The Vulnerability of Enthusiasm

When you tell a person about your deep love for something or someone, you make yourself vulnerable. Anyone who has said the first, “I love you,” in a relationship knows what I’m talking about.

I recently wrote an email to a friend extolling the new documentary You Can See Everything — which I wrote about here last week. I told him how meaningful it was to me and how I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I included a link to my blog post. I reckoned that he was well aware of the movie but may not have been motivated to see it and that my praise of it would inspire him to check it out.

It turned out that he had seen it. He told me, very clearly and in considerable detail, what he thought. Evidently he had wanted to see a different movie. He felt that the filmmakers had left Elizabeth Holmes off too easily. I found the film's ambiguity exhilarating, while he found it troubling.

It’s not as if we saw two different films; we saw the same film through different lenses. 

His comments told me that he missed what I found so remarkable about You Can See Everything: the filmmakers didn't try to tell us what to think about Elizabeth Holmes. They trusted us to come to our own conclusions. She most certainly DOES NOT come off sympathetically, as my friend suggested. He seemed to want Fielder and Oppenheim to re-litigate the case against her. But we already know what she did: She committed fraud on an epic scale. We get it.

The film gave me space to observe and think for myself.

I had a singular viewing experience. You Can See Everything confounded and fascinated me, giving me questions to ponder. What more could you want from a film?

But the main thing I’m left with from his email is this: I don't like the idea of a person eviscerating something that I've just said represented a meaningful experience for me.

I was sharing an experience that had genuinely moved me. I told him I'd seen the most amazing film I’ve encountered in many years, that I couldn't stop thinking about it, and that I’d written a blog post about it. That's personal.

My friend was certainly entitled to disagree with my interpretation. But what bothered me was the extent to which his response concentrated on dismantling something I’d just enthusiastically praised. Why do that?

Recently another friend raved to me about a movie that I thought was terrible. I simply told him that I didn’t share his enthusiasm for the film but was glad he enjoyed it. Why rain on his parade?

My Values: A Blog Post Inspired by Therapy Homework

On Wednesday my therapist gave me homework. One assignment was to track my moods and their ups and downs. The other was to write down my values. Well I find that I'm rather propped of what I wrote. (Now if I could only live up to them.) May I suggest that you write down yours too? (I flatter myself that I have readers -- a reader.) It's an exercise that gets you thinking about who you are, what you care about and how you'd like to see the world.

My Values

Self determination: the notion that people should have power over their own lives.

Equality: the belief that we are all equal, there are no inherently superior people.

Freedom from prejudice: no one should be judged negatively because of their race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexual identity or skin color.

Honesty is integral to a healthy life: honesty with others is important, honesty with oneself is essential.

Love and loyalty: the capacity to love whether it be romantic love, the love of a friend or family member is essential to emotional health. Loyalty is love practiced.

Cooperation over competition: Working together, serving the greater good should be an individual goal as well as society’s.

Accountability: holding yourself accountable for your actions and holding others accountable for their actions that impact you or others.

Humor: it is the best medicine. It can provide insight, relief and a cure for ills. To have and to use it is a sign of intelligence.

Thoughtfulness: considering how your actions affect others.

Being and appreciating creativity: humans are unique in their capacity to imagine and create art. This should be nurtured and appreciated. A strong inner life is enhanced by a lot of various art forms.

Self examination: Socrates said an unexamined life is not worth living. He was right. Self reflection is critical to personal growth and responsibility.

Play hard, have fun: Fun is the best thing to have, go out and have it (just make sure your fun is not negatively impacting anyone else). And do it with gusto.

What't the Deal With People Who Send Anonymous Threats? I Don't Know Either But I Take a Look at the Problem

You can never get through the news anymore without reading about people getting death threats. Some of them are graphic and specific. Some of them mention killing or harming family members. Others say that the recipient or a spouse or daughter will or should be raped. There are people who receive dozens, hundreds even thousands of these.

Recipients include politicians, whistle-blowers (how dare you reveal the truth!), victims of alleged crimes (how dare you accuse the perpetrators of the crime!) some are activists health care workers and some are athletes or coaches or the kin of an athlete or coach. This is one of the stranger ones. Threatening someone because they miss-kicked a ball.

I’m staggered by the sheer number of people who issue such threats. It’s not a handful of kooks. It’s one helluva lot of kooks, spread out all over the country and the rest of the world.

I’m curious about the mindset of these people. Some are surely angry about what their target did or didn’t do and the best way to tell someone they upset you is by saying that they should be killed. I imagine others think they can intimidate the recipient into changing their behavior or beliefs. 

I would venture to guess that the main consequences of receiving a death threat can be anything from irritation to crippling fear. Is that what threateners want to do? Scare people? What’s the point? You’ve made someone nervous and frightened. Maybe caused serious anxiety. Are you proud of that? Is it mission accomplished? Really, is this the way to make the world a better place?

What kind of people send death threats? They come from all ideologies from all parts of the world. What do these people have in common? I would imagine one thing is cowardice. They are certainly not brave enough to confront someone in person, if they had the chance. 

These are doubtless powerless people — as many of us are or at least feel. It’s a way of “doing” something. You’re angry about someone has done. It may be a celebrity, it may be a woman alleging rape, it may be state senator. What can you do? You have no influence in a situation that strikes a nerve in you. So telling the person that they should be tortured and killed must feel like “doing something.” It also gets the anger out of your system — or it least is intended to.

Of course a lot of concentrated threats on one person can sometimes have an effect. Maybe the person will withdraw from the campaign, or drop their lawsuit or not print the rest of the story out of fear for their or their family’s lives. Is this the way to accomplish change? Win over opponents? Using the truth, logic, reasoning or  persuading must seem useless or too difficult.

Threatening an athlete for a mistake in a match is a really bizarre one. Don’t you think the person feels bad enough as it is? How does it help to tell them that they should be dead? 

I notice that people like the idea of punishing people for their mistakes. I recall my college football team losing a close game. A running back had fumbled the ball away in a key moment. A lot of people in an online forum were suggesting that in the next practices he should have to run extra wind sprints to teach him a lesson. I wondered if they thought that the player was unaware of the costliness of his miscue and that it was something he should avoid in future. Maybe they thought the coaches wouldn’t know how to instruct him in better ball security so that punishing him was the only answer.

I’d still like to know who these people are who send threatening emails, texts, social media posts and the like. There must be a helluva lot of them who walk among us as regular people. Our neighbors, co-workers, bus drivers, grocery clerks, lawyers maybe. Who knows?

Question: Do I think the prevalence of anonymous death threats tells us something disturbing about human nature generally, or something more specific about the culture we've created through social media? Answer: Death threats predate the internet age, they are a tale as old as time. What the internet has done is make it easy to send a lot of such messages and to send them anonymously. Indeed anonymity is key to the existence of those who threaten. If they had to sign their missives and include their contact information….well, there’d be an awfully significant drop in such threats.

I’m kind of stuck here. There seems little that can be done about the problem. Maybe if we could improve the public discourse — difficult to do in the age of Trumpy. I’m sometimes struck by how easy it is to send threatening messages online. Can something be done about that without inhibiting free speech? 

I got a threatening message once. It was generic and thus pretty easy to ignore. But getting lots of them with some specificity would be a different matter. I don’t know that it would scare me but it might depress me. Maybe just what the sender wants.

Honestly I don’t know how to end this. It’s not something you can put a smiley face on. It seems out of my ken to offer a solution. In many ways we live in a sad world filled with sad people who do awful things. Inexplicable things. 

Here's a thought. How about we counter death threats by sending people "life promises." A little note to someone we don't know telling them that they are valued and wishing them all the best. Might try that.

The Ups the Downs and the Sideways of Having Co-Workers

Typical workplace gathering at one of my many workplaces

Retirement means no more workplace. I exchange good mornings with the missus but that’s it. In a workplace you can have over a dozen good mornings to get through before the workday starts in earnest. Some of those include how-are-yous. Monday’s there are how-was-your-weekends. Friday’s there’s always some idiot who says: “Hey, it’s Friday.” (Thanks for the calendar update!). On Wednesdays someone might refer to the fact that it’s hump day. I had one co-worker who referred to Thursday as “junior Friday.” Somehow that never bothered me like me it should have. No one, ever, never said anything about Tuesday other than a vice-principal who pointed out that “Tuesday is a day with no personality.” At her memorial service I mentioned that to someone who said, “I don’t know about that.” To which I thought: “oh do fuck off.” I hate when people try to argue with you when you share what someone else said. The messenger is not to be killed.

I got along perfectly well with most of my co-workers. Some became friends as tends to happen. I mentioned something to this effect in class once not terribly long ago and a few students were aghast. I believe it was a student from China an another from France who said that should never happen, friendships with workmates are strictly verboten. I meant to explore the topic at greater length. It might have been their lines of work, I don’t know that it was necessarily a French or Chinese thing. But they were adamant. 

My goodness, imagine how many co-workers I had over the years. We’re talking about fifty years worth. Some passed through and were literally gone in a day or two, there were two people I worked with for over twenty year (poor sods) others close to that long. You can really get to know a person, then again you can really not. Some people keep to themselves and are private about their home lives. Sometimes you find out things about a person that are stunning. Usually not. Most people aren’t all that interesting. Oh sure, they have unique thoughts on some topics and are expert in others and have many fine qualities but no one would write a biography about them.

I had one colleague for half a day. Turned out she was a bit of a nutter. Came in her first day and commenced complaining to her higher-ups about a variety of topics. It was the day of a large student intake which meant orientation — everyone was too busy to listen to her. So she called the company’s bigwigs. Evidently they were not amused. She was fired at lunch time. Who needs that kind of nonsense.

In my younger days I had romances with co-workers. When you’re in your early twenties (alternative newspaper in a college town) that’s not at all uncommon. Could it get awkward? I should say so. Regrets? Nah, I was basically a randy kid, what did you expect? I’ll tell what could be a bigger problem, asking out or hitting on a co-worker and getting rejected. Ouch.

There were a few co-workers over the year who I disliked. Not many. Even a few — again, not many — who I detested. Part of it was that I was a volatile personality with an out-sized ego. Part of it was that some people are — at least at particular places in particular times of their lives — awful. One might argue that I was.

I’m thinking of the last few co-workers who I had a strong distaste for and console myself in the fact that others disliked them too. One was a hot-headed, misogynist. People HATED him. He was fired. 

I recently worked with some chap who took over from someone who I quite liked. That’s tough. He was very different. That’s tougher. But he was also strange. Never ended class on time. Not even close. I was always careful about that to such a degree that I ended class at 11:44 (it went until 11:45). The other thing is that this guy was a flake. Taking personal days, vacations and constantly sick. He was also late a few times. Here’s the capper. After a few weeks on the job he called me by the wrong name. At this point the school had six employees. He had to learn six motherfucking names and couldn’t pull it off. Thankfully he left after a few months. In his last week this asshole called me by the wrong name again. To top if off he referred to another teacher by the wrong name. Talk about something that isn’t rocket science.

Some co-workers are aloof. Some are painfully shy. Some — and this is a far greater sin — are chatterboxes. I remember working with one woman who could’t shut up to save her life (ask her students). I learned early on never to ask how her weekend was or I’d have to brace myself for an endless detailing of every movement over the preceding forty-eight hours. The problem is that some co-workers vastly overrate how interested you are in the minutia of their daily lives. 

Some co-workers you feel like you know after a few days. Others you spend years with and they’re a total mystery.

What’s also weird is that for some people their entire circle of friends consists of co-workers. What, you can’t make friends outside of work?

I had male co-workers who were fans of rival teams, a few of them were jerks about it. That’s a male thing. Men can be jerks about all sorts of things and don’t hesitate to constantly tease one another, often cruelly. I hated that. Women co-workers are nicer. That nurturing instinct.

You’ve got to draw boundaries with people at work. You’ve got to let people know what topics are off limits, how much you’ll share about your family, your psychosis, your personal history, your religious beliefs or lack thereof, your politics. Early in sobriety I confided in the wrong person that I was in a twelve-step program. He broadcast to the rest of the school and worse weaponized it against me later. I was, he asserted, more fun when I was drinking. Just what a recovering alcoholic needs to hear.

Of course I haven’t even gotten into one particular form of co-worker — the boss. That’s a huge topic worthy of it’s own post. I’ve a lot to say on the topic and if you’re good boys and girls you’ll hear it one day.

Before I go I’ve got one vignette. I worked with a woman who was big in the union. A real leader among teachers who reveled in her successes. She once told a few of us how important it was to treat the staff, secretaries, custodians etc. as equals. My reaction: you really think you need to say that to us? And aren’t you suggesting that they AREN’T equals, just that they need to be treated “as if” they were.” Whatta….(I won’t use that word in this blog).

I’ll add another note to that. My best friend was a member of the staff (a student safety officer) and another friend was a custodian. I got along swimmingly with the secretaries and everyone else on the staff. You never had to tell them we were all equal. They were the type of people who knew. Bless ‘em. 

Recently there was a memorial service for someone I worked with for close to the twenty years I mentioned earlier. I mentioned earlier. He became a vice-principal and was a popular supervisor, even I liked him. It was a great occasion to honor his life but for a lot of us it was a chance to see people we'd been through the wars with. People we'd worked with, fought with, laughed with, argued with, shared stories with. Any animosity that had existed among us was gone. I hadn't seen some of the people in decades. We had a bond, the kind you develop with co-workers. 

Anyway I don’t have co-workers to share space with anymore (unless the wife lets me hire a secretary). I already miss them, for all the aggravation they can cause. After all they’re all people (that may start changing) and getting to know other people is one of life’s great joys.

The Good Old Days Are Looking Better -- Though Far From Perfect

When I was a kid presidents tried to advance Civil Right

The world should be a much better place to live in today than it is. In so many ways it's worse than I was a kid. Climate change is the best example. In days of yore you’d get blizzards, heat waves, hurricanes and occasionally an abnormally warm spell in winter and a cold one in summer. Back then it was news. Something different. Now we’re living with so many weather anomalies that they’ve become the norm. Especially the blistering heat of summer all across the globe (not so much here in the Bay Area — thankfully). It’s getting worse too. People are worried about the threat to the planet. The planet will be fine, it’s the people on the planet who are fucked. Indeed, people are dying because of the extreme weather — in large numbers. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be spending summers where it’s broiling hot all day everyday. Even London has had eighty degree weather most days for the past couple of months. That’s frickin’ crazy. 

Another thing we didn’t have to deal with when I was growing up was having a total moron as the leader of the free world. We had presidents who lied, cheated, ignored the needs of the people and started wars but nothing as bad as what Trumpy has been doing. No one who shattered the political norms. Presidents didn’t used to call reporters stupid or horrible people or accuse them of fabricating “fake news.” Nor did presidents shamelessly self-promote and weren’t so blatantly corrupt. They didn’t call into question the integrity of our elections. When I was a kid we were trying to guarantee civil rights not take them away. The lies weren’t so plentiful or obvious. The loyal opposition was shown respect. Even Nixon wouldn’t have dreamed of calling the people across the aisle, “dumbocrats.” The rich have been getting much, much, much richer these days while the social safety net for the less fortunate is being shredded. The imbalance in our country’s wealth distribution is ridiculous.

There were still small businesses when I was a kid. Mom & Pop grocery stores were ubiquitous. In fact there were all kinds of independent businesses. We had places that weren’t part of a multi-national chain where you could get a burger. You might even know the guy that ran the place. There was Johnny’s down the street and we knew who Johnny was. 

I don’t know if things were better because we had milkmen, but they weren’t worse for them.

People didn’t stare at their phones all the time nor for that matter leave the house with their phones — not that they could. Kids used to go outside and use their imaginations to play games or organize ball games and they didn’t have “play dates.” We roamed the streets and did fine. You didn’t have a phone to look at but you could pick up a stick and make a game with it. People were a couple of million times less paranoid.

True, we didn’t have all the safety features with cars, bikes, playgrounds and toys so today’s kids are safer. But they’re also more pampered and made the center of attention from birth. Children aren’t integrated into families in the same way, they are the center of the universe for their parents. 

(It just occurred to me that when I was a kid if someone wore a bicycle helmet they’d be teased mercilessly.)

We didn’t have streaming services or cable so if you wanted to see a movie you had to wait until it was on TV where it was butchered by commercials and sometimes edited (censored). If you wanted to hear a song and didn’t have the record then you had to wait for it to be played on the radio. 

There were no computers for googling so if you needed the answer to something you bugged your parents, or a teacher or you looked in an encyclopedia if you had one or went to the library. You had to be resourceful. 

People had record players, sometimes stereos. Not everyone had color TVs, I didn’t until my senior year of high school back when we had six channels on TV and I think that sixth had just been added.

There were a lot fewer sports events on TV. But I liked sports from that era a lot better. It was before there were a millions teams in each sport (although the fact that there were only six ice hockey teams was ridiculous). There weren’t dozens of rounds of playoffs in pro sports. College football had conferences that were regional and practically-sized. There were no stupid playoffs for a national championship. Bowl games were still a big deal. College basketball didn’t have half the schools in the post season tournament. There were no “wildcards” making the playoffs. Best of all a stupid kid like me could afford to go to a game. A family could have season tickets for an NFL team without taking out a second mortgage.

Concerts were also affordable back then. For ten bucks you could see the biggest names in rock n’ roll. No one was getting away with selling tickets for thousands of dollars.

We still had movie theaters. Lots of them and I’m not talking about heartless cineplexes but actual theaters. Ticket prices were not just reasonable but cheap.

But back then gay people had to remain very much in the closet and could be arrested and jailed for the act of love. There was nothing approaching Pride Month or a Pride Parade. Women were still way, way behind men in terms of equal pay and just generally being treated like something other than sex objects. It still ain’t great today but it’s far better. Progress for African-Americans and other people of color was being made. Today there are forces trying to reverse those advances.

One of the biggest differences between then and now was that there was a much greater sense of hope. Like I said, progress was being made and there was the belief that improvements in society and politics were going to be permanent and added to. Today there is one helluva lot more cynicism and one can see why. The powerful have become more powerful and infinitely more heartless. Pushing them out of the way seems a mammoth task. Global warming is draining people physically and emotionally. It feels like a big defeat — likely because it is.

I still hold out hope because not doing so seems such a final loss and violates the best of the human spirit. Gotta keep the faith, baby.

You Might As Well Believe in Unicorns, My Take on Astrology and Religion

I mentioned to a co-worker that I'm going to be a grandfather for the first time in the Fall. She congratulated me and expressed great delight at the blessed event. But then she proceeded to tell me what astrological sign the child would be and how she has the same sign and how cool people born under that sign are. I said nothing as is my usual response to such nonsense. Later I thought it sad that one would ignore things like DNA and upbringing and the environment one grows up in and attribute a person's characteristics to the alignment of the stars when said child was born. I’ve always hated it when people reference astrology as if it had any basis in fact. 

If I’m wrong, show me the scientific evidence.

Astrology descriptions are written to fit almost anyone, to wit: “you value close relationships but need time alone,” “you can be confident but also self-doubting.” The accuracy is coming from the reader, not the system.

People look for patterns, it’s a way to make sense of things that seem random and unknowable (ya know, most of life). They connect dots between a horoscope and a real event and ignore all the times nothing lines up.

Systems like astrology create the feeling that there’s an underlying order to the world. The sense of structure can be comforting.

It’s also why we have religions. There is little to no historical or scientific evidence to back most of what Christians, Muslims and Jews believe. Holy books are elaborate fictions. They can be instructive in teaching fables and morality but they can also be perverted to do things like demonize homosexuality. People who believe that there’s an invisible man in the sky who controls everything, take comfort in the existence of this supreme being. Some people believe he sent his “only begotten son” to Earth and he performed miracles before rising from the dead. This he did to absolve humans of their sins. Makes as much sense as believing in unicorns. Christians often call their organizations “faith-based.” I think of them more as “fantasy-based.” 

While all the power rests in God — by whatever name — people do believe in the power of prayer. Which just goes to show people will believe anything. I told a former colleague of mine who is Christian that a former student of ours had been reported missing. Later he let me know that his congregation was praying for her safe return home. As I understand it his assumption was that God would hear these prayers and think: “I better find this woman and make sure she gets home.” Evidently the all-knowing God had not previously considered her plight. In any case the woman has still not returned home. God evidently ignored the congregation’s prayers. Why? What’s the point of praying if God is going to do what he wants anyway? (It was God’s will!)

Why do people believe that praying will move the needle even the tiniest bit? Because I can assure you it does nothing more than make the person praying feel like they have influence in a situation in which they are, in reality, powerless.

Astrology, religion and the like give answers for people who can’t be bothered thinking for themselves. A ready-made belief system saves a lot of time and energy. Never mind that the answers it provides are facile.

To each their own, of course. The problem comes when people share their nonsense with others like the woman who tried to tell me about my future grandson months before he was born. When I thought about it later I was offended. Keep that crap away from me and my progeny. In the same way I don’t want to hear about your prayers or your faith or the good book or Allah or sitting shiva or any of the other superstitious nonsense you waste your time with. 

Seriously, people.