This morning I sent an e-mail to my wife about the Survivor pool here at work. She likes to participate so I picked a name out of the hat for her too. As the e-mail was written, misconstruing ‘hot’ for ‘hat’ made it sound like I thought her player was hot.
When she teased me about this I had a bit of an over-reaction. After a few minutes of going at it I was able to talk about how it felt to be teased as a child. And worse, to have my parents response be, ’to just ignore it.’ I grew up feeling like I was somehow worthy of being teased, and that there was nothing I could do about it. Furthermore, I should never have any feelings about it afterwards, I should be able to just ignore it and move on to other things.
I quickly learned not to share stories about my having been teased as I wasn’t ever given a place to explore and vent the hurt associated with the tease. I turn all of my hurt feelings inward, and over time this has produced a couple of behaviors that aren’t good for me.
I have some anger about being teased, and I use this anger to shutdown people who tease me. I make it so uncomfortable for them that they move on to other people. Where this hurts me is that I end up feeling cut off and alone, since no one wants to be around someone who is so nasty all the time.
It has also made me wary of sharing bit of my life with others, as I am afraid of being teased. This also leaves me feeling cut off and alone.
Only by facing my issues about having been teased and never having dealt with the aftermath of that teasing, will I be able to let go of the anger and wariness that I developed to survive. Only by giving voice to the old hurts and pains that little Mark experienced can I get rid of these old, and now toxic, emotions.
This is too good to pass up: http://www.ooblick.com/text/tomordor/
Michele and I had a excellent discussion this evening. It started out being about our upcoming mortgage refinance. Both of us are feeling a little apprehensive about this and we needed to air out our feelings. This is only the third mortgage process we have been through.
Buying groceries happens every week so we are comfortable with the process. Buying a car is something we have done more than a couple of times, so we feel fairly secure in that situation as well. Buying, or refinancing, a house is not an everyday occurrence. We both feel a bit out of our depth. Talking about things that have a horizon that extends out 30 years forced us to consider our future.
Where are going? What do we want when we get there? Originally when we moved here our plan was to stay roughly 6 to 9 years. Preparing to refinance the house has made us question our plans. It helped me to refocus on what I want out of my life.
I want to be able to live in mild comfort, and share the remainder of my days with Michele. Where that happens is less important than its happening. Seen in the light of this goal, the stress of refinancing for some temporary financial relief seems less something to get excited about and more something to just move past.
Today, Michele pointed me to this article about the current situation that exits between the Western world, and the Islamic world. It is very important to read this with an open mind. This is the most coherent and cohesive description of the underpinnings to the attacks against this country, and the gulf of misunderstanding that now prevents us from resolving the situation those attacks created.
This is a Religious War by Andrew Sullivan.
Periodically when we clean out our refrigerator we discover various tupperware containers whose contents have become biology science experiments. I spent a couple of hours this morning cleaning out my emotional deep freeze and ridding myself of a particularly smelly bit of emotional tupperware.
In talking to Michele about some of the issues we are both dealing with these days I discovered, quite to my dismay, that I am willing to emotionally manipulate her into taking action where I am afraid to act. This typically happens when I am faced with authority figures. Growing up I was never given a real chance to face authority figures on my own. My parents, through the best of intentions, often stepped in and dealt with situations I had created. Over time I came to expect that someone else would do the heavy lifting, or at least go first down the path.
In dealing with my family now, as and adult, I still fall into the habit of letting someone else go first. When that doesn’t happen I try and manipulate the situation so that I don’t have to be first. This is not something I am overly proud of, and my hope is now that I see it clearly I will be able to stop myself from doing it again.
The process to unearth this putrid bit of tupperware was exhausting. I came into work afterwards and I have felt almost feverish every since I arrived. My thoughts are sharp enough, but my response times are dulled and slow, and physically I feel like I’ve been tossed over a waterfall in a barrel. I did manage to complete a rather lengthy and tedious task on my to-do list so I feel good about the day. But now I am thinking I’d be taking better care of myself if I just went home and took a nap.
One of the few pieces of software that I miss from Windows was the multi-protocol chat client Trillian. This free gem allowed me to be simultaneously connected to the 4 major chat services: AOL, MSN, Yahoo, and ICQ. Having been an early chat adopter (ICQ: 292099) I have enjoyed using instant messaging for several years now.
Trillian was nice because it worked. Sure there were skins and nifty non-chat related extras included, but at the end of the day it was a solid IM chat client.
On Mac OS X there are two multi-protocol chat clients: Fire and Proteus. I have tried both, and found both to be lacking. Fire has promise, but it doesn’t support any kind of proxy connection ability so I am unable to use it from my work location. Also it has seen no releases or improvements in months.
Proteus has some very nice features, including a tabbed approach to handling multiple chats in one window. Version 2.x didn’t support proxy connections, but the recently released version 3.0 did. However it is a partial solution supporting HTTPS only, and not HTTP. Again, I am unable to connect from my work location.
I think the real problem is that Proteus is almost good enough for all people for all situations. Developers who might want to develop a competing product would have to go a long way to equal what Proteus already has in place. And without competition, Proteus is motivated to step up their production rate.
Proteus would be the tool if they would refocus on pure chat functionality first, and adding extras later. Just because the developer is intimidated by the complexities of HTTP proxy coding is no reason to skip this vital component of a truly good chat tool.
There maybe a bright spot on the horizon in the form of the 2.0 release of Adium. The developers there have a good AIM clone going, and have expressed a desire to include gaim (the open source multi-chat tool) in their code base. Now if they just would add proxy support, they would have the ultimate Mac OS multi-protocol chat tool.
When I was in college my favorite comic strips were ‘Doonesbury’ and ‘Bloom County.’ It appears that Opus may once again grace the Sunday comics page again.
I can hardly wait.
“You can lead a yak to water, but you can’t teach an old dog to make a silk purse out of a pig in a poke” — Opus Penguin
A few weeks ago my wife’s copy of Camino became unstable and she was forced to use Mozilla Firebird instead. About two weeks ago I tackled this problem one more time. I stumbled across instructions on the Camino web site detailing how to remove Camino entirely from your hard drive. They are as follows:
Uninstall( hidden just above the documentation link ) To get rid of all the files that Camino created, do the following: ( a ) Drag the Camino icon to the trash ( b ) Drag the /Library/Application Support/Chimera folder to the trash
Since we already had exported her bookmarks I deleted the files in question.
Then, I downloaded version 0.7 (still the current version) and installed it. Everything works fine once again.
Hopefully someday soon we’ll see a 0.8, or 0.9 release and then a 1.0 version of this fine browser.
Today while I was reviewing our bank statement online I noticed a charge from my former hosting company. I thought I had cancelled the last account I had there when I transferred my business domain to my current host. I was therefore upset about the $19.95 charge I was seeing in the register.
I called the company, and after spending a glorious 35 minutes on hold, was connected with “Brad”. Brad was able to figure out that I had been billed an extra month on the business domain, but that was $24.95. He couldn’t find anything that resembled the $19.95 charge I was seeing. He suggestion was to call my bank and try to have the charge stopped at that end.
So I called the bank, credit union actually. The hold time there was less than 10 seconds, but they weren’t any help at all. It seems that debt card transactions are beyond the bank’s purview. The unhelpful woman there suggested I call the company who was billing me. This was the last straw in a contentious relationship with the credit union that has stretched back almost three years now. We were already planning on taking our business elsewhere with the arrival of the next paycheck, having the bank refuse to help me with this matter just cinched it. I told the woman that I was very unhappy with the lack of help or support, especially since I was a member of the credit union, and that with the arrival of my next check she could expect us to close this account forever. She said to have a nice day and hung up.
After having and setting aside several retaliation fantasies I decided to call the hosting company one more time. The new guy was much sharper and used the credit card number to track any charges. None were found. Then I remembered that once upon a time we started to setup a web site for my wife. I thought I had cancelled it long ago. I knew that the domain registration had expired. When I asked him about that domain, bingo! He found a $19.95 charge to my wife’s debit card number, which bills to the same checking account. D’Oh!
The account has been cancelled for certain this time. Hopefully I’ve remembered all the domains I’ve played with over the years and cancelled all the inactive ones.
We are still going to leave the bank. Even though it wasn’t their problem I expected to get better service and support. Rude customer service just isn’t tolerable in this day and age.
My earliest memory is of Christmas. I must have been about two-years old. When I described the scene for my parents years later they were astounded that I could remember something from such an early age. To my knowledge there are no pictures of the things I described so I think these are actual memories.
Most of my childhood is remembered in my head somewhere. Odd things will cause me to remember something from long ago. Mostly these memories are images only, there is no sound or feeling attached to the memories. Maybe as children we don’t remember our feelings, or maybe, the emotional memories are such that as adults we aren’t aware of them in a meaningful form.
In any event I have almost no emotional memory of my childhood. Even the few moments that standout are felt through a thick barrier. It is like I am an observer of my life and not a participant.
I grew up in a very intellectual atmosphere where thought and reason were far more valued than emotion or feeling. The emotion I have the most memories of is anger. Anger expressed by my parents, either towards each other or me. And I remember that I wasn’t allowed to express my anger. My recollection is that I was always told to stop being defensive whenever I expressed any anger. The message I got was that it was okay for others to be angry, but it wasn’t okay for me to express that emotion.
Later as an adult I was terrified of my anger. I told my wife that I was afraid of it and that it was a horrible thing. She worked very hard to get me to express my upset and anger at various situations. Situations where anger was warranted, and its expression would actually benefit my mental health. It took a tremendous amount of work on my part to break through the conditioning I had not to get upset and express anger. After I had expressed it in several appropriate settings, Michele pointed out to me that my anger wasn’t some horrible out-of-control thing to be feared. Rather it was a natural expression of truth.
Whether the message that anger was just an expression of truth was given to me as a child or not I do not know. All I know is that I took the messages, verbal and otherwise, from my childhood and built a model for dealing with the world. We all do this in our childhood; we all construct a model of how we think and feel the world works. Over the course of our lifetime we continually add to and subtract from this model. In some cases the model works extremely well and allows us to function successfully. In other cases the model hinders us greatly and causes unending struggle.
In my case my anger model wasn’t accurate or helpful. I felt that anger indicated I had done something wrong. Anger meant I had failed. I punished myself with more anger. Over time this cycle of unexpressed anger, and self-directed anger as a result, built into a series of medical issues and life threatening situations. In my early thirties I started having great difficulty swallowing my food. Over time this condition grew until I was throwing up during almost every meal I ate.
After several tests and doctors it was decided that I had a narrowing in my throat called a ‘shotski’s ring’. There is a treatment for this that literally tears the ring apart by inserting a balloon device into the throat and slowly inflating it. I had this treatment done 6 times in less than 3 years time. After each treatment I would have 2 or 3 weeks of eating with no swallowing difficulties and then the problem would reappear. Already dismayed at the prospect of going to the hospital every 5 months, I was crushed at the idea of going once a month.
After a move forced me to seek out a new doctor to perform this procedure, and after being thoroughly disappointed in the new doctor, I decided that medical treatment of this condition wasn’t working. I needed something else.
I have spent the last 6 years dealing with my emotions. The primary emotion I have difficulty with is anger. Especially anger towards authority figures. When I am on top of my emotions, and expressing them openly, honestly and in the moment, I have no trouble eating. When I am not facing some part of my emotional being I start to have trouble swallowing. When I start throwing up during meals I know that I have lapsed back into my old, destructive habit of not expressing anger.
I consider myself lucky that my inappropriate expression of anger as a truth was self-directed and not focused on others. While I have suffered medically as a result, I am healing emotionally and physically now. Had I turned my anger outward I could easily have ended up as one of the tragic figures seen on television after a spree-shooting incident. As a society we are failing miserably to give young males either an accurate emotional model of the world, or a safe place to express the anger that is a natural by-product of life.