Albus Dumbledore Is Gay-- So What?

News flash for those who haven't heard: J.K. Rowling, author of the beloved Harry Potter series, has declared that Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore is gay. Reactions from her vast audience all seemed to start with an intial expression of shock, followed by either groans of dismay or applause as deemed appropriate. Letters and e-mails have begun pouring in, on both sides of the subject. The announcement made CNN and many major newspapers. You get the picture. It's big, and it's controversial.

I admit that my own initial reaction fell somewhere in the "shock and dismay" category. Not so much because I think there's anything wrong with being gay, but because of the politicization which is likely to follow, and what that's likely to do to the story. Did you ever have an English teacher assign one of your old favorites as a class reading, then ruin it for you utterly by making the class spend hours on what it all meant? That's it exactly.

According to the news reports, it's already started. Melissa Anelli, webmaster of Harry Potter fansite The Leaky Cauldron, was quoted in CNN.com as saying, "By dubbing someone so respected, so talented and so kind, as someone who just happens to be also homosexual, she's [Rowling is]reinforcing the idea that a person's gayness is not something of which they should be ashamed." With all due respect for Ms. Anelli, the statement is technically true, but possibly beside the point. It goes like this: if homosexuality is somewhat normal, then there's no need to keep pointing it out.

Which is, I dare to suggest, why Rowling didn't hit us over the head with it. For the purposes of the story, Albus Dumbledore's sexual orientation is no more of an issue than Lee Jordan's dark skin, the Weasley family's poverty, or Harry Potter's glasses. In that context, it's no more remarkable to show a gay man as being magnificent, wise, and kind than it is to show an orphan boy as being generous, brave, and resourceful-- or to show another gay man as being unrepentantly evil, for that matter. Do the math: if Dumbledore was romantically involved with dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald, then by logical extension, Grindelwald was also involved with Dumbledore. And yes, you could split hairs all day over whether they actually "did anything" (Rowling doesn't say) or whether Dumbledore's love was unrequited (unlikely, as the two young men were supposedly inseparable)-- but if you do, you miss the whole point. Albus Dumbledore was the man he was because he consistently chose to act for the greater good, not because of (or in spite of) his sexual orientation.

Unfortunately, some of the same people who see no shame in homosexuality will also see no shame in reducing a beautiful and complex story to that one issue in order to prove their point. And that would be an absolute tragedy. Yes, Dumbledore is gay. And Lee Jordan is black. And Ron Weasley is dirt-poor. And Harry Potter wears glasses, and Mad-Eye Moody is missing an eye and a limb, and Hermione's parents aren't wizards, and Luna Lovegood is a complete flake, and Professor McGonagall is surprisingly normal, and Neville Longbottom spends half the series as a terrified screwup, and--oh, who gives a damn. They live, they love, they grow, they kick bad guy butt. Enjoy the story.

Oh, for the love of...

This is a topic that probably should have been #11 on the "Help me out here... Part 1" post, but I forgot it. And I was just going to leave it alone, until one of my switchboard sisters here at Global Expertise specifically asked me to add it. Hey, if it'll add 33% to my readership...

And I'm switching back to the hammer, because this particular connection doesn't seem to be lighting up a few of our dimmer bulbs, and I figured a little percussive maintenance might help to fix the problem. Or at least make a few of us feel better.

Here's the take-home from today's lesson: we can't make them talk to you.

We can transfer you to their extension, we can provide an alternate number IF there is one in the directory, and we can give you their e-mail address, but we can't make them talk to you.

We also can't tell you whether or not they're in prior to transferring you. This is partly because they are all adults, and don't need to come to us for a hall pass before they go to the potty. And partly because we are a GLOBAL company, so if they did all have to come to us first, there would be so many people streaming in our door that we wouldn't have any time to answer the phone (see "recruiting").

We also can't run paper messages over to their office, for three reasons. One is because, by the time we get there, you will have run out of patience (or someone more important will have called you) and you will have hung up. Trust me on this one. And the other two reasons are because A) if we did that we would spend so much time away from our desks that the only way we could answer our own messages would be by e-mail (see "recruiting") and B) it would generate a truly obnoxious amount of paper (see "global warming").

If we transfer you and it goes directly to voice mail, that is not a mistake on our part. It was a deliberate setup on their part. When you jump directly back to us to complain about the voice mail, we will be glad to transfer you to someone else, IF you have their name, but we can't make them talk to you.

Corollaries: We can't make them check their voice mail, send a return fax, or answer their e-mail, either.

We apologize for the inconvenience. Sheesh.

Help me out here...Please! Part 2

... But first, a digression.


In my last post, I all-capped the word GLOBAL everywhere it appeared, to call attention to the fact that a GLOBAL company has certain charactistics not usually found in a smaller company; namely, its size. Calling a GLOBAL company and asking for "Michelle" or "the senior VP" or "someone in the IT department" is kind of like going to a bookstore and asking for "that book by that lawyer guy." Umm, could you be a little more specific?

Something else about a GLOBAL company is that we get a lot of job applicants. An awful lot of job applicants. Like a few hundred of them a day, every day, all of whom seem to want personal attention. Note to the concerned parties: you can't have it. Not because you're not special enough, and not because it's a test you have to pass to prove that you really want it badly enough, and certainly not because I Don't Understand The Situation (more on that later). It's because we are a GLOBAL company, and a few hundred apps a day divided by eight hours gives you a quotient of "everybody's busy".

All of that being said, I'm going to stop hammering on GLOBAL, because my arm is getting tired, and anyway, I need to change weapons for finesse work.

If you want to get a job at our GLOBAL-- excuse me, global company, here are some things that might make your life a little bit easier. Put them into practice, and mine might get a little easier too. 'Preciate it.

1) Understand that it's not about you. Ever. I don't mean to be unnecessarily harsh, but we're the ones with the need, and it's going to cost us someone's entire annual salary, plus benefits and infrastructure, to fill it. In other words, we're the customer and you're the provider. You understand that we're going to be fairly discerning about where we choose to spend that kind of money.

2) Do your homework. If you want our money, you should know something about our needs. This is why we have a website.

3) Special note for college students: our different sites have different functions. It's not like a restaurant chain. So, if your field is finance and all the open positions are in big financial areas like New York and Chicago, and not in the little college/party town you're calling from-- there's a reason for that.

4) Another special note for college students: talking with a recruiter at a campus job fair does not automatically give you an inside track to a job with Global Expertise Corporation. He talked to 500 students that day. So did his partner. So did the lady who's up the road at the other college. So did that other guy who flew out to UCLA. You have to go through the system like everybody else.

5) Your contact's name is your key to the city. Don't lose it, or you won't get past the gate. See the first paragraph of this post. In fact, see most of yesterday's post.

6) Believe me when I tell you that there's only One Way Through The System. It's set up that way for a reason. Our recruiters are the ones who did it. They don't particularly want to take time out of their day to break their own system in order to make your life easier and theirs more complicated.

7) I can't help you beat the system. I can't put you in contact with anyone who can. I couldn't do it even if you had a gun to my head, because they didn't give me the numbers. They know that if they did, eventually I would crack under torture, fall to the Dark Side, and call one of them. They did it for a reason. See #6 above.

8) Corollary to #7: I also can't clarify the position description for you, give you the name of the hiring manager, provide feedback on your application, or connect you with anyone who can. That extra "personal touch that means so much" is not going to be an advantage in this particular case the way it would be in a smaller office.

9) No matter how many years you have in the field, what you got your PhD in, what your military rank is/was, or whether you're trying to place a third party candidate, there is still Only One Way Through The System. It is not because you have failed to impress me with your importance; I have spent most of my life in the DC area and I assure you that I most certainly do Understand The Situation. If for some reason you do not, I will be glad to spell it out for you in proper military phonetics.

10) This one's for all the headhunters and executive search agents out there: Don't call me. And if you get me by accident, don't ask me for names. Seriously-- you want me to help a complete stranger poach off the top talent from the organization that graciously provides me the means to live indoors? You know, they used to shoot poachers 'way back when, but those were kinder, gentler days.

Thank you for your consideration, and I look forward to hearing from you at your convenience-- provided you've actually been paying attention. Trust me, it's a skill you'll need here.

Help Me Out Here... Please! Part 1

After a couple of months trying to find a job that was willing to let me schedule around my classes, I finally landed a position as a switchboard operator/receptionist for Global Expertise Corporation. Not their real name, obviously, because I want to keep this job. Even though it gets frustrating at times, pushing a little button and saying the same things a hundred times a day-- because, you know, usually I'm saying the same things a thousand times a day and pushing everyone else's buttons... (um, that was supposed to be a joke).

Anyway, usually it's not too bad. But then there are days... Days like, oh, say, Tuesday, when about every fifth call was some person who required special handling for a Situation That Was Not Like Everyone Else's (except that it really was, including the part about it not being my job to do their homework), and the other four kept coming in on rapid-fire, so close together that there wasn't even time to swallow a spoonful of chili in between. You know those days... Days where you stagger out the door battered and limp, wanting only to drop whimpering into a comfy chair with a bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips and watch CSI reruns until your brain re-congeals...but you can't, because you have class tonight and it's going to be seven (!!) more hours until you get home. And besides, you're out of chips.

So, in the interests of your tax dollars not having to support me when my head finally explodes from the pressure of holding my formidable sense of sarcasm in check for eight hours at a time, please take a moment to read these thoroughly reasonable guidelines for dealing with the person who answers the phone.


In no particular order:


1) Have the correct name of the party you're looking for. "Frank Thompson" and "Fred Johnson" are not the same person, and a directory search for one will not bring up the other. It doesn't matter that he's a senior VP. We have about 300 of those, so the description doesn't help. And oh by the way, if you're doing business with a senior VP at a GLOBAL company, then you should be able to remember his name.


2) Likewise, don't call a GLOBAL company and ask to speak to "Bill". Or "Joe". Or "Ms. Johnson." Seriously, go to your favorite online phone directory, or snag an old paper copy from the library, and look up "Johnson." Do you see the problem?


3) Enunciate, or hang up.


4) Use your speakerphone Only For Good. Making me say, "Hello, Global Expertise Corporation" three times while you talk to your executive assistant about what to order for lunch is not For Good. Especially since you're having better food than I am.


5) Ditto for your cell phone. If you have to shout over the background noise, go someplace quieter.


6) On the subject of cell phones, check the number before you return that missed call. If the number ends with more than one zero, chances are really good that the receptionist will have no idea who called you from that number. Our company is called GLOBAL Expertise for a reason. If it was really important, the caller would have left voice mail. If they did, and you were too lazy to check it, shame on you. Shame.


7) Be honest about your motives. You are not looking to "send some information to the director of Accounting." You are trying to get us to do business with you. Tell me that on the front end, and you'll get connected to the right person a lot more quickly.


8) Corollary to #7: if you have walked into our office with the intention of acquiring new business now or at any point in the future, and you do not have an appointment, you are soliciting. Read the sign on the door, and choose wisely. Do NOT try to argue semantics with me; I'm Irish, I rocked the verbals on the GRE, and I have the security desk on speed-dial.


9) Corollary to #8: if you do choose to solicit, be honest about the company you're representing. You "office supply" guys who really work for XYZ Marketing-- I know about you. I'm nice enough not to mention your name on a public forum, but the people who wrote "Why XYZ's Parent Company Sucks" were more than glad to pick up my slack. And you don't even want to know what's going to happen if you get kicked out of our building a third time.


10) Unless you're a policeman, firefighter, EMT, or the nanny of my boss's children, you do not need to interrupt his meeting. I need my job a lot more than you need an answer in the next five seconds.


Got it? Good.

Still don't understand what the fuss is about? Don't see your particular offense-- uh, situation-- listed here? Then you're probably a job search candidate. Not to worry-- I'll get to you tomorrow.

Long Time No See

...So my last post was in July. No way to soft-pedal it; I've been procrastinating.

I could justify it, perfectly reasonably, by saying, "...well, first I started volunteer-mentoring a friend in trouble, then I got laid off right before school started, then school DID start and I had to try and find a job in addition to studying... blah blah blah..."

I'm not always reasonable, but I do try to be honest. I've been procrastinating. One reason is that I felt like there was a huge, gaping inconsistency in my last post, and I had no idea how to address it. Not that anyone was demanding I explain myself-- as far as I know, only 2 people beside myself have even read it (how sad is that??)-- but I just felt the urge. Blame it on my upbringing. The other reason was because I didn't really have anything to say other than, "well, first I started volunteer-mentoring a friend in trouble, then I got laid off right before school started... blah blah blah..." Hence, no posts.

I tried to address the first half a couple of weeks ago; I started a post and saved it but never got back to it. I guess my subconscious was trying to tell me something. Probably that explaining my need to explain myself is unnecessary and annoying. So I won't bother. And as far as my supposed gaping inconsistency goes--namely, what a self-described Grey Triber was doing in a spiritual workshop anyway--all I have to say is this: I'm Irish. Union of Opposites. Read the profile.

As for the second half, that part where I didn't particularly have anything to say at the moment, it seems to have been a temporary condition. Don't say I didn't warn you. :)

Pink and Grey

Recently, a contact on the Gathering of Eagles list posted a link to the forum for an article called "Tribes", by a guy called Bill Whittle. I started reading, and then went on to his other articles... and then it was Tuesday. I remember a sort of a groundswell somewhere in the middle where I took time out to read Harry Potter. Then I went back to Whittle's blog. It was awesome.

Here's a link to the article: http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000129.html

Now, for those of you who returned here after reading it, all I can say is thank you, and I'll do my best not to let you down. My own reaction-- after I removed my lower jaw from the keyboard, bowed repeatedly, and chanted "eeny oony wanah!"-- was to think, damn, if I had a little more confidence and a little less restraint...

They say the birthing process isn't pretty. I'll let you be the judge of that at the end of this article.

In the interests of honesty, if not dignity, I'll begin by wiping the egg off my face in full view of my reading audience. I failed my "detect obvious" check the first five or so times I read that article. You see, when Whittle divides the world into the Pink and Grey tribes, he's setting them up as the Tribe of Feeling Good vs. the Tribe of Getting Results-- not as the Tribe of Emotion vs. the Tribe of Logic. And this is a very important distinction, because it illustrates precisely why I can hear and even resonate with that sort of comparison from Bill Whittle when I can't stand it on a Myers-Briggs test.

I profiled incorrectly, or at least incongruently, on a Myers-Briggs test once, and that wasn't pretty either. I took a modified version of it as part of a workshop a church was offering; we were supposed to divide up by type and do the same exercise one of four ways depending on which type we were. It was an interesting exercise, and I might have just smiled and nodded and written it off as a mild diversion-- except that I got a Xerox of part of the book the organizers were using to run the workshop, and read it on the way home. That was when I found out that the sense of duty and the attention to detail that had landed me in Group C, had kept me solidly out of Group B, where all the creative people in the class were doing all the seeking that had brought me to the workshop in the first place.

I thought I'd been robbed. More to the point, I thought it was my fault. I reacted accordingly. Explosively, but accordingly. The fallout took years to clear.

Proponents of the M-B test will tell you, with a sort of supercilious certainty that you can hear even in the printed version, that it's extremely rare for anyone to profile incorrectly. You are what you are. All I have to say to them is, next time I have to move, you can carry all the boxes full of journaling and writing and exploration and half-finished novels and burning unanswered questions. You do have a dolly cart, I hope?

Actually, that's not quite true. Something else I have to say to them is, quit making stupid assumptions. Just because I have a well-developed sense of duty and tend to serve as emergency back-up memory for most of my friends and family does not mean that I'll best serve the world as an anonymous fact-checker, perfectly content to do the small things quietly in return for absolute certainty of my place in the bureaucratic hierarchy. With the fire in my blood? Are you kidding me?

(Note to Rich and Denise: stop laughing.)


Of course, that's my reaction now-- almost five years later, after my subconscious has had a chance to turn the sour grape juice into something I can drink with a straight face. Yes, I was going down a dark and dangerous path trying to micromanage my way through some really difficult situations, and no, that wasn't particularly good for my creative side. But spending all my time on internal affairs wasn't helping me one bit to get out of those rotten situations, either. Glaringly Obvious Advice of the Day: if you want to reach the stars, you need both the fire and the rocket.

Re-enter Bill Whittle-- one of the few people who can make the Grey tribe sound like people and not like functionaries; one of the few who understands that creativity doesn't belong exclusively to the Pink tribe, and that it can be united with practicality in one package to produce spectacular results. Let me be clear-- probably a third of my wardrobe falls somewhere on the spectrum between "raspberry" and "radioactive azalea", but don't let the t-shirt fool you. I'm not that interested in greater self-awareness or finding validation for my story; I'm interested in solving the doggone problem.

It's not about being special because of what we know. It's about being effective because of what we can do.

The Letter

...So I wrote this letter.


Someone posted a challenge to readers to send 6000 letters of support to the members of Regimental Combat Team 6 in the Middle East, and I decided to join the effort. I had no idea what I was going to say. Eventually, I decided to write about the March 17, 2007 rally with Gathering of Eagles. And as I wrote, I started to get into it-- the way you sometimes do when you're singing along in church or with a really good song on the radio and you just want to close your eyes and let the music carry you along. It was kind of like that, only with writing.


When I was done, I sent off the letter to the address provided, and posted a copy to the Gathering of Eagles forum. I thought the group might like to see how we all looked, from the perspective of a few months later. I figured I'd get some pretty good feedback, but it hadn't been posted yet by the time I left work. I checked again once I got home that night-- quickly, because I had somewhere to be-- and discovered that it seemed to be overwhelmingly positive, but I didn't have time to read it. In retrospect, maybe I should have, because I was like a kid on Christmas Eve, waiting impatiently for the chance to open my presents. Only I was really in my mid-30s and out on the town with a good friend's bachelorette party, which I couldn't seem to keep my mind on for any great length of time. We got home around 2 AM, and let me tell you, I got no real sleep all night. I was even dreaming about checking my e-mail. Somehow I knew this had the potential to become something bigger.

On Friday morning, I finally got a chance to check the list, and the reviews were indeed positive. In fact, I was floored by some of the things they said. One online buddy said that my letter should have come with a "tissue box alert", a sentiment echoed by two off-list friends who read it later. Our national chairperson selected it as the feature article for the front page of the website sometime Thursday or Friday. Other comments came in, including requests to use my letter as recruiting information for our group, and another request for permission to cut and paste it into letters being sent to other overseas troops. I granted them, asking only that they credit my screen name and not change anything other than editing for length.

The funny thing is, that letter is not the one I would have written at the time of the event. On March 18, the day after the rally, my thoughts were of my windburned face and the mud caked on my boots. My stories were humorous accounts of eating a Subway sandwich while standing between two men in skeleton-face bandannas, and using a Porta-Potty in winter conditions. I didn't have even the basic facts of the event-- such as how many people were there-- let alone the perspective that turned the mud and the clawing wind into foils for an act of faith. It was a need to paint the picture for others that brought out that aspect of the story-- and in the process, changed my own picture of the event I'd attended. Sometimes doing for others can bring out resources we didn't even know we had.

I can look at this in two ways. In one way, all I did with my letter was to make a fairly large splash in a fairly small pond. But in the other, the ripples from that splash found an outlet to travel all the way across the ocean. I know my letter has gone overseas at least twice. I know that the members of Regimental Combat Team 6 were glad to receive my letter, even if most of them will never get a chance to read it. And in the end, that's really what it's all about, because I did it for them. Just like we all did, back in March.

(To read a copy of the letter as posted, please go to this link:
http://gatheringofeagles.org/2007/06/21/to-marines-from-a-war-eagle/)

Graduate School

About a week ago, I finally got accepted to graduate school. I've been greeting the congratulations with pleased and proud smiles, and the thought of tuition and books with the appropriate amount of trepidation. According to all signs, the real work still lies ahead of me. But that's like standing at the bottom of Everest and waiting to begin the climb. I may not be up the mountain yet, but I've put in a lot of work and taken a long trip just to get this far.

I officially started this journey about eighteen months ago. But on another level, I started it in June of 1996, when I took a job which had nothing whatsoever to do with my original field, working under conditions which sometimes bore more resemblance to life in the Army than they did to the rest of corporate America. I look back on my time at the rat lab, at days of despair and exhaustion, at days of getting up at 5 AM and commuting 90 minutes each way on public transportation to a job where getting sh#t on was a literal and frequent occurrence, and I think, whatever it is, it's not going to be that bad.

But there's bad, and there's bad. The sense of resignation you get when you just don't have the energy to rise above it all is one thing. The sense of frustration and outrage you get when you've actually broken the pattern to take real, focused, effective action and you still get denied, is another. It feels like getting bait-and-switched by the universe.

Which brings me to those last eighteen months.

I was living in Tallahassee, Florida at the time, and I realized that my Great Leap Southward had not so much given me the whole new life I was looking for, as cleaned all the junk out of the old one so I could actually make use of the resources I had. But to take hold of them, I would have to move on again-- back to where I came from. Obstacles overcome: pride, inertia, old dreams, financial hardship, moving in a tropical storm.

I started the application process by identifying schools that I wanted to attend and studying for the GRE test. Obstacles overcome: limited research interest in the field I wanted to study, self-confidence issues at applying to three top schools, math anxiety, learning to apply math skills in a whole new way, learning to write a coherent and error-free essay in 30 minutes.

I had to get three sets of three letters of recommendation, and my only option was to get them from my former employers. Yeah, the ones I'd told that I was done with science. I had to visit in person to start re-cultivating one of them, and field all the questions about whether I was in school yet and why I wasn't in Florida. Then I had to follow up repeatedly to make sure my letters got sent. Obstacles overcome: Pride, self-confidence issues, transportation, re-establishing communication, repeated follow-up.

I took the GRE, did well, wrote my admissions essays, and completed my applications. Then I had to wait. Obstacles overcome: financial hardship (several hundred dollars in fees), writing a professional admissions essay (took weeks!) the waiting game.

I got denied by the first two schools, and took it hard. I called the admissions office of one of them, and spent 45 minutes on the phone discussing my application and what I could have done to improve it. Obstacles overcome: discussing my shortcomings, fessing up to the boss about making a 45-minute long-distance call from work, not kicking my best friend out of the house when she said something I didn't want to hear.

I wrote a letter to the third school, with the supplemental information suggested by the admissions advisor I'd called the week before. I waited a long time for the response from that school, then got denied by that one too. Obstacles overcome: discussing my shortcomings again, waiting game again.

I finally applied to the fourth school. They don't have my degree program at all, and I had to apply as a non-degree student. I got in. Obstacles overcome: more pride, resignation, more financial hardship (about $100, but still).

So when you count it all up, I spent about 18 months, a cross-country move, a few thousand dollars, a lot of swallowed pride, a lot of mustered courage, a lot of follow-ups, three denials from graduate schools, and a lot of character-building to get in as a non-degree candidate to my "emergency" school so that I can get enough recent academics to try this all again in six months.

Oh, and one of the things missing from my application, the one that might have turned a denial into an acceptance had I only thought to mention it-- was evidence of sufficient grit.

Somehow I don't think that's going to be a problem for next year.

Citizen Erin

About a month ago, severely angered by certain political events, I sat down at my computer and did something I'd never done before. I wrote letters to my senators.

While I wrote, my heart pounded and my hands got cold. Some of that was the result of trying to channel all that anger and adrenaline into a coherent and focused force. And some of it was just plain fear. Would I get in trouble for overstepping my bounds? Would I be dismissed as a nut job? For some reason, I had the unshakeable idea that the only people who were "allowed" to write letters to Congress were those who either wore Brooks Brothers suits or tinfoil hats. The rest of us in the middle just didn't have any need to do that sort of thing.

Let me just get this on the record: WRONG.

First of all, if the CEOs and the crazies are the only ones writing to Congress, then the only opinions Congress ever hears are those of CEOs and crazies. And we wonder why the government is in the mess it's in...

Second of all-- and this is a whole 'nother rant-- we've all forgotten how to be good stewards of our own lives. We don't take responsibility responsibly. Sometimes we don't take it at all. We pay other people to do it for us, then we assume it's been taken care of and promptly forget about it. This makes sense if, for instance, we're buying an airline ticket to Hawaii. We're not expected to get up in the middle of the flight and check on the pilot or take over if he's having trouble. But it makes less sense if we're paying a student's tuition to flight school and deliberately refuse to hear anything about his actual progress-- especially if we expect him to fly us to Hawaii at the end of the year.

That's the way most of us treat politics. We vote once every couple of years, if that, and pay our taxes, and promptly forget about it. Meanwhile, the object of our votes may be spending our tax money to send himself to Hawaii and lobby for higher tuition at the flight school. He's not obligated to warn us beforehand. It's our job to check. And if we don't like what we see, it's our job to let him know.

Of course, if we do like what we see, we might want to let him know that too. Even if we think that the only people who actually approve of Congress are either rich or crazy.

My Best Friends' Weddings

Years ago, when my good friends Tony and Angela got married, I learned that another good friend, Jonathan, did not like champagne. "That's okay," I assured him, "when my turn comes, I'll make sure you get to toast with a screwdriver!" We both could have used something a bit stronger than champagne by that point: I had tonsils the size of bowling balls, and he was recovering from a broken collarbone. And, as I told Denise later, "Because if I marry him, he can do whatever he wants at his own wedding, and if I marry someone else, he'll need the vodka!"

Ten years later, I find myself reconsidering those words with a sense of irony, because Jonathan is getting married-- and not to me. The same higher mental functions that let me be genuinely happy for him are also making me very, very grateful for my lifelong distaste for orange juice.

Interesting fact about me: most of my close friends are male, many of them are ex-boyfriends, and almost all of those are either married or engaged. By this point in my life, I've been to a fair number of weddings, and I have to say that watching an ex-boyfriend walk down the aisle with another woman is a whole different kind of bittersweet. Sometimes it's been a relief-- like when Aaron got married, and I was secretly grateful that I'd never have to deal with his advances again. Sometimes there's been a sense of rightness to it-- when Crane got married, I couldn't imagine anyone better for him than Anne (she and I have since become good friends). And sometimes, like when Andrew got married, I've wanted to bawl my eyes out-- despite the fact that he and I had broken up while still in high school, and had only recently rebuilt the friendship we should have had in the first place.

Another interesting fact about me: in high school, I was a Civil Air Patrol cadet with a semi-secret superpower. I would date a guy for a few months or a year the way kids do in high school, then we would break up-- and then the guy would get the state's Honor Cadet of the Year award. I seriously went three-for-three in three years-- just ask Andrew. I used to sit around at the banquet tables at the awards ceremonies, joking quietly with the other female cadets about what a fortune I'd make if I could bottle that ability. Looking back at that from an adult perspective, I realize two things: one, I had an uncanny accuracy for choosing rising stars; and two, at that stage of my life, they really were better off without my drama. Growing up seems to have cured that second part quite nicely, thank God. But now that I've learned how to channel all that passion for something constructive, I really wish I still had access to that first part.

At sixteen, it's easy to see the fire in someone's heart, and to know that they'll love us and their dreams with equal ferocity. But somewhere around our mid-twenties, we make of that fire something harder, like steel or glass-- something that will hold polish and an edge. Dreams become ambitions. Love becomes sex with security. Desires become necessities. The ethereal quality goes out of our lives, and any attempt to bring it back makes us look hopelessly naive and juvenile, as though we still sleep with teddy bears and write letters to Santa. Even the internet dating sites, which sell the idea of everlasting love, temper it with the advice that potential matches will be scared away by the mere mention of the word. We learn that anything that blazes forth had better be sex, innovation, or diamonds, because anything else is just a waste of energy. We become so hard and glossy and grounded that we shower Bridezilla and dismiss "happily ever after" as a wedding planner's tactic to get further into our wallets.

That is, until the day we're actually confronted with the impossible. Someone gets engaged or married, someone we knew back when love and dreams underwent nuclear fusion and gave us unlimited, burning energy, and suddenly all the years of glass and steel melt away before a force so hot and bright that we can't look directly at it without tears. Something has called out the fire in us.

The question is not what I would do if I could bottle that ability. The question is why we ever keep it bottled in the first place.

Life on the Edge, Week 2

Eighty-eight dollars.

That's how much my not-eating-out initiative saved me last week. I know this, because that was the balance left in my bank account when I checked on Day 10. By some strange coincidence, this was the exact amount of money I was going to have available to get through the coming whirlwind. Five events in four days. A bridal shower, dinner-and-a-movie, Mothers' Day, and a day trip to a graduation. I figured I could just-- just-- make it, if nothing went wrong and no unexpected expenses occurred. You know, like trying to color my hair and having the bottle go flying out of my hand mid-squirt, spraying colorant on the nice white tiles on its short trajectory into the toilet bowl. Or having the heels on my only pair of dress shoes wear completely through in mid-week. Or having my mom invite five other people to her Mothers' Day breakfast without telling me.

I didn't plan for those? Silly me. So that'll be ten dollars for another box of hair color, a week of wearing nothing but pants so that I can wear my boots instead of dress shoes, and four dollars in ATM fees so that I can pay my brother-in-law for my mother's and my breakfasts after he puts them on his AmEx.

Frugality, good. Desperation, bad. But somehow I got through it.

For the bridal shower, the theme was "Things the couple will need on their honeymoon." Having no idea where they were going, I bought them a journal with one of those magnetic-clasp covers, and decorated the first page with descriptions of all the things they might need: everything from "Passion!" and "More Rum!" to "kindness" and "Advil". I wrapped it in leftover Christmas paper (plain silver-on-silver stripe) with a big blue-and-silver bow. They fed me dinner and drinks at the shower. Total cost-- I won't post that here, in case one of them visits this site! But it was quite doable.

I feel a bit guilty even describing Friday's dinner-and-a-movie as an event, since I already knew going into it that he would be paying for everything. We ate a lot of sushi, saw SpiderMan 3, and generally had a great time. Total cost-- none to me, but a big hug and a hat tip for a good friend's generosity.

Saturday was a two-fer. First came the Mothers' Day breakfast, which I had expected to put on my ATM card as I had no cash. Then came my sister, her husband, his sister, and my two nieces. Followed shortly by the need for cash in hand. Followed shortly thereafter by the realization that I really should bring my own "little sister" something when I went down for her graduation on Sunday. Again with the journal, again with the Christmas paper-- only this time, I didn't write in the journal first, and I used the paper with the stars on it. Total cost-- about thirty bucks.

For my next trick, I spent about eight bucks at Trader Joe's to get another bottle of cheap red wine and some fruit to make sangria for the next party. I had been worried about how to transport it, but after my best friend helpfully poured us each a glass of Cran-Raspberry juice, I had only to wash out the jug and voila! (Note to the reader-- if you do this, put the jug in the trunk and not in the driver's compartment, because it will count as an "open container". Just FYI.) Total cost for the day-- about 40 bucks, which left about 20 in the bank for Sunday's meals on the road. For both of us.

Enter divine intervention. Denise also came up slightly flush, so between the two of us, we had about sixty dollars to get through Saturday's dinner and Sunday's road trip. I can't say it was the healthiest food I've ever eaten, but I did managed to get a salad involved during lunch on the trip back. When we got home Sunday night, I found my determination to cook dinner thwarted by a lack of clean pans, a lack of space in the kitchen, and a waiting period to get to the sink or the spice cupboard. We ended up going out to dinner after all. Total cost-- well, let's put it this way. I ended the evening with about three dollars and change in my purse, and this morning, I found out that I was exactly sixteen cents overdrawn.

I took the three dollars and change, and had lunch at McDonald's.

An Afternoon's Perspective Shot

A few weeks ago, I had conversations with two different people about what's going on with my mom.

The first one was with a man I had known as a boy in grade school. We sat on his front porch while he held his baby daughter in his lap, and he asked me how I was doing. I told him I thought I'd completely lost the ability to panic. If it wasn't leaking plutonium, I said, it wasn't a problem-- and if it was leaking plutonium, I knew who to call. He said, basically, that he thought I had my head on pretty straight.

The second conversation was with my best friend Denise, who I've known "only" since college. We sat in her car while she drove westward in rush hour traffic and I told her how stressed I was getting. Just because I'm not panicking doesn't mean I'm not stressing. She said, basically, that if I tried to mortgage my future to take care of my mom's present, she was going to kick my ass.

Now-- on one hand, having a cancer patient in the family will stretch your resources to the breaking point and beyond. You will run out of money. You will run out of time. You may run out of the room screaming as you finally lose your temper and pull everyone else down with you. No one gets out for free. But on the other hand, I'm doing the best I can to marshall my current resources properly. I'm working to get out of debt. I'm eating more healthfully and exercising more often. I average 8 hrs of sleep a night. My friends and my employers are both in the loop and both quite supportive. And when I think of my future-future, that place where I hope to be in a couple of years, it looks the same from today as it did from six months ago, only without my mom in it. I'll cry a river when the time comes, but I'm not ready to do it yet. So if I'm being so responsible, why did she make the comment? Because, just like everybody else, I tend to prioritize the "urgent" over the "important".

Just to clarify: "urgent" is when you're sprinting for the bus because you don't want to be an hour late getting home. "Important" is when you decide that the lost hour is not worth sprinting across four lanes of oncoming traffic. Urgent things are usually one-time expenditures of time and resources; there is some pressing need to do them right now. Important things are usually long-term commitments that require constant care and vigilance, but don't normally create a feeling of immediate need. We neglect them because either we figure that they're big enough to take care of themselves for a day or a year at a time without our input, or we assume that they're too big for our puny efforts to make any difference at all. And down we go in the Hellevator.

In my particular case, I think Denise was talking about money. My immediate financial goals are fairly modest: I want to save up to pay in-state tuition for the fall semester and to get a good used car. Both of these things are out of my current price range. Both of these are things I've managed to get along well for over a decade without having. So it's easy enough to say, "Well, I sure can't buy a car with thirty bucks, so if that's all I've got, I might as well give it to my mom." At which point, Denise would most assuredly kick my ass.

You see, for all my comment about, "...and if it is leaking plutonium, I know who to call," that assumes that I know it's leaking plutonium. And when it comes to ourselves, we often don't. That feeling of urgency can override even our best attempts at self-governance, in the same way that a magician's patter can distract us from catching his sleight-of-hand.

And even with help, it's still a slow process. Thirty bucks this paycheck and thirty bucks next pay check don't add up very quickly. At that rate, it would take me 43 months to earn one semester's tuition, and another 86 months to pay cash for a thoroughly modest used car. That's a total of 10 years, 9 months, for those keeping score. It seems a bit like rush-hour traffic sometimes-- lots of stop-and-go while facing other people's rear ends and making very little progress. But at least, it seems I have good companions for the trip.

How I Stopped Buying Food and Survived for Six Whole Days

For years now, I've called May "The Month of No Money." An average May involves two Mothers Days, three birthdays, an anniversary, an annual luncheon, and at least two unscheduled events. And they all seem to happen in pairs. Usually during short-money weeks.

This year is no exception. I found myself having to fund a couple's shower, a visit from an out-of-town friend, a birthday party, two Mothers Days, and a day trip--all the same week!-- out of the same paycheck that had already covered my rent, gym dues, two weeks' worth of groceries, and two credit card payments. Thank God I'd already paid for that luncheon. I took one look at the paltry sum left over-- a sum that ordinarily wouldn't be enough to get me through a week without events-- and realized that the time had come to implement drastic measures. Such as not buying any more food.

No crumble cake at Starbucks because I overslept. No lunches from the sandwich place because my co-workers were putting in an order. No bags of salad greens or jar of artichokes or can of smoked oysters on the way home to make a quick dinner. I'd just put two weeks' worth of groceries in the house; surely they could last a whole two weeks.

Well, yes, but I wasn't quite sure that I could.

It wasn't my tummy that was rumbling; it was my sense of entitlement. Understand that I was in no danger of starving, or even of having to eat anything I didn't like, since I'd bought all the food in the first place. But I was in danger of having to settle for something that didn't move me right at that very moment, like cooked frozen veggies when I really wanted a salad, or of having to eat the same thing for dinner several nights in a row because I still had four servings left. Or of disrupting my whole weekend by not buying Saturday breakfast out when my best friend Denise and I both conveniently ran out of time to eat breakfast at home.

But I did all those things anyway. I ate my cooked broccoli with bleu cheese dressing and got something like five encores out of the Italian sausage soup. I called up Denise and reminded her not only to eat breakfast before she came over, but to check her fridge for lunch food so I'd know if I should bring anything over. When I went to the luncheon, I didn't buy a drink at the bar. When Denise came over for dinner on Sunday night, I served her leftover baked chicken with a complete lack of self-consciousness. For probably the first time since college, I was managing to live day-to-day without spending money.

I'm not saying I went completely without cheating. I started last Tuesday with $40 in my pocket, and spent over half of it that very day on-- you guessed it-- meals out. I've bought three bottles of water at the gym (though I finally got wise and saved the last one to refill for next time). When I overslept last Friday, I bought a lox-and-bagel sandwich and a bottle of iced tea with the last of my ready cash. The other days, I've been breakfasting on the granola bars and Pop Tarts we keep in the break room at work. But for five-and-a-half days out of the last seven, I haven't bought any extra food. And I haven't broken out my ATM card even once since the grocery run.

In the beginning, there was a definite feeling of pressure. It wasn't the holding-my-breath-for-two-weeks kind of feeling that I usually get during a money crunch; I knew I wasn't going to overdraw my bank account. It was more like the kind of pressure that comes with trying to break a bad habit. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what I was doing. But the more I did it, the easier it got. One short week later-- allowing for the Sunday luncheon and the two meals I haven't eaten yet-- I've had six homemade dinners, five homemade lunches, and four homemade breakfasts (six, if you count the break room supplies). I calculate that I've saved at least $80, or possibly more depending on how long those groceries last. And that was really the whole point. It wasn't about learning to eat better or to manage my time more wisely, though they've both been valuable side effects. It was about learning to control my spending. And I think I have laid a small but very solid foundation for that-- even if I do have occasional flashbacks to my broke college days.

And if I survive the next six days-- the ones with all the events in them-- I just might have enough resources to survive the remaining two birthdays, another party for a different out-of-town friend, Memorial Day festivities, a couple of other unplanned events, and the airline tickets for that friend's wedding in June. But that's another paycheck.

An Open Letter to Our Candidates

Dear Candidate,

Thank you for taking the time to find out which issues are important to me as a voter. You’ll find I’m quite low-maintenance, as I don’t demand all the latest trendy features from my elected officials. I’ve come to understand that “entitlement” is government-speak for “white elephant”, a beast that will not only ruin me, but trample all over my boundaries and my neighbors and leave a big mess of manure in its wake—and I simply can’t afford the expense.

For instance, I don’t want socialized medicine. If I wanted to wait five years for an operation, I would opt out of my health plan and invest the difference. That way, when my doctor tells me that the government will no longer cover the procedure because not enough people need it, I can pay the airfare to another country where doctors are still allowed to heal people, and have it done there.

I don’t need a tax break for driving a hybrid car. If I didn’t deserve one during all those years of riding public transportation and walking everywhere, I can’t in good conscience take one for expanding my carbon footprint. Please rest assured that when I do get a car, I will do the responsible thing and choose a 100% post-consumer recycled car that has as many good years left in it as a new hybrid, only without the environmental impact of a new manufacture. The reduced cost and smaller property taxes will be more than sufficient to cover any tax break I might have received. And if I do it just right, I’ll even be able to give a local small business a boost.

I’m not looking for additional restrictions against religion in public places. Frankly, I’m bracing for the day when the Declaration of Independence gets removed from classrooms for that phrase about being “endowed by their Creator.” That’s if the “all men are created equal” doesn’t get it yanked first for lack of inclusive language.

You’ll be relieved to note that I don’t expect you to champion mandatory prayer in public schools either. It is my own responsibility to bring up my children in the faith, and if they grow up to be godless heathens, I have no one to blame but myself. For that matter, I don’t expect further government oversight of my retirement fund or the fast-food industry, either. I understand that overconsumption now causes problems later, and the government is not expected to rescue me from my own lack of good judgment if I choose to ignore the warnings.

Speaking of warnings, I personally see no reason why I should have to make a choice between having freedom and having an atmosphere. Both are necessary and we all know it, so kindly stop with the fear-mongering already. That also goes for the zero-tolerance policies. Taking away teenagers’ nail clippers is not going to prevent a school shooting, and firing foul-mouthed commentators is not going to clean up the Billboard Top Ten.

Setting aside all of these hot-button issues should give you the resources you need to concentrate on the things that are really important, such as making sure that our police, emergency services, and military personnel are fully empowered to do the jobs for which they were hired. Trust me, if my house catches on fire or someone tries to break in, I’m not going to be worried about the additional tax burden for calling 911. And while we’re on the subject of those three little numbers, what ever happened to “United We Stand”? If we took all the energy and passion wasted on partisan infighting and directed it toward fighting the terrorists, we’d already be done with the war in Iraq.

Oh—and when you do get to that part about defending the Constitution, please remember that the First Amendment applies to both parties equally and that the Second Amendment has not gone conveniently missing.

I understand that citizenship carries certain inherent responsibilities, and I am prepared to exercise mine. This includes staying abreast of the issues, keeping track of your voting record, and making sure that you know my needs as a constituent. Consider it my thanks for your generous offer to represent me.

Sincerely,

Erin_Coda, Instigator
Somewhere, Virginia

Too Much

It's just too much.

The shooting at Virginia Tech. Harry Reid's declaration that we've lost the war in Iraq. Anti-war groups protesting at the Coast Guard Academy's graduation ceremony. My own alma mater fighting a lengthy court battle against their Board of Trustees. All of which apparently require my attention and active support, lest my apathy doom a school or a nation.

My mother's diagnosis of lung cancer. The endless rounds of doctors' appointments and medications and social workers and trips to the free clinic. My own struggles to get my health and my finances in order while I'm still young enough to do something about it. All of which also require my attention and active support.

Three rejection letters from grad schools. A near-deadly six month holding pattern while I try not to lose focus in the face of all this other stuff. The realization that even if I salvage that lost first year, it will be another four years after that until I can put my skills to work for the country the way I want to do. The realization that there are quicker avenues available, but that taking them would blow my current life into tiny, glittering pieces. The constant, dragging knowledge that the point where I am professionally, academically, romantically, and politically is the point where I should have been ten years ago. All of which eats up what little attention I have left.

I spend hours and hours with my best friend interactively making up stories which never get written down. I spend hours and hours writing letters which never change officials' or newspapers' opinions. I send off e-mails to friends and relatives who have better things to do than answer me. I hear over and over again that I'm a great writer and that failing to use my talent is a crime against the universe. I remind myself over and over again that complying with the universe's laws does not guarantee success. I blog just to take the pressure off.

It's a bit like body-surfing. I'm carried along by momentum one minute, then the next minute I'm underwater and being tumbled like gravel. It's kind of like that, only without the beach.

It's just too much.

Overweight and Unhealthy

I have an announcement to make: I am overweight and unhealthy.

It did take something of an official declaration to confirm this, as a height of 5'4" and a dress size in the 12-ish range puts me in the decided average for most American women. On the infrequent occasions when I used to complain about my weight, I got no credibility. Other women would look at my relatively slender extremities and snort. My doctor would tell me not to get so hung up on the numbers. I was about 145 lbs then-- a weight that most people outside of the nutrition industry would agree was a little on the high side for a short woman with small bones-- and was looking to trim off maybe 10 pounds of that; 15 pounds, tops. I happen to love fresh food and veggies--preferably in large quantities, see nothing wrong with an occasional sundae, and actually think that one-piece bathing suits are much classier than bikinis. In other words, I was hardly obsessive. But I still couldn't get anyone to take my concerns seriously.

Fast forward a year or two. I have now gained my very first desk job at the age of 35, replacing the job that kept me on my feet all day and that I walked a mile uphill both ways to get to and from. (Have you ever lived in Tallahassee?) Add a new baby in the house, which means that every available surface in the kitchen is covered with baby stuff and my food-prep area has shrunk to the size of a dinner plate. Not to mention that I'm afraid to actually cook anything from scratch, lest I somehow let fall an errant drop of chicken juice and have to burn down the kitchen in the interests of sanitation. (Have you ever lived with the mother of a preemie?) All the exhaustion from sitting on my butt all day means I'm too tired to cook, too tired to exercise, and too tired to get out of bed until 40 minutes after my alarm goes off. It's breakfast at Starbucks, lunch on the run, and dinner that's more like three shifts of snacking-- usually on real food, but not in the way that generates leftovers for the next day's lunch. Repeat ad nauseam. Some days literally.

Something had to give. And that something was my mother's health.

To make a long story short, my mom caught that nasty respiratory virus that was dropping people left and right, put off going to the doctor, and put such a strain on her lungs that she ended up in the hospital with heart failure. She was sent home ten days later with a bag of medications, a list of doctors' appointments, home oxygen therapy, and a final diagnosis of lung cancer. You might say it was a wakeup call. It didn't matter that my own immune system shoots down threats with the dedication of Strategic Air Command, that I have first-rate health insurance and no fear of doctors, or that I've never smoked a single cigarette. The warm glow thus generated had a lot less to do with ruddy good health than with leaking plutonium (see http://kangarooregina.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html). I could mosey on into the Hellevator while I airily justified the reasons why my exhaustion and incredible shrinking wardrobe were really not problems, or I could get my butt in gear and do something about it while there was still time. Considering the example currently before me, I chose to haul booty.

The gym I joined, not surprisingly, does not have Geiger counters. But I wouldn't have been too surprised to hear the scale and the blood-pressure machine start chattering away while a klaxon sounded somewhere in the background and red lights spun warningly in the hallway. I clocked in at 159 lbs, with a blood pressure of 158/108 (please, dear God, let my doctor not see this just yet). I'd have to lose 15 pounds just to get back to my "zero" point. And you know, I still don't look heavy. But I do have a trainer who takes me seriously. Like my doctor, she does tell me not to dwell so much on the numbers. But that's because she knows it could take me a year to lose those 25 pounds, and she doesn't want me to get discouraged before I start.

I showed up to the gym this past Monday for my first official session. I changed into the workout pants that had seemed so appealing in the store, and discovered a decidedly unattractive pear shape to my midsection. The addition of a cheery yellow t-shirt left me wondering if I should just stencil "Yukon Gold" on my back. I exited the locker room in the general direction of the workout area, and couldn't find my trainer anywhere. I climbed onto the elliptical machine, set my workout, and had to drop the intensity twelve minutes later. I had to stop after twenty, and I never did get around to any weight training. But I spent more time, covered more equivalent distance, and used more resistance than when I used to be a regular at my last gym. I may be overweight, unhealthy, and out of shape, but it seems that I really do have the tools to fix this problem. And I can't say it's discouraging.

Gaining aspect

Aspect, as described in my last entry, is one of those things that we find hard to define, but we know when we see it. It's that quality that turns people like us into people like Einstein and Mother Teresa and Gandhi and Audie Murphy-- not the greatness, but the sovereignty over a particular area which gave them that greatness in the first place. (And if you don't know who Audie Murphy was, go look him up. Seriously.) We fumble our way toward a definition of that quality with approximations like "honor" or "devotion", or we try to force on it some self-help phrase like "living into our purpose", but that doesn't begin to describe it. Take the farthest limit of human ability, and square it. That's mastery. Take the limit of mastery and square it. That's aspect.

As hard as it is to describe, it's even harder to achieve. Whole books have been written about to think like Einstein or pray like Mother Teresa, but following them doesn't even bring us close. The defining process of aspect is intuitive rather than linear, and intuition is notoriously hard to replicate. The directions fail us because all the concrete instructions in the world cannot tell us how to make an intuitive leap, and all the airy descriptions of intuition leave us nowhere concrete to plant our feet for the jump. We feel even worse when we ask those with fully-realized aspects how they got there: those people tend either to cite some sort of divine intervention, or to see their journey as a fairly obvious progression given their own natures. Whereas our prayers don't seem to have provided much in the way of inspiration, our own natures aren't leading us anywhere even close to genius, and we don't want to hear any more platitudes about our "best of self" being just as good and worthy as the best of the great ones' selves.

Fair enough. Let's see if I can make this concrete enough for the rubber to meet the road, and possibly gain some ground.

1) Everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone who is capable of basic reason, has the potential to manifest aspect.

2) Aspect develops from some basic trait that you already possess, and already have some knowledge of using. Even if you couldn't pick the relevant trait out of all the others. Even if you don't feel self-empowered enough to use it properly. Even if you couldn't name a single positive trait about yourself if you tried. You have one. It's in there. Trust me on this one.

3) If you have no idea what your traits are, get a couple of close friends and ask them. And don't discount what they say just because they're your friends and they "have to" say that, or because you think the traits they mention aren't spiffy enough (see #6).

4) If anyone's ever told you that you have a gift for something, consider that a clue. Especially if you really didn't see what all the fuss was about. One caveat-- if it's something that you absolutely, positively, cannot stand, stop doing it and start looking elsewhere.

5) Aspect is not fame, fortune, or glory. You may not get any applause for attaining it. You may not get true love, financial success, or less stress-- or any of those other traits that we've been taught to expect as rewards for "getting it right". If you'd still do whatever-it-is anyway for its own sake, and something in it seems inherently "more" to you-- even if you don't know what or why-- consider that another clue. The irony is that once you do manifest your aspect, you'll probably be doing incredible things on a regular basis, and wondering what all the fuss is about.

6) The process will transform both the trait and you. So if you sometimes want to scream because your trait seems to be something fairly obvious-- like compassion, for instance-- and you were really hoping for something spiffier, don't panic. In the book On a Pale Horse (see previous blog entry), compassion was exactly the trait that got a complete loser like Zane chosen to be the new Death, and he went on to prevail against the Devil himself. And no, he didn't do it by "sympathizing" him into submission. The trait you start with is not necessarily the aspect you're going to end up with, and you will have the opportunity to grow into it (see #8).

7) A lot of the process is circumstance, dumb luck, outside influence, etc. It's your response to those prompts which will change your trait into your aspect. This is the part where the road map breaks down and your moral compass becomes necessary. Use it early. Use it often.

8) Your ATtention and your INtention are both required. If you find yourself letting important things slide or shoving them aside so you don't have to deal with them, that's one of those decision points. If you find yourself wondering "what's the use?", that's another decision point. If you find yourself rationalizing away a particular action or behavior, or find yourself justifying the reasons that it's really not a problem-- decision point. If you feel trapped by circumstances or forced toward a decision that you really don't feel comfortable with-- MAJOR decision point. And please do be honest about the reasons for your actions and decisions. Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons will eventually lead you down, not up.

9) Don't personalize the obstacles. They aren't a secret sign that the universe or the devil is out to stop you, that you're being tested to see if you're really willing to go the distance, or that you're close to beating Level 35 and winning all the dragon's treasure. Stuff happens. See #7 & #8 for a quick guide on what to do when stuff happens.

These are guidelines, not hard-and-fast rules. They're not comprehensive-- partly because I'm still exploring the process myself, and partly because it's going to be a little bit different for every person who tries it. They're also not guaranteed to develop aspect if you follow them. But they will help you navigate the road a little more easily, and at the very least, they'll help you to get through your daily grind with your identity, humanity, and integrity intact. And you never know-- one of those ordinary moments may provide you with just enough ground to plant your feet and take that first leap.

Death and Aspect

Sometimes you just don't know which way to fall. For instance, last week, I went to check my mother out of the cardiac wing of the local hospital, and showed up with an Egg McMuffin in one hand and a copy of Piers Anthony's On a Pale Horse in the other. There is a part of me that would love to take credit for the near-literal gallows humor. Another part of me understands how contrived it would've been if I'd done it on purpose. The truth is that, being nearly out of both money and attention span, I had to find a way to fill both my body and my mind quickly and cheaply. McDonald's provided one solution and my roommate's bookshelf provided the other. Given the discussion that follows, I ought to chalk it up to Fate. But she's another book.

Pale Horse, if it's not obvious from the title, deals with Death. Specifically, it deals with the man who assumed the office of Death upon the demise of the previous officeholder. Zane, the new officeholder, is not what you'd call a confidence-insipring kind of guy. He's a complete loser-- the kind of low-grade nobody you don't even bother to warn your girlfriends about, because no one would be likely to notice him in the first place. By about the second or third chapter of the book, he has already cursed his mother, gambled away his inheritance, catalyzed the death of a former girlfriend, and squandered his best chance at love and fortune for an enchanted stone that finds loose change. He tries to commit suicide and can't even do that right; instead, he kills Death and is forced to assume the position. The pun is somewhat intended-- it turns out that he was manipulated at every turn by the other Incarnations in order to bring about his situation, and it's not too long before the Devil gets him over a barrel.

How Zane prevails, however-- that's a thing of great beauty. And it's almost impossible to describe accurately without either spoiling the plot or reducing the whole thing to a cliche. Suffice it to say that when he finally crosses the line between performance and ownership, he gains a level of mastery that even the Devil himself can't break. He does it by fully manifesting his aspect.

Aspect is one of those things that we know when we see it; and on some level a lot of us want it for ourselves, even if we can't describe it. We tangle our tongues around approximations like "honor" or "devotion", or we struggle to assimilate nebuluous self-help phrases like "creating your own reality" or "living into your bliss". But aspect is more than these, in the same way that a triangle is more than a pyramid; it's a whole different order of being. Aspect is the quality that turns soldiers into heroes and believers into saints. Those on the outside are astonished that such actions and such presence can come from an ordinary human being. Those on the inside usually don't understand what all the fuss is about.

For us, there is good news and bad news in this. The good news is that everyone has the potential to realize aspect. The bad news is that most of us go about it entirely the wrong way. We search fervently for the path to wisdom, or we demand that rocks move when we butt our heads against them, or we go through our same dull routines day after day and wait for a flash of brilliance to strike down like lightning from heaven and tranform us. It's not entirely correct to say that these things don't work; it's more that they don't work in the way we want them to. These are more likely to develop in us the aspects of "seeker" or "hardheaded" or "waiting", not whatever it is we're actually searching or fighting or waiting for. For those of us who have ever raged at being told "you're trying too hard,"-- and that would include me--this seems to be what those other people are really trying to say.

As Death himself discovers in that great little book, the determining factor of aspect is intuitive, not linear. There simply is not an absolute road map to get us there from here. However, there are a few key points that will give us a better feel for the road.

First, we need to understand what aspect is. It is that domain in which we are sovereign-- and at the same time, it's the sovereignty we exercise over that domain. It's more than just mastery. It's the point where mastery and identity merge almost inseparably to become something greater than the sum of their parts.

Second, we need to understand what aspect is not. It's not glory or fame or renown; it's not necessarily about smoking the competition or keeping our edge. It depends entirely on us, not on others. That means that we don't have to wait for official kudos before we claim the title for ourselves. It also means that all the kudos in the world cannot grant us aspect.

Third, we need to be willing to start small and accept the transformation as we go. Aspect generally starts from some more familiar quality which may or may not bear any resemblance to the full manifestation.

Fourth, we need to hone our discretionary skills-- qualities like good judgment, perspective, and honesty. They may not help us with the actual intuitive leaps, but they will help us recognize the correct jumping-off points when we get to them.

Although we all have the potential for it, fully realized aspect is rare, for a number of reasons. Some people don't see the need to delve more deeply into areas of their lives that already seem to be functioning well. Others get to the edge of their understanding and turn back, unable to make the leap. Still others are unwilling to transform their lives that far, or to accept the greater responsibilities that flow from aspect. And some people manage to travel a fair distance along the road without ever quite understanding the significance of it. Those who do fully realize their aspect, however, can change the world just by doing as their nature demands.

I'll admit it-- I definitely want to be one of those people. If you do too-- or even if you just want to read more of my observations on the subject-- please see the next blog entry. And so I look forward. To what, I don't always know, but definitely forward.

Community-- the lost art

A much-beloved college chorale director once said something I'll never forget. He was describing the actions of former students who came back to town and said things like, "Oh, Mr. Harris, we were just in Lynchburg last weekend, and we almost came to see you, but..." He smiled that particular smile-- and if you've ever seen one, you know exactly the smile I mean; it's devastatingly effective-- and said, "If it's a priority, you'll do it."

I mention it now because, based on Mr. Harris's assessment, maintaining community just does not seem to be a priority for most of us any longer. Somewhere among the text messages and rollover minutes and cheap e-mail, we've lost not only the art, but the desire to remain connected to one another. We've forgotten what it all means.

For example, I have a dear friend whose primary means of communication for many years was to e-mail me other people's messages. Whenever I saw her name in my inbox, I knew I was just a click away from sampling whichever bit of inspiration, humor, "chicken soup", or moral outrage was currently making its way through the Internet. Yet I had no idea what was going on in her life, and she had no idea what was going on in mine. Repeated inquiries such as "Long time no hear from-- so how are you doing?" received the sorts of responses I might expect to get from a distant maiden auntie, if I actually had one: "I am well. I think of you often. Take care of yourself." Recently, she sent me another posting, this one a humorous poem about how we should be pleased to get yet another forward, because it means that someone is thinking of us. While I'm always pleased to know that someone is thinking of me, I sometimes feel vaguely cheated that twenty years of friendship doesn't usually earn me anything more than a quick click.

I had a similar discussion with members of our small, supposedly close-knit community church. After twelve years of dedicated attendance, I was dismayed to find out that my self-described "church family" considered me worthy of a lovely sendoff when I moved out of state, but not of keeping in touch with me once I'd left. The letters I sent might as well have been tossed into the ocean in bottles for all the response I received. My great move backfired and I ended up returning home after less than a year, but it was six months and a healthy dose of Christmas responsibility before I could set aside my indignation and visit the church I'd once called home. When I jokingly called my former choir mates a bunch of schmuck-oids for not writing, I was airily assured by one member that she hadn't seen her best friend in 25 years. The following Easter, the choir director told me how much everyone had missed me. When I asked rhetorically why they hadn't written, I got met with a smile. One of Those Smiles. You know the one.

It's not just me. I recently participated in a forum where alumnae of my alma mater were concerned about the lack of response from their "adopted students" on campus. During a time of extreme crisis, the alumnae had reached out to offer support and morale to those in need, only to have their cards and letters completely ignored. The supreme irony is that the crisis was likely caused in part, and certainly worsened, by college administrators treating the offers of alumnae assistance with the same disregard. It's also interesting to note that the perceived decline in enrollment corresponds neatly with a decline in beloved college traditions, such as the gradual move from family-style dining on college china to the impersonal card-swipe that entitles today's students to fill their own generic plates.

While I try not to bring up problems without proposing solutions, I have to admit that I have no easy answers for this one. The pace of today's life often means that we have barely enough energy to take care of our own needs, let alone spend active time supporting relationships that seem to be self-sustaining. The truth is that they are not self-sustaining, and neither are we. Our lives are better when we live them together, and when we truly realize this, we will be willing to make the commitment. It doesn't take much. Somewhere between the quick click and the message in a bottle lie the few words that will hold us together for another hour or another week. The form and even the content is less important than the act. Make that act a priority. You won't be disappointed.

Leaking Plutonium

There's a prevailing attitude which shrugs off any circumstance that might require unpleasant action. It often goes by the name of "apathy", especially in teenagers, but the fully-developed version usually requires a chain of rationalization to reach the end of the line. I used to call it the "leaking plutonium" argument. It goes something like this:

Unless it's leaking plutonium, I don't have the time or energy to deal with it.
If it is leaking plutonium, it's not going to kill me instantly. So I can put it off.
(If it does kill me instantly, the problem is over.)
If I do get cancer, there's no cure anyway, so I might as well not worry about it.
So it really doesn't require any action on my part.

This is what my long-ago bioethics professor might have called a "slippery slope" argument: one conclusion leading to another, until you're plunging downhill on greased skids, headed straight for the twilight zone. Nowadays, we're more likely to cut out that troublesome middle part, thus turning the slippery slope into the express elevator to Hell. Perhaps some of these arguments look familiar:

"Five more bucks isn't going to make a difference in my retirement fund... but now that I'm broke, I might as well have a latte."

"I'll just call Mary next week... and now that I haven't talked to her in a year, I don't really have a reason to call."

"One cookie isn't going to ruin my health... and now that I'm fifty pounds overweight, skipping one cookie isn't going to change the facts."

The interesting thing is that the descent isn't automatic. It requires our cooperation to send us down the black hole: first in the willingness to get onto the elevator in the first place (the "it's not going to happen to me" argument), then in the suspension of common sense (and often consciousness) during the trip, and finally in agreeing to continue the trip once we realize where we're headed (the point where we decide "it's too late now"). But it works, entirely too frequently, because we think that it's just too much work to stop the elevator. We weigh the five bucks in savings against the afternoon without latte, and decide it's just not worth the effort. Four straight hours without caffeine, are you kidding? Looking at the big picture just seems to make it worse: you mean I have to do this again tomorrow? And again the day after? For how long?

Until we succeed; that's the real answer. And we had better hope we do, because that point where we decide we're past caring about the consequences is nowhere near the actual bottom. What will happen at the end of the month, when those daily lattes have added up to the hundred dollars we don't have to pay the electric bill? What will life be like in a year, when those fifty extra pounds have become a hundred and Mary no longer has any need for our company? Or in five years, when the hundred pounds have become terminal heart disease and we don't even have Mary's new number to say goodbye?

That point of decision should be recognized for what it is: not the opportunity for moment of comfort in the face of overwhelming odds, but the opportunity to turn those odds around. Maybe you didn't notice when something first started leaking plutonium, but now that you do, you can take action. Plug the leak, call the repair crew, evacuate the building-- just remember not to get into the elevator. And when you get home, call Mary. I guarantee she'll want to hear about this one.

Biting Into an Unripe Permission

Here’s a helpful hint for all the “women’s empowerment” types out there: if you really want to catch my attention, I respectfully suggest you moderate your language. I don’t mean the four-letter words that no decorous lady would have deigned to utter in my grandmother’s generation; I mean the ones with real destructive power. Words like permission, deserve, and allow.

My great-grandmother’s generation grew up with women fighting for the vote, and wishing like the girl on the old recruiting poster that they could join the Navy. My grandmother’s generation did join the Navy—and the Army, and the Air Corps. My mother’s generation fought for equal pay and equal rights. My own generation has seen women flying combat missions and serving in the President’s cabinet. And what has all this progress gotten us? Reminders that we deserve chocolate.

Listen, people, when I see the chocolate that’s actually worth flying into combat for, I’ll accept that context for the word “deserve”. Until then, I see no reason why chocolate should be a merit issue. And even if it were, such reminders hint at a truly poisonous dynamic, with the gurus in the role of benevolent parents offering treats, and ourselves as the children who have to be bribed into doing what’s good for us. Sorry, everyone, I’m not buying it. And that goes ditto for bubble baths, new shoes, naps, and anything else we’re supposed to “deserve”.

It’s not just the gurus who propagate this stuff; too often, we do it to ourselves. Consider what we say to a female friend who’s looking ill or just run-down: “You should take better care of yourself!” We dispense this advice as though it were a synonym for, “Try some Echinacea,” or, “Don’t forget to drink plenty of orange juice,” but it’s not. There’s nothing personal about these measures; a woman is not going to lose ego points over it if she’s never tried Echinacea or if she hates orange juice (and there’s a reason I know this). Telling a woman that she should be taking better care of herself, however, implies that you think she isn’t doing so. There’s a sort of scolding tone to it, an undertone of I-told-you-so, as though getting sick were somehow preventable, an occurrence that she could have avoided entirely if only she’d done what she was supposed to do on the front end. Yeah, that’s what I need when I’m flat on my back and as sick as three dogs—a good scolding to remind me that the whole situation is somehow all my fault.

And then there are the assumptions we make when it really is all her fault. Like when she staggers into work, punch-drunk with fatigue, after staying up until 3 AM the night before to get the house ready for holiday company. We shake our heads at another sister who has apparently been caught by the perfectionist trap. Never mind that they guy in the next cubicle staggered in the same way, after staying up all night to put the kids’ bikes together. His motives pass without question--he was living up to his responsibilities. So why do we assume that she got trapped by hers? With that one assumption, we disparage her ability to make responsible choices, turn her hospitality into drudgery, and turn her considered sacrifice into an act of victimhood.

Women of America, we have got to cut this stuff out.

Now, I am not suggesting that we all become the Thought Police. Words like deserve, permission, and allow do have their proper places. We deserve fair pay for fair work. We give our doctors permission to release information to our insurance companies. And yes, we even allow ourselves that piece of chocolate cake on occasion. But these things seldom require outside authority to confirm our choices. That’s not to say it’s never needed; I hope we all have good friends who speak up for us when really are settling for unfair treatment or being a little too permissive or too stingy with ourselves. But there is a world of difference between a good friend saying, “You have great business instincts—have you thought about an MBA?” and the motivation industry’s poisoned platitudes, such as a recent e-mail “tribute” which stated approximately, “but if there’s one flaw that woman has, it’s that she doesn’t know her own worth.”

The solution is simple—not fast, not easy, but simple. If we don’t choose to be perceived this way, then we must confront these perceptions whenever we encounter them. It doesn’t have to come to open warfare, just a quiet declaration of strength in the face of those who would unwittingly undermine it: “Of course it took all night, but it was worth it.” Or, with gentle perplexity, “What makes you think I don’t take proper care of myself?” And while there may be little that we can do about the legions of advertisers telling us that we deserve only the very best, we can remind ourselves that they are targeting our self-worth only as an access to our wallets. The real “very best” that we deserve is respect—and it’s much better than chocolate.