Author Archives: oinsketta

The Burnout Scale

Feeling burnt out lately as I try to somehow advance my exciting, innovative program alone. Trying to revive my spirits to continue rolling the child-run animation workshop hoop down the road, cheerfully, winningly, I search the internet for advice and inspiration.   Here is some I found last night:

4. Identify the specific causes of your burnout.

The Maslach Burnout Inventory identifies six areas leading to burnout:

  • Workload (too much work, not enough resources)
  • Control (micromanagement, lack of influence, accountability without power)
  • Reward (not enough pay, appreciation, or satisfaction)
  • Community (isolation, conflict, disrespect)
  • Fairness (discrimination, favoritism)
  • Values (ethical conflicts, meaningless tasks)

After identifying the source, name it out loud. Brainstorm with someone you trust about how to specifically change this aspect of your work life.

My father’s 17 years older first cousin Eli, a very tough old bird, complained of the side effects of his fentonyl patch.   Eli’s children, who approached the prickly old man with caution, did not tell him he was wearing the pain patch because he had inoperable cancer.  His doctors were instructed not to tell him either.   He started wearing it only a few weeks before he died, when the doctors he went to couldn’t prevent or explain the excruciating pain he was in.  I only found out he had cancer once he was dead from it.

But it was the side effects he grumbled about on the phone that day.  “I got dry mouth, constipation, acid stomach, you name it….” he muttered.   When I arrived he had me read the list out loud to him

“cramps,”  

“yop!”

“sleeplessness?”

“yop!”

“fatigue?”

“yop!”

“irritability?”

“what the fuck do you think?!”

“yop.”

I thought of this as I began to take the good advice offered in the post about how to combat burn-out.  That there is nobody I can really talk to very much about it is another problem carrying out that excellent advice.  But I did read most of the list aloud.

Undaunted, I searched further:

2. Tell people about it. 

Share your vision with anyone who will listen. Sharing your idea will keep you motivated as you get reconnected to your goals with each conversation. More importantly, you will be amazed by how much others want to support you in your endeavors and are willing to connect you to the right people.

Yes, actually, I have been amazed by how much others have been willing to connect me to the right people.  The only problem, so far, is that nobody I know has ever met any of the right people for my program.  A small, temporary setback, no doubt.

3. Don’t do it alone.

The number one cause of  feeling overwhelmed is trying to do it all alone, and being overwhelmed creates fear. Hire a coach or join a meet-up for support. Ask people for help, seek out partnership, and build a team.

Excellent advice!  I’ve been trying to build a team for a year now, and so far, like the US Army, it is an army of one.   I don’t want to sound sour, but the people I’ve paid, who seemed to have such a good time playing with the kids, gone.  The volunteers I’ve had, so enamoured of the creative beehive of child animators I’d assembled, gone.   Got to keep building, I guess, searching for the right partners!

4. Fail.

Waiting for the ‘right time’ keeps you in perpetual procrastination. You will make mistakes. But this forces us to be creative, often landing us in better places. Welcome failure as an opportunity for growth.

Yes, this is perhaps the best advice of all.  I am going to welcome the failure to form a team and find people to brainstorm with and learn from my mistakes — as soon as I am able to figure out what they were.   Perhaps it takes a team to brainstorm why it is that a friendly person with a great program that kids love can’t figure out how to build a team to brainstorm and solve that puzzle.

Oh, well, back to work.

The Opposite of Love

It has been observed that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.   This sounds right to me.   Hatred, like love, is a powerful emotion, and powerful emotions are subject to change — indifference is the complete absence of any feeling about it one way or the other, there’s nothing to work with there, no redemptive moment possible when one party absolutely doesn’t care.  

Don’t kick the person when she’s down, step over as though you haven’t even seen them lying there.  It may seem an academic distinction, hatred vs. indifference and which is the opposite of love, but come for a short stroll, please.

Tell a joke, around the table people either laugh, laugh politely, groan, or shake their heads.  One person looks you dead in the eye, with the dead fish expression.  And afterwards doesn’t break character by winking, smiling, saying anything.  You make yourself vulnerable, to some extent, telling a joke and the dead fish reaction sticks a skewer in that willingness to open yourself.

Not the best example, perhaps.  My father was a master of this technique, I should be able to describe it better.   It requires, more than anything, knowing when to apply a good cold dose of strategic silence.   When you open yourself up to express a concern, speak directly about your feelings and ask for a reply– silence.  When you complain of the lack of reaction, you become a whiner and the silent party can now focus on what an asshole you are.  

It’s a foolproof system.   Mildly provoke somebody (“just kidding!!”) up the ante a bit (“for your own good!!! I love you!”) wait for the reaction and then — silence.   Beautiful, to a certain type of angry person, what a nice dose of silence will do.  Who needs the rack or a water board? 

“When you ask my opinion you just want me to tell you what you want to hear!” protests someone giving you the hard truth and dismissing the feelings you express as paranoia, over-sensitivity, lack of epidermis.  You can point out how many times you have sought and used contrary opinions to make changes in your life, your projects, your ideas, but in the case at hand– “you only want me to tell you you’re right” serves to end the conversation.   So be it.

Be direct, we are told.  In marketing, as in life, honesty, directness, integrity– these things rule (although countless exceptions apply).   The cure for directness?   Silence.

And of course, one person’s directness is another person’s double-barreled shotgun blast to the kisser.   C’est la guerre, I suppose. 

Rage on the rise?

I don’t know if it’s just me, or if the level of rage around us has increased dramatically.  I know why my father was in a rage much of the time, his mother whipped him in the face with a heavy cord from the time he could stand.   Anyone would be subject to rage with that kind of upsetting start.  I had some insight into my mother’s anger, though she’d get angry when I’d try to be sympathetic about it and I learned to change the subject, on a dime, when she got that look on her face.   My sister’s anger is not hard to figure out. But the most perplexing thing is the amount of anger simmering, some behind smiles and the best of intentions, in people around me, in the world at large.

A few weeks ago a friend set a misunderstanding into motion for seemingly inexplicable reasons.   He later had an insight — he was provoking a fight between his two older brothers by his actions.   His brothers were each over a thousand miles away, so others were cast as gladiators.   He cast me in the role of the tougher of his two brothers, I imagine.   I had a friend years ago who bizarrely mistook me for his father, unbeknownst to me, and was enraged, for years, apparently, that I never praised his teaching.   Many of us seem to spend a good deal of our lives playing out scenarios with surrogates standing in for dead abusive parents, absent abusive siblings.

I blame nobody for being enraged in a world like the one we live in.  People are livid all over the place.  Look at the highways in Florida, general incivility, the unsportsmanlike behavior of trash talking millionaires on TV, the wars raging on several continents, the indifference to the death and torture of innocents done in our name, the bitter zero-sum impasse in our government, the continued war against the weak while the richest grow much, much richer as the world becomes more and more crowded, warm, polluted.   You may have a nice group of friends, a supportive community, a sanctuary from the violence and hatred afoot everywhere these days, but the murderous rancor in the papers every day is hard to ignore.   A wit, Harry Shearer, tweeted today:  On FTN, Colin Powell calls Assad a “pathological liar”. I clearly remember when Assad assured the UN that Iraq had mobile bioweapons vans.

Of course, there were no mobile biological weapons vans in Iraq, nor any other signs of a nuclear weapons program, no ties to the 18 or so Saudis who were the suicide pilots on 9/11, but, for some reason, a lot of death was rained down on Iraq, in my name and yours — countless Iraqis and thousands of dead, maimed and permanently disabled American veterans of a war as senseless, and brutally patriotic, as World War One.   The wartime president who ordered the pre-emptive attack on Iraq recently told a group of Shock and Awe veterans with prosthetic limbs that he deeply appreciated their sacrifices and that he’d tried diplomacy to avoid going to war with Saddam Hussein.   

Maybe it’s true we can do little to change the big things.  Change starts with ourselves.  I have to be thankful that I’m able to remain mostly mild, instead of flying into rages.   Hard work, and good work, and I’m glad and grateful to be doing it.  Maybe it’s true the only thing we should focus on is taking care of the people in our lives, being kind, and helping, and always giving the benefit of the doubt to our friends, until they prove us wrong. 

It isn’t easy to be consistently kind and empathetic when things are difficult.   It’s hard to be patient when events press in on us, or to be mild when people treat us badly.   Kindness and mildness are more important than most people know.   Like hope, they are the things that remind us that life is good, they make an unbearable situation worth enduring.    

A friend wrote recently of a yoga tale in which the snake, badly beaten, complains to his friend the guru, who finds him bloody in the road, that the guru told him not to strike back.  “Christ,” says the guru, “I said don’t bite. I didn’t tell you not to hiss!”

Sometimes it is necessary to hiss, I suppose.  But when confronted with things we can recognize as expressions of generalized hostility, my approach nowadays is to walk away, remain silent, there is no last word to be had worth the letters it takes to spell it.  There is usually little to be gained by talking to people who will argue to the death that you are nuts to be hurt by things that were not intended to cause harm.

My elbow that accidentally broke your nose?   What is mysterious about “accidentally”, asshole?

We get variations on that from angry people sometimes and experience teaches that the best response is to seek medical attention and stay out of harm’s way in future.  You will not win any arguments with people like that.

Nor is there any point in trying to.

I began writing this musing over whether people who were the victims of angry people when young are attracted to each other.  The little brother who was sucker punched by his older brothers, the middle sister who never got a dollar, nor any credit, from her parents, the older brother who bore the brunt of his mother’s rage and her random slaps across his face, the little sister terrorized by her insane bully brother.   There may be a magnetic force at work, drawing a certain type together.  I hate to think that is so, but it’s hard to imagine that everyone out there is the victim of some kind of crime against them when they were a child.

On the other hand, take a look at the world we live in.  Sadly, you will not have to look very far.

Elmore Leonard’s Game

My father, who had the taste to love Sam Cooke, recommended Elmore Leonard to me at one point, many years back.  He thought I would like Elmore and I did.   Between us we probably read every book Elmore Leonard wrote, often passing them on to each other.  I think my father even read the westerns, the early novels.   I may have only read one of those.  But I was always happy to find a new crime novel by Elmore Leonard on the bookshelf at the library, snatched it up immediately, read it in a day or two, passed it on to my father if he hadn’t read it already.

Master of dialogue, and ingenious plot twist, and creator of page turning interest, Leonard often underscored the cool of his bold, sometimes stupid characters by showing that they weren’t in a hurry.   “He lit a cigarette and looked at her, taking his time.”   I noticed early on that every single book by Leonard contained the line “taking his time”, usually several times. Thus began the game Elmore and I, the reader, used to play.

I would chuckle, as I read some of them, to see that Elmore had taken his time using “taking his time” in a book.  I’d note on the bookmark, p. 117, and smile, nod, “good one, man,” I’d say to Elmore Leonard.  Then he’d pepper the next chapter with it, 124, 127, 131.  Damn, he’s good, I used to think.

Of course, I love dialogue too.  And space on the page.  I literally begin choking when I see a block of text margin to margin in every direction, an immense, dense paragraph filling the entire battlefield of the page.   It’s like music, when somebody’s playing on every single beat, and somebody else is too, and there’s a wall of strings behind them, and the singer comes in, bleating directly on every beat.

“Let me breathe, damn you!” I mutter, closing a book with its black pages of type, and not taking my time about it.  I literally won’t read those books, no matter how wonderful the writing might be.  Open any place in Mein Kampf and you’ll see that kind of merciless shit, page-long paragraph followed by two page paragraph.

Terry Gross ran a nice tribute to Elmore Leonard recently, an edited version of her 1995 and 1999 interviews.  At one point Elmore says, once again warming my heart:

I like dialogue. I like to see that white space on the page and the exchanges of dialogue, rather than those big heavy, heavy paragraphs full of words. Because I remember feeling intimidated back in the, say, in the ’40s, when I first started to read popular novels, Book of the Month Club books, I would think, god, there are too many words in this book. And I still think there are too many words in most books. But dialogue appeals to me.

It appeals to me too.  Sometimes, sadly, the best dialogue I can find is here, tapping like a mechanical monkey on a keyboard, aware that it’s not a true dialogue.

“Don’t be so judgmental, man,” says Zeppo.

“Shut up, man, let the guy think,” says Ratso, a retired judge sensitive about such things.

You can hear Terry and Elmore Leonard talking here:

http://www.npr.org/2013/08/23/214831379/fresh-air-remembers-crime-novelist-elmore-leonard

there is also a transcript of their conversation you can cut and paste, if you’re in college writing a term paper on Elmore Leonard, say.

When Leonard died the other day, at 87, I got an email from Sekhnet, who broke the news to me by writing that Elmore Leonard won’t be taking his time anymore.  Of course, she pointed out, ever ready to console, his characters still will.

I had to chuckle when, at around 15:30, toward the end of the interview with Terry Gross, Leonard describes the way Quentin Tarantino went about turning the novel Rum Punch into the movie Jackie Brown.  The interview is almost over when Leonard casually mentions that Tarantino took his time with it.

I loved it.

Temper, Temper

As I am in a ditch today, spinning muck with my rear wheels, I checked on the Yankee game which was supposed to be in progress.   “Delayed” it says on the ESPN website, where to Sekhnet’s grim amusement I tend to follow the box scores of games in progress while I do other things on the computer.

“The game’s not boring enough?” she asked the first time she saw me open the window to see how many hits Cano had, “you need to turn it into a box of numbers?”  I began explaining the beauty of a box score, the complete story told with a list of names and a few columns of numbers, but she was already heading back to the garden to do something that made sense.

I felt a sharp pang of annoyance when I went to check the score just now, since I live only a few miles from Yankee Stadium, where the game is supposed to be ticking away in a box score in another window, and it doesn’t seem to be raining here.   I had a sudden memory of my father, a man of towering anger, shaking his head and laughing once when I got angry about something as a boy.

“You were mad at the rain one time, in a rage that it was raining!”  he observed brightly.

What it was, of course, was a boy’s disappointment and frustration that the thing he’d been looking forward to had been cancelled on account of rain.

The little flash of annoyance, almost anger, at the rain today, reminded me to be grateful.   Gratefulness, my friends, better than anger almost every time.   I’m not talking a tumor with a silver lining, I’m pointing out that it is good to see the larger picture.   In the context of a life, every change for the better is something to be thankful for.

Now to call my old friend who is busy dying.

Opening A Can of Worms

A friend who leaped out of character to shout me down in a discussion of Bradley Manning a month or two ago, replied to my mild-mannered email making the points he hadn’t let me make in the car by telling me I deserved a more thoughtful reply than he was able to craft at the moment.   I probably posted something about it here at the time (here, at the end of this post).   I was shocked at his ferocity, after he asked me casually what I thought of Manning’s disclosures.

We had a more measured discussion a few weeks later, inconclusive.   Then, earlier today, I opened the following can of worms:

ME:  I agree with the  ACLU Comment on the Bradley Manning Sentence 

“When a soldier who shared information with the press and public is punished far more harshly than others who tortured prisoners and killed civilians, something is seriously wrong with our justice system. A legal system that doesn’t distinguish between leaks to the press in the public interest and treason against the nation will not only produce unjust results, but will deprive the public of critical information that is necessary for democratic accountability. This is a sad day for Bradley Manning, but it’s also a sad day for all Americans who depend on brave whistleblowers and a free press for a fully informed public debate.”
 
 
HE:  I heard that the government asked for 60 years and that the defense sought 30 years.  Although I didn’t follow the case in depth, my sense is that the sentence of 35 years, in the context of the history of Bradley Manning, is cruel.  The Union’s proportionality comment and its comparison between treason and leaking, are hard for me to address without a better knowledge of the pre-trial and trial record of the case. Puzzling, is why the defense sought 30 years. What’s your guess?  
 
 
ME:    The defense asked for 25 years, I guess they figured that was the best they could hope for, given his guilty pleas to many of the charges, the trial, and the judge’s rulings.  35 years does seem an unduly harsh sentence, but Manning’s head goes on a pike as a warning to any other conscience-stricken nerd who may fancy himself a person of conscience.  We do that now.

 
Many of the issues are hard to address knowledgeably since most of the trial record has not been released.   Kind of a neat loop they have there, in a dark side Dick Cheney kind of way.  Although it seems the gov’t stipulated that no actual harm was caused by Manning’s disclosures.  Nor was any war crime apparently investigated as a result.  What happens in war stays in war.
 
Nothing ambiguous about this part of the ACLU’s statement:
 
When a soldier who shared information with the press and public is punished far more harshly than others who tortured prisoners and killed civilians, something is seriously wrong with our justice system. 
 
Lt. Calley, for his part in the belatedly reported My Lai carnage, three years under house arrest.  I think Calley was the only American punished for that massacre.
 
I guess the judge considered herself merciful for shaving four months off Manning’s sentence for the cruel and unusual (except for Gitmo detainees) detention Manning suffered while awaiting American Justice, you know, the nude solitary confinement in an outdoor cage and that kind of thing.
 
As my old man used to say “doesn’t this make you glad to be an American”?

HE:  In this era, there is a violent war between secular and sectarian in which we have been killed and injured and are in danger.  The theory is that government exists to protect us.  In such anomic times, it seems as though the community approves of giving the government a good edge when it comes to social control over autonomy.  In kinder times, the edge swings back to civil liberties. 

I thought about replying, then thought better of it.  The man has a fine vocabulary, I had to look up “anomic”.

Dig it, complete with a fitting quote from Charles Krauthammer:

an·o·mie or an·o·my  (n-m)

n.   1. Social instability caused by erosion of standards and values.

2. Alienation and purposelessness experienced by a person or a class as a result of a lack of standards, values, or ideals: “We must now brace ourselves for disquisitions on peer pressure, adolescent anomie and rage” (Charles Krauthammer).
[French, from Greek anomi, lawlessness, from anomos, lawless : a-, without; see a-1 + nomos, law; seenem- in Indo-European roots.]

A Walk in the Park

After six hours or so in the chair reading advice on marketing, watching videos on social media, networking, what makes a video viral (most often celebrities tweeting about them, surprisingly enough), fundraising, and getting updates from a friend who was putting in a hard day’s mostly futile research on behalf of my nonprofit, I took a walk.  

Balmy day, the nearby park was green and lovely, dotted with people out enjoying the summer afternoon.  As I came over the hill to the tidal basin by Spuyten Duyvil I saw that it was low tide.   The open metal sphere, a work of public art built in the middle of that usually watery expanse, was sitting on mud.   There was mud in every direction for a few hundred feet.   I made my way to the end of the little island that looks west, over the treacherous stretch of river the Dutch named “Spouting Devil”, to the cliffs across the Hudson.

I saw on the mud, each a few hundred feet from the water in the channel, two young women in bathing suits on landlocked water motorcycles, large jet ski type vehicles intended for slicing through water.  In the channel two men were in the water.   The tide had apparently gone out quickly, the boats had become stuck on wet, sticky land, and the men had somehow made it into the water while the women stayed on the large padded seats.

The men hailed some passing jet skis plowing through the channel and these bison-sized one passenger boats approached the shore, but were careful not to get too close.  “We have a rope!” called one of the men in the water.   He thought it was a great plan.   The jet skis backed up, like skittish horses, it was not hard to see their reasoning.   It was like watching a scene by the watering hole on the nature channel, the drinking animals lifting their heads in unison, the one in the water already doomed.

When I left the park an hour later I could see, from another angle, that the jet skis were still firmly on the mud, while others were skittering in the water nearby, but not getting too close.

Nobody likes getting stuck on the mud in low tide, I’ve noticed.

Mindfulness

Each of us is the one who must remain mindful.  Picture the gentle voice droning soothingly in your ear– you are here, you are taking a step, you enjoy the coolness and taste of a ripe strawberry, music plays, your head moves, eyes look.  Take a breath, life itself, draw it in slowly, deeply.  Savor for a moment the life force it sustains.

Watch out for that maniac driving 70 mph on the sidewalk.

Do not be distracted by the look of terror in the doctor’s eyes, genuine alarm, the cuff still around your bicep.  That look was on August 6th.   Medication for high blood pressure indicated, but phone tag didn’t work out and now, two weeks later, the doctor is on vacation.   Kind of him to leave that voice mail yesterday before he left for his canoe trip, his meditation retreat, taking his pregnant wife and their three year-old to Disney World.

Relax the arteries, release the pressure that is building, forget about the ticking time bomb, the silent killer, the stroke sneer (thanks Stephen King).  The world is not a burden unless you make it so.  The world is a miracle and it is a kindness to the self to remember that just because someone like Hitler is most likely to run things, he really believes he’s doing the right thing.  That’s the important thing to keep in mind.  It’s hard making the tough decisions about who shall live and who shall die and who shall eat shit and who shall eat strawberries.   Be grateful you do not have to make such decisions.  Think of the young child’s tenacious commitment to fairness.  Be encouraged, have courage.

Breathe mindfully.

Zombies

We are surrounded by zombie movies, books, zombies on TV.   The reason for this is ever more clear: we are surrounded by zombies in real life.

You want a straight answer?   Ask any question, then listen.  

“nnnngggghhhhh, ngggggghhhhhh….. nggnnnnnggghhhhh……” comes the drone.  Then watch your ass and get ready to run.  If they bite you it’s all over.

Psychopaths Among Us

As many people know, not all psychopaths are violent murderers who kill without remorse.  Granted, psychopaths who are violent murderers do kill without remorse, since they lack even a soupcon of empathy, but not all psychopaths kill.   There is a psychopath test, and a scale, and many people who achieve top marks on the psychopath test never kill anyone.

Take Jim Fallon, an affable neuroscientist who describes himself as a hobbit.   He studied the brains of numerous psychopaths, both mass murderers and corporate CEOs, and speaks convincingly about what separates the killers from the highly functioning confident, bright, driven, remorseless psychopaths who climb to the top of corporate hierarchies and amass fantastic fortunes.

According to Fallon the gene for violence in a brain configured for psychopathy is activated by a three-dimensional experience of unspeakable violence at a young age. Being the victim of, or witnessing, traumatic violence triggers this gene and it is only a matter of time until the time bomb goes off.   Many with brains identical to mass murderers never express violence, except perhaps as ruthlessness in the board room, where it is admired as one of the traits of a winner.

I’ve probably written about Fallon here before, and his fascinating talk can be heard here.  Fallon, well into his distinguished career, learns of his family history of murder and discovers that his brain has the same damage in the orbital cortex that is the hallmark of psychopaths.  

The mild-mannered, avuncular Fallon subsequently asks everyone he knows if they can see the defining trait of the psychopath, lack of empathy, in him.   To his surprise they all see it.  “You don’t really listen after you ask how I am,” notes one, and the others all echo some variation on this.   He realizes they are right, he doesn’t really care.  He thinks of parties he attended instead of going to the funerals of close friends and family members.  He sees a pattern of genuine disinterest in himself.  He then has that moment of clarity when he realizes he really doesn’t care that he’s a psychopath.

I’ve found myself wondering lately, as the frail bark of my program, kept aloft by optimism and faith, sits almost abandoned now on the seaweed covered rocks, if I perhaps possess something like this trait.  In a year of operation I have not recruited a single reliable ally.   It will require a piece of luck I am hard-pressed to imagine at the moment to move things in a good direction.   If the next stop of this successful program is the end of the line, it’s no mystery that I find myself a bit distressed as I try to imagine Plan B.

Take the sad facts of the case.  I didn’t want to exploit young people who might be interested in working in the program by making them “interns” or volunteers.  I was determined to pay them for what I (alone, apparently) consider important work.  I paid them generously out of a small donated fund that is now almost gone.   These payments did not result in loyalty.  

One assistant “forgot” to tell me she couldn’t be at the last session, even as we made plans to discuss it, even as she hugged the kids for the first and last time.  I was touched to see her getting hugs, since she often complained that some of the kids were mean to her.  I had no idea they were saying goodbye, since she “forgot” to mention to me that she wouldn’t be back until an email a day or two before the last session.   Another assistant didn’t show up for the final session, nor did he contact me before or after, and another was 40 minutes late for two out of four sessions over the summer.  My grant writer has vanished from the face of the earth.

“Maybe I am a psychopath or something,” I muse to myself, because there needs to be an explanation for what otherwise seems like plain bad luck.  “Maybe people sense that I genuinely don’t give a shit about them, are only using them to try to make my program succeed.  Maybe they realize that they are only tools, and they resent it.  As much as I try to make nice, they see through it and realize they are dealing with a psychopath.”

Sekhnet comforts me when I raise this troubling idea.  “You’re an outlier,” she says soothingly, scratching my back tenderly.  By this, of course, she means I am that rare psychopath who is neither dangerous nor effective.