Monthly Archives: October 2015

Yesterday was beautiful

Even I realized this, as I strode crosstown cursing Gandhi after the penultimate wasted session with the bright, sympathetic but inexperienced student therapist.  Atmospherically the day was about perfect, cool but no need for a sweater.   The sky over NYC was the perfect eternal blue backdrop for a gorgeous technicolor post card, or a painting by Dali at the peak of his powers.

For Sekhnet’s part, she was dodging leaping kittens as she puttered contentedly in the garden, a lush natural world far from her troubles and worries, and my worries, and my troubles. 

Ten Minute Drill – Supervisor

It’s like going to the dentist, really, a ten minute drill (and more for the reader than for me, perhaps).

Thinking of some recent folly, which I’d like to comb out of mind.  With high hopes I began a course of CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) with a student therapist, at a steeply discounted rate that added up, over many weeks, to the price of a decent guitar, or a very good acoustic amp.  I’m not crying over the money (though I’m resentful) as much as over the long stretch of unthinkingly wasted time.

CBT is a technique that allows the successful practitioner to run negative feelings through the filter of Reason, to consider these feelings from a more productive perspective.  Identify their source and move beyond them to do what negative feelings often stop one from doing.   I’d gone into the program with three distinct but inter-related goals, made no progress at all on the first two and only minimal progress on the third.

Trouble was, the therapist was a student.  Trouble is, I speak well, fluently, concisely.  This student, young enough to be my daughter, revealed, after many, many weeks of spinning my wheels, that she deferred to me, because of our age difference, because I speak so well, am so analytical, seem so capable and confident and blah blah blah.

“Have you no supervisor?” I finally ask, aghast.   I had begun suggesting exactly what the therapy should have been doing, the simple, practical steps that should have been reasonably taken, but many weeks too late, the sessions are almost done.  Another exercise in uselessness.  If I could have designed and implemented the course of treatment myself, motivated myself to move forward toward the three unrealized goals I came here with six months ago, why would I need to be coming here?  “What has your supervisor advised you?”

She was cagey about the supervisor, yes she had one… but… it’s good that we’re talking about how disappointed you feel.   I realize now, since each session is video taped, since her supervisor is clearly not helping her to be a more effective therapist, that she’s aware that this person who is evaluating her will watch with twitchy, beady eagle eye for the moment in any session when she might admit, in the interests of that candor so important to effective therapy, that her supervisor is a bit hands off, distracted, stuffy, paranoid, pompous, kind of the caricature of that useless, tic afflicted maniac we think of as becoming a supervisor and evaluator of other shrinks.

“Do you feel better now?” asks Siri.

Well, Siri, a tiny, tiny bit better, yes, thank you.  I’d better get back to designing my own therapy program now.

Meaningful versus “Sisyphic” work

Interesting talk by a well-spoken and insightful guy.   He talks about the demoralizing effect of seeing no effect from your work.  He describes his experiments designed to show how important a sense of meaning and progress is to continuing to do good work.

The good news: it takes little conscious planning, and little effort, to motivate good work.  The bad news: it takes far less consciousness or planning, and no effort whatsoever, to demotivate.

Twenty minutes, interestingly spent.

Vonnegut’s Genius Take

From a short book he wrote toward the end of his life, a series of mini interviews with famous and infamous people from the world beyond.  Afterlife Correspondent Vonnegut would enter the Pearly Gates for each interview, pursuant to the deal the atheist made with St. Peter to be allowed into heaven to conduct these short chats with historical figures for the benefit of those of us walking on the earth at that particular moment in time.  The proceeds from the sales of the book were donated to National Public Radio, or possibly to WNYC.

In his short intro Vonnegut describes the loneliness of modern life, a theme he often revisited.  He contrasted life in modern industrialized society to the vastly more social lives lived for millennia by groups of humans.  An Ibo baby in Africa is taken to meet her 400 aunts, uncles and cousins who take her in their arms by turn and coo at her and tell her how beautiful she is.  Wouldn’t you love to be that baby? asks Vonnegut.

The truly genius take is this, and I don’t have the text ( less than two sparsely type-set pages in total) in front of me so you’ll pardon (or not) a paraphrase.  

Freud didn’t know what women want, wrote Vonnegut, but Vonnegut does.  Women want to talk, to everyone, about everything.  What do men want?  Some pals and nobody to be mad at them.  The modern arrangement, a man and a woman pair off and live together, become the largest part of each other’s social universe.  

The woman gets somebody to talk to about everything all the time: but it’s a man.

The man gets a pal and somebody not to be mad at him: but it’s a woman.

Because a great Vonnegut insight should end with a profound, yet comic bow he adds:

Each one, unwittingly, has the same anguished complaint against the other: “you are not enough people!”.

As pithy a nutshell of something fundamental as any you’ll hear today, it seems to me.

World’s Smallest Giant

There is a great scene in Norton Juster’s fantastic The Phantom Tollbooth where Milo and Tock stop at a house with a sign “World’s Smallest Giant.”   They ring and an average sized man comes to the door, rendered with beautiful simplicity by Jules Feiffer, and identifies himself as the world’s smallest giant.   Bewildered, they are invited to go visit the World’s Largest Midget, who, by a neat quirk, lives right around the corner.

Around the corner turns out to be the side of the same house where a sign over the door proclaims “Midget.”  They ring and the average sized guy comes to the door, deadpan as can be, drawn identically by Feiffer, but for the sign above the door.  They go on to meet the world’s fattest thin man and the world’s thinnest fat man.

(You can read the entire short, delightful chapter for yourself here, as it turns out, only slightly different, and infinitely more charming, than the version above.  In fact, the whole wonderful book is at the link above.)

Branding and selling, baby.  The quality of the actual product is important, most likely, but the branding and selling of it, and the deadpan confidence to always insist it is exactly what you say it is– way more.

A Small Piece of What Hobbles Me

Among the things that have me by the toe, the waning of democracy and the ever steeper upward tilt of the so-called level playing field.

“Are you fucking crazy?  You are held by the toe by a myth that was, at best, an exercise for keeping order and property, designed by the wealthy and maintained, whenever necessary, by their goon squads?”

Democracy was more than that.

“If you say so, my idealistic friend.”

Take the example of public education, a once truly democratic institution.  Not that long ago the children of immigrants, educated in New York City Public Schools, could attend the City College, for affordable tuition they could earn by working as they studied, get an excellent education, graduate debt-free with a degree that was worth as much as degrees now costing $160,000, and find work in their chosen field that allowed them to move out of the tenements where they grew up. 

“OK, nice example of democracy in action, and meritocracy, but times change.  Systems evolve.”

Ya, mon.  This is what has me by the toe, in the New Gilded Age, working with an outmoded belief in something good that is now under constant, coordinated attack by a well-funded army of profiteers.   I designed a program for public elementary school students, to work as a group, guided by their own ideas, supported by adult facilitators.  My idea was to show public school kids, in poor neighborhoods, at their best– give them a showcase to demonstrate what they could do if they weren’t being actively trained to be factory workers in factories that no longer operate in the US, or, failing that, failing, dropping out and becoming prisoners in a privatized for-profit prison system.

“You are pissing into the wind and ignoring the fact that, sad as it may seem to you, you are one of the few people you know who is even passingly following this sickening debate about public education.   Only people with bleeding hearts give more than a passing thought to the fate of the kids you want to work with.  The children of the disenfranchised are an abstraction.   ‘Disenfranchised’ — without the right to meaningfully participate in decisions about their own governance.    But let’s not get lost in emotionality.”

“Look at the numbers, it makes everything easier to understand when you view it with a calculator in hand.   Simply multiply the number of students entitled to a free public education in the U.S. by the sum each state and school district allocates per student.  That number is hundreds of billions of dollars a year, left on the table for substandard education.”

Hundreds of billions of dollars a year. No need to pull a number out of our asses, when we can pluck one from the internets:  $621 billion a year, as of a couple of years ago.

“No small sum, my friend.   Private entrepreneurs who have already shown they know how to make billions are the best stewards of that kind of dough, not people with interesting theories about how children learn, or a quaint belief that cooperation yields more social benefit than competition.   You can’t expect public school administrators, teachers, educational theorists and the like to know as well as Bill Gates, Michael Milken, Michael Bloomberg, giants in making mountains of profit, some of the richest and most enterprising men in the world, how to maximize the profit of that enormous investment in such an important human resource.”  

You make my case for me, friend.   Milken served his time in prison, ten year sentence generously discounted by 80%, seemingly got to keep most of his ill-gotten money and is now called a philanthropist on his Wikipedia page.  We learn at a glance:  

Michael Robert Milken (born July 4, 1946) is an American former financier and philanthropist. He is noted for his role in the development of the market for high-yield bonds (“junk bonds”),[1] for his conviction following a guilty plea on felony charges for violating U.S. securities laws, and for his charitable giving.  

Forbes currently lists his net worth at $2.5 billion.   

Read on and learn how you do it.  This is how you do it:

Milken and his brother Lowell founded Knowledge Universe in 1996, as well as Knowledge Learning Corporation (KLC), the parent company of KinderCare Learning Centers, the largest for-profit child care provider in the country. He is currently chairman of the company.[18] Milken also established K12 Inc., a publicly traded education management organization (EMO) that provides online schooling, including to charter school students for whom services are paid by tax dollars,[19] which is the largest EMO in terms of enrollment.[20]

“This is really the best use of your time right now?  Showing how a convicted billionaire felon/philanthropist is profiting by redirecting public school dollars to his own for-profit enterprises?   This is really the best use of the time that is slipping like sands through the hourglass?”

Not at all, friend, not at all.  Just a small piece of what hobbles me.

Get Away from the Screen

Excellent advice, read after my timer went off, 48 minutes of cleaning picked at, when I popped back on to the screen.  

Do you see any significant clearing in the tangled undergrowth of your desk, your kitchen table, your chair?   That tangle on the floor next to and behind the chair?  The precarious pile of boxes, paper, musical instruments and effects balanced next to the chair?    

Another 48 minutes for the timer, your back into it this time, instead of looking hopefully at the screen for something that will distract the mind.  There is a rich universe of things here for distracting the mind, although rich is probably the wrong word for the kaleidoscope up here on the screen.

Very well, 48 more, let’s go.

Tenterhooks

I don’t know what they are, exactly, but goddamn them.  Time running out, whipsawed between waiting for a promised immediate definitive call back from a well-meaning woman at the credit card company with slightly insufficient attention to detail and a long trip by subway, bus and foot to allay, to the extent I can, the stress of someone I’ve stressed out by my own slightly insufficient attention to detail lately.

Seeking to reduce her stress, I am on tenterhooks, real or imagined, since I need to leave and was just promised that if I stay I’ll get an immediate call back with a definitive answer I don’t absolutely need until around 9 Central Time (it’s 4:14 Central Time now).  

Time to use my imagination to cast the tie-breaker against reality, whatever that may be.  Here we go:  I can imagine myself on the subway, standing now, since it’s rush hour, listening to a podcast, not minding a bit.  I can imagine finding a vexingly lost item where I hope it is when I get back to the farm, having time to make a surprise dinner for my stressed out, exhausted partner who will be particularly happy to see me if my vexing stories turn out to have happy endings.  

And if not, misery, as they say, loves company.   Y’allah, let’s get the show on the road! 

The Search for Love

“You search for love, that never stops as long as you live, it’s the human condition.  If the love you had when you were little was a little crazy, or very crazy, well, that’s going to explain a lot about the rest of your search,” said the Israeli.  “You think it’s easy to trust crazy people?  But you can’t live without love and you can’t truly love without trust, I can tell you that from my own life.”

“What’s all of a sudden with the fucking Israelis?” asked a second Israeli, no less impatient than the first to be on to his favorite subject.

“I’m trying to explain to him not to feel like a schmoke, him and his beautiful friend over there, I also don’t want her to feel like a schmoke, ” said the first Israeli, “he and his beloved both had very scary starts in the world.  She will deny it, turn it into something that made her strong, he will admit it with way too much not always hilarious detail, but basically similar stories.  You look for comfort in a hostile world and the person who is giving it to you is a victim twitching with terror, eyes darting nervously, cortisol is being released every two minutes.  Children from war zones have this kind of elevated cortisol and adrenalin, programmed with fear as they develop only the most primitive childish theories on how to live without terror.”

“You want to talk about terror?” asked the second Israeli, “I can tell you plenty of stories about terror.  In fact…”

The first Israeli cut him off, “I don’t want to talk about terror, we’re talking about love.  I mentioned the extreme form of fear only to illustrate a point.  Fearful people can act brave, and its an inspiration to the brave among us sometimes, but at the core of their operating system there is fear.  Terror is terrifying, everyone knows about that.”

“I’ll tell you about terror,” says the second Israeli, “I have some interesting theories for you about terror.”

“Terror we’ll talk about another time, love is the subject today,” said the first Israeli, undaunted.  “Love is the highest feeling there is, connection to another, to others.  Love is what every song is about, finding it, losing it, lamenting its loss, getting a second chance, hoping for new love, the redemption of loving and being loved.  ‘The greatest thing you’ll ever learn, is just to love, and be loved, in return’ as the strange enchanted boy sings to Nat King Cole.”  

“Yes, we can talk about love songs, it’s a nice topic, but they are on their way to Yad Vashem, these two, looking for the lost hamlet where the river split into three branches to the southeast of Pinsk.  The place where the angry side of his family was stomped like so many cockroaches.  You think they are thinking of love songs, Shmulik?”   

“Why do you have to say my name, Doody?   We are abstractions, literary devices and you have to pull off the masks like it’s nothing?  I don’t understand you, man.  Yad Vashem is Yad Vashem, love is love, mixing things is mixing things.  You like to mix things, don’t you?”

The second Israeli waved his hand dismissively, “you like to keep things simple.  I get it.  OK, love is love, we search for love, if we were raised in a fearful house where we were not heard, felt in danger all the time, developed massive defenses, it will be harder for us to move past fear and trust people and give and take love in the comforting way everyone hopes to.  Is that a pure enough telling of what you were talking about, Literary Devicesky?”

“You dance so divinely, Doody.  Why is it that you have had so many wives?” said the first Israeli.  

“Look, Mr. Don’t Mix Things In, now we are suddenly talking about my three wives, only three.  Not so many, really.  And why are you… eh, never mind.  Have you noticed that neither of us has let either of these two get a word in?  Not a single word.  That’s kind of funny, I think, since they are your guests.  I think it’s funny.”

“I don’t know if it’s funny,” said the first Israeli.