. She's the only woman on the list.
The male version of Joni Mitchell -- poet, iconoclast, thinker, dreamer and lover -- is Leonard Cohen. Here's a cut off his latest album, which is also so very me...in so very many ways.
Music has brought us together and it keeps us that way. Happy Canada Day, one and all.
Instead of rehashing the tired, and quintessentially Canadian, theme of "what it means to be Canadian" (I don't see many Spaniards musing on what it means to be Spanish), I'm going to give you a musical compendium: Canadian songs that have had an impact on me.
There've been quite a few. CanCon rules came into effect the year before I was born, so I was fed a steady diet of Canadian music I wouldn't have heard otherwise. In today's globalized culture, we can debate CanCon until the maple leaves fall off the trees, but there's no denying it was a huge step up for Canadian bands, most of which really did deserve the recognition.
First up would be a song my Mom used to play when I was four and five years old...my first exposure to sad popular music, and the benchmark against which I have judged all sad songs since: Which Way You Goin', Billy?, The Poppy Family (1970). There have been sadder songs since: this one, for instance, sung four years later by Terry Jacks, who at one point was married to the singer of the previous song and whose guitar features in it. Or this one, which is Irish but which is sung here by the transplanted Canadian, John McDermott. I can't get through this one without a tear.
The first song I picked up by ear on the piano: Heart of Gold, by Neil Young...to this day the only Neil Young song I like. (This would be why: I can't hear Neil's voice without hearing Seán Cullen's.) One of the next songs I learned was Music Box Dancer, by Frank Mills...a man I got to meet and duet with, the highlight of my young life. Believe it or not, this instrumental piece went to #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1978. For many years, this was the song people thought of first when they thought of me: it's for that reason it was included in my wedding soundtrack.
When my stepdad came along in 1980, he brought his own music with him. He deeply mourned the death of John Lennon in December of that year, legitimizing something I already knew at eight years old: music has a deep and lasting effect far beyond the length of a song.
When John was in a good mood, or needed some energy, he cranked up Oowatonite, by April Wine, or Barracuda by Heart, a band Wikipedia claims is American. Much of Canada would dispute that, considering the band was officially formed here and found its first success here.
I didn't appreciate these two songs at first. You'll laugh, but disco was about the "hardest" thing I'd heard as a small child, and wailing electric guitars set my teeth on edge at first. My life has been characterized by a gradual expansion of musical horizons, such that I can appreciate some fairly heavy metal now. But back then I equated a driving beat and shrill guitars with violence, something I had a pathological aversion to.
The first, and to this day one of the very few, rock concerts I ever attended was Glass Tiger at Fanshawe Park in London. A group called Monkey See opened for them. The notable thing about that concert was that Eva was in the audience too. For all I know, I saw her. Somehow that wouldn't surprise me: we crossed paths a few times before meeting in early '99.
There's one Canadian song that I subconsciously change the lyrics to each time I hear it: Summer of '89 (oops, I did it again) by
(It turned out to be "never". First romantic regret.)
University brought some new musical obsessions. The quartet of Canadian groups that meant the most to me were Spirit of the West -- this was not one of their hits, but it should have been -- Moxy Früvous, which I'm not going to link in light of their lead singer's alleged actions (and I really don't like having to put 'alleged' in there, either) -- and the Crash Test Dummies (who supplied me with this song I want played 'At My Funeral', not to mention my my first break-up song). And last but not least, the Barenaked Ladies, whose song What A Good Boy was my anthem for many years.
'I go to school, I write exams
If I pass, if I fail, if I drop out, does anyone give a damn?
And if they do, they'll soon forget
'cause it won't take much for me to show my life ain't over yet...'
My second break-up song--well, that one was played for me, at top volume, on repeat, from an empty room behind a locked door. Also Canadian. And damnit, this one's vicious. Had to leave the house after the third repeat: it still stings all these years later.
Two more icons of Canadian music I have to acknowledge have shaped my musical life. Here's a lesser-known song from Joni Mitchell, the lyrics of which are so very me apart from the gender. Credit Joni, too, for writing the single most profound, poetic song on life and love that I have ever heard. Joni is not doing well as I write this, and she has been in my thoughts and in heavy rotation in my playlists. She was ranked by Rolling Stone as the 72nd best guitarist in the history of rock. She's the only woman on the list.
The male version of Joni Mitchell -- poet, iconoclast, thinker, dreamer and lover -- is Leonard Cohen. Here's a cut off his latest album, which is also so very me...in so very many ways.
Music has brought us together and it keeps us that way. Happy Canada Day, one and all.
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