Category Archives: Friendship

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.

How Well Do You Know Yourself?

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The wife recently asked me to take the Jung/Myers Briggs personality test available here. Probably wanted to find out what’s wrong with me. It was relatively pain free and the results mostly jived with my sense of self. Take it and tell me what you think of the results.

I’m an INFJ or “Idealist Counselor”. Here are some excerpts from the “Idealist Counselor” description:

Counselors have an exceptionally strong desire to contribute to the welfare of others, and find great personal fulfillment interacting with people, nurturing their personal development, guiding them to realize their human potential. Although they are happy working at jobs (such as writing) that require solitude and close attention, Counselors do quite well with individuals or groups of people, provided that the personal interactions are not superficial, and that they find some quiet, private time every now and then to recharge their batteries. Counselors are both kind and positive in their handling of others; they are great listeners and seem naturally interested in helping people with their personal problems. Not usually visible leaders, Counselors prefer to work intensely with those close to them, especially on a one-to-one basis, quietly exerting their influence behind the scenes.

Except for the fact that I could be a much more patient listener, that’s accurate to the point of almost creepy. Helps explain why I prefer small dinner get-togethers to large cocktail parties and why I loathe self-promoters. There’s more.

Counselors are scarce, little more than three percent of the population, and can be hard to get to know, since they tend not to share their innermost thoughts or their powerful emotional reactions except with their loved ones. They are highly private people, with an unusually rich, complicated inner life. Friends or colleagues who have known them for years may find sides emerging which come as a surprise. Not that Counselors are flighty or scattered; they value their integrity a great deal, but they have mysterious, intricately woven personalities which sometimes puzzle even them.

Isn’t blogging going against the Counselor grain? Not necessarily. I share thoughts and emotions, but not my innermost thoughts or most powerful emotional reactions. I’ll probably peel more layers off over time, but never get to the core in this format at least.

Counselors tend to work effectively in organizations. They value staff harmony and make every effort to help an organization run smoothly and pleasantly. They understand and use human systems creatively, and are good at consulting and cooperating with others. As employees or employers, Counselors are concerned with people’s feelings and are able to act as a barometer of the feelings within the organization.

That explains in part why I’ve been in a professional funk. My workplace has lacked harmony for quite awhile. Outnumbered by those who think people’s feelings are unimportant, I’ve thrown in the towel on trying to help things run smoothly and pleasantly.

Blessed with vivid imaginations, Counselors are often seen as the most poetical of all the types, and in fact they use a lot of poetic imagery in their everyday language. Their great talent for language-both written and spoken-is usually directed toward communicating with people in a personalized way. Counselors are highly intuitive and can recognize another’s emotions or intentions – good or evil – even before that person is aware of them. Counselors themselves can seldom tell how they came to read others’ feelings so keenly. This extreme sensitivity to others could very well be the basis of the Counselor’s remarkable ability to experience a whole array of psychic phenomena.

Psychic phenomena strikes me as over the top. And do you think they purposely write all the descriptions as positively as possible so that everyone feels better about themselves? And you gotta love the examples of other Counselors—Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Goodall. Nice company to keep. I’m a confident writer and speaker, but as clearly demonstrated in Wednesday’s “Fall” post, I’m anything but poetic. And when it comes to others’ feelings, my antenna do seem more finely tuned than most.

For example, I picking up on things right now. You think I’ve been a bit self-absorbed in this post and I’ve gone on too long. Points well taken.

What Does Olympia Bear Girls Swimming Foretell About the Future?

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The hard working, talented, quirky goofballs suggest the future is brighter than all the doomsdayers would lead you to believe.

We just completed our first five extra-long practices. Everyone put in the necessary work and got along well. Coach is seemingly trying to disprove my thesis from awhile back–that people don’t change. He’s more flexible than before, letting his hair down and deferring to the captains and his assistant coaches. Relaxing.

Because they applied themselves, the girls improved their technique and began to get in shape. Lots of impressive new ninth graders. I ran stairs with the team in four groups, the ninth graders, the sophs, the juniors, and the seniors. I told the ninths that I didn’t know what to call them. They didn’t really appear to be freshmen. Freshwomen might be a tad racy. The politically correct term on college campuses is “first years”. Then a brilliant suggestion, “Fresh”. Some of the Fresh are going to make life miserable for their elder teammates. In total, three girls had the audacity to run the stairs faster than me. I told them they may have to switch to x-country.

I told the team that Coach just celebrated his 47th wedding anniversary and was planning on swimming 1.75 miles in Lake Washington over the weekend. I pointed out that’s the amazing thing about swimming, you can do it a heck of a lot longer than football, soccer, probably any other sport. During this preseason, the girls are unplugged for four hours every morning, running stairs, talking, stretching, talking, planking, talking, practicing, talking, racing, talking.

At one point, Sixteen yelled over during a kick set, “Hey dad, tell me to ‘Pick it up!'” “Okay, ‘Byrnes, pick it up!'” She then hoisted her posterior 8 inches higher above the water. All of her lanemates laughed uncontrollably. Fool me once.

I ask one senior where she wants to go to school and she says Stanford. Backup, USC. Unacceptable I tell her. A Chinese-American fresh jumps out to stretch a sore shoulder and says “It’s probably violin practice.” I’m guessing there’s a Tiger Mother behind that tiger.

My hope is the coaches and parents can focus broadly on the process this season instead of narrowly on district and state time cuts. In the broad scope of things, high school is over in a flash. The most important questions aren’t how fast did you swim or how many points did you score, but did you learn to work hard, did you swim to the best of your abilities, did you gain confidence in your physical strength, did you get along with others, did you enjoy it enough that you want to continue doing it well into the future?