Rubbish Without a Clause

Patience: I grew up a spoiled child. I admit this. In my family, patience was rarely a virtue. But if I've learned anything in life, it's not where you come from, but where you're going that matters most. While I was a spoiled child, I was also a miserable teenager and young adult. I learned quickly and painfully that life won't spoil you and it's certainly not interested in instantly gratifying you. So I learned to be as patient with life and with people as I can. Some may say I'm too patient (had that nice little doormat phase in my late teens), but I think that was finding balance. When I figured out that the world did not exist to service me my needs and my desires, I used patience as a defense. They'll come, I said to myself. They'll eventually come. And if my needs were not met, then I told myself that it just wasn't time.

I have my limits, of course. People who are blatantly using me find that I lose patience quite quickly. Otherwise, I will wait until the end of time if someone needs me to. I become increasingly impatient with myself. I always feel like I need to do more, do better.

One of the ways I cultivate this patience is to limit my expectations of people. I put myself lowest on their priorities and gladly accept when they're busy. I accept whatever it is they can offer me in our relationship, and rarely push for more, unless I see a clear and welcome sign that more is being offered. Even then I'll hesitate and proceed with caution. Sometimes this makes me too slow to act. Sometimes I miss opportunities. When so, it just wasn't time.

Longing: If my patience with other people is my virtue, there is a corollary to that virtue in the longing it produces in me. No matter how much I can give, there is still that unsatisfied part of me that wants to take, to need and be needed and want and be wanted and damn the consequences because you can only repress for so long. I live with longing -- longing for love, for physical intimacy, for success, for understanding, for clear communication, for truth. But I sublimate these longings as best I can. Sublimation is my new favorite word. I long to say, "I love you," with a clear idea as to what that means, because I stopped saying that years ago, when it became a term too burdened for me to wrap my head around. I recently started saying it again, and it both elates and slashes at me. I know the feeling to be true, but I long for meaning.

So with patience I deal with my longings, those feelings I feel would unduly burden others. The hardest question for me to answer is "What do you want?" That question has taken almost existential dimensions. I want a companion and I want to cuddle and I want to finish my book and I want friendly kisses and I want recognition and I want my friends to be happy and I want people in general to stop sucking … and I want a cheeseburger, damnit. So when people ask me what I want, I don't know how to answer. I don't know at what level they're speaking. I don't know if I have a good answer.

Nurture: When I discovered that the universe was a cold and impersonal place, and that if there was a god, he wasn't even remotely interested in my well being, I took it upon myself to become a force of nurture. I am the rock upon which you build your own strength. I nurture talent. I see talent, (and to misquote Al Pacino from some movie, I'm a scary judge of talent) and I just want to do everything in my power to get that talent the recognition it deserves. I see someone working their tail off to make it in this world, on their own, with no or very little help, and I want to be the one to give that extra nudge, to be the catalyst for turning their hard work into success, and then I want to fade away. It's not the thanks or the recognition that I seek in this. I simply seek to make a difference in someone's life.

I also feel a strong nurturing sense for my friends. I have surrounded myself with strong, talented people from all walks of life, and I want them all to do well. When they're down, I will get down on my hands and knees and crawl with them until they are ready to stand. When they stand, I will be by their side. I'm no white knight. I'm just a pillar to lean against.

Grief: Grief never really ends. I still grieve for my dad, for lost friends, for ended relationships. My current novel is about fathers and families. It's a supernatural mystery, but strip it down to bare essence, and it's about fathers and families. I handle grief poorly, in that I don't follow the prescribed steps for it. I grieve through sublimation. When I lost my dad, I threw myself into my work. I remember pissing off and getting pissed off at a classmate of mine the day after it happened. There was a quiz in our Old English class, for which I, naturally, didn't study. A week later we got the quiz back and I received a score of like 85 out of 100. This classmate, a real piece of work with a planetoidal ego, who got an 84, started moaning about how I was bragging about not studying when he had studied his ass off. Fortunately I had friends around to point out, "Dude, he just lost his dad. Of course he didn't study." The dude didn't get it, but I didn't care. I had just started teaching and was taking three classes. I aced all my classes and finished my first semester teaching with excellent ratings. Then the next semester, I started acting out. Simply throwing myself into my work was no longer keeping the demons at bay. Instead I started in on trysts and near misses, a couple of them inappropriate. Had one friend been around more, I might have tried to break up her relationship and pursue her myself. I almost tried that anyway with someone else entirely. I certainly was braver and more aggressive than I had ever been before, but it wasn't me. It was grief pushing me.

Now I grieve by writing about it. Sublimation works best if there is an eventual outlet, even if it's not the one you wish. My first novel was dedicated to my dad. My second is about grieving for him. My relationships still haunt me, and some end up in my writing. With the end of this last relationship, I threw myself into my work, but then work ended. It's too early for me to write about it, so I wait for the acting out. I think that has come, and I'm trying to suppress it as much as possible, since the targets of my acting out do not need the burden of my neuroses.

Nobility: This is a weird one for me. If anything I see myself as an ignoble creature trying to rise above my station. Part of the patience and the longing is a response to never feeling worthy. I've gotten better over the years, but even with the smallest of hang-ups there are always bound to be residues residing in the psyche. The only possible nobility I see in me is in my calling. It took me years to articulate this, and it's only by the grace of she who worded me here that I did, but my calling is to tell the truth about the human condition through art, to express the world as authentically as possible through the lenses of fiction and poetry. Without authenticity, there can be no truth, and without truth, according to my boy, Keats, no beauty. Yes, I'm writing a novel about a haunting and a potentially pedophiliac priest and giant fucking spiders, but the novel itself is about families and grief and fathers and faith. The spiders are simply the things through which the real themes are woven. I find nobility in this act. I find that even in the darkest and most depressing of art, there is some grain of hope, some uplift of the human spirit. One of the greatest human failings is our lack of authenticity. Uncomfortable truths deserve a spotlight, not the shadows in which bury them.

I've been reading entries and comments on the blog Psychotic Letters from Men and something has come to bother me. A lot of the stories I've read and heard (from other sources) have some flavor of this line: "Even though we just hung out and talked about bass fishing, he developed feelings for me." This line pushes buttons in me. Who knows what triggers emotional responses in us? Who knows what connections, what communications, what insights lead us to feel whatever it is we feel? Now, I realize that the bulk of the men in these blogs are emotionally and mentally unstable, are lacking the ability to handle these feelings, and therefore express them in destructive manners. Still, the admonition I get from this line is that somehow these feelings are wrong, that the feeler is somehow a bad person, not because he handled it badly, but because he had the feelings in the first place.

I wasn't the most suave cat on the prowl in my seedtime, as I've said before, but unlike those in PLfM, I was capable of learning from my social faux pas (plural) and not making those mistakes again. Unfortunately I learned some wrong lessons. I once had a girl in high school, for whom I had strong feelings, tell me that I wasn't feeling what I thought I was feeling. My not feelings for her caused her distress. Therefore, I concluded, my not feelings were bad, and I shouldn't feel them. Of course, feelings can't be turned off like a faucet. I discovered new and exciting ways to sublimate my feelings into socially acceptable outlets, and therefore found myself making friends with almost every girl I had a serious crush on. I was the "nice guy" with ulterior motives.

Of course I got frustrated with this role, and did things like expecting parity for my niceness. Really, I was just a manipulative son of a bitch who went about expressing his feelings in the wrong way, just like many of the douches on PLfM. I didn't get it.

Only by the grace of my friends who discussed my behavior with me did I finally start to get it. I was trainable. But I still held on to the idea that my feelings for women in my life, if not communicated up front, were wrong, and that I had one shot before I was a permanent passenger on the friend train, and that if I persisted in my feelings once that ticket had been punched, then I might as well pull the emergency break before the train derailed on its own. Sublimation became my friend, my constant companion. Sublimation is responsible for some of the closest friendships I have, even though I always wanted more. My feelings were wrong, but I made them right for others.

It took a lot of self-reflection and training to get me to where I am today. I no longer expect parity for being nice. In fact, I respond a little poorly when people reciprocate out of obligation. Doing the right thing is about doing the right thing, and not the expectation of a reward. I have friends for whom I would move mountains and then cook them meals afterward.

While I know that my feelings for these friends, sometimes deep, intense feelings that can only be love (and besides, isn't denying someone else's feelings just another form of objectification?), that heavy pressure in the chest after a particularly intense conversation, that spring of good feeling and pleasure when they do well, or find happiness, that empathetic depression and weighted shoulder slouch when the universe picks on them, are fine and natural and right. I sometimes still believe that the intensity with which I feel, is wrong. So I hide it. I sublimate it. I sit back and do cool, even if I'm not feeling cool. So I sympathize with those for whom feelings just develop. I don't sympathize with those who make the same mistakes over and over and never learn, but for those who feel deeply, but strive for wisely, I have nothing but good wishes.

~Peter

In one of the fora I frequent, I ran across this beauty of a blog: Psychotic Letters from Men. It's frickin' frightening. These are the stalkers and psychos who follow women around malls and nail stuffed puppies to trees and believe they can trick women into loving them. Of course, I read these and start examining my own behaviors, but mostly I feel a sense of WTF?

There's a companion blog: Why Women Hate Men which is equally vile. It's want ads and dating profiles from the permanently pathetic.

This is horrifying reading, folks. It's like a trainwreck next to a car crash underneath a busload of nuns.

~Peter

I just lost a lot of numbers off my cell phone. Many I had other places and manually reentered, but a lot are gone. If you think I should have your number, leave it here as a comment. Comments are screened and will remain so for privacy.

Anyone want to come over and watch movies?

Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you. Or just five words that I want to see your associations with/thoughts about.

Faithfulness: The word faith is funny one for me, because it doesn't mean the same to me as it does to billions of others around the globe. I do not trust or believe blindly. For me faith is the belief that certain patterns, once established, will continue to present themselves, with the occasional variation. When I say I have faith in someone, I mean I believe that person will continue to act, improve, or do whatever else they have shown themselves both willing and capable to do. Faithfulness simply means continuing to act in a positive manner that has already been established. People I trust, in whom I have faith, act in consistent manners with me, and communicate with me when they aren't consistent.

On the same token, I try to be as consistent with people as possible and try to discuss when I feel the need or desire to act in an inconsistent manner. Sometimes things change, and it's best to deal with those changes. All relationships are either implicit or explicit negotiations. I tend to prefer explicit.

Desire: I am constantly at war with my desire. From women to delicious foodstuffs, I have strong urges and emotions that I simply channel into other things, either because the desires are no good for me, or because they're unavailable, or sometimes because I actually feel unworthy of them. I'm slow and stubborn when it comes to my emotions. They build over time and become entrenched, which means many a time I've become enamored with someone well past the point of established relationship. Because this obviously can destabilize the establishment, and I see no benefit to renegotiation, I tend to suppress that desire and maintain status quo ... see faithfulness. I'm a firm believer in suppression and redirection. This is why I'm a writer. It allows me to channel my angst into something creative.

Glasses: I've worn glasses for two decades now. I've needed them for longer. Unfortunately, my first glasses were the ones with the oversized lenses that covered half my face. When I could start picking out my own frames, I began getting them with as small a profile as possible. The more they blended with my face, the happier I was. Then something happened. I realized that I found women in glasses to be incredibly sexy. So I decided to embrace my inner geek and go for something a little stronger in terms of my glasses. I now wear thick Oakley frames that look black, but are in fact a dark olive green. I tend to think I look better in glasses than without. I'm told that the combination of thicker frames, chin-strap beard, and mustache make me look more writerly. Of course, the whole glasses thing comes about because my hero is ...

Superman: This is my hero. Again, I don't see Superman the same way the popular Zeitgeist does. Superman, for me, is a torn figure. Lots of has been said about the Batman/Bruce Wayne dichotomy, about how Batman is the real person and Bruce Wayne is the mask. Superman, though, has a triune identity. Neither Superman nor Clark Kent (Metropolis) are his real identities. Superman is a mask he wears to maintain an image as a paragon of virtue, a symbol for humanity and his allies to rally around. Clark Kent in Metropolis is a bumbling nerd, a mild-mannered reporter, an aw-shucks farm boy lost in the big city. Again, it's an act, a mask he wears for the situation. The real person can probably be called Clark Kent in Smallville. What people don't always pay attention to, and what the show Smallville, for all its faults, has fortunately focused on, was that he was raised to be human. He did not grow up thinking he was the end all be all of existence. He was raised to be firm, yet humble, accepting of his strengths and his weaknesses, but also with all the wants and desires of a regular human being. This is the Clark Kent who married Lois Lane. She and his parents are the only ones who really get to see this.

As one who wears many masks -- the teacher mask, the socializing mask, and others -- I understand Superman's split. I understand wanting the place where all masks fall to the floor and we see only our real faces staring back at us. It's tiring to prepare our faces for the faces that we meet all the damn friggin' time.

In addition, I identify strongly with each of Superman's personae. I like to be helpful. I derive a certain amount of happiness at helping others do well. I don't want to rescue anybody, but I certainly don't mind lending a hand to those who just need that extra little push. I'm not a baggage handler, I'll just keep the top one from spilling off the pile.

I also play the fool, at times, and the rock at others. I'm a ham and a goof when in my social mask. I'm also calm and collected in my social mask. People confuse this with being fun and laid back, when I'm usually anything but. Or when I'm calm, they sometimes confuse it for being uncaring.

Lastly, there is a part of me afraid that revealing my true self to the world would hurt those I care most about. Not that I have any deep secrets. It's just that those things I keep to myself, that are for myself, I trust very few with. For many, it would mean becoming inconsistent in my behavior. So I guard my secret, my true self, behind a pair of glasses. Not a cape, though. That would be silly.

Moving: For someone who hates moving as much as I do, I sure do a hell of a lot of it. I haven't lived in any one house or apartment for more than two years at a stretch for the last six years. I hate packing up boxes. I hate loading boxes. I hate unpacking boxes. I hate all that comes in between. I'm a Taurus, for goodness sakes; we're supposed to be homebodies. And the funniest part? I'm already thinking that I'm going to have to move again. Should I get these jobs in the South Bay, I have no doubt that the commute is going to wear on me. Yet, this nomadic lifestyle has been a part of me since I was 25. For as much as I hate moving, I can't seem to stay still. I can't seem to find the stability I allegedly crave. I could be lying to myself about this need for stability. That's something I have to figure out for myself.

~Peter

I have an interview at West Valley College this afternoon. They are going to ask me six questions and then have me perform a 10-12 minute lecture that supports basic revision skills and appeals to students who have probably taken the class multiple times. I'm pulling out a lecture on how to read the mysterious marks on your paper. Most students ignore the red because they have no idea what AWK or PASSIVE or CS means. And I'm going to appeal to them with a sense of whimsy and enthusiasm. Best line? "In an active sentence, the subject verbs. In the passive, the subject gets verbed. Please don't let your subjects get verbed."

~Peter

The weekend I return to California, a good number of my friends will be out of town.

Wow.

~Peter

I can laugh at this article from the onion now. Ten years ago it would have been painful. I'm a better human being, and better man these days.

~Peter

As many of you know, I'm recently single, and while I'm not yet ready to dive into the pool of razor blades that passes for dating these days, I have been thinking about it. One of the things I've been thinking about is how to handle rejection, both explicit and implicit. Some of you might be thinking, "WTF is implicit rejection?" I'm glad you asked.

Implicit rejection is when someone of your preferred dating gender goes out of the way to not reject you outright, but hints, or avoids, or generally acts in a passive aggressive manner until you get the hint that you should leave her alone (since I'm about a Kinsey 1, I'm going to use my gender of choice in this). Unfortunately, I've encountered this one often. In my early twenties, I discovered that "I'm too busy right now" in too many cases, was code for "Not in this lifetime." The problem with this avoidance technique is that it ruins it for those who are interested, but legitimately busy. Other equally passive ways of implicit rejection include not returning messages, screening calls, and moving to another country and joining an ashram.

Several years ago, I started talking to this sound technician in California. We originally met online and had a few conversations. I'd just ended a messy affair (the affair wasn't messy, the ending was) and was looking for some validation and maybe some good laughs. So pretty soon into the interaction, I arranged to meet this girl for coffee. She had a concert to go to that weekend, and so we thought we'd meet that Monday when she got off work. Cool deal, right? I called her that Monday afternoon to solidify the details and she never called me back. I got an email from her later saying that she had meeting all week and that we should reschedule. She never rescheduled and stopped responding to my emails. I later deduced that she met someone at the concert and didn't want to be upfront about that. I wasn't too upset because I met Liz soon after.

There are other ways of implicitly rejecting someone. Flashing your wedding band and talking about your husband after several otherwise positive communications is a brilliant technique. The point is, these techniques are often favored because they avoid confrontation, and are thought to spare the feelings of the recipient. Unfortunately, they merely serve to confuse the pursuer, especially if there has been a change in interest levels, or a perceived change.

Now, explicit rejection is much cleaner, but ultimately rarer. Explicit rejection comes in two flavors: "Let's just be friends," and "No." Let's just be friends is an old favorite dating back to your high school years. In fact, I'm certain that every generation of high school students thinks they've discovered this explicit, if problematic rejection. The premise behind "Let's just be friends," is simple, because it defines the boundaries of the relationship. Only, some pursuers see "Let's just be friends," as "There's still a chance!" I have no problem with this form of rejection, so long as the boundaries of friendship are well defined (benefits? no benefits? friend dates? phone calls? bitching about lovers?) The problem with such friendships, though, is that they are based on inequalities. The pursuer must suppress natural desires. It's tough, although eminently possible, to be friends with someone whom you want to see naked.

The other, the No, is the cleanest, but rarest of all. It says, "I will not date you, Sam I am. Not in a box, not with a fox, not in a house, not with a mouse." It clearly defines the boundaries of the rejection and is probably the simplest to accept. It offers no dim hope for the hopelessly misguided, and it allows the pursuer peace of mind that it's all out of his hands. The no is so rare because it requires a strength of character to reject someone outright. All of the rejections I've looked at thus far are seen as "letting him down easy." Honestly, a clear answer is easiest of all. It might seem harsh at the time, and stings like a son of a bitch, but it really is the clean break. It cuts and cauterizes, whereas the others leave the limb attached to fester with false hopes.

Now, for all of that, rejections are hard to take. Even if you know that you're a fucking catch, and any girl would be lucky to have you, rejections tend to spark that ur part of your lizard brain, the one that makes you doubt yourself. They make you ask why you weren't good enough, smart enough, funny enough, thin enough, handsome enough, or any combination thereof that makes her want to throw you on her bed and meet some life goals. This is an irrational reaction, because you have no control over what she does or does not find attractive. But who said we are rational? Even if you know you're a catch, that doesn't mean you necessarily believe it. Knowledge and belief are two different animals, and beliefs are reinforced by emotion in a way that pure, logical knowledge never can be.

Dating is about a lot of rejection in all sorts of flavors. It's about finding the complementary puzzle piece, not the one that completes you, but the one that adds new depths and new dimensions to the picture of your life. Some of the rejections will be clean, and some will linger like a bad burrito. If you stick to it, though, and be the best you can, then you'll finally find that piece you can lock into.

~Peter

Having seen Star Trek yesteday, and having mulled it over for a bit, I've decided that it was a really excellent movie. What made it excellent? For me it was the fact that I believed in the characters. While a couple drifted dangerously close to parody, I fully believed that each actor was the character he or she portrayed. They weren't paying homage. They made the characters their own, especially Sylar ... I mean Zach Quinto, whose Spock was a highlight of the movie. I didn't think I was seeing a young Leonard Nimoy, although should they ever do a Nimoy biopic, Quinto is it. I was seeing Spock.

For those with any Trek inclinations, the movie with worth seeing.

~Peter

Fear of failure is the death of creativity.

~Peter

So, here I am, back where I was two years ago. I'm moving a thousand miles with no guarantee of work when I get there.

Fun!

~Peter

I'm 31 today, and, I suppose, for the next 364 days as well.

To think, I actually worried that, with an Obama presidency, Jon Stewart would have nothing to lampoon.




~Peter

I've jumped on the bandwagon and cracked the wheel. I too twitter under the nom de plume powriter.

~Peter

The engine on my 97 Chrysler LHS has started to make a ticking noise that speeds up with acceleration. Sometimes at higher gears it diminishes in volume or seems to disappear altogether. Any clues?

~Peter

So I just saw the news that Smallville has been renewed for a ninth season. It's hard to believe that the show has been running that long, and then I count my DVD seasons, and realize, yup, it has. I remember being less than impressed with the initial season of the show, but as a fan of all things Superman, I kept at it, and have grown more and more enamored with the show as it has delved deeper and deeper into the mythos. The move away from Lana and Lex this season and the introduction of Doomsday as the big bad have me waiting with great anticipation for each new episode this season. Toyman in a recent episode was pitch perfect for me. Even the dynamic between Lois and Clark, before the stupid, although satisfyingly ended, reintroduction of Lana, was something that kept me tingling.

But here's the thing. The No Flights No Tights thing has got to go. It's gotten so bad that in the recent League of Superheroes episode, that mantra was used as a line. It's over. It's done. It's played it's course, and Clark Kent, unless he's going to hide in the fortress until he's thirty, has to transition into Superman; that means flying and a cape and glasses when he's not being supes. At least he should start flying.

Here's the thing. I'm all right with him not being Superman just yet, but the series must come to a conclusion soon, and that conclusion should be, inevitably, Superman, cape and all, revealing himself to the world and beginning the dual existence of CK and Superman.

I want my flights and tights, thank you very much. The show has earned 'em.

~Peter

So it appears the new Kindle does everything but tuck you into bed and some people are having shit fits because audiobooks and print books are two different rights issues.

Let me say this once. You're not paying for the text with an audiobook. You're paying for the performance.

When you buy an audiobook you are paying for the experience of having someone professional, and hopefully good, read a book to you. When the kindle reads to you, you are paying for the privilege of having a computer, one with no sense of performance, nuance, or drama, convert text into a simulacrum of speech. The sounds only have meaning because we assign them meaning. Otherwise the computer is simply making best guesses at sound based on certain algorithms. In fact, I see this as a step beneath libraries that have volunteers record books for the blind. At least volunteers can vary their speech patterns.

In the end it will come down to one thing. No one wants their erotica read to them by Stephen Hawking. It will be a helpful feature for the blind, and especially helpful for the myriad periodicals they can subscribe to through the Kindle, but it will never replace Lenny Henry reading Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys.

~Peter