Reset Command
[From an episode of an Australian DIY television programme, as witnessed by Ack, the ex-husband/best friend]
Average Looking Aussie Male: Ugh! I cannot be part of this any longer! You people are all plastic!
Perfect Looking Aussie Female: (to an equally attractive male counterpart) [blink, blink, mouth agape] What does he mean plastic? I do yoga!
Sigh.
I do yoga too.
Right now I kind of have to. For a couple of reasons.
As I have successfully quit smoking for 21 days, I have come to accept that there are things that go along with this much lauded success: expanded hips, protruding belly (combined with accompanying cavernous button), and a penchant for, well, everything edible. The other reason, the real one, is to calm the savage beast.
Here at the target coordinates 44˚N / 79˚W, the weather outside is not frightful. It's closer to Postal Service's bleak yet plausible Sleeping In; now we really can swim any day in November. It's not right. Everyone outside is parading H&M's spring collection.
I believe true Canadians are the ones who don't complain each year about How cold it is or say stupid things like Why do I live in this country? during the bleaker months of the year. I count myself among the contingent True. We've wholly accepted the fact that this, our home and native land, is a 4 season festivale. Some seasons are longer than others. Others are very much like a magician's disappearing act. With no wand in sight, spring, with bunny, vanish into thin air. We're lucky to catch magnolia in bloom, the perfect shade of pink, the tree that takes the cake 2 out of 52 weeks of the year. With premature petal loss, branches seem to cradle, curving down, mourning, trying to recollect. God, I love that tree.
Blink.
Mouth agape.
I do yoga.
Canadians get used to our seasons. Expect them. Fall means going back to school or starting something new and scary, leaves kicked all the while. Winter means snow forts, hibernating, dutch ovens, soups, stews and chili. Spring is smelly and everything is possible. Summer is frolicking and sweaty, dunking bunions into cold lakes with tadpoles nipping at your heels.
We don't really have winter this year. We have Finter or Wring, a far less satisfying combination than, say, brunch. I know it's only February, but now we've got 2 more months of not knowing what to expect. I'm not sure, but I think somehow this new weather, which is conceivably manufactured (a new paranoia), could be wreaking havoc on lovers in my vicinity. That and the sudden stop of the Chandler wobble last weekend.
Fatty I have been fighting a lot lately.
Without a winter, gone are the cozy nights of running in from blizzards panting and half frozen. There's no need for collective foot stomping to rid boots of slushy matter. Unnecessary are hands to run up and down bodies to recirculate. No need to bring the duvet out to the sofa to snuggle warmly together. No need to exchange Eskimo kisses. Nothing's frozen for things to thaw. With thaw comes examination and putrescence.
Mr. Holmes: Damn it Watson, give me back my magnifying glass!
Mr. Watson: If I may say, sir, perhaps you should examine the world less scrupulously.
Mr. Holmes: Whot? Would you like a sacking?
Mr. Watson: You can't actually sack me, Holmes. We're fictional.
You're not perfect.
I'm not perfect.
This is what's wrong with you.
I'm avoiding what's wrong with me.
You're wrong.
I've been wronged.
You hurt me.
And I will hurt you back.
This has been going on for a month. It doesn't matter who said it because the parts are easily switched around. Boy in italics. Girl in plain font. Girl in italics. Ordinary font boy. Doesn't matter. The end is the same. No end.
But you can bonk a snake on the head when you see that it's trying to eat its own tail, telling it there are healthier menu choices.
I believe in breaks, in breathers. Reset time. Especially when things are too volatile and situations are too close to be able to see any truth or real solution. I have to step back from macroscopic. Choose letterbox. It all gets in then. No sides are cut off unwittingly because of screen deficiency. Step back, step away. Not forever, just for a while. Gain some perspective. Cry on someone else's shoulder. On many shoulders. Hear different opinions. Work. Watch other people. Mediate other lovers' fights.
When you do that, sometimes you're lucky enough to learn:
We're all varying degrees of broken.
You can't change other people's behaviour, but you can make better choices.
Lose the battle to win the war. [If I was the tattooed type, this would be the one.]
I am not too proud to read self help books.
You're doing no one any favours if you're helping with resentment.
Maybe yelling and screaming is a bit self-indulgent.
I have friends that I wholly accept. They are all quirky. They all do things that are slightly irritating, but I don't take offense to them. I don't gutturally attack them because I know them intrinsically. I know that any uncharacteristic behaviour of theirs comes from another place, another planet perhaps, certainly from another time in their life's cycle. Luckily my gift is empathy. My gift, however, has been charred and rendered useless while in a romantic situation.
This week I'd discovered something I'm not terribly proud of. There are things I've picked up from my father. Things like treating strangers or pals with more consideration and more patience than the one(s) closest to me. Expecting perfection from that poor one. Punishing him if I didn't get it.
And I set out to be exactly everything he wasn't.
Luckily these things have all been unconscious behaviour. If they had been conscious decisions, I'd have to check myself into a Walk-in Sociopath's Clinic. I'm out of Bay Street's clutches this week, at least, but now that I know that I've been doing wrong, I have to do something about it. I can't just go on the way I have been. What I can do is change my behaviour, my response, which has the power to change everything.
I had a conversation with my boss's boyfriend the other day. He's not only gay, he's Sicilian, which means he's not adverse to yelling.
Sicili: I can't HELP IT! It's because I'm FRUSTRATED!
The Comrade: I know, sweetie. I'm the same way.
But there are those who hear no words beyond the roar of rising decibels. Maybe they learned that yelling really meant something hellishly fierce and brutal. Wait 'til your father gets home. Maybe they learned it was the aural blast just before being hurled into a freshly painted wall by a single clenched fist.
Somehow my body had been impervious to harm. My flesh was knight's armor protecting my soul. Besides I was doing the 20 Minute Workout during high school. I'd jumping jack anyone's ass... while yelling and screaming.
But yelling and screaming, though expressions of frustration, are ungenerous to the ones we love, as well as self-indulgent. I suppose it's a bit caveman.
Sicili: But that's how I am! I can't change it!
I had been a smoker for 24 years. A pack a day. Then one day I decided I didn't want to smoke anymore, mostly because I felt these filtered friends had fucked me over and made into a junkie. I didn't want to label myself Former Smoker Now Ex-Smoker. I don't really like labels unless it's a Sexy Stinky Cheese™ label that more than likely doesn't exist. I don't want to have been this and now that. I happened to have smoked before and now I don't smoke anymore.
I want to be able to say, "I happened to have yelled out of frustration before and now I don't anymore." It's an issue of a bit of self control.
If I had to pick one distinguishing feature from 2005, it would have been this: I allowed myself to feel sorry for myself. And I've allowed myself to express pain to the ones who dispensed it.
Giuseppe, the ex-boss who fired me because his disgusting transient partner didn't like what I'd written about him in a blog past, came into the Cheer's Equivalent Bar a few weeks ago.
Giuseppe: You don't call. You don't write. You don't visit. Aren't you happy to see me?
The Comrade: Do you want the truth, Giuseppe?
Random Drunken Darling at the Bar: NO! Not the truth!
But he knew. He knows. He lives with a lot, which is just fine as he's always welcomed failure.
It was also the year that I had finally realised that I helped others who were afraid to help themselves. I've always spoken out on injustices, defending others. But when injustices happened to me I've historically made concessions for those transgressions. But they get stored. Filed. Released after due reset time.
Over the Christmas holidays Fatty and I were invited to my brother Vince's house for dinner. His whole family was there: wife, 3 kids and him. We brought booze. On the way up I gave Fatty a brief debrief about what to expect.
The Comrade: Vince is the whitest Chinese man you'll ever meet. Baritone robotic, if you can imagine. He used to be really funny. He's very serious now. He once asked me to tell him if there was anyone bothering me at school. If there was, he'd go beat them up for me. He'd tell me this as he steered me on handlebars to grade 2.
At dinner my 44 year old brother had produced a flowchart outlining the ongoing life cycle of my father. This exercise was more than likely one dispensed by his therapist to gain empathy towards someone who was less than the idyllic example of paternal.
Vince: See? From this year to this decade he was starving; his mother had died 6 months after he was born; he was in the care of abusive women...
The Comrade: That was when he was straining corn from cow dung to get any nutrients?
Vince: Correct.
Anita [Vince's wife of 20 years]: My father went through a similar situation during the war in Germany. He made the best of what he had and became a good and patient man, an excellent father and doting husband.
The Comrade: Yes he had. [To Vince] She's right. Because our father had been mistreated, he thought he was entitled to mistreat.
And I was doing the same.
Later Anita, whom I've grown to really like over the years, expressed empathy to me about my situation at home.
Anita: Knowing the family from which you were raised, I don't know where you came from. I have no clue. You were left alone after everyone hightailed it to university - their salvation, their freedom. You had to stay. No back-up. That must have been so hard.
The Comrade: Thank you, Anita. Thank you for acknowledging that.
Vince: I've acknowledged that before.
The Comrade: Not to me you haven't.
And silently she wondered where he had been when she needed a bully beaten.
In absentia.
Because it was said, it was assumed that the grief was over now. But sometimes when an unnamed thing is finally christened there emerges something really dark and unforgiving within a person who was once light and forgiveness. And that darkness took her show on the road and became the most caustic girlfriend in the Greater Toronto Area.
But I hurt!
Everyone does.
New lesson plan. A morphing plan created by the Universe.
I have some work to do.
Average Looking Aussie Male: Ugh! I cannot be part of this any longer! You people are all plastic!
Perfect Looking Aussie Female: (to an equally attractive male counterpart) [blink, blink, mouth agape] What does he mean plastic? I do yoga!
Sigh.
I do yoga too.
Right now I kind of have to. For a couple of reasons.
As I have successfully quit smoking for 21 days, I have come to accept that there are things that go along with this much lauded success: expanded hips, protruding belly (combined with accompanying cavernous button), and a penchant for, well, everything edible. The other reason, the real one, is to calm the savage beast.
Here at the target coordinates 44˚N / 79˚W, the weather outside is not frightful. It's closer to Postal Service's bleak yet plausible Sleeping In; now we really can swim any day in November. It's not right. Everyone outside is parading H&M's spring collection.
I believe true Canadians are the ones who don't complain each year about How cold it is or say stupid things like Why do I live in this country? during the bleaker months of the year. I count myself among the contingent True. We've wholly accepted the fact that this, our home and native land, is a 4 season festivale. Some seasons are longer than others. Others are very much like a magician's disappearing act. With no wand in sight, spring, with bunny, vanish into thin air. We're lucky to catch magnolia in bloom, the perfect shade of pink, the tree that takes the cake 2 out of 52 weeks of the year. With premature petal loss, branches seem to cradle, curving down, mourning, trying to recollect. God, I love that tree.
Blink.
Mouth agape.
I do yoga.
Canadians get used to our seasons. Expect them. Fall means going back to school or starting something new and scary, leaves kicked all the while. Winter means snow forts, hibernating, dutch ovens, soups, stews and chili. Spring is smelly and everything is possible. Summer is frolicking and sweaty, dunking bunions into cold lakes with tadpoles nipping at your heels.
We don't really have winter this year. We have Finter or Wring, a far less satisfying combination than, say, brunch. I know it's only February, but now we've got 2 more months of not knowing what to expect. I'm not sure, but I think somehow this new weather, which is conceivably manufactured (a new paranoia), could be wreaking havoc on lovers in my vicinity. That and the sudden stop of the Chandler wobble last weekend.
Fatty I have been fighting a lot lately.
Without a winter, gone are the cozy nights of running in from blizzards panting and half frozen. There's no need for collective foot stomping to rid boots of slushy matter. Unnecessary are hands to run up and down bodies to recirculate. No need to bring the duvet out to the sofa to snuggle warmly together. No need to exchange Eskimo kisses. Nothing's frozen for things to thaw. With thaw comes examination and putrescence.
Mr. Holmes: Damn it Watson, give me back my magnifying glass!
Mr. Watson: If I may say, sir, perhaps you should examine the world less scrupulously.
Mr. Holmes: Whot? Would you like a sacking?
Mr. Watson: You can't actually sack me, Holmes. We're fictional.
You're not perfect.
I'm not perfect.
This is what's wrong with you.
I'm avoiding what's wrong with me.
You're wrong.
I've been wronged.
You hurt me.
And I will hurt you back.
This has been going on for a month. It doesn't matter who said it because the parts are easily switched around. Boy in italics. Girl in plain font. Girl in italics. Ordinary font boy. Doesn't matter. The end is the same. No end.
But you can bonk a snake on the head when you see that it's trying to eat its own tail, telling it there are healthier menu choices.
I believe in breaks, in breathers. Reset time. Especially when things are too volatile and situations are too close to be able to see any truth or real solution. I have to step back from macroscopic. Choose letterbox. It all gets in then. No sides are cut off unwittingly because of screen deficiency. Step back, step away. Not forever, just for a while. Gain some perspective. Cry on someone else's shoulder. On many shoulders. Hear different opinions. Work. Watch other people. Mediate other lovers' fights.
When you do that, sometimes you're lucky enough to learn:
We're all varying degrees of broken.
You can't change other people's behaviour, but you can make better choices.
Lose the battle to win the war. [If I was the tattooed type, this would be the one.]
I am not too proud to read self help books.
You're doing no one any favours if you're helping with resentment.
Maybe yelling and screaming is a bit self-indulgent.
I have friends that I wholly accept. They are all quirky. They all do things that are slightly irritating, but I don't take offense to them. I don't gutturally attack them because I know them intrinsically. I know that any uncharacteristic behaviour of theirs comes from another place, another planet perhaps, certainly from another time in their life's cycle. Luckily my gift is empathy. My gift, however, has been charred and rendered useless while in a romantic situation.
This week I'd discovered something I'm not terribly proud of. There are things I've picked up from my father. Things like treating strangers or pals with more consideration and more patience than the one(s) closest to me. Expecting perfection from that poor one. Punishing him if I didn't get it.
And I set out to be exactly everything he wasn't.
Luckily these things have all been unconscious behaviour. If they had been conscious decisions, I'd have to check myself into a Walk-in Sociopath's Clinic. I'm out of Bay Street's clutches this week, at least, but now that I know that I've been doing wrong, I have to do something about it. I can't just go on the way I have been. What I can do is change my behaviour, my response, which has the power to change everything.
I had a conversation with my boss's boyfriend the other day. He's not only gay, he's Sicilian, which means he's not adverse to yelling.
Sicili: I can't HELP IT! It's because I'm FRUSTRATED!
The Comrade: I know, sweetie. I'm the same way.
But there are those who hear no words beyond the roar of rising decibels. Maybe they learned that yelling really meant something hellishly fierce and brutal. Wait 'til your father gets home. Maybe they learned it was the aural blast just before being hurled into a freshly painted wall by a single clenched fist.
Somehow my body had been impervious to harm. My flesh was knight's armor protecting my soul. Besides I was doing the 20 Minute Workout during high school. I'd jumping jack anyone's ass... while yelling and screaming.
But yelling and screaming, though expressions of frustration, are ungenerous to the ones we love, as well as self-indulgent. I suppose it's a bit caveman.
Sicili: But that's how I am! I can't change it!
I had been a smoker for 24 years. A pack a day. Then one day I decided I didn't want to smoke anymore, mostly because I felt these filtered friends had fucked me over and made into a junkie. I didn't want to label myself Former Smoker Now Ex-Smoker. I don't really like labels unless it's a Sexy Stinky Cheese™ label that more than likely doesn't exist. I don't want to have been this and now that. I happened to have smoked before and now I don't smoke anymore.
I want to be able to say, "I happened to have yelled out of frustration before and now I don't anymore." It's an issue of a bit of self control.
If I had to pick one distinguishing feature from 2005, it would have been this: I allowed myself to feel sorry for myself. And I've allowed myself to express pain to the ones who dispensed it.
Giuseppe, the ex-boss who fired me because his disgusting transient partner didn't like what I'd written about him in a blog past, came into the Cheer's Equivalent Bar a few weeks ago.
Giuseppe: You don't call. You don't write. You don't visit. Aren't you happy to see me?
The Comrade: Do you want the truth, Giuseppe?
Random Drunken Darling at the Bar: NO! Not the truth!
But he knew. He knows. He lives with a lot, which is just fine as he's always welcomed failure.
It was also the year that I had finally realised that I helped others who were afraid to help themselves. I've always spoken out on injustices, defending others. But when injustices happened to me I've historically made concessions for those transgressions. But they get stored. Filed. Released after due reset time.
Over the Christmas holidays Fatty and I were invited to my brother Vince's house for dinner. His whole family was there: wife, 3 kids and him. We brought booze. On the way up I gave Fatty a brief debrief about what to expect.
The Comrade: Vince is the whitest Chinese man you'll ever meet. Baritone robotic, if you can imagine. He used to be really funny. He's very serious now. He once asked me to tell him if there was anyone bothering me at school. If there was, he'd go beat them up for me. He'd tell me this as he steered me on handlebars to grade 2.
At dinner my 44 year old brother had produced a flowchart outlining the ongoing life cycle of my father. This exercise was more than likely one dispensed by his therapist to gain empathy towards someone who was less than the idyllic example of paternal.
Vince: See? From this year to this decade he was starving; his mother had died 6 months after he was born; he was in the care of abusive women...
The Comrade: That was when he was straining corn from cow dung to get any nutrients?
Vince: Correct.
Anita [Vince's wife of 20 years]: My father went through a similar situation during the war in Germany. He made the best of what he had and became a good and patient man, an excellent father and doting husband.
The Comrade: Yes he had. [To Vince] She's right. Because our father had been mistreated, he thought he was entitled to mistreat.
And I was doing the same.
Later Anita, whom I've grown to really like over the years, expressed empathy to me about my situation at home.
Anita: Knowing the family from which you were raised, I don't know where you came from. I have no clue. You were left alone after everyone hightailed it to university - their salvation, their freedom. You had to stay. No back-up. That must have been so hard.
The Comrade: Thank you, Anita. Thank you for acknowledging that.
Vince: I've acknowledged that before.
The Comrade: Not to me you haven't.
And silently she wondered where he had been when she needed a bully beaten.
In absentia.
Because it was said, it was assumed that the grief was over now. But sometimes when an unnamed thing is finally christened there emerges something really dark and unforgiving within a person who was once light and forgiveness. And that darkness took her show on the road and became the most caustic girlfriend in the Greater Toronto Area.
But I hurt!
Everyone does.
New lesson plan. A morphing plan created by the Universe.
I have some work to do.
posted by Comrade Chicken at
12:36 a.m.
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