HoHoHo

Christmas Day, 2012.  I'd say Happy Holidays but I'd piss off the traditional folks.  But if I say Merry Christmas then the secular humanists are going to be all over me.  I'm screwed.  I'm always getting screwed.  The world is against me, the cards are stacked against me, everyone hates me, guess I'll eat some worms.

If today is a great day for you, rock on.  There are a lot of people who really enjoy the holidays and I say bully, bully.  There are families who get along well and people who like to shop and decorate and all that crap.  Certainly the intent behind this holiday - ironically on a date that has more to do with trying to bamboozle ancient pagans into buying into a new religion than anything else - is wonderful.  Giving gifts, thinking of others, let's go wassailing and all kinds of other things that don't usually happen is hard to argue with.

But if you think today is a great big pain in the ass, rest assured that you're not alone.  There are a lot of expectations.  There is a lot of money spent.  There are a lot of people around who you may not spend much time with, and often for good reasons.  It's easy to be overwhelmed and disappointed.  I used to quote the statistic that more people commit suicide around the holidays than any other time of the year until I found out it wasn't true.

As Jon Stewart said, and I'm paraphrasing: "Ah, the holidays.  When you have a 4 hour meal with your in-laws who you only see once a year.  What could go wrong with that?"

The best Christmas SuperK and I ever had was the first time we put some serious distance between my family and ourselves.  We were in New Orleans.  When I pulled into the hotel I asked the bell hop if any restaurants were open on Christmas.  The Old City was very religious and traditional and almost everything was closed.

He looked at me strangely:  "They're all open," he said.

SuperK and I had gumbo and a couple of dozen raw oysters drenched in horseradish and hot sauce for our meal.

Priceless.

Meditation: A practice in which an individual trains the mind and/or induces a mode of consciousness to realize some benefit, although it can be argued that meditation is a goal in and of itself.

Meditation helps free me from the obsession of self.  It helps me to stop thinking about me, a Herculean task of Sisyphean proportions.

I frequently confuse being productive with being busy.  I can stay busy.  I can go out into the backyard and dig a large hole, then fill it back in.  This would keep me busy although I would hardly call it productive, unless of course I was looking for something in the large hole, didn't find it, and then realized I'm renting so I better fill the $#!! hole back up.  Or I thought hole-digging would be good exercise or more likely, I went into the backyard to get my shoes, which I put out there for some reason that I can no longer remember, forgot what I was doing, saw a shovel, and began digging randomly.  I would look up with a confused look on my face when SuperK would lean out and say:" What are you doing, dear?"

Work is a nice cover for productivity.  So is child-rearing.  I'm not saying those things aren't good or productive, just that they take up big chunks of time, chunks of fixed time.  It easy to split a day up into go to work, work until lunch, eat lunch, work until quitting time, go home.  That's a day.  But when those things stop or are taken away, what then?

I regret nothing.  I move forward and things work out the way I want them to, or they don't.  All I can do is move forward. I'm not in charge of what happens when I get wherever I end up.  I try to remember that the effort is up to me but the results are up to god.

I'm So ANGRY

Anger: An emotion related to one's psychological interpretation of having been offended, wronged or denied and a tendency to react through retaliation.   Or so says Wikipedia.  I left my beloved Webster's at home.

I am pondering anger this morning.  I have a terrible temper, which makes me so mad.  The men on the paternal side of my family all had big tempers.  I vowed to avoid this tendency, obviously unsuccessfully.  And the men all have a nice, passive-aggressive type of anger: not angry all the time but when the anger surfaces it's best to get out the way.  It's a very common technique for people who want to control things.  If I'm angry all the time people are going to move away; if I blow up at odd times people are on their toes and I'm better equipped to manipulate them.

Anger is a manly manifestation of fear.  It's easier to get my way when I'm violently angry than when I'm weeping quietly, although sometimes I do that, too.  It all depends on whether my fear is venting outward - anger - or burrowing inward - depression.  These are both very effective ways to get attention, to get what I want from you

Today when I'm angry I do two things.  First of all, I keep my mouth shut.  Nothing good comes out of my mouth when I'm pissed off.  Then I try to look at why I'm angry, especially if I'm angry at another person.  This is growth for me - my tendency is just to saddle up my anger and ride off into the sunset, six guns a-blazin'.  I almost always find that someone has touched something uncomfortable in me and it's easier for me to blow up than to take a look at what I don't like about myself, try to change it for the better or accept it for what it is.  Finally, (OK, that's three things) I try to look at the source of the anger.  I almost always find a person who isn't doing that well and is trying to make themselves feel better by devaluing someone else. Nobody thinks this consciously when it's going on but it's what's going on.

On and On I Go

I'm really getting annoyed that I didn't start using the Crisis List earlier.  Here's an update about a situation that so falls in the category of "This is what you're complaining about?  Really?  No shit?"  It's a distressingly  large category for me; I don't have much to complain about.  Anyway, I left the New City and its winter weather and drove 1000 miles due south where the weather is . . . how shall I put this? . . . somewhat milder.  Actually, it's #$!! perfect.  I realize that anything I say after this is going to make me sound like the spoiled, ungrateful brat that I am.  

Anyway, we're staying in a ground floor apartment in a vacation rental.  For the first few weeks there were a couple of nice women and their noisy dog staying upstairs.  They worked so they weren't terribly loud but they weren't quiet, either.  They told us that they were leaving for another assignment and that someone else would be moving in after they left.  (Ed. Note: brilliant use of a redundant comment, probably meant to lengthen what is already a fairly boring post - was there any confusion that the new people would move in before they left?)   The point here, if I can relocate it, is that I immediately put this on the Crisis List: New neighbors would be noisy.   I imagined a bunch of drunken college students blasting Metallica at 2 AM and peeing off the deck into my backyard.

I met the new neighbor yesterday.   She arrived in a Volvo.  She's my age - and I'm old - and she is here because her extremely pregnant daughter is close to delivering her first child.  To recap: I have a lovely middle-aged woman who is going to be at her daughter's house visiting until she becomes a grandmother, at which point she'll be helping to care for a newborn.  I don't believe that I'll see her much and I bet she's going to be tired when she's here.

This is what I worried about.  This is what I wasted my time worrying about.

Da Phone

I make a lot of phone calls.  Most of the time I'm doing OK when I make the call and a lot of the time I get hold of someone who isn't doing as well as I am.  This is what we call a symbiotic relationship - listening to someone else talk through a problem really helps me, usually a lot more than it helps the person who is getting something off their chest.  It's amazing to feel like I'm being helpful.  It didn't happen much when I was drinking.  I didn't ever care about anyone then - now I usually don't care about most people, a big improvement even though it may not seem like one.  It's the old adage about taking an interest in someone else to everyone's benefit.  I forget this on a daily basis.  I'm worried about me and I don't care about you but when I pretend I care about you then I find I actually start caring about you and then I feel great.    I have to start out pretending that I care before I can work up any actual caring.

I got a call from a friend yesterday that I call regularly but who doesn't often call me.  I had left a few messages but hadn't heard back from a few other guys and I needed to talk a bit.  My buddy was doing well, better than I was, so I got to talk.  I don't talk all that much.

I bet it helped him more than it helped me.

Crisis!

I was battling some free-floating anxiety yesterday.  This means that I was feeling anxious about some things that weren't actually real.  They sure weren't likely to happen.  It was my fevered brain struggling to come up with problems.  I didn't have any problems so I made some shit up.  It’s what comes naturally to me: Problems.

So I trot out my trusty Crisis List and wrote down the things that were bothering me.  It helps me visualize what’s going on and makes me write down what I think the solution is.  But yesterday I could be bothered to even write down the Crises, preferring instead to let the anxiety free-float to its little heart’s content.  I did decide to get up this morning and write down the anxiety makers but I couldn't remember one of them.  It was obviously quite important and pressing.

The second one was for something that hasn't happened yet and probably won’t happen – it falls into the category of “Imagining the Worst Possible Scenario Even Though That Is Damned Unlikely To Happen.”  It’s a very popular scenario in the Seaweed household.  In fact, it may be the most popular scenario.  I can’t think of anything more popular than imagining problems where no problems exist.

The third and last category was total bullshit.  The solution I wrote down was this: “Really?  Really?”  I couldn't believe that I even had this as a problem.  It was in the category of My Ferrari isn't working well problems.

Restless guy.  I would have been one of the dudes on a wagon trail getting scalped and freezing and starving to death a hundred and fifty years ago.  I would have left a reasonable existence 

It's STILL All About Me

I sent a note to a buddy of mine yesterday and I called him King John.  I was joking; moreover, I have no idea where the impulse to call him a king came from.  I thought something so I said something - I'm working on the brain-mouth interface but it's a big job.  These impulses are one of my qualities that people either find endearing or that gets me beat up from time to time.  I think some people find it endearing.  No one has said so but I have to assume there's somebody out there.  Hello?  Anybody?

He responded immediately as if I had criticized him for being too big for his britches - he wasn't angry but he was depressed.  We quickly cleared it up but I'm still laughing at how eager we are to beat ourselves up.  The President of Mongolia can be talking about water rights issues in the high steppes and I'll think: "Is he talking about me?"

No, I'm not self-centered at all.