Car = Normal?

I am in my 40s and have never married, and never wanted to. I have never wanted children.  I'm a feminist.  I have never really wanted to own my own home.  I'm nonmonogamous. I tend to date queer women.  I haven't owned a car for almost 20 years.

I've been thinking a bit about these things; there is a lot of social pressure, some of it invisible in the fish-don't-notice-water sort of ways, to act in certain ways. Hetero-normative ways. Consumer-culture ways. And I'm no rebel--I'm a white, middle class man, and as such I have benefitted from and participated in the dominant culture for 40 years, and will continue to do so to whatever degree.  But I have also been proud of the ways I have ducked a few kinds of normative pressure--I've been proudly childless and carless, for instance, for a while. I think folks who don't want kids shouldn't be pressured into having kids--most of the pressure is just general social pressure, though some folks have more obvious pressures put on them by their families. The general social pressure includes folks who say, "Well, you'd understand if you had kids." Sometimes this may be true, but it's often said in a way that implies that folks who don't want kids are somehow less mature than those who do, or those who have them.

And to a lesser extent, I feel the pressure of normativity almost every day--people ask me if I own my home, if I'm married, if I have kids, if I own a car, if I have a college degree, stuff like that, all the time. But mostly I kind of rail against that type of pressure, am kind of proud that I haven't "given in".  "I bike everywhere," I sometimes say, "though I do use zipcar from time to time," as if I were doing the world a favor.  But mostly I don't own a car because it's a pain in the ass--the payments, the upkeep; it's just too much for me, mostly. And when people find out I don't own a car, they sometimes look at me askance--just like they do when they find out I don't want kids, or don't want to own a home. But the difference is this: I kind of feel like I'm immature about not having a car.

I don't know why the car thing is different, but when I am driving my partner's car, I feel more like an adult. When she bought a new car, and I started driving it sometimes, I felt like I had somehow matured. I felt the gentle caress of approval from others that can come from doing the "things adults do"--people get these sorts of sentiments of approval when they get engaged, or get married, or buy a home; they get them when they have children.  They even kind of get them when they get divorced, as if that was yet another stage of adulthood.

I wouldn't feel more adult if I got married; neither would I feel more mature if I bought a house. But I do feel more adult driving around in a car that isn't even mine--which is weird. Not sure why it's different for me, but I sort of feel like, yeah, a person *should* own a car by the time he's 42--even though in the next moment I am proud that I bike (almost) everywhere. We now have a second car (briefly), while we decide what to do with my partner's old car, and I got really attached to the idea of having that car as mine, even though it's a bad idea in varous ways.  (For instance, it's bad for my health--within a couple of weeks of having it, I stopped riding to work, and gained a bunch of weight.)  It's odd, because the mature thing to do is to donate the car, and to continue mostly riding everywhere I go--but part of me thinks that I'm still being immature, imagining I can go through life without a car. 

Gratitude

1. Carrot juice.
2. Nyquil
3. Good books.
4. A partner who communicates well with me what's going on inside her head and heart.
5. Drivers who notice bikes, and behave accordingly.

Restaurant Armageddon

Matt Bors is a God of Cartoonists  http://www.mattbors.com/

I think it would be a lot of work to own a restaurant.  I imagine this is even true when owning a franchise. And I suspect that, for a lot of individually-owned restaurants, labor costs are some of the highest costs.  And yet--it's hard not to notice that the owners often drive new BMWs while the workers take a bus or ride their bikes to work.

I work near a restaurant-supply grocery store, and it's open to the public, so I sometimes go there to buy some stuff for making lunches.  I see restaurant owners there--you can tell they are owners because they treat the folks who work at the grocery store like crap.  People who do service work for a living (who aren't also owners) generally treat other service workers at least moderately well.  And you can tell they are owners because they are putting their restaurant groceries into expensive SUVs, the payments for which they are undoubtedly writing off on their taxes. 

I know some restaurant owners are kind-hearted people who really want to treat their employees with respect, and would love to provide health care--but it is expensive. But I think (educate me if I'm wrong) these folks are the exception to the rule.  I work at a small company, and a huge part of my compensation are my health benefits.  I know it's expensive. But the folks I work for want to treat me like a human being who deserves health care. I really appreciate that, and it is part of what keeps me working here--not just the money that it represents, but the feeling behind it. Owners of companies who don't want to pay for health care because it cuts into their profits, but who still want to pretend they respect their workers while they themselves live in the Oakland hills and put their kids in private school and the like, these folks just don't make sense to me, and they make me angry.

My last job was at a corporate coffee shop. I had a regular customer who created restaurants and then "flipped" them for profit. He had already done so with a couple of restaurants when I met him. At the time, San Francisco had just voted to increase the minimum wage of any workers in the city, and he was talking restaurant Armageddon--he would go out of business, most restaurants in SF would go out of business, he said. I told him I doubted that. He said he knew, because he was in the biz. A year later I asked him about it, after he had sold another restaurant, and he shrugged it off. I suspect a lot of the hand-wringing around health care by corporate CEOs of chain restaurants is more of the same.

Human Heroes

I only recently learned of a years-ago "sex scandal"--let's call it what it is:  A very popular Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Sogyal Rinpoche, sexually abused some of his close followers.  In doing just a little bit of research, I've sadly discovered that this isn't an isolated incident.  I'm also bothered by the fact that I'm not really surprised; I'm more than a little disconcerted that I hadn't heard about this stuff until now.  I suppose I was enjoying my ignorance in some ways, content to feel some righteous indignation toward Catholics and Christian Evangelicals, whose sex abuse revelations sometimes feel never ending. But of course sex abuse isn't really about a particular religion--like all kinds of abuse, it's about power.  People like Sogyal Rinpoche have the power of personality, popularity and religious devotion, and don't have a problem using that power to fuck those they have power over. It's sad, and makes me angry.

I've been thinking a lot about how I relate to various meditation teachers that I have had. Initially I mostly loved just sitting in a room meditating with other people (that is, after I got over the utter foreignness of doing something like that in my lift)--I didn't particularly like dharma talks; I didn't even like the way the whole thing was set up, with "followers" on their meditation cushions, all looking forward toward the teacher, who sat in front of the altar (don't get me started on how much I didn't dig the altar itself)--the whole thing just felt, well, like organized religion, and in my mind therefore prone to potential kinds of power abuses. 

It helped a lot that I went to a meditation center that focused on having a very diverse membership, across different backgrounds, races, genders, sexual preferences, class rankings and the like.  It also helped that a big part of what we were being taught included the Buddha saying, basically, "Hey, don't take my word for it--try it for yourself."  Also, every dharma talk usually included some sort of Q&A, which was very different from what (little) I had experienced in organized religion.  Not only were we invited to question, there definitely was the feeling that the teachers knew they were learning from us, just as we were learning from them.

Still, it sometimes felt so easy to get pulled into the cult of personality--I immediately had a couple of favorite teachers, and even briefly flirted with the idea of asking somebody to take me on as their student.  But I always backed off from that, because it was important to me to not make the people into more than they were.  And sometimes it's difficult to do that--a couple of my teachers are so full of lightness, so very good at teaching, that I just love being in the room with them. And I have learned to just enjoy that, but there's always a little voice in the back of my head saying, "Watch out!" We tell stories about people all the time, and with amazing teachers we can easily imagine they are more than human. And this is partly what leads to imagining that they can do no wrong, even as they are doing wrong.

I kind of feel this way about how some people revere Obama (and, though it's not quite equivalent, people who revere Reagan)--I guess I just don't easily revere folks I don't know intimately, warts and all. I want heroes, for sure--its' awesome to have role models, and inspirations.  But I want my heroes to be human*, not somehow infallible and more than human, in part so that I can know that they, too, may need other folks to call them on their bullshit.  And in part so I don't get fucked over. 

*This of course doesn't apply in comic books, and most fiction. I want superhuman heroes there.

Decluttering, Part blah, blah, blah

I don't dig the sensationalized hoarding shows, but I do look at images like this, sometimes, for motivation along the lines of "there but for the grace of god, go I".  (It's weird, but even as an atheist, that phrasing just works for me.)  Thing is, while I'm no where near this bad when it comes to book hoarding, I'm pretty sure I could be, if I'm not careful.  As it is, I purge books every few years, but it's (so far) really difficult for me to do. 

It's really a trip behaving in a way that you know isn't rational, but struggling with changing that behavior. Years ago, I had a pretty intense fear of flying (that I have since overcome almost completely), and no amount of logic about how relatively safe airplanes are would affect the visceral emotional reaction I had around flying. Similarly, I have a weird emotional reaction to getting rid of books--and knowing that it's weird isn't enough to help me leave that emotional reaction behind.

This morning I donated some of the comic books that I gathered up a couple of weeks ago.  And, even though I had already gone through the whole decision-making process about getting rid of them, I still had to really struggle to just let them go. It's difficult to not feel totally nutty when going through such a struggle, even as I can admit to myself that, yeah, most people have something nutty to deal with (and the ones who don't just haven't discovered it yet).  I suppose there's even still a bit of shame lingering, especially when I look at pictures like the one above and imagine that this is kind of what people see when they see my overflowing bookshelves.  I don't think that sort of shame is helpful (which is one reason I'm writing publicly about this), especially because it's not rational itself--it's isolating, when, in fact, there are many, many people going through similar struggles.

Spent some time sitting quietly and thinking about how good it feels to release stuff, if I take the time to let myself feel that. I still feel an overdeveloped sense of loss, and that is frustrating, but I'm also focusing on the "freeing" feeling one normally gets when cleaning up one's life. Or, I'm trying to. 

It's fascinating to me that some people, even most people, do this without trying, while I have to work at it. 

On Being Left of Obama

In the last few years, I've been working on compassion for self and others. I'm pretty good naturally at empathy for certain folks--underdogs, folks who are oppressed in various ways, people in my near and immediate circles who I care deeply about. I do struggle with developing compassion for my self, and for folks who have what I perceive as Very Different world views. On some level, I just can't wrap my mind around certain types of beliefs in any kind of deep way. For instance, I "get" on some level why folks are homophobic--some folks are in the closet themselves, some folks are afraid of anything they perceive as different, some folks feel  comfortable moralizing about certain facets of our lives. But on a deeper level, I just don't get it--I feel like if folks could just hang out with queer people a bit more, if they could more easily recognize that lots of us are on various continua when it comes to sexuality, if they could just learn about other folks, that they'd come around. I feel this even though I suspect deeply that it's not true, that the fear and ignorance and anger and all of that are sometimes so deeply ingrained that there simply can't be room for change.

Similarly, it's tough for me to "get" folks who are Republicans. Sure, sure, there are "fiscal conservatives", but I don't really get them either, on any deep level. 

Now here's my dirty-little-not-so-secret:  I feel the same way about folks who are gung-ho about Obama. Sure, I get how amazing it is to have a smart person as prez. I get the importance of the first African-American prez. And I get that there are all kinds of good things that he's helped happen--things I totally support like ditching DADT, universal health care (sort of), working with diplomacy and not just with weapons on international issues...it's not a short list!  But that doesn't make me want to rally behind the guy, since he's also the guy who has authorized the murder of 3,000 people through drone attacks in Pakistan since he's been prez. Just as one example. And Pakistan is a country that we're *not* at war with!

I'm not advocating the idea that "there's no difference" between Dems and Repubs. I recognize and applaud that some folks (including me!) are much better off with Obama as prez versus Romney (or, heaven forbid, Ryan).  I just have some deal breakers regarding fully supporting a politician, and Obama runs up against lots of them. State-sponsored assassination.  Unwavering support of what seems like terrorism to me (buckets of money for Israel, without any real concessions regarding the occupied territories).  Look, dude said he would "take early action" to close Guantanamo Bay back in 2008. "Early" has come and gone. We have more invasive surveillance of citizens under the Obama administration than under Bush Jr.! (www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty/new-justice-department-documents-show-huge-increase)  This ain't nitpicking.

So, little help here--what is it that allows others to downplay or ignore these faults?  What I don't "get" is why these aren't deal-breakers for other folks, when other things (Romney-ish things) are deal-breakers?  Hating on gay folks (the way Romney does) is horrible. Hating on women (the way many Republicans do) who want abortions is horrible. But hating on Pakistanis is also horrible. Imprisoning folks without a trial in Guantanamo is also horrible.  Why do some of these horrible things matter to people, while other of these horrible things matter so little that folks can clap and smile and cheer Obama on? 

Just. Don't. Get. It.

Bit of a Purge

This is a picture of seven "short boxes" of comic books that I collected together to donate/get rid of.  Most of these comic books have been sitting in my closet for the entire time I've lived in my current apartment--about 8 years. In sorting through a bunch more boxes, I should note that I kept more boxes than I am getting rid of, so I still have 8 or so boxes of comics I don't want to get rid of (yet?).  

Thing is, this purging isn't just about comics, or about getting more room in our closet (though it is partly about that--now that I live with my partner, it's only fair she have as much room in the closets and I do).  It's also about changing my relationship to these objects.  I've always been something of a "pack rat", and this tendency seems to run in my family. Lately I've begun to recognize that "pack rat" and "hoarder" are both part of a spectrum of behaviors, and I've grown to believe that if I don't create more mindfulness around my pack rat tendencies, that they'll continue to move toward the hoarder end of that spectrum.  

One tendency of hoarders is that they have more emotional attachments to inanimate objects than other folks do, and this is certainly true for me.  When I was younger, I not only had affection for stuffed animals and the like, but I found myself feeling empathy for individual lego pieces. If I was searching for a particular brick, and found two at the same time, I would set the "extra" one aside, so I could use it later; I would feel as if it were lonely or sad if I didn't find a place for it. I recognize that this shit sounds cray-cray, which is one of the reasons I'm talking about it in a public forum--around 5% of the US population has hoarding tendencies--more than people who have OCD, for instance.  Just like talking about depression, I think folks don't talk about hoarding enough (aside from gasping in horror at reality television shows about it).  

Here's what my brain does when I try to decide whether or not to get rid of a set of comic books:
+  Ok, I haven't read this in years, and I probably won't read it again. It should go in the "go" pile.
+ BUT JEFF DON'T YOU REMEMBER WHEN YOU BOUGHT IT? YOU WERE GOING THROUGH X, Y AND Z AT THE TIME. DON'T YOU WANT TO HOLD ON TO THAT?
+ Um, no. I don't. I have the memory. The comic isn't related to it. It should go in the "go" pile.
+ BUT JEFF, WHAT A WASTE THAT IS. YOU SHOULD FIND THE COMIC A GOOD HOME.
+  Um, no. There are hundreds of these comics out there for people to buy if they really want them. And nobody gets these particular comics if they're in my closet. They should go in the "go" pile.
+ BUT JEFF, WHAT IF YOU WANT TO READ IT AGAIN SOMEDAY?  
+ Um, no. I can buy it again. Or torrent it. And I haven't read it in 10 years. It goes in the "go" pile.


And, after all of that, I still feel a loss when I put it in the "go" pile. My nervous system is weiiiiiird that way. 

To be clear, there are objects that I think it's healthy to have an emotional attachment to. One comic series was coming out right at a very tumultuous time in my life (Hi Katy!), and it's so identified with that time that I pull it out from time to time and read it again. I'm gonna keep that one for a long while. But I now recognize that some of these attachments are just unhealthy, and result in heading further down a path I don't want to go down. So I'm trying to get better in touch with the feeling of freedom that comes from purging stuff. It doesn't come naturally. I'll keep plugging away.