Tuesday: kids at school!

A. went in at about 10, but she’s there, for at least a few minutes. We will see how that goes.

I wrote a note for T. to use to excuse himself for the zoom interment of his grandfather.

I’m looking forward to a quiet day wasting time watching TV. I’m sure this will not work out, but I’m gonna try.

Elevenish

Today, FIL’s interment was in Florida, and the Mass, which he wanted very badly, was said around 11 a.m. and available on the church’s website.

For Reasons — primary among them the evil I see in the Catholic Church in general, and the specific damage done to FIL by that church, much as he loved that church — I did not attend the zoom. R. has either caught what A. is recovering from or suffering from allergies and there’s quite a lot of dust around so I was doing some cleaning, but decided against vacuuming even tho R. was doing the remote viewing from the third floor and I was on the ground floor. While I was at it, I watched “Shame”, last Sunday’s NCIS:LA episode.

Shame is about an investigation into what appears to be the third suicide on board a Naval vessel. It turns out not to have been a suicide, but rather a murder, and over the course of the investigation, the NCIS:LA team visits The Brass Boot, which has a back room so that officers who are not heterosexual can have a social life that doesn’t impact on their naval career or their heterosexual marriages. The investigation ultimately discovers what happened and arrests the person who committed the murder, and the team — which includes member Millenials, GenXers and at least one Boomer — discusses what they encountered. The Boomer, played by Gerald McRaney (who honestly is never not going to be the less appealing Simon of Simon and Simon, at least to me) has a monologue on the topic of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and specifically expresses gratitude for the younger generation for getting this thing right — not being concerned about who people love.

TV rarely (let’s go with basically never) makes me cry, and I suspect this particular speech would have gotten little more than a grunt and an eyeroll from me, except I was watching while NOT watching the Catholic interment of FIL, and remembering FIL’s service in the Navy. And all the trouble caused in so many lives, because it wasn’t okay for FIL to be gay.

The episode wraps up with Agent Sam Hanna, played by LL Cool J, talking to his daughter about how he knows both about the end of her previous relationship, and that she is dating a young woman now, and they both get in a little speech — her about how she was waiting to tell him until she had it all figured out, and him saying he’d love her whoever she loved.

There’s a lot that I have really loathed about this series over the years — like every cop show ever, it too often glorifies police violence, and like many shows that were on during those years, weaponized the existence of gitmo and justified torture. But this show, like NCIS, and like The Equalizer (altho I just straight up _love_ that show, for rebooting something I loved as a kid, that I can’t possibly love now, into something I can love as a middle aged woman), gives me a window into where something like the center of our American culture is. And watching Eli Lilly cave in the wake of the heist episode of The Equalizer gave me hope. Watching “Shame” tells me our society has moved from shaming people for who they love and are attracted to and who they just plain want to fuck, to feeling shame for all that was done to people for who they love and are attracted to and who they just plain want to fuck.

That long arc is slow, but we are making it real.

Stabilizing Happiness

Some decades ago, I went through a sustained process of self-change. It could plausibly have been labeled the result of a quarter-life crisis. When I was 25, I divorced my first husband and disassociated myself from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, which my parents had each been members of prior to my birth (my father’s parents had converted before he was born). My first husband, similarly, was the result of multiple generations of Jehovah’s Witnesses. This is not common. Most people who are JW’s stop being JWs after a few years.

Jehovah’s Witnesses, like many high-demand religious and related groups, actively discourage many activities broadly accepted within society. In some cases, that’s healthful (you have to quit smoking, for example, to become or stay a member). In other cases, it very much is not. They have a complicated, hostile, largely negative and frequently litigious orientation towards education, health care, mental and emotional health care, etc. They see human life and the universe as a whole as the setting for a War between a Creator God and His primary adversary, and our lives as choosing a side. They look forward to a prophesied end to this battle, and their reward at the end of resurrection to a life on Earth that never ends, and in which they enjoy perfect happiness and health. They are pretty coy about whether or not that will involve sexual reproduction or not for humans, or, really, any creature at all.

Being born into a Jehovah’s Witness family, with a substantial portion of one’s extended family also members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, creates a world-within-a world. I had not really been aware of the degree to which this was true until after college when I finally left, and thought back to what an anthropology professor had said along these lines to me some years earlier. Because Jehovah’s Witnesses practice shunning of ex-members, and enforce the practice of shunning, requiring even close relatives of ex-members to completely sever ties with ex-members AND because Jehovah’s Witnesses, like most cults and high-demand organizations, discourage ties to people outside the organization, I didn’t have much in the way of a social network when I left. I would eventually learn that I also have autism (and, indeed, a lot of those Jehovah’s Witness relatives do, too), which surely did not help.

What I did have was a highly compensated college degree and a good job. Since the one part of my life that was functioning well was work, I focused on that. Some years later, after retiring from Amazon, and looking at the dying embers of the relationship that had followed my first marriage, I realized that it was a good time to really think through how I was going to live the rest of my life and hopefully enjoy it, in a more or less stable way.

The results of the conversations I had with friends in an effort to figure all that out (and the books and articles I read) went into Exercises in Happiness. (https://www.seanet.com/~rla/advice/toc.html )The core idea is simple and none of it is new — it’s a mechanical approach to getting one’s basic needs met more or less in priority order. I’ve reread that work over the years a few times, and feel no particular need to go back and correct it. It’s not where I am now, and for that I am grateful.

After several years of enjoying life, developing better relationships, traveling, exercising, learning martial arts and some other things, I decided that it was a good time to try to have a child. I didn’t feel I had to have a child — my friends had children, and I enjoyed being around them and providing some help where I could — but I felt like I would regret it if I did not try. The results of that went into a sprawling and not linearly organized work I titled Reproduction for the Hopelessly Geeky (I would realize that I had autism towards the end of this project). (https://www.seanet.com/~rla/repro/TopicList.html)

I now find myself — predictably! — at that point in life where the kids are Old Enough so that I can think in a more sustained manner, and consider another large project. (There are also fiction projects, but I’m not talking about any of that here.) I have been working, on and off, on I Can’t Stop Thinking About Your Brother, which is an attempt to help families and individuals figure out how to calibrate Their Crazy Person (we all have at least one), and what kind of relationship it is possible to have with Their Crazy Person, and strategies for collaborating with other friends, chosen family and family with respect to Their Crazy Person. But mostly, about what kinds of mental and emotional health care options are available, and what can reasonably be expected from those options. It’s a remarkably intractable problem, and the terrain around us in mental and emotional health care options is evolving rapidly. I’m not sure I’ll ever meaningfully finish that project.

I find myself drawn more and more to the general problem of reducing extreme swings of emotional response to frustrating and intractable problems. Obviously, there’s the just give up option, but I often don’t like that (and find it very difficult to stick with, too!). In general, I allow myself only goals I believe to be attainable (and I strongly advocate for only attainable goals). But I’ve never limited what I was willing to entertain as possible choices to Obviously Attainable. It can take a lot of thought and research and understanding to recognize what is attainable and what is not (and, equally, one can make mistakes. Alas.).

I am also having a lot of really fantastic conversations with women friends — and some men — of a certain age. The conversations are about our frustrations with our relationships: with our partners, with our partner’s family, with our family of origin. But mostly, these are conversations about frustrations with in-laws, as the preceding generation loses capacity and then passes, and as the next generation leaves the nest, sort of. When I was younger, I read a lot of articles about “The Sandwich Generation”: adult women who were simultaneously juggling full time jobs, growing children, and aging parents. Nothing about what I am dealing with, or what my friends are dealing with, are “The Sandwich Generation”. In general, we enjoy enough prosperity that we are not expected to supply hands-on care to the aged. More typically, the aging in-laws are surprisingly resistant to any assistance or involvement beyond enabling. And also in general, our children are at least well past toddler level demands by the time the press of aging in-laws becomes great.

It is in this context that I am drawn to the general problem of reducing extreme swings of emotional response to frustrating and intractable problems. I’ll be needing a title. Please help.

Administrivia: longer posts

I’ve been posting some longer pieces that are not daily-updates, but drafts of components of writing projects.

Why am I doing this

Because I have some time to think, and I’ve been meaning to get back to writing in a focused way, and this is a low-key way to get started. I’m producing the drafts over in google docs, and then copypasting over here. If the draft becomes part of something, it’ll be the docs version of it that is changed, not what is posted here. If you post a comment on something here, I will read it with interest, and it may well strongly influence how the project develops (if it does at all). But also, it might not.

Is there more?

Maybe. At any given point in time, there are a number of these things that I’m working on; when it gets done “enough”, I’ll post it here. If you really like something, and want in on it, I’ll focus more on that and I can also potentially include you as a commenter on the google doc so you can see it sooner and provide more direct feedback.