This Agression Will Not Stand

Let's set aside the obnoxious old saw that it takes more muscles to frown than smile and admit that, in situations that are frustrating or unpleasant, the path of least resistance is to be awful.  It's a hard thing to admit and most of us have the blinders on when it comes to our own tendency to be ungracious, but it's true and human and something that requires vigilance instead of denial.

The past few weeks at work have been particularly hellacious, an impossible numbers game wherein hundreds of people descend on our five-person operation with everything they own and, owing to a poor understanding of geometry, physics, and the notion that the world doesn't revolve around them, become enraged to find that we can't fit the astonishing pile of consumer goods they've deemed necessary for a weekend getaway on a boat immediately.

Look, I'm no angel where this is concerned.  No one ever thinks they're the one being unreasonable, and I'd like to imagine that I can claim the high road. Realistically, though, it takes an extraordinary amount of energy not to trade snark for snark, raised voice for raised voice, veiled insult for veiled insult.  I try. Really hard.  But while I'm mostly successful in not shooting first, I struggle not to fire back in kind and when I dig in for a fight, I am not fun.

That said, being on the receiving end of these shenanigans and being responsible for young seasonal employees who are still learning the operation but who are smart, courteous, and hard-working, and watching bitter hags having a bad day just eviscerate these kids makes me realize what a lot of assholes there are in this world.  And now that I'm more conscious of it, I see it everywhere that customer service happens: in stores, at the movies, in restaurants...Ev. Ery. Where.  Customers are awful, entitled know-it-alls.  Sure, sure, there are times when things are legitimately bad and someone needs to do a better job, but just look around and see how often someone in a line near you goes from 0 to subhuman because a grocery clerk needs a price check or won't accept their Canadian currency or asks them to wait a moment while they put out the fire that's just erupted in the trash can.

So the thing is, it takes a little bit of decorum, a little bit of restraint to overcome the junkfood-style satisfaction of being awful in the moment but it's well worth it because in the long run it's kind of soul-crushing.  Or it should be, if you're even kind of a good person.

Am I a broken record?  Maybe.  But if the easiest way to be is awful, it's worth reminding myself and others to be diligent about NOT being so as often as possible.

It's 4 a.m. and I'm about to go to work.  Today I will behave as though every customer is an alien new to earth and in need of guidance.  Today I will muster an appreciative laugh for lame jokes just to honor the spirit of positivity.  Today I'm bringing cupcakes to work just because.

Ready? Go!

One Man's Crazy is Another Man's Wholesale Cultural Condemnation

I've been indulging in a meditation lately on relativism, vis a vis the world going to hell in a handbasket.  We were doing okay when one man's trash was another man's treasure, but I'm talking about bigger stakes: One man's human rights  (or two men's, as the case may be) are another man's abomination. One man's social responsibility is another man's wasteful spending.  One man's holy war is another man's crime against humanity. You get the idea.  The irony here is that everyone involved is pretty certain of their position.  In the mathematics of social ideology, Perceived Objective Truth + Perceived Objective Truth = No Functional Objective Truth.

It's really not all that noteworthy.  I don't think there's anyone who doesn't have some kind of narrative to explain why they do the things they do, whether they're professors or garbage men or 4-years-old or schizophrenic.  When confronted with the suggestion that they've acted badly, they can offer what is, for them, a perfectly reasonable explanation of why they did it.  The logic may be faulty and/or the moral judgment may not sit well with a segment of the population (or in some cases, community standards), but by and large, people are doing things for a reason, and in their minds, at least, a good one.

Given that militant commitment to subjective morality is the name of the game in the twin cesspools of  politics and public discourse, this headline in today's New York Times gave me pause: Lawyer Says Suspect in Norway Attacks is Insane.  Gosh, lawyer, you think?

I'm not the first person to point out that the reception of this suspect relative to other terrorism suspects.  I've already read a number of op eds and blog entries and facebook-repost zingers noting that the same mostly conservative, mostly Christian folks eager to define terrorism as the purview of (inherently-evil) Muslims have managed to give Anders Breivik a religious hall pass.  He may be a Christian, but not a good Christian, and isn't their denunciation of his acts proof that real Christians are the standard-bearers of moral righteousness? [Insert tired argument that moderate Muslims "aren't speaking out against terrorism"]

Well, gang, I hate to bust up the xeno-/teleo-phobic party, but no. Just like I don't expect English majors to apologize for the Virginia Tech shooter because they share intellectual interests, I don't expect religious communities, nations, or other cultural subsets held together a tenuous group of shared characteristics to apologize when one of their number loses it.  Whatever identifiers were in play before the attacks, there's really only one that actually defines this guy, and his lawyer hit the nail on the head.  Breivik is insane. In my mind, that doesn't let him off the hook, it just means that pundits on all sides need to stop trying to make any meaningful points about terrorism, causation, religion or any other pet subject based on the actions of one cracked egg. 

This guy probably had a lot of things in common with a lot of very disparate folks.  Those people didn't gun down children.  Let's not pretend we can extrapolate things about Christians, or, say, Norwegians, based on one who did.

Of course in the context of legal proceedings, the definition of insanity is itself a little whacked.  I'm neither a lawyer nor a psychiatrist, but my understanding is that insanity, as determined by court-appointed experts, is a condition in which the perpetrator was unaware that their actions were wrong.

In my mind, this is where things go off the rails a bit:  The question isn't really whether they were aware that their actions were wrong (which suggests an objective, universal standard), but whether they were aware that other people would judge their actions to be wrong.  It's one of the reasons that the insanity defense is so seldom successful:  no matter what deluded logic makes a person feel vindicated in committing a heinous act, most of the time they understand that their convictions are at odds with society at large.

There's a lot a wingnuts with a martyr-complex and optimistic lawyers.  Generally, if someone is caught murdering people, they'll do their level best to convince a jury and the world at large that their motive excuses an act they understand is morally repugnant to pretty much everybody.  It's a tiny, tiny group of people who are a) living independently in society and b) so delusional that they honestly don't understand what the problem is.

The outcome in insanity cases is a bit cockamamie as well.  Pleading insanity means accepting a sentence in a mental institution regardless of the jury's findings.  If you're found not guilty by reason of insanity, you are institutionalized for an indefinite sentence until it's determined that you're no longer a threat.  You might also be found "guilty, but insane" in which case you will receive a sentence of pre-determined length like a regular prison sentence, but serve it in a mental institution.

Aside from the penalties, insanity has some galling semantic implications for victims' families.  When someone is not guilty due to insanity, they are "not responsible" for their actions.  I'm just speculating, but I bet that tidbit makes for some salty wounds.

Maybe there's a good reason to keep the definition of insanity as stringent as it is.  I guess it means that if if you're willing to fess to it and receive treatment regardless of the outcome, some worthwhile goal is achieved.  But, and maybe I'm crazy myself, but it seems to me that if you kill someone and believe that you were right to do it something in your brain is not okay.  The DSM-IV is a wonderful, nuanced volume.  Here are some of the ways the DSM-IV describes sociopathy: "failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviours as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest," "Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another."

At the end of the day, this is just another weird cultural judgment call: One man's dangerous criminal is another man's dangerous mental patient.  And maybe my lefty bias is showing, but if the purpose of the penal system is rehabilitation (and despite all evidence, ostensibly it is.  I'm speaking now of the U.S.), then warehousing people who are, from a clinical perspective very obviously damaged in an environment where they will receive little or no treatment from overworked and under-trained staff is an embarrassment to the social ideals we purport to have. I'm not saying that we should fill psychiatric centers with violent criminals, but I absolutely believe we should be providing a whole lot of psychiatric treatment to violent criminals.  Particularly in cases where there is a likelihood that the prisoner in question will re-enter society, we have an obligation to them and to the public at large to address the issues that caused them to offend in the first place.  I can almost guarantee that those issues will not be that they are of a particular faith, race, gender, political party or sexual orientation.  So what say we stop sniping at each other and think about how we identify actual risks, prevent actual casualties and deal with the actual, individual perpetrators instead of strawmen.

Here's where the sprawly expanses of this post comes together: In order for a society to function, there has to be some common ground.  And there is but we've become increasingly fractious and fractured, so focused on the things that define us separately,  and so intolerant of perceived and actual differences that we're in danger of losing our identity.  It shouldn't be hard for us to agree that people who commit mass murder are sick, sick individuals.  It shouldn't be hard for us to refrain from using national and international tragedy to frame pot shots at ideological opposites or to hop on a soap box on those occasions except to express solidarity with victims and their families or seek partners in working toward an end to these kinds of atrocities.  Instead of chasing down metaphorical escaped horses and blaming each other for leaving the door open, we ought to agree that we all want to keep the horses in the barn and work together to make it happen.

Night Owl Jamboree

We keep some pretty weird hours.

I sometimes go to work at 4:30 a.m. and sometimes at 2 p.m.  B doesn't work.  I've learned to be something approximating a morning person when necessary, but ultimately, given my druthers, I'd stay up all night and get a million things done.  And these days I often do.  It makes those early mornings a little harder to fit into my schedule without cat naps here and there, but that's the price you pay for freedom, I guess.

I've referred to the woman down the hall as Scary Neighbor, but most of the time we refer to her as Bad Nana, Mean Nana, or, if she's been particularly awful in our direction, Bitch Nana.  From what I've gathered, she cares for (and I mean this in the very loosest sense of the word) her granddaughter, who is roughly 4 or 5, and, based on my interactions with her in the hallway, smart and sassy as all get out.

This makes me incredibly sad, because Bad Nana is the very last person I would put in charge of anyone's well-being, least of all a child's.

In our late night world, we make music and talk philosophy and blog and cook and generally live a happy life of creativity, terrible jokes and awesome food. And then Bad Nana came and added the hobby of listening to Bad Nana hold court among her weird harem of 20-something hoodlums and 40-something, generally intoxicated African men.  In general, she has nothing good to say about any of them when they're not around.  And she's got some pretty ignorant things to say about her Muslim friends, and you'll have to trust me on that, because I wouldn't repeat them for a million dollars.

This evening I decided to reclaim a tupperware container of beans that had been sadly neglected.  It is a sad but true fact that vegetable proteins rot with a furious stench worthy of their animal counterparts (a word to the wise: if your tofu turns, just toss the container. Seriously.  I've literally never encountered anything as foul as rotten tofu).  So I dumped it in the trash and took the trash out.

Around from the back of the building came one of Bad Nana's older-type friends who greeted me with vigor and attempted to make small talk.  The last time I exchanged pleasantries with one of Bad Nana's friends it ended with, "Aw, you gettin' cold over there...I see you, girl."  It took me until I was in the apartment and had put the grocery bags down to realize that he was referring to my nipples at which point I considered going back outside to throw down.  Instead, I adopted a policy of icy avoidance of the whole lot.

So when I found myself there with Cheery Drunk Guy, I began to consider my options.  He obviously wanted to get in the building, and I, obviously, did not want to let him in behind me.  Happily or not, it turned out that in his sojourn behind the building, he'd managed to wake Bad Nana.  Bad Nana was not happy.  And when Bad Nana ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.

She stormed out the door.

"Do you know what time it is? Don't DO this to me. For real.  It's motherfuckin' three o'clock in the morning...who the fuck's that? [I waved a little] Oh...For real, what the fuck do you want at motherfuckin' three in the morning?"

I was really hoping here that she'd just relent and let him in and make a path for me to scurry back to my happy little world, but instead they sat down.  I was running out of ways to drag out the task of putting out the trash.

"Seriously, yo, do you know who's awake at three o'clock in the morning?  Motherfuckin' crackheads.  The only people awake at three o'clock in the morning are motherfuckin' crackheads. For real.  I finally got to sleep after four days awake and you fuckin' wake me up..."

I finally just sucked it up and excused myself to get past them.  They stayed on the steps dropping motherfuckin' F-bombs for another half-hour.

And I went back to my cocoon and made a baked tempeh salad to take to work tomorrow night while B nerded out on the new sampler we got for pennies.

The number of times the phrase, "It's a small world," has come in the past week has been astronomical.  It's funny that people use it almost exclusively to demonstrate how many ties there are between disparate people at great geographical distances, or in unexpected circumstances.  And I've used it a million times myself. Portland, Maine, is practically the capital of the Small World phenomenon.

It's interesting, then, that we rarely note the opposite, which is undoubtedly more common.  The life that Bad Nana leads has virtually nothing to do with mine, despite our shared accommodations and physical proximity.  The same could be said for Gordon, the elderly fellow who used to live across the hall and could often be found holding a sign asking for change at the corner of State and Forest, "Homeless, please help."  Whatever Bad Nana thinks she knows about crackheads, Gordon was one, and he was in bed by 9 every night.

The parade of coincidence and serendipity that triggers our "Small World" excitement is definitely enthralling and more than a little magical, but I'm way more intrigued with the flip side, the people I pass on the street every day, the clerks in the store, the tenants of buildings I pass all the time that I've never met.  That we are capable of encountering people all the time and know nothing about them is astounding.  I think there's a sort of instantaneous, animal sorting that happens, "Like me, not like me...not...like...like...not."  It's really a kind of alarmingly disengaged way to go about our lives. Because whether the assessment is "like" or "not like," the result is the same:  we never really consider the people around us as distinct individuals.  Unless someone is singled out for fame or infamy, we tend not to bother.

If that sounds like a judgment, it's because it is.  But from a practical standpoint, I know it would take a huge amount of energy to think differently, given the number of people we encounter every day.

There's something (or several somethings) swimming around in here, but the sky's pink and Bad Nana's cussing on the stoop and it's bed time.

Marriage Ain't the Only Game in Town

Marriage is in the air.  If you're into wedding extravaganzas of the traditional variety, June is a month more or less synonymous with these blessed events (which, given the weather is okay if you're getting hitched in a church and partying in the ballroom at the Ramada,...for the married-oceanside-under-the-great-blue-sky set, it's a recipe for disaster).  More recently and specifically, the legalization of gay union in the state of New York has put everyone in a matrimonial state of mind.  I've spent a lot of time thinking about marriage.

I've spent so much time thinking about it, that I think this is going to have to be a multi-post discussion.  Here's part the first: Marriage Ain't the Only Game in Town (some thoughts on our collective obsession with the ring).  Coming soon to a blog near you: Red Herrings and Elephants in the Room (Legalizing gay marriage has nothing to do with marriage: discuss). And finally: Both Sides Now (well, you'll see). Without further ado:

A couple of weeks ago, a childhood friend of mine whose blog I like very much, despite what I suspect is a very wide divide between our worldviews and experiences since the days when we built impromptu boats explored abandoned buildings, wrote a piece about "happily ever after."  In it, she laments that the popular imagination is enthralled with stories of courtship, but usually loses interest once the happy couple walks off into the sunset, and we rarely get to see what happens on that stroll.  The gist of it is that although it's a lot less sexy to think about the ups and downs of a long-term commitment, THAT journey deserves celebration as much or more so than the happy "how we met" horseshit that most people are excited about.

I'm with her, as far as that goes.  As pretty much anyone who's every interacted with other human beings, platonically or romantically, knows, infatuation is easy, but the kind of dedication, patience and, yes, love required to make a relationship work over time is exceptionally demanding and sometimes really not that fun at all. I'll suggest that it takes a lifetime of hard work just to understand, accept and appreciate our forever-changing selves.  That anyone manages to do the same for and with another person is nothing short of miraculous.  Raise the roof for any couple with the emotional largess to navigate time and space together for  great length of time.

Where I part ways with my friend, however, is where she equates this kind of commitment exclusively with marriage.  She values marriage so highly that she places cohabitation outside of marriage alongside  the escalating divorce rate as lamentable conditions undermining meaningful long-term commitments. This drives me bonkers on just about a million levels.  Here are some:

• As I noted in the comments section of her post, there are plenty of people who exemplify the most virtuous behaviors attributed to government-legitimized couples who are either legally excluded from or voluntarily opt out of that institution. Let's leave aside for a moment the sometimes superhuman effort demanded of gay couples who've had to negotiate their long-term relationships not just on a personal level, but on a public, political level as well (activist or not, being in an open gay relationship still reads as a bold statement to much of the public at large).

• I can cite dozens of instances where people previously married have moved on since their divorce with a new partner -- one they haven't married.  More notably, they have no intention of marrying again, but these relationships have, by and large, outlasted the ones in which they pledged "'til death do us part."

• At the risk of reading too much into it, there's a subtle implication here  that somehow the public proclamation of commitment is what makes it valid.  In other words, it's insufficient to have a monogamous, mutually satisfying, long-term relationship. It's just playing house until you've laid your heart's intimate depths open for public acknowledgement and judgment.

We are a culture that loves the narrative of marriage as a rite of passage.  For most young Americans, whether their plans for the future involve being an astronaut or a firefighter or a secretary or a ditchdigger, the plan for their personal lives is obvious: meet someone, fall in love and get married.  The subtext is that this is what people do when they're grown ups.  The tandem assumption (although the stigma has certainly lessened over time) is that if you don't do this, or if you divorce, you are some combination of lazy, immature, unserious, and/or morally bankrupt.  I would posit, however, that the real heart of the problem is not careless, unconsidered divorce, but careless, unconsidered marriage.

If getting married is the last piece of your relationship puzzle and both parties share a vision of what that means, great.  If remaining unmarried floats your boat, great. The bottom line is that we as a society benefit from happy, thoughtful people cultivating happy, thoughtful relationships (particularly is there's a shared vision of children in those relationships) and that's not something that happens because of elaborate traditional ceremonies or legal contracts. It happens when people make reasoned decisions about their life together and build that life on a foundation of trust, respect, and love.