House of sickness

My house is wall to wall sick ladies. Actually, it’s just two sick ladies, one tiny and full grown. I’m worried about getting sick so my hands are raw from washing and I’m thinking about sleeping on the sofa instead of next to the wife.

It’s not uncommon for people to get sick at the start of spring. It’s not unusual for people to get sick at any particular season or part of a season. There are more cases of respiratory and viral illnesses in the winter but people get sick all year round. This is similar to the fact that sun damage to skin is still an issue in winter but people spend less time outside so there is less concern and awareness of sun damage in winter.

Whenever my house gets full of sickies I like to think about the various anti illness rituals and beliefs people hold. Because more flu and cold like illness things happen in winter that’s when the flu shots happen and when people have their anti cold rituals in place. Folks start uping their vitamin C intake, using their nettie pots, taking garbage like Airborne. I find all of these things fascinating. Most of them don’t do anything to stave off illness but their use is common and people swear by whatever thing or set of things they do to prevent and overcome illness.

We have this kind of thing in other areas. Just watch how people behave when waiting for an elevator or waiting at a stoplight. There are so many ideas about how to get an elevator to come faster or how to make a light turn green but activating some sort of magic underground sensors so people try random things and for the elevator comes or the light happens to change just after or while they are doing one of these random things they attribute the change to the action. This is also how psychics make their money, as the correct guesses or remembered more than all the guesses they made that were way wrong.

All of these things are attempts to have some control over what is largely a not controllable world. We humans mostly have to react to world around us with little ability to make everything bend to our wills. And that can be scary so we look for ways to manipulate the world around us. When we can’t find these ways we just see an ability to do so when one doesn’t actually exist.

The sad thing about this, for me, is that I should probably assume that any time my little lady appears to be doing what daddy tells her she may just happen to be doing what I asked despite my having asked rather than because I’ve asked. I’m fine with the idea that I can’t make a light turn green or ward off the cold but I really want to believe that my child will do what I tell her and be a good girl if I just work hard enough at it. And that’s what makes me a hopeless out of control human being.

LW

Wanting

My three year old was out of town recently for several days without her mom or dad. I figured it was time she learned some life skills so she hitchhiked across country from Delaware to San Jose. One evening I was talking with her on the phone and she said, “I want you daddy.” The statement was plaintive and a little sad. She missed me, she wanted to be near me, she was feeling things and not really knowing how to express them, but “I want you” was what she came up with. I thought that was pretty sound. And it really made me feel loved.

An essential quality in pretty much any story is conflict. And conflict arises from the wanting something. Whether that wanting be in the form of wanting an ice cream or wanting to lose yourself in the laughter of a beautiful woman the wanting is what matters. Love is, and I realize I’m jumping a few steps in this progression of connecting all love to want, love is an heightened wanting.

I think a very basic, perhaps instinctual human feeling, is a desire to be wanted. As a person without religion or a belief in something above and beyond the world around me I’ve had to figure out where my moral and ethical guideposts come from. (Obviously, they come from my parents and the cultural context in which I spent my childhood just like every other human being, but I couldn’t just point to a specific book or set of stone tablets as a simple origin.) It seems likely to me that humans are moral and treat each other overall with respect because the people who do that are more likely to survive and pass on their genetic code which means this tempermant might be selected for evolutionarily.

This concept simplified is that the meaning of life is that one should strive to have good people want them.

It’s an idea that can turn ugly. The desire to be wanted surely has something to do with my culture’s celebrity obssession and the desire to be on reality television. There’s some confusion and conflation of being seen by millions of people and being wanted. Sort of the little kid idea that any attention is worth having. So care should be taken and awareness is important. I can lead my life with a goal of having a group of people I think are good want me. But I have to make sure that I know exactly what that means and why it’s important.

Maybe the objective can’t be to be wanted but how wanted a person feels can serve as a guage for how well life is being lived. Maybe?

LW

Gutterpunks

There’s a section of gutter that’s been in various places along the boulevard outside my house for the last week. I know which house it came from based on the style and color but I don’t bring it over to their house. Instead I ignore the gutter and occasionally move it if the wind blows it into my yard. I sort of feel like it’s the responsibility of the people whose gutter it is to come and get it. Surely they see it. Or are they so unaware that they don’t realize a part of their house has blown across the street and it now mucking up their neighbor’s yards?

Really, leaving your gutter just blowing through your neighborhood is about the worst thing a person can do. It demonstrates not only a complete disregard for all of the people around you but also an open negligence for one’s home. The very place where you get your rest, eat you food, and store all your stuff and you can’t be bothered to keep track of the pieces of this place.

Sure, I’m lazy and choose to step over a piece of gutter every day rather than pick it up and bring it across the street but at least I go to the trouble of not having gutters because I know I wouldn’t bother keeping track of them. And that recognition of my own laziness is what makes me better than those beguttered people.

LW

I’m running from something

Exercise has been a really good thing for me for a long time. I landed on running several years ago after being a gym rat and it’s come to feel like home. I mostly like doing it and I like how I feel after I do it.

Plus, there’s something about me that gets great satisfaction in having something I know I want and need to do nearly everyday. I can’t stress how valuable it is to have a daily ritual that gives me something I know I can start and finish all in the same day.

But, I’ve just become aware in the last week that I’m now using running and any other exercise I do as a way to avoid other things. Lately I’ve been spending 90 to 120 minutes on my daily workouts when I used to rarely go more than 60. And I’ve been denying this change and telling her she’s crazy when my wife comments on it.

Last night I found myself into my fourth mile after 10pm after having spent an hour working out in my home gym (a pull-up bar, a folding chair, and half a dozen dumbbells) when I realized something might be up. Maybe I wasn’t just running because the resistance workout wasn’t a high enough calorie burner and because I want to keep my runners legs. Maybe I wasn’t going for a run before bed just to clear my mind and ensure that I had done at least one thing that day I didn’t find ultimately disappointing. Maybe I wasn’t running to get and keep health in my life but instead to try and avoid things that are important to me and that I deeply care about but am finding increasingly terrifying.

I quickly thought of two major things that could easily be what my excessive exercise was helping me avoid.

One: If I can work out long enough and late enough every night the wife will be asleep or nearly asleep and I won’t have to contemplate having a conversation about the surprisingly few but worryingly significant issues I don’t think are being addressed between us. If I’m just working out to be fit and take care of myself how can that be a bad thing, right. But if I’m working out so I can wait the wife out and not communicate, well that doesn’t just do harm to what is easily the most important and worthwhile relationship I’ve every been a part of, but it also taints my running. Neither of which is okay with me.

Two: I’ve lost all confidence in my ability to write anything worth a damn. Seriously, that’s it. I know I’ve been capable of writing things I’m proud of in the past. I have things I’ve written that I am excited about sharing with people live on stage. Things I know are funny and good and still have a truth for me. But I can’t seem to convince myself that I’m that same person. I no longer think I can write something good or something funny. I want to be a writer but when I think about writing, and I’m almost never not thinking about writing, I want to throw up.

I know this insecurity in one’s writing is unoriginal. And that pisses me off too.

This brings me to the purpose of this posting. I haven’t posted a blog entry since September and I didn’t think I would post another blog entry. But, I’m working on a writing project and I do want to be a writer both as my profession and as a large portion of my identity so I’m going to make myself be a writer. My fear can go frag itself. I’m going to pile crap upon crap on this blog everyday, or nearly everyday, until I recognize the writer that’s somewhere in my head hiding. And then I’m going to write some more.

I almost decided to stop running yesterday because it occured to me that my running is a way of hiding from my fear of sucking as a writer. But being fat and out of shape isn’t going to make me a writer. Writing is. So I’m going to write.

LW

Revealed

I’ve been reading this book called 10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace. It’s not a long book as there are only 10 secrets but I’ve been pacing myself. I don’t want to quickly burn through all the secrets and then find out that I’m not totally successful and internally full of peace after learning all ten rules.

I think the problem is that the book has a table of contents and each secret represents a chapter. All the table of contents is is a list of the ten secrets for success and inner peace. It’s really hindered my desire to delve into the actual meat of the book. I already have the 10 secrets that are the keys to my success and zen-like calm so why should I waste any time having them explained to me when I could be spending my time and energy taking action based on the secrets and achieve the success I so clearly desire, as is illustrated by the fact that I have this book.

I guess that a secret isn’t necessarily something that fits into a sentence so the ten secrets listed in the table of contents maybe just opening lines to some super powerful life clarifying insights contained within secrets that take upwards of four paragraphs to explain. At the very least, each chapter starts with a quote or two from someone awesome and unique like Shakespeare or Ogdon Nash. I’m five secrets in and so far the quotes have provided the most insight. But, maybe the tenth secret unlocks the true message of the previous nine secrets.

LW