Category Archives: Friendship

The Most Difficult Three and a Half Words

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A close friend has been experiencing extreme leg pain for over a year. She’s seen a medical conference worth of docs, had tons of tests, and is still lacking the thing she wants most—a diagnosis.

A month ago I went with her to an appointment with a rheumatologist who said the root problem was not rheumatological. Unable to string together the most difficult three and half words, he offered up a boilerplate myofascial something or other hypothesis.

Today we travelled long distance to see The Man at the Pain Center at the hospital in the Big City. I am always in awe of ace doctors. Dr. Ace studied her file for a long time, asked clarifying questions, and then continued with more questions during a physical exam.

In the end, he said, “I’m not clever enough to know what’s wrong.” I dig the way Brits use “clever” instead of “smart”. It’s clever. “There’s still a lot we don’t know about the brain,” he explained. Deeply disappointed, my long-suffering friend pleaded with him for a diagnosis. “I just want to know what’s wrong with me.” At which point he said the three and a half words, “I don’t know.”

Imagine if we lived in a world where one political candidate attacked another about flip-flopping and asked, “How can we be sure you’re not going to change your mind again?” And the candidate responded, “I don’t know.”

Or one in which every financial analyst asked to make predictions about the market in 2012 said, “I don’t know.”

Or one in which a Westpoint political science prof when asked about the lessons of the Iraq War said, “I don’t know.”

Or one in which Christopher Hitchens, when pressed to explain why he was so sure there’s no God had said, “I don’t know.”

Or one in which a man driving aimlessly in a car, when asked by a woman whether he’s going in the right direction said, “I don’t know.”

Or one in which Billy Graham, when asked to explain why he’s so sure there’s life after death said, “I don’t know.”

Or one in which Hilary Clinton, when asked what will be required to bring genuine Middle East peace said, “I don’t know.”

Or one in which Tom Friedman, when asked what the United States must do to reclaim it’s greatness said, “I don’t know.”

Or one in which Bill Gates, when asked why he thinks his teacher evaluation plan is going to improve schooling said, “I don’t know.”

Or one in which a blogger, when asked why he thinks everyone would be well served by greater humility and honesty said, “I don’t know.”

Steve Jobs—A Life Well Lived?

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I enjoyed and recommend Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs bio. The overarching question it has left me with is what’s the best way to assess whether one’s living or lived a good life? And how best to define “good life”? Specifically, do professional successes trump the personal or vice versa? Do you most want to be remembered as an amazing chief executive, lawyer, teacher, trooper, counselor, sales manager, engineer, doc, pastor, carpenter, nurse, or as a caring and loving father, mother, husband, wife, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, neighbor, friend, citizen?

Everyone answers those questions somewhat differently in the way they live their lives. Jobs’s professional activities—he reinvented six separate industries—were clearly more important to him than his personal roles and identities—he was self absorbed, he was a distant father to his three daughters, and he rarely cared about anyone else’s feelings.

We seem to excuse people like Jobs—people at the very top of their field—for being what some readers of the book have described as a “self absorbed asshole”. Why is that? Is it because people at the very top of their fields tend to be extremely wealthy? Do we give the ultra rich a pass on being shitty parents or people?

Most of the time I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished throughout my thirty year teaching career, but in my own personal calculus of assessing whether I’m living a good life, I emphasize the personal. It’s most important to me that I be a good husband, father, friend. I can’t help but wonder though is that because I haven’t accomplished more professionally? Is my personal orientation an excuse for not being more ambitious and not working harder? Or do I emphasize the personal because I’m overcompensating for my dad’s explicit “professional accomplishment” orientation?

Jobs didn’t have the ideal balance, but I’m not sure I do either. More questions than answers.

What We Can Learn From the Cain Train

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I know, I said I wasn’t going to follow Presidential politics for another ten months, but Cain Truth is one entertaining website, and I just can’t help myself. And I know I’m supposed to assume a person is innocent until proven guilty, but I just can’t help myself.

Dig this headline from the website, “Cain Attacked by Accuser; Will Not Stop His Effort to Renew America.” Here’s what that conjures up in my pea brain. The Hermanator is walking down Main Street, suit coat over his shoulder, touching  and healing struggling business owners while simultaneously pushing a steady stream of slowly approaching bimbos out of the way. The initial draft headline read, “This Week’s Skank Won’t Sidetrack the Cain Train from Fixing America.”

Cain is a heaven sent joke in response to all the peeps, like one of my friends, who thinks all of our political problems will disappear if we’d just elect a flesh and blood businessman.

From Slate.com: Cain initially called Ginger White’s claims “more false allegations.” But stopped short of accusing White of lying. Still, he nonetheless stressed that he had never had sex with her and that he did not consider their relationship to have constituted an affair.

Mrs. Cain Train is going to love that explanation.

If we’ve learned anything about the Cain Train, we’ve learned the more it talks, the further it goes off track. “At this point I’m just simply saying these things are going to come out and until we know what they are, then my attorney doesn’t know what to respond to.” The drip, drip, drip really is unfair to his attorney. If the women were more considerate, they’d do one large group presser. If you like gore, gather round, this is going to be a long, drawn out train wreck.

In the middle of rebutting the allegation, our Business Knight in Slimy Armor pivots. If you watch closely, you can see the wheels start turning in his big business brain. Damn, he suddenly realizes, after thirteen years maybe she’s got some evidence of our non-affair. Quoting again from Slate.com. . . the Republican did concede that the woman making the claim was “someone that I know who is an acquaintance that I thought was a friend.”

That’s what I hate about women, they just can’t keep non-affairs on the down-low. Asked if he had sex with the woman, Cain responded no twice. If you close your eyes, you can see a gaggle of Saturday Night Live writers excusing themselves from their dinner guests and sprinting to their respective laptops. The gift that keeps on giving.

Again, Slate.com. . . in a written statement Cain’s lawyer, Lin Wood, took a significantly different tack, suggesting that the issue was a private matter and that it was out of bounds in terms of what the media should be focused on. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Didn’t anyone from the RNC vet this guy? Have the “skeleton” talk with him? Granted, it would have been a long convo, but why do national politicians have to re-learn the Nixon take-away over and over, the coverup is always worse than the initial mistake/crime/non-affair.

If you are thinking of running for president sometime in the future, or just want to be a more authentic human being, ask yourself, “What would Herman do?” and then do the opposite.

If the King of Kapitalism really wanted to be President, he should have begun by talking honestly about his moral shortcomings and hoped that the electorate would have appreciated his honesty and separated his personal shortcomings from his political promise.

Coping With Narcissists

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Is it just me or is it seemingly impossible to get along with narcissists? Of course if you caught my betrothed after one of our spats, she’d say I’m a self-centered sad sack.

I’m three-quarters the way through Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs and I can’t help but make connections between it and Whybrow’s American Mania.

Don’t know if I’ve ever been so conflicted about one person. There are at least three Steve Jobs—1) the counter-cultural Zen Buddhist, exquisite designer, artist-philosopher, modern Stoic, vegan; 2) the focused, driven, scarily perfectionist, extremely mercurial, control-freak, business genius; and 3) the sometimes cruel, heartless, empathy impaired human being.

Readers of the bio are probably most interested in Jobs 2, but I find the human nature/human being story far more interesting.

I need to finish the book and think some more about it before reconciling my schizophrenic thoughts. For now I can say Jobs 3, the uncaring, mean, empathy impaired knucklehead often repulses me. Which brings to mind Whybrow’s insights on empathy. He writes, “. . . the experience of intimacy and the stability of the attachments one has in early years ultimately shape our capacity to understand the feelings of others. Human empathy is largely a learned behavior, much as is language. . .”

So we’re not hardwired to care about others? Whybrow says empathic understanding results from “social anchors” or a “. . . wellspring of healthy families and the nurturance of supportive, economically viable communities. . .” In other words, immerse young children in caring families, schools, religious and civic organizations and they will follow the caring adults’ lead and end up empathetic young adults.

Could the fact that Jobs was adopted have compromised the stability of his attachments so much that he never “learned empathy” in the way he learned English? I wouldn’t think so because he was months old when adopted and his adopted parents were stable, supportive, and loving.

After deciding not to marry Jobs, one of the two women he was closest to in his life found a psychiatric manual, read about Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and concluded that Jobs embodied all of the symptoms. (Here’s hoping Betrothed never stumbles upon that.) She said, “It fits so well and explained so much of what we had strugled with, that I realized expecting him to be nicer or less self-centered was like expecting a blind man to see.” “I think the issue is empathy,” she added, “the capacity for empathy is lacking.”

I’m clueless as to the root causes of Jobs’s lack of empathy, but the larger, more important takeaway is that empathy is learned. Whybrow convincingly argues that empathy results from a “wellspring of healthy families and nurturance of supportive, economically viable communities.” Sadly, some families aren’t sufficiently healthy, nurturing, supportive, or economically stable enough to pass on empathetic understanding to the young in their charge.

If expecting narcissists to someday be nicer or less self-centered is like expecting blind people to someday see, the best way to cope with them is to stop expecting them to return personal interest and care with similar curiosity and kindness. Far easier said then done.

Narcissus admiring himself shortly before his first triathlon

Think Legacy not Longevity

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I think it was my ten year high school reunion somewhere in Orange County, California where I reconnected with one of my best friends from the 6th or 7th grade. At the start of junior high we were tight. I learned to ski on trips to Big Bear with his family and I spent a memorable week backpacking with them in the Sierras. He was a stud, a good running back and hurdler who gave both up for surfing and partying which he also excelled at. In high school, I was his designated driver.

Must have been the drugs, because at 28, he was pretty whacked out. Despite not looking especially healthy, he pigeoned-holed me and was going on and on about living to something like 125. I should have humored him and told him I was really looking forward to our 100th reunion. Pills; 1,000 calories a day; filtered carrot juice, can’t remember all the bullshit stuff he thought would get him to triple digits.

Granted, my childhood friend is more extreme than normal, but most of us don’t like thinking about dying. Many people spend lots of energy trying to delay it as long as possible.

In hindsight, I wish I had encouraged him to think legacy not longevity. It’s not the length of our lives, but the quality of them. Whether 40, 60, or 80, do you leave your world—whether it’s your family, the places you worked, the physical environment, or your community—better off?

I have to credit Peter Whybrow, author of American Mania, for this reminder. This sentence of his stopped me dead in my tracks. Pun intended:

In a collective denial of aging. . .we employ all available technologies to simulate youth, misunderstanding that the secret to immortality lies not in the individual but in the society we leave behind.

I can’t express it any more clearly than that.

I Am the 1%

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Not based on my five figure salary, my Kirkland Signature wardrobe, my penchant for water at restaurants, or my municipal golf courses of choice.

I am the “one percent” based upon health, meaningful work, beautiful surroundings, good friends, and a loving family.

Turning fiddy in a few months. My peers are showing varying degrees of wear and tear. Their setbacks help me appreciate how fortunate I am to be able to afford healthy food, to have time to exercise daily, to have access to quality medical care, and to feel younger than I am.

My work matters. How fortunate to get paid to help young people write, teach, and think through what they believe and how they want to live their adult lives. And remarkably, every seven years I get the ultimate gift, time to press pause and read, think, write, rest, renew.

Half the year I get to cycle in unbelievably beautiful mountain settings, swim in an idyllic next-door lake, and run on wooded trails and sleepy residential streets. In the summer it’s almost never hot or humid and there are no bugs that would prevent one from eating outside. There are no hurricanes and hardly any lightening, but I reserve the right to amend this post if I someday survive the overdue Shake.

I often climb the mountains, swim the lake, and run the trails with excellent friends. Fitness fellowship.

My extended family is a blessing. My wife and daughters especially so. Apart from one very bad leg, they’re healthy and happy. My Better Half and I just returned from visiting First Born at Leafy Midwest Liberal Arts College. Most nineteen year-old college students would be semi-embarrassed by visiting parents, but for some reasons ours was off-the-charts warm, inviting, and appreciative the whole time. Even invited her Spanish teaching mom to her Spanish class and took us to great student a cappella and modern dance concerts.

When we first arrived on campus, Spanish teaching mom went to meet her at the Language Building. I read in the “Libe”. At the appointed time I headed across campus to meet up with them. Turned a corner and there she was walking by herself to a piano lesson. Cue the killer off-the-ground hug.

We stayed in a room in this house which a woman left to the college with an unusual condition—that it always be available as a student hang out with the necessary ingredients to bake cookies.

Home Base

The suggested donation for staying there was $30/night. We had twin beds in a smallish room. The first hints of winter crept in through the window next to my bed. I could whizz while simultaneously brushing my teeth in the tiny bathroom.

But looks can be deceiving. No one would suspect that inside this humble house, in one of the modest rooms, a One Percenter slept contentedly.

Marriage Red Flag

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My nomination for a SLP personal finance journalism award—given to the author of a particularly succinct, lucid, and provocative personal finance article. From Rachel Emma Silverman in the Wall Street Journal (10/17/11):

If you care too much about money, your marriage may suffer.

A new study by scholars at Brigham Young University and Provo, Utah and William Paterson University, Wayne, N.J.. looked at more than 1,700 married couples across the U.S. to determine how their attitudes toward money affected their marriages.

Couples who said money wasn’t important to them scored about 10% to 15% better on measures of relationship quality, such as marriage stability, than couples where both or one spouse were materialistic.

Also, couples in which both partners said they valued lots of money—about 20% of the couples in the study—fared worse than couples who were mismatched and just had one materialist in the marriage.

“Couples where both spouses are materialistic were worse off on nearly every measure we looked at,” says Jason Carroll, a BYU professor of family life and lead author of the study. “There is a pervasive pattern in the data of eroding communication, poor conflict resolution and low responsiveness to each other.”

In the study, published recently in the Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, participants completed a questionnaire which evaluated their relationship and asked, among other things, how much they value “having money and lots of things.”

Dr. Carroll says the research team had expected that disparate couples, those with different ways of viewing money, would have worse relationships. They found, though, that it was “materialism itself that’s creating much of the difficulty,” even when couples have plenty of money, he says.

Materialism might cause spouses to make poor financial decisions, such as overspending and running up debt, which can strain relationships. What’s more, materialistic spouses may pay less attention to their relationships and give their marriage lower priority than other concerns.

In other words, marry someone who values “having money and lots of things” at your own risk.

Fraud Antennae

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By comparison, we’re a very strange family. We almost never talk to and never text with Away At College Daught (AACD). We Skype on Sunday nights. Typically, six days without any contact. I understand if you want to tar and feather us.

So it was quite surprising when AACD called mid-morning, mid-week recently. Someone had just called her from her bank and said they needed her debit card number because they were having problems with their network. She gave it to the caller. And immediately realized she’d been duped. Her mom told her to immediately call the bank and everything would be okay. She did and it was, but her experience begs an important question. How do we form meaningful trusting relationships with others while simultaneously guarding against criminally inclined people looking to take advantage of us? More succinctly, how do we develop fraud antennae? The more desperate people’s economic lives become, the more critical it is we develop fraud-detection skills and sensibilities.

I told AACD’s younger sissy the debit card story as a precautionary tale and explained to her surprise that there are people in the world who wake up every morning trying to figure out better ways to steal elderly people’s life savings.

Bernie Madoff, besides offering regular 20% returns, was supposed to be pretty charming. Nicholas Cosmo probably was too. A minnow compared to Madoff, Cosmo only defrauded 4,000 investors out of $195m. Or consider David Dutcher’s experience. Here’s a teaser to get you to read the entire LA Times article:

David Dutcher met Sharon on Match.com in late 2008, a few months after separating from his wife. “We had a lot in common,” he recalled. Sharon loved four-wheel-drive trucks and sports. They met for coffee, then dinner. Sharon was tall, slender, blond and beautiful. She moaned that she had not had sex in a long time. She told him he had large, strong hands and wondered if that portended other things. She described his kisses as “yummy.” “It felt a lot like Christmas,” said Dutcher, 49, a tall, burly engineer with wavy red hair. The women fiddled with Dutcher’s tie and massaged his neck and shoulders. The brunet unbuttoned her blouse to reveal generous cleavage. “I am way over my head with these girls,” he remembered thinking. “I hadn’t been out dating in a while.”

Apparently Dutcher’s Christmases are different than mine, but I digress. “Sharon” had been hired by Dutcher’s ex-wife. The night ended much worse than Dutcher imagined—with his arrest for driving under the influence by a cop working with Sharon and Dutcher’s ex. The age-old honey trap* with some crooked soccer moms and cops thrown in for good measure.

The crooked uniformed cop, an admittedly extreme example of fraud, brings to mind the uniformed Norwegian killer who every adult on the island somewhat understandably, albeit tragically, assumed was legit.

Dutcher simply needed to stop staring at the cleavage long enough to ask himself if what he was experiencing was so far out of the ordinary that maybe he had been set up. This is what I’m going to call the “so far out of the ordinary/too good to be true test” and maybe that’s the answer to my question. Then again, a lot of very smart and successful people didn’t think that Madoff’s promised 20% investment returns in a wildly fluctuating, but mostly down market were too good to be true so how can I expect D-squared to have applied the test?

More importantly, how do we guard against more subtle attempts at fraud, like the stream of fake emails or phone calls seeking debit card numbers? And how do we teach young people to form meaningful trusting relationships with others while simultaneously guarding against criminally inclined people looking to take advantage of them?

Experience is the best teacher. AACD is less naive as a result of that phone call, panic, and quick trip to the bank. But what kind of curriculum, dinner conversations, and other resources might help young people be proactive in detecting and thwarting the fraudsters in our midst? More simply, how do we teach them things may not be as they appear?

* When I was a teacher at an international school in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia back when Al Gore was inventing the internet, the US embassy folks invited my male colleagues and me to the embassy for a meeting where they cautioned us about beautiful Ethiopian women known to seduce American men in the hope of weaseling their way out of the country. Even showed a film with case studies on how it was done. This had one effect on my friends and me. We were more excited than normal to go clubbing the next weekend. Alas, I regret I was never a victim of the honey trap. :)

Does Absence Actually Make the Heart Grow Fonder?

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The title of Jessica Grose’s review of Iris Krasnow’s new book The Secret Lives of Wives: Women Share What it Really Takes to Stay Married.

Krasnow’s thesis—there can be positive aspects to time spent away from a spouse—at least for (non-military) wives.

Potential benefits include greater emotional and physical self reliance and more in-depth communication.

Quoting Grose: Krasnow says that the most important marital lesson she took from the hundreds of women she spoke to was the importance of maintaining a sense of evolving self, apart from one’s relationship. It’s not that geographic space is the only way of achieving a separate identity—for example, several of the wives said reconnecting with physical pastimes helped them develop their sense of self—but it is a surprisingly effective one.

Must be an autobiographical work given the focus on double X’s. Newsflash—men also stand to benefit from maintaing a sense of evolving self.

There’s more than one way to stay happily married for the long haul. Some of my friends seem to be doing the opposite of what Krasnow is suggesting. They spend as much of their non-work time at home together and they’re in near constant texting and calling contact with one another. It’s easy to understand their desire to spend as much non-work time together as possible when commuting long distances and/or working especially long hours, but I have to confess to not understanding the need to be in near constant contact. I wonder, when they eventually sit down to dinner after sending fifty texts and talking twenty times during the day, what do they talk about?

I can’t read Krasnow’s book because my brother said my recent poem crossed the fem vortex line. But I’m sympathetic to her thesis. I wonder how some of my “single-minded family” friends are going to fair when their last children fly the coop.

The wife and I definitely benefit from time apart. It makes negative visualization tons easier—what would my life be like without her/him? Upon reuniting, we always appreciate each other a little more.

In some alternative universe, it might be nice if we didn’t need to spend any time apart to maintain genuine, mutual appreciation for one another, but we’re fallible, so we do.

Developing In-depth, Intimate Friendships

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Who knew there’s something really nice about driving to swim meets way out on the Kitsap Peninsula. Or more specifically, driving home from them.

Four years ago, following the South Kitsap meet, Nineteen and I started out listening to National Public Radio, and then as the sun set on Commencement Bay and the Narrows Bridge, talked about the world, her world, our worlds. Not a top-down father-daughter talk, a balanced adult one.

Last week, as Sixteen’s (S’s) passenger, I was in the right place at the right time for another thoughtful and memorable conversation. I mostly listened as she described a moving letter she had received earlier in the day from a close friend who struggled with anxiety last year. The friend wanted S to know how important her help had been and how much her understanding presence meant to her. Her other friends, she explained, ran a little hot and cold, which made her especially appreciative of S’s consistent care.

“What I like about A.F. is she’s vulnerable,” S reflected while hugging the right line of the two lane highway. “She’s not afraid to admit everything’s not all right. That gives me the opportunity to help.” She explained how good it felt to help her friends, to share insights from the serious difficulties she experienced as a middle schooler. It gives purpose to that especially challenging chapter of her life.

S’s story reminded me of two important steps in developing in-depth, intimate friendships—admitting one’s vulnerabilities and humbly asking for help.

Taken together, sometimes saying, “I’m afraid. I’m anxious. I’m lost. I’m stuck. Can you help me?”

Knowing that doesn’t mean I do it well. I don’t. At all. I probably inherited my stubborn, sometimes self-defeating self-sufficiency from my parents who grew up in barren eastern Montana on the heels of the Depression.

Paradoxically, I enjoy helping my friends whenever they ask for help, but I don’t like inconveniencing them. At all. A tip of the iceberg example. I spent twenty minutes in the garage last week unsuccessfully trying to tighten a bolt, while holding a washer, and screw in a very awkward position because I didn’t want to inconvenience the wife. Finally threw in the towel, asked for her help in applying pressure to the top of the screw, and had everything assembled in less than a minute.

More significantly, I’m almost always resistant to counseling, yet the few times I’ve committed to it, it’s proven helpful.

Obviously, everyone has to be somewhat self-sufficient, but there’s a point of diminishing returns, a point I cross fairly regularly. I’m not sure how to explain my stubborn, sometimes self-defeating self-sufficiency. It’s irrational. If I could throw a “start depending upon others more on occasion” switch, I would have already.

I’d ask you for help, but I don’t want to inconvenience you.

Maybe I’ll just groove some more to Bill Withers in the hope it’ll eventually sink it.

Thanks S for the inspiration.