Category Archives: Gratitude

Nice Hitler Mustache

I’d rather just have a small goatee, like an old hipster with a scruffy shadow on my chin.  I’ve never really liked mustaches, it’s just that the goatee without it makes me look like former Surgeon General C. Everett Coop, or an Amish man.  Sekhnet also said like a trout, I think, though it may have been a catfish.

So the mustache is a compromise to begin with.  I don’t like it bushy, like Stalin’s, don’t like it in my food, I don’t like the sides hanging down like a mocking Mexican bandit’s slit eyed mustache.  I blow my nose a lot, so I can’t have the mustache coming all the way up to my nostrils; I carve a horizontal snot channel into every mustache I’ve grown in recent years, to prevent nasal matter from landing in the mustache.  

I barely tolerate having a mustache, is the thing.  I think Django’s mustache is cool, so I model mine a little after his.  Sekhnet’s father always wore a trim, white mustache, and made it look natty, and he gave me some good tips on keeping it trimmed, so I do.  My godfather, Volbear, always had a close cropped mustache, the better to abrade the tender bellies of young cousins he’d hold upside down as they squealed.   Sekhnet likes to scratch various parts of her face with a short napped brush of a chin beard, and the cropped, trimmed mustache goes with this.

In trimming the mustache, to keep it as short as the beard, I sometimes inadvertently clip it a little too close on one side of my mouth, then I have to trim the other side to match.  It is only a matter of a few days until this grows in again, but sometimes, during that time, I see my friend Maya.

“Nice Hitler mustache,” says Maya pleasantly.  I used to try to explain how mine is more like Jimi’s mustache, how it doesn’t go all the way up to the bottom of the nostrils.  I always felt like showing her a picture of Hitler to show her how vastly different my mustache is from Hitler’s.  

On the other hand, she makes a good point.  I thank her, she smiles.    

She’s right, when you put it that way.  Why wear even the ghost of Hitler’s mustache?

The only trouble is, I trim my mustache much more often than I see Maya.  Have to start checking in with her more regularly.

Blues for Sammy Worst

two and a half years of mostly iPad images presented in a semi-snappy 3:49

Blues for Sammy 2

sorry, boys and girls, I had to take the link to the movie down.  Too much personal content up there for any unscrupulous content collector to collect and pass off as original.   I will put the soundtrack up for  music collectors to enjoy and for the more unscrupulous to claim as their own odd composition.

The Long Slog

I had the image of pushing a heavy, almost round rock up a steep hill. This is how my project often feels to me.  A friend told me that even if this Sisyphean image was accurate, thinking so was not a helpful way to imagine a difficult undertaking that requires patiently applied perseverance.

“Why not think of it instead as rolling a hoop down the road?” he said.

I did, and it was a huge help.  At first.  I have found, as time goes on, that the hoop is not completely round, that its edges are sharp, that it weighs as much as the rock I’d been pushing, that the road is gutted and long, and devilishly inclined, that cars now whiz by, often very close by, and rarely miss spraying a plume of filthy water.

“What else would you rather be doing?”  I ask myself.  I have no better answer than this, truly nothing engages my imagination and my various skills more.  So I continue slogging the long slog.  Strength to all of our arms!

We take our laughs where we can get them

There was a woman, a very good looking young woman, actually, who had a small business running after-school programs and seemed to grasp the educational and group dynamics potential of the student-run animation workshop.   When I increased the price to about double what the first after-school program was paying, she barely hesitated before agreeing to pay it.   Her assistant was a great and supportive fan of the workshop, she urged me to organize the little mini-animation festival I put on for the kids and their parents.  One day a week or so before the festival the usually cheerful assistant came in and told me her boss had died the previous day.  Cancer she never revealed to anyone she worked with had ended her life at 34.  Her business winked out of existence a few months later.

Fast forward a few challenging months and, temporarily (or permanently) out of public school programming, I am conducting a four session workshop for women with chronic serious diseases.  Some are in recovery from cancer, others show up straight from chemo, some show up once and not again, others make half the sessions.  A core of four is there every week.  These first time animators all produced very cool animation, worked beautifully together, got more and more demanding about seeing the day’s rough cut before they left, high fived each other at the end.   One woman in particular, Liz, was a great innovator.  She came in with brilliant and ingeniously different ideas week after week.  Her animation for the four sessions is here. 

She was excited about assisting at the recent Stevenson workshop, the first I’ve done since last summer.  The day before the workshop she was hit by the flu and couldn’t make it, she expressed her sincere regrets.  I assured her there’d be more sessions, promised she’d be at the next one, whenever I could arrange it.  A few days later I sent her the clip from the Stevenson session, telling her how difficult it had been and that she hadn’t missed much fun.  I didn’t hear back.  I wrote again a few days later, telling her I hoped she was up and around and that I’d be sending her the new website soon.

When the website was done I sent her the link, since she had grasped the idea so well and run with the ball so enthusiastically, once she’d had her head down on the table for the first forty minutes or so of each session.  I emailed her once more after not hearing back, and was beginning to fear the worst for this talented woman I barely know.  I have gleaned that she is living with cancer, and that it is not easy living.

When I got a smart phone I texted her that I’d joined the 21st century, hoped she was over the flu and feeling better and added this picture.

Are You OK ?

Several days passed, and hearing nothing from her, I imagined the worst.  A gloomy thought twisted its way into my head: this workshop is the accursed kiss of death to the rare women who really get its potential and find it compelling.  

Then tonight, at 1:35 a.m. a tiny bell in my pocket sounds, and she’s texted:

Congratulations!  Sorry for the delayed reply.  I’m so so happy flowers are growing (emoticon of red flower) Rain makes it happen (yellow umbrella) Happy Spring!

I wrote back:

Thanks.  Good to hear from you — and happy Spring to you, too!

I hope you don’t have any objection to this wonderful bit of work being here (and I sent her the link)

3:42 a.m.  I’m glad you sent this.  I’m very upset and can’t sleep.  Seeing this animation was uplifting.  Thank you . … (emoticon of girl holding up hand)

3:45 a.m.  I’d share this on my Facebook (emoticon of two people holding hands) except one thing.  If it’s not too much bother, I’d like an edit…

Here I had an actual laugh.  A small one, yes, but genuine (nobody here to impress with a fake laugh) and, like I said up top, I’ll take me larfs where I can get ’em.

3:49  the part with the butterflies has the cat jumping in. (Cat head emoticon)  At one point its head changes to a dog.  That’s not my taste (slightly disgusted looking emoticon)

3:52  I’d post your page without hesitation if that part were eliminated (a series of emoticons animating a round yellow face bursting into a laugh)

3:55  Thanks for replacing maddening thoughts with delightful ones.

She made my day with that one.

4:08  I enjoyed Jesse’s project!  (gold star emoticon)  The patterns in the beginning are well done.  The tumbling guy has fun hair.  (emoticon of a thumb up)

4:14   I will try to sleep and think of (emoticon of rowboat, I think) being inside (angel fish emoticon) animation (some kind of water emoticon).  Thank you. (emoticon of little angel head with halo).

Fooling Myself?

The young therapist told me today to add some daily “mastery and pleasure activities” to my daily schedule.  These are fun interludes that remind us of what we love and what we have accomplished.  Apart from not really keeping a daily schedule, I told her as far as a satisfying mastery activity I have this daily writing session that ends with a press of the publish button.  

I am always satisfied and feeling somewhat better when I press the button.  Not that every post is a gem, or even worth more than a cursory glance, some may go to disturbing places, but the exercise of getting the post ready for the “public” is something I’ve mastered.  By the time I hit “post” the writing is as clear and easy to read as I can make it.  At its best this blahg is my higher self giving good counsel to my regular day to day self, reminding me of who I am trying to be, how far I have come, how far I still have to go.

A few weeks ago an old friend wondered why I spend so much time tapping these posts (it’s really less than an hour a day, I would think) and suggested it is far healthier to interact socially than to live in my mind as much as I do these days.  He’s right about the social interaction– this online social universe is actually a nightmare world of mostly disconnection and narcissism.  I explained to him that the illusion of a social life is not why I write here.    A week or two later he read a couple of posts that he admired, that touched him.  He wrote to single them out.  

I gave him the back story of one, Listening, and described the inspiration, a fellow very active on social media who anxiously reads the blahg whenever we have some kind of trouble (this latest round goes back months, including several long, patient, useless discussions about the issues, as with F before the end, and there are several posts related to it).  He was also struck by the one about madness from a few months back, which was also inspired by my faltering friendship with this same chap.  

The night after the second seder, as I waited for sleep to come, I had  a choice: spend an hour figuring out how to send the fellow the precise kiss-off he earned and deserved (a waste of time and energy), or trying to get to the deeper question involved — understand and digest the harm done to me and process my feelings about it.  It is an important exercise, understanding my feelings and getting past the hurt to react as nonviolently as I am able.

Writing made me think about it more deeply, make connections, allowed me to take something positive out of the otherwise distasteful experience.  Looking beyond the personal to the larger principle involved was helpful to me, as was the exercise of making it clear to a reader, and in the process, more clear to myself.  I think the piece could be helpful to others as well in laying out the human issues involved– the damage of not being listened to, the fruitlessness of one-sided relationships for the person on the wrong side.

 
I understand that this fellow was rarely, if ever, listened to, except by me at times.  I appreciate that things are not black and white, that he has fine qualities, a sense of humor, decency and so forth.  Still, individual acts and failures to act, particularly when they come one after another, form a pattern that speaks much louder than promises and conditional apologies.  Hitler had it rough, but if I had a time machine I’d go back and break every bone in his body if I could.   Maybe go back earlier and make sure his dear mother had an abortion.

My friend and I, I hardly needed to remind him, had it rough growing up, but we help when we can and try not to hurt when we can’t help.  We don’t build a fanatical political party and death camps and all that other fucked up shit.  We don’t leave people we care about hanging. To those who can’t help being hurtful, good riddance.

 
Our first duty is to preserve ourselves, an extra challenge for those of us who were forced to learn on our own to become our own protectors.  Sometimes quietly subtracting an unwitting underminer is the most positive thing we can do for ourselves on a given day.  

Black and White Thinking

My father, a lifelong black and white thinker, lamented on his death bed that he had not seen and appreciated all the colors and gradations of human experience.  “I think how much richer my life would have been,” he mused in a voice that was near the end.

I did not at that moment have any feeling besides sympathy for him as he went.  It was one of those times when everything aligned correctly and we were able to finally have the conversation he had never been capable of.  It’s not clear how much of a long-term blessing it was for me, though it felt enormous at the time.  I’m sure it was a blessing to him, to be able to unburden himself to a life-long adversary he’d created, a suddenly former adversary who was now gently helping him go.  

I think of my father first whenever I hear the term Black and White Thinking.  Those words are on a sheet the CBT therapist gave me during the last session.  Ten ways people suffer and ten ways each form of, what is essentially deleterious cognition, can be changed for the better by properly reframing them.  I don’t know how much faith I have in this whole system, though the value of going to this session every week, working myself out of my torpor, seems beyond question.   I face many obstacles in a possibly impossible undertaking I have staked everything on, but I am facing them one at a time again.  Waiting for the mapped redesigned website to load at wehearyou.net so I can return to my marketing and networking efforts.

My father’s black and white thinking arose from the facts of the world he was born into.  His mother hated his father.  She had done her duty with him and eight or nine months later their first child was stillborn.   She lay with him again.   The second child, my father, was a huge baby.  She was a tiny, furious woman.  She cursed him before she even saw him.   Once he could stand she began whipping him in the face for what felt to her like a baby’s defiance.  

I have to get in the shower and down to my session in a moment, but I leave you with this excellent TED talk I heard last night.  It was about the long-term changes in a human mind and body produced by childhood trauma.  The chemicals that are available to us in a moment of danger, things that give you a surge of strength and concentration to fight or flee, constantly flood the child who must be on guard against, say, a whip in the face from mom.   This does damage that is hardwired into the human body.   Listen to this pediatrician.  The talk is fifteen minutes long and well worth your time.