Transplanting a Seattleite

After dropping A. off at school in Burlington, R. and I drove to CBS Exotics in Winchester, where we oohed and ahed over very, very, very beautiful rock. When I was renovating my kitchen in 1999 (when the startup I worked at succeeded wildly, I didn’t buy a sports car, I bought a sports kitchen, lol), I put in granite countertops. I looked at, but concluded I could not afford at the time, Blue Bahia. For one thing, there was a lot of granite in that kitchen. And for another, I was pretty sure that my fabricator had messed up on the quote (he had, and that was fine, because I had figured out what it should be and had the money for him. As is often the case with me and people I hired to do stuff for me, he was a little surprised.), and when I looked at what I thought it would cost with Blue Bahia, it made me uneasy. I don’t like to feel uneasy, so I picked a very beautiful, but much less expensive, rock.

Anyway. Less granite in this kitchen, so I finally get the blue stuff, and it turns out R. had never seen it before and he loves it like I do. Like everyone does, really, in the end.

CBS Exotics lives up to its name, and has sodalite (no, but pretty), onyx (blue, which we’re waiting on pricing for, and green, which we decided wasn’t quite as awesome), agate (omg but definitely not for the countertops. Thinking about some table tops, tho) and a lot of really pretty granite with great color and pattern. So much fun!

FF started late, and a couple people couldn’t make it, but there were four of us. I’ve been thinking about what would it mean to have something in the Customer Service Box (story idea) to “cure” various things. So we talked about ADHD, and the parts it is crucial to preserve and to what degree a “cure” for ADHD would mean environmental / job / educational setting changes, and to what degree a “cure” might mean changes to the person of a genetic or hormonal or other nature. Similar for autism — not being able to talk seems like something I’d like to be able to offer people a “cure” for, but a lot of the rest of autism isn’t something I see as changeworthy (I do think there are some aspects of neurotypicality that should be “cured”). We also talked a little about what kinds of dentistry would survive the ability to grow a replacement tooth or teeth in adulthood, and how long people would live if you really could get rid of “all” “disease” (not forever) and whether aging itself is something that could be slowed or reversed and how various science fiction has considered that. It’s fun to talk about the different approaches, and I found it healing. I was raised in an extended family context that had been JW since before my father was born on his side, and my mother was born into a Mennonite community altho raised mostly outside it (and part of that in JW-world). The idea of living on earth, in a world without disease and aging, is something that is normal to me — that’s what they offer most of their members — but it’s all magical. God shows up, kills everyone that’s not on His team, and fixes it all. Which honestly, if He could do that, wow, what a personality disordered way of arranging human history, testing everyone for personal loyalty. There’s no flavor on the promise, of exactly what it means to never need to have dental work done again. Do you still have to brush your teeth? Floss? Their answer to, but will there be children is, we don’t know we’ll have to wait and see. Unsatisfying! A refusal to engage with the consequences of any reality sneaking into the comforting promise.

I was thinking about _that_ in part because A. had some questions about conspiracy theories and mental illness. Current psych thinking is that they are not particularly correlated to psychotic disorders, but psych in general has a really interesting take on what counts as delusional thinking (religions don’t because it’s not a delusion if you are part of a group that believes the thing. I mean, way to dodge a lot of conflict, psych. Telling on yourself.). They are prepared to find a connection between high levels of distress and conspiracy thinking, and that, I think is a solid foundation for how people commit to the kinds of promises about Heaven and Hell and Paradise and afterlives in general. My dad belabored, when I was a child, going door to door with him, how people who had nice houses with nice gardens were unlikely to be receptive to what we were offering, because they already were living in a kind of paradise. Also, sort of ignoring the fact that essentially no one was receptive to what we were offering, outside of that whole period of time leading up to 1975. I particularly like the idea that distress in the present leads to people believing in afterlife promises, because it also explains the observed reality that a better life in the present tends to have less kookiness in it in general.

ETA: I listed a backpack on FBM and it’s already been claimed by R., the delightful woman who is a consistent customer (?). I love the backpack, but it actually holds less and is less convenient for my purposes than the Fjallraven Kanken. At this point, I’m probably ready to go list some of the remaining backpacks upstairs, as this is literally the only one I use anymore. It’s kind of funny, after aspiring for so long to be a onebagger, I have accidentally attained my goal after mostly giving up on it. Classic.

I’ve restarted this thing so many times. First, it was the I Can’t Stop Thinking About Your Brother book, which was intended to help people who were particularly trapped in an unsatisfying family relationship who were trying to calibrate just how crazy the other party was and what they could do about it (as opposed to keep trying to change the other person, wish things were different, vent without doing anything further about it).

That evolved into something else, which was a, hey, you’re really anxious, and you think you have to be in order to get enough stuff done, but there are alternative motivational systems, and that was how this thing became Advice Book 2, mostly shilling once again for the Basic Needs Theory, but with an emphasis on how you can use the energizing effects of taking care of your Basic Needs as motivation, and also if you clearly understand why you are doing something and it genuinely aligns with your desires, that’ll provide plenty of motivation without needing to be anxious.

But I’m stopped _again_, and I think I’ve figured out why (again) which is probably not the last problem with this project, but it is a step. As a society, we really believe in _and enforce_ being “reasonable”, which de-emphasizes being emotional but _also_ makes it really hard to see certain kinds of bad behavior for what they are. For example, my overarching theory of personality disorder is persistently disruptive of reciprocal, prosocial norms. Sometimes, that pattern is fucking obvious. However, _sometimes_ “being reasonable” makes it very hard to see that pattern.

Let’s say I want to do something, and I’m in a relationship (I’m someone’s kid, or spouse or roommate or whatever, and this project impacts on them). I say, hey, I want to do this thing. And the other party or parties say, I don’t want you to do this particular part of it / in this particular way. They do NOT actively engage to help you accomplish your goal — they don’t propose an alternative (or they propose only alternatives that it would have been pretty easy to predict you would not like), nor do they commiserate with your frustration or validate your desire to do the thing or whatever.

That’s _fine_ in an enemy, total stranger, whatever. It’s _reasonable_.

But it’s quite bad in a close relationship and can thwart the participants’ ability to accomplish anything at all over time and will hollow out all the goodwill in the relationship eventually leaving a paper thin shell that literally any sneeze will completely destroy.

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.

January is the Monday of the year, but also, January tends to be a pretty low-demand month for me. The kids are in school. We are not traveling. Everyone is saturated with social so there’s not a ton going on there.

This year, T. has a job and there are no longer any babysitters in the picture creating random chaos and drama. The kids are fairly orderly, and T.’s doing his own laundry, and they often will help out with keeping the house sort of sane appearing. Also, my standards are about as low as they have ever been. What with one thing and another, I actually have enough time to think about taking on a project and it’s NOT going to be decluttering or cleaning or even planning a vacation. Yes, I will go on vacations. No, I will not spend a lot of time planning them. I’m still doing a fair amount of Duolingo, but I’m not playing any games other than Birzzle when I’m on the phone or whatever. I am listening to podcasts and doing lego. But there’s still a chunk of time, despite all the cooking and so forth.

So, what to write! I’m still not ready to write that JAK monograph, and right now, I’m rereading Mary Stewart and possibly will reread some Alistair MacClean and maybe even the Ngaio Marsh books where Roderick and Troy meet and get to know each other. I’m thinking maybe take the amorphous ideas I have about how these various authors do their thing, and use them in a practical way myself, before articulating them in a monograph about JAK’s work or perhaps more generally. I could finish _Giving Notice_, or retackle NotaB, but I’m not really feeling it. I was developing a romantic suspense idea under the title _Necessary but not Sufficient_, but I’ve got little to go on there. HOWEVER! Back in 2012, I was putting together a teleportation mystery in which Estella Ripley and Arthur Unruh are trying to figure out why the rare but real disappearances while teleporting happen and whether it is possible to rescue the victims. I even set up a NaNoWriMo goal, and I have a first chapter draft, and notes for a second chapter. Super, super, super little to go on. But! I don’t see any reason why I can’t just as easily set that in the near-future of 2023, as the near-future of 2012, which is more than can be said for _Giving Notice_ or even NotaB.

When I originally put this idea together, I was not thinking in terms of romantic suspense, so I’ll have to work out some kind of relationship arc, and I don’t think I ever worked out exactly what was going wrong with the teleportation tech and whether it was solvable and whether the people were savable. So, lots to think about and prep.

I had a great convo with K. I walked 2 loops of the 1 mile while on the phone with her.

I had a nice walk and visit with M.

I've been poking at people to help me out with a fiction story. Two long time residents of Seattle have provided substantial assistance already with some of the backstory details for my cast of characters, which reassures me that there are not huge errors there that someone is gonna read and it's going to spoil there enjoyment because something impossible happens.

I also asked R. (High Priestess, altho not in her sacred capacity) for some help with the arc of the story. I was having trouble identifying the conflict and therefore the climax of the story. I described the plot elements and she suggested the alternating chapters approach (his chapter, her chapter, his chapter, etc.) and said she had seen it work well even when the characters weren't interacting much at the beginning of the book. Along with some other observations on her part, that made everything just sort of click. I reworked the timeline a little bit, and kept the previous girlfriend around for the first third of the book instead of relegating her entirely to backstory, and I wound up with a beautiful, three part story, and one of the first scenes I visualized turns out to be _perfect_ for the climax/crux/dramatic turn in the middle of the book.

Who knows if I will ever actually _write_ it, but everything this long I've written before had no pre-plotting done -- I either ripped off a plot from someone else (Leia at Hazard was a ripoff of Restoree, for example) or just had sort of a free form quest (Time and Mischance). It is downright _weird_ actually knowing the whole arc of the story ahead of time. (To be fair, the incomplete novel with Hale and what'shername actually had chapter synopses written for the whole thing by about the time I was halfway through it or thereabouts. But I didn't plot it out completely ahead of time. And I never finished it.)

I've been working on a fiction project and using the social security baby names database. Fun! As a bonus side effect of creating names, birth dates, college majors, etc. for two families (mom dad kids -- not aunts uncles etc.; maybe later), I've learned all kinds of odd details, like, what was the first birth year that didn't have a draft lottery during the Vietnam War.

The goal here is to make it so birthday parties, phone calls, etc. are actually _not_ plot driven, but can instead become plot drivers, by creating an interrupt in the story being told in which new developments can occur. I don't know if I've ever seen anyone do that before.

It was A.'s half day, so she hung out with the sitter for a little while and then I got her back in time for play therapy and T. went off with the sitter.