Miscellany Sunday, Nov 22 2009

1) The small weasel cat has taken to licking out my coffee cup on a regular basis … luckily she waits until I’m done with it.  However, she needs to be caffeinated exactly as much as she needs a hole in her precious head.  She is a very strange spotted person to have in the house.

2) The Amazon and I went to the Eugene Symphony last Thursday; it’s not a bad little ensemble … they have a fairly light and crisp sound, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t … the best orchestras, of course, are able to change the character of their playing depending upon the piece, but the average ensemble has to make do with a “signature” sound that reflects the personal taste of the conductor.  It’s an enjoyable orchestra overall, though they weren’t quite up to the challenge presented by the showcase piece of the evening, the Saint-Saens Symphony #3 in C minor, colloquially known as the “Organ Symphony.”  Most people know part of this symphony, though they would never in a million years identify it as Saint-Saens.  I had forgotten how long it takes to get to the fourth movement (or the end of the second movement, depending upon whom you ask), which is the really good one; the first three movements are so very … French.  Pleasant enough, but sort of like sitting in the auditory equivalent of a pastel-colored fog machine.  I keep meaning to research what in the world inspired Saint-Saens to write this symphony with the organ in it; despite the fact that he himself was an organist, it seems abundantly clear that he doesn’t have much of an idea of what to do with the organ in the symphony, except that he understands it is capable of making a bloody great noise.  The organ has some brief solo work elsewhere in the symphony, but mostly has chords that blend in with the rest of the music, as though it is hoping not to make a spectacle of itself.  Then comes the fourth movement:

In this movement, the organ has three massive chords, and then, at least to my way of thinking, it majestically blares out:

Here’s a great tune that everyone knows

I plays it once, then off I goes.

It’s a fine tune, but it passes quite fast

Then I sit here for six minutes with my thumb up my ass.

What I really love about the particular YouTube clip I chose is the painting of Saint-Saens, looking virtually indistinguishable from Sigmund Freud.

So, yes.  Overall, a very entertaining evening.

3) When did the Christmas holidays start directly after October?  I remember when I was but a lad, the Christmas season started sometime around December 10th.  That seems about right.

4) I spent part of the evening vacuuming lavender blossoms out of my dryer.  Just don’t ask.

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Brief Updates Friday, Nov 20 2009

1) The piece of flesh that the dermatologist gouged out of my back turned out to be harmless, so now I’m (predictably) annoyed at the inconvenience and expense of the biopsy. 

2) My student finished his paper on time, amazingly.  His dad had to help him a bit more with it once he got the outline back home, but they both acknowledge that he never would have gotten started if he hadn’t seen me first.  I’ll be damned. 

3) I have figured out that I don’t yet need a housemate in order to afford my house, but I will need one by May of 2010 unless business picks up quite a bit, which it is almost certain to do between now and then.  But at least now I have my drop-dead date, as it were, so I can take it off my mind for a little while.

4) Plus I just saved $700 annually on my car insurance by switching from Safeco to Allstate.  I couldn’t believe how much I was being overcharged.  I feel like an idiot for not switching years ago.

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The Best Hour Wednesday, Nov 18 2009

Anyone who knows me is aware that I have developed a psychological and possibly physiological inability to stop working.  I can stop for an hour or so at a time, but I find that I become highly anxious if I don’t have something productive to do.  This is partly to do with my pervasive and sickening fears about the economy, and partly to do with the fact that I associate my personal value with my work, as many men seem to.

At any rate, despite already having two jobs, I frequently scan the local job postings board to see if there is a third or even fourth job I might like to pick up.  Yesterday I saw a very unusual ad, for a “motivational writing coach.”  The ad poster was looking for someone “creative and dynamic” to help his son finish the papers required for his college classes; if he doesn’t turn them in, he’ll fail. The son is very bright, but can’t seem to get going with the papers.  He is completely stuck.  All motivational tools have failed; they can’t think what to do next.  The pay offered was interesting — a certain sum per final draft page the kid produces, plus a bonus if the paper gets better than a C grade.

It seemed to me that basically they were looking for someone to coax the young man out of a paralyzing case of writer’s block.  So I called the dad, and talked to him on the phone for a while … they’d received many calls from out-of-work folks with English and education degrees, but they hadn’t heard from anyone who had any idea how to proceed.  I was quite sure I knew what to do, and suggested that the dad and the kid meet me at my office tonight.  I shook hands with the dad and then told him to go away and get coffee down the street, so the kid — Patrick — would feel that I was working only as his advocate.

An hour later, we had a detailed outline for the paper he needs to write, on a topic he’d never considered … the most basic part of his block was that he had no enthusiasm for what he thought the assigned paper topic was, but after five minutes of casually conversing with him, I suggested a different topic that fit with the requirements of the assignment, and which he was very excited to write about.  We sat together with his source materials, finding some appropriate citations, and mapping out exactly how he was going to proceed, including exact word counts  he needed to write for each section.  I explained to him the system I’d come up with for article/paper writing when I am under pressure, and he wanted to know why they don’t teach this kind of thing in college.  It’s a good question; and I don’t know why.  My system probably wouldn’t work for everyone, but it seemed to be a good fit for him. 

“I feel so relieved,” he said, when we were done.  “I wish the writing class I’m in was teaching me this kind of thing.  Everything just looks a lot better to me now.”

I don’t know whether he’ll write the paper.  I don’t know whether I’ll be paid.  And I don’t care.  That was one of the best working hours I’ve ever spent.  It reminded me of why I went into freelance editing/coaching to begin with, way back when I was doing it more frequently.  I hope he does write the paper, because I want to know what he’ll end up saying.  And maybe his knowing that will be enough to motivate him to get started.

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Order Random No Items in Particular Sunday, Nov 15 2009

1) Much though my more impatient side would like to dismiss Angelina Jolie as a marriage-wrecking media attention whore, I have to admit, the woman can act.  I highly recommend a film called Changeling, in which she gives a remarkably authentic and nuanced performance as a single mother whose only child goes missing in 1920s Los Angeles.  Anyone who is upset or triggered by stories about children in danger should pass on this one, but for those who can tolerate it, it’s a remarkable (and true) story, and very well done. 

2) I am once again considering the possible benefits of renting out part of my house, or possibly selling the house and moving to an apartment, and cutting my housing expenses approximately in half by doing so.  I can’t decide which of these options is more palatable; nor can I decide whether either of these things is actually necessary to do.  I am not well-equipped to deal with the ups and downs of commission-based self-employment, and I have a pervasive fear of Waiting Until It’s Too Late to Do Something.  It seems that many people I know Waited Too Long, and consequently are buried in debt, out of work, and suffering terribly.  I actually feel guilty on a daily basis for owning a home that’s larger than I need.  Now it’s anyone’s guess as to why the hell I’d feel less guilty if I rented part of it out.  Clearly a better way to soothe my conscience would be to offer free space to someone.  But when I contemplate that option, I find I don’t feel guilty enough to make it an acceptable idea. But it would seem like a pleasant detachment from temporal concerns were I to sell the house I don’t need, and move into an apartment.  I wouldn’t like that, but I’d feel less like a gloating plutocrat.  I don’t know whether my moral philosophy or my economic philosophy is the more confused, but I do know that it seems I should do something, and I don’t know what it is.

3) I am pleased to report that the gouge out of my back is healing nicely; I can’t really see why I need to put a Band-Aid over it, but I suppose I’ll continue to follow the instructions even though I don’t see the point of them.  I can actually reach the gouge well enough to slap a bandage on it, which leads me to be impressed with myself.  Evidently I am easily impressed.

4) If you’ve never made a toasted sharp cheddar cheese and onion sandwich, and then enjoyed it with a side of homemade tart cranberry sauce, then you’re really missing out on one of the world’s simplest joys.

 

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Surgery and the iPod Wednesday, Nov 11 2009

Because I have paid up my insurance deductible for the year, which is something I rarely accomplish, I have been trying to think of any medical procedure I might need to have so I can get it done before the end of the year, and actually have it paid for.  There was one thing I’d been on the fence about — seeing the dermatologist.  My mother’s family is a veritable cornucopia of moles, skin tags, and curious protrusions; lucky me, I got that gene.  There are a couple of moles I’ve been watching for a year or so that I thought I should have looked at, and a funny little spot on my back, between my shoulder blades, that I sometimes notice in the mirror, but which I can’t examine closely because my head doesn’t turn all the way around.

So today I went in to have the dermatologist look at all of this, and to my surprise, she didn’t care anything about the moles (which are very large and ugly, I might add) but wanted to perform surgery immediately to biopsy the thing on my back, which she pronounced to be:  “… really strange-looking.”  She warned me that doing this would probably leave one hell of a scar, but I find that an unexpected benefit of having no natural vanity and considering myself to be hideously ugly is that I really don’t care if I’m maimed by surgery … the whole thing is already a lost cause, so hey, go for it.

So they pumped my back full of I don’t even know what, but my whole shoulder went numb, so it was good stuff, whatever it was, and I flopped down on the surgery table, which was awkwardly positioned in a room far too small for this kind of thing, so my legs were kind of hanging off the edge of it, and the doctor and her assistant kept tripping over me.

“You’ll have to come back in ten days to have the stitches out,” the doctor announced.  I hadn’t realized there were going to be stitches, but I guess that made sense, with the scar warning.  I heard some clanking and felt some tugging and pressure, and wondered vaguely how much it would have hurt without the shot.

Out of nowhere, the surgical assistant announced, “Well, the gym told me the iPod can’t be saved.”

“That’s not surprising,” the doctor said.  “You should have expected that when you dropped it on the treadmill belt.”

“Well, you know, the really bad thing is that it was my friend’s iPod.”

“Yeah, she’ll know better than to lend you anything again,” the doctor remarked, setting a jar down that contained a livid portion of my flesh, approximately one inch in diameter.

“But I like that gym,” the assistant continued.  “They have this stairstepper thing … it’s kind of like an escalator, where it just cycles around and around.  It really kicks my butt.”

“I’ve seen those,” the doctor remarked.  “So David, do you have anyone at home who can help you take care of this?  You have to put ointment on it, and change the dressing.  After the first 48 hours, you can just use a big Band-Aid.”

Tempted though I was to reply: “Oh, am I actually still here?”   I said, instead, “No, but I’ll figure it out.  Thanks.”

“We’ll send this up to the OHSU lab, and let you know what they say,” she said.

The other nice thing about being me is that I’m not the least bit worried about whatever it is.  I’ve always figured I’ll be dead by the time I’m fifty anyway, so if the thing turns out to be some malignant growth that’s eating me alive, that will pretty much fit in with the plans I already had.

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John, Helen, Irvin Friday, Nov 6 2009

1) On Wednesday night the Amazon and I had the incredible pleasure of seeing John Cleese perform a one-man show — basically a cherrypicked retrospective of his career.  I still can’t quite process the fact that he was actually there, and we saw him.  Him.  John Cleese, for the love of God.  The most remarkable thing about the show, I think, was his ability to come across as simultaneously friendly and incredibly urbane.  And although I’m sure he could give the lecture in his sleep, he managed to give an impression of talking conversationally with the audience.  He told us that his mother lived to be 101, and he seems scheduled for similar longevity; I wish I had as much energy now as he seems to have at the age of 70.

2) I have noticed recently that my new favorite phrase appears to be: “I think that ship has sailed.”  This is quite useful for sardonic/ironic effect, and is also a useful way to tell someone that he or she is an idiot without being explicit.  I am observing the departure of so many ships that I am beginning to feel a strange kinship with Helen of Troy.

3) Recently I started re-reading Irvin Yalom’s book Love’s Executioner, the classic/famous account of himself and ten psychotherapy clients and how they impacted one another in the therapy process.  My second encounter with the book has really reminded me, as if I needed reminding, that the reader brings as much to the book as the author does.  The first time I read the book, which was maybe ten years ago, I found it interesting and entertaining.  This time around, from the perspective of someone who has been in extremely demanding and intensive therapy for more than two years, my reaction is that I’m grateful this egotistical asshole isn’t my therapist.  I know people usually praise Yalom for showing the “humanity” of the therapist’s role, but I’m not sure I’m inspired by knowing that he thinks of one of his clients as “a ninny,” and that he practically wallows in his disgust for fat women — and refers to this disgust in the present tense; it’s not something he’s gotten past.  Of course I understand that therapists bring their own crap into the therapy relationship; that’s the basis for countertransference, and in some instances, it can be useful.  I also know that the clients gave their permission for their stories to be told, and so they must think that they were helped — and in many ways I’m sure they were; healing is always a hit and miss process administered by one imperfect human being to another.  Some of the book really made me wonder, though, where the therapist should ethically draw the line as far as refusing to work with clients for whom the therapist does not have a genuine and natural empathy.

One of the points he makes in the story “Fat Lady” is that he took on his fat client, Betty, even though she revolted him so much that he couldn’t look at her, because he wanted an opportunity to grow as a therapist and to work out the countertransference she brought up in him … and that he could only grow this way through the therapeutic relationship.  Well, sorry — I call bullshit on that one.  If we consider the therapist’s countertransference to be what the rest of us non-therapists experience as projection, then none of us would ever be able to work through anything outside of therapy.  I have daily opportunities to become aware of , observe, and try to wrestle honestly with my trigger points and projections — to see where my irritations, hatreds, and judgments show me to myself in ways I’d rather not see.  If Yalom really needs to have a fragile psyche at his disposal in order to work out his own stuff, then he is, I think, irresponsible.  I would never for a moment deny that therapists are challenged by and learn from their clients.  But for a therapist to take on a client he finds disgusting simply because she provides a countertransference challenge?  I can’t accept that as ethical.  Did he help her?  Yes.  But this is one story, and I wonder how many other disgusting clients he took on and didn’t help due to his own issues getting in the way of the crucial concept of unconditional positive regard from analyst to analysand.  It’s impossible to give unconditional positive regard and still find someone too disgusting to look at. 

However, one thing I did find to be interesting and useful about the book was his observations about different degrees of resistance to the therapy process.  It actually made me appreciate myself more as a therapy client; I am not guarded or defensive, I’m not in denial, and I welcome conversations and observations that make me feel painful or uncomfortable, because I recognize those experiences as points to guide me more clearly toward places where I am still wounded in ways that I need to look at.  I’m very good at recognizing that  surge of anger or irritation in me is a surefire indicator that the truth has been spoken — and in fact, I frequently verbalize that when my therapist suggests an interpretation or direction: “I don’t think that’s right, because it’s not pissing me off,” or, conversely, “That bothers me, so there’s almost certainly something there; I’ll think about that and tell you what I figure out.”  And then I go away and spend hours processing that information, and getting as close to the truth as my mind will allow, and I come back and present the next layer of information — a little deeper, a little more risky, a little scarier each time; each of those risks takes off a layer of scar tissue and gets closer to allowing that wound to breathe so it can start healing differently, rather than being buried.  At any rate, if Yalom’s book did nothing else, it showed me that most therapy clients don’t show up in quite that way from Day One, and so I gained a new gratitude for my willingness to endure the discomfort of disassembling my miswired psyche … or maybe a new gratitude for my realization that this miswiring has me stuck in ways that I don’t want to live with all my life, despite being more functional than most people I see.  I’m very grateful not to have been fooled by my functionality into thinking I’m healthy; it seems that’s something that people often get tripped up by, and they waste a lot of life, until they have a crisis and realize that functionality is a surface phenomenon, whereas life is lived elsewhere.

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Ramblings of No Particular Import Monday, Nov 2 2009

1) I don’t know where my car thinks it lives, but it was convinced that we were on Daylight Savings Time two weeks ago.  It updates via satellite signal, and there isn’t a way to manually reprogram the clock.  Now that we really are on Daylight Savings Time, it’s already old news to me.  On the other hand, my new thermostat mysteriously knew about the time change even though I didn’t tell it.  I do not understand the arbitrary opinionatedness of these computer-chip-driven items.  Note:  Thanks to Don, I now realize that I can’t tell the difference between being off DST and being on it.  I also confuse DST with DSL a lot of the time, and find that evidently I want high-speed connected daylight.

2) Last night the small weasel cat woke me up from a deep sleep at 3 AM by pressing her cold wet little nose (it’s extraordinarily damp and frigid, like an ice cube on the front of her face) against my nose, which convinced my unconscious mind that I was about to be murdered by some unholy combination of a burglar and the Abominable Snowman.

3) This cracks me up.  It’s much funnier if you actually know Spanish, partly because the Spanish itself is written for comic effect, and the guy speaking it is hilarious.

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And That Was My Day Wednesday, Oct 28 2009

1) This morning I noticed that Liu has lips.  I’m sure she’s always had them, but I have never noticed them before.  I don’t know whether this means there is something odd going on with her mouth that has suddenly caused me to become aware of her lips, or if I have merely ignored them until now.  Now that I know about them, I can’t stop thinking about how strange they are. 

2) I’m pretty sure I have a sinus infection, but I don’t want to go to the doctor to find out because I’m afraid of getting some horrible virus at the doctor’s office.  So I will wait until it goes away or I die or my head explodes in a fountain of green slime.  I won’t burden you by telling you why I think this latter result is likely.

3)  The Amazon is taking me to see John Cleese do a one-man show next week if I am not slimy or dead or destroyed by cat lips.  I can’t get too excited about it, lest I psych myself out and have expectations of the event that cannot possibly be met.  I did that once when I had a ticket to see one of my favorite authors, Robertson Davies.  I built him up in my mind to the point where I would have thought him a failure had he not raised the dead and parted the Red Sea onstage.  So I ended up not going to the event, and he died a year later, and not having gone is one of the greatest regrets of my entire life.  Therefore I am not thinking about John Cleese.

4) Today I visited the home of a lady who was getting ready for an estate sale, to clear out her dead mother’s house.  There was a pile of long fluffy things by the front door, which caught my eye.

“Would you like a boa?” the lady asked me, completely deadpan.

“Uh … what?” I replied.

“A boa.  Do you want one?”

After looking at them, I did want one; I thought it would make a great cat toy.  I was right.

5) I heard through the grapevine today that an agent where I used to work was asked to leave the company because it turned out he was holding houses open in order to find sex partners.  He would post the address of the house on Facebook, along with an explicit description of his sexual preferences and assets.  Then he would have sex in the house with whoever showed up.  He was extremely indignant when the manager took him to task about this.

“I’ll have you know that just last weekend, I refused a blow job when it was offered to me,” he said.  He also stated that he was doing the world a service, rescuing bored men from their fat wives, and that he was regularly tested for HIV, so what was the problem?  Plus, he didn’t really need to sell houses, because he was writing a memoir, and he was sure it would be made into a major motion picture.

With my luck, he’ll probably be my next editing project from the self-publishing company.

 

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Random Items in No Particular Order Monday, Oct 26 2009

1) Today I saw a Yahoo! news item titled “World’s Oldest Living Dog,” with a fetching (ha!) photo of some long-haired half-dachshund thing.  I found this to be enormously irritating.  Of course it’s a “living” dog — why would there be such a photo if it were the world’s oldest dead dog?  Wouldn’t “World’s Oldest Dog” have sufficed?  And another thing — it makes me want to scream when people refer to dachshunds as “wiener dogs,” but not as much as I want to scream when I hear them referred to as “datsuns,” which seems to be a newly-prevalent linguistic idiocy. 

2) The advent of the cold and flu season has reminded me that some people have more obnoxious-sounding coughs than others.  I don’t know what real excuse there is for coughing of the retching, throat-clearing variety, unless you have pertussis, in which case, you shouldn’t be out in public.  I think the world would be a much nicer place if people paid attention to these things, and made some small effort not to be even more disgusting than they naturally are. 

3)  I attended a pumpkin-carving party at Elissa’s on Saturday, and was so completely exhausted that I evidently gave the impression of being relaxed, and in some respects I suppose I was; since I’d pretty much lost the will to live, I also had lost much of my “oh hell, do I have to seem sociable?” party anxiety.  This latter issue, had it become problematic, would have been resolved by the party guest who chattered at me, magpie-like, all evening, to my bemusement.  I started to wonder whether I had some neon sign over my head that said: “Conversational Charity Case — Please Rescue!”  I got rather a handsome jack-o’-lantern done, which will light the way for the thousand trick-or-treaters expected at my parents’ house on Halloween.  No, really; we’ll get at least that many.

4) Today when I was doing my grocery shopping, I spied a bag of a type of toffee I really like — dark chocolate hazelnut, made locally, so it’s very fresh, and wonderfully flavorful.  It’s also very expensive, and of no nutritional value.  So I made a deal with myself that I could buy the toffee only if I contributed an amount equal to its price to the “Meals for the Homeless” program that is available to add on to the grocery bill at checkout.  This internal bargaining didn’t prevent me from purchasing the toffee I didn’t need, but the Portland Rescue Mission got six meals out of it, so I suppose there was some roundabout virtue in the whole process.

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Things I Learned This Week Saturday, Oct 24 2009

1) If you misread “tablespoons” as “teaspoons” in a cake recipe, you end up with a pretty flat cake.  You can try to save it by putting the 1/8th-inch layers together with redcurrant jelly and icing it with whipped cream, but it will still be flat.  You can then serve a piece to your very polite SO, who will smile and nod and pretend to like it, but you’ll still know it’s … questionable at best.  Then you’ll have to look at it sitting in your refrigerator (where you’ll have to keep it, because you iced it with whipped cream) and wonder what the hell to do with it.  It seems a shame to throw it away, although when you add up the cost of the ingredients, it cost you maybe $15 to make it … less than two nice desserts would cost at a good restaurant, so why don’t you just throw the damned thing out, and move on?  Why?  Why don’t you?  You don’t know.  You just keep staring at it, and it stares flatly back.

2) If the cat runs away howling from the litterbox after visiting it, there’s a good reason. 

3) If you didn’t park under the walnut tree because you observed nuts falling from it with amazing force much in the manner of small atomic bombs, then probably you shouldn’t walk under the tree, either.

4)  There are very few people in the world who don’t respond with delight at hearing this piece played live.  Part of the fun is seeing whether the musicians will survive it, and in what condition, since every measure is full of pitfalls that only an exuberant sixteen-year-old composer could invent.

5) Half a bottle of red wine fixes nearly any recipe.  The other half, given to the cook or to the guest, would probably also fix any recipe, but in a different sense.

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