A Pilgrim’s Digression

Contrary to what I learned from Ayn Rand long ago, I’ve come to see selfishness not as a virtue, but as the central problem of humanity. Although I do not wish to undercut Paul’s claim that the love of money is the root of all evil, I think that selfishness may well be a contender for the heavyweight title.

That said, it pains me to say that I believe our son can be a very selfish little boy. Defined as caring only for one’s own interests and needs and disregarding other people’s feelings, the term “selfish” has no positive connotations, as far as I am concerned.

I am sure in many ways, B. is not unusually selfish for a six year old. After all, he is in that stage of development dominated by ego. Some people never grow out of that stage and even as adults view their own personal happiness as of paramount concern. In some ways, I rank myself among these selfish people, who constantly strive, worry, and fret about their happiness, to the detriment of the happiness of all those around them.

On the other hand, it is frustrating that despite an apparent willingness to be a better person, B. has trouble feeling empathy, or even sympathy for other creatures.

At the risk of highlighting only his bad moments, let me give some examples.

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When you were a teenager, did you sleep more than you do now? When you were a teenager, if someone offered you quality, name-brand clothes, would you turn them down, instead opting to buy your clothes at the Goodwill?

Having a teenager come live with us as a foster child has been both rewarding and revealing. It has been rewarding in that so far, we seem to have lucked out and been given a mannerly, thoughtful, creative teenage son without all the pains and tribulations of raising him for 18 years. It has been revealing in that I think both Lynn and I have long forgotten what it was like to be a teenager.

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I began this post as a comment in response to Heather. It quickly grew too long for a simple comment.

Heather writes that she has no answers for me. Well, I have no answers either, and I still write here, probably much to the chagrin of a lot of people. As for whether I am depressed, I’m not supposed to be depressed; I’m on medication. And I don’t feel depressed, not the way I used to anyway. I daresay my family would say I do not look depressed; I do not act depressed.

I just don’t have much feeling about anything, my grandmother’s health aside. I can intellectually consider the ramifications of the fact that my son never sees me read a book for my own pleasure, but as far as feeling outrage, or a sense that I need to change my own attitude and begin reading again…no, I have no desire to do that.

I do not have the desire to do much of anything. No ambition. No motivation. I just don’t see the point anymore. Life flows on regardless of my action or inaction. Last Friday, Lynn and I were sitting in the coffee shop and a man nearby began chatting with us. It turned out he was an editor with a University Press, and much to my chagrin Lynn started asking him for advice about publishing. She told him about things I have written and asked how I might go about getting published, and I just sat there, a cold, embarrassed lump wishing the man would go away or receive a phone call or something. He kept looking at me, expecting me to say something, and I looked back at him, passively and without expression. Finally, to my relief, he did receive a phone call. I told Lynn afterwards she needs to give up the idea of my writing. I am not writing anymore. I am never going to write again. I will never publish anything.

My therapist read some of my writing and basically confirmed what I knew already: I can write well, but not well enough. There is no point in pursuing it any longer as a viable option for a career, or even as a hobby. I once spoke to my therapist about how I have always wanted to write about my childhood, and his response was, “What makes you think your childhood is worth writing about?” Then, apparently sensing the harshness of that reply, he said, “Or rather, why would someone want to read about your childhood?”

That comment was like a cold slap of water. Why hadn’t I seen it before? Of course it wasn’t worth writing about. That explained a lot, actually. It explained why I found it so difficult to complete anything I began writing remotely resembling a novel-length autobiographical piece of fiction.

My life is not worth writing about! My experiences are not worth writing about. And if my own life is unworthy of fictionalization, then what else is there for me? I am not smart enoough to write non-fiction or criticism. I am not imaginative enough to write non-autobiographical fiction. And what’s more, the desire to write seemed to pass away with my therapist’s words as if it had been a mere phantom of the mind.

I felt as if he had awakened me from a dream. Now I stand in the cold daylight of a cold morning, awake and trying to get my bearings.

I cannot remember a time in my life where I felt more apathetic about the things that used to interest me. I remember at one time being the kind of person who was interested in writing and thinking about politics and current events. Indeed my blog began as a direct response to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and for several years afterwards it was mainly a political-themed blog.

Some of my earliest, fondest memories of intellectual awakening are of my senior year of high school, 1991, when a friend and I would argue the pros and cons of the Persian Gulf War (he was pro, I was con) in the few minutes before the bell rang and our Physics class began.

I do not see myself arguing with anybody, about anything, these days. I simply don’t feel passionate enough. The war, the election, politics, the culture…I just don’t care. I still read the news as a way of passing the time, and I have opinions about things, of course. But I feel no desire to impress those opinions upon anyone. God knows in our world there are enough people eager to impress us with their opinions. Everyone has opinions they believe to be the gospel truth.

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Fair warning: do not read this post over breakfast, lunch, dinner, or a noontime snack.

I sometimes wonder about the much-vaunted intelligence of dogs.  They are quite smart in some regards, as any dog owner knows who has had a dog that seemed quite literally to understand every single word said to it.  I just wonder, sometimes, if we mistake their devotion to us for true intelligence.

I am prompted to ask just how smart dogs really are by the behavior of our pup, Saffron. The dog eats shit. Literally.

Cat shit. Dog shit. Probably human shit, if any were available. Pretty disgusting, no?

Every time I take her out, I have to be constantly on guard against her nosing around and wolfing down one of her own turds. And even though we try to clean up her waste from our yard, there are plenty of cats loose in the neighborhood, all of whom seem to prefer to use our yard and flower beds as their personal litter box.

You have not known the meaning of disgust until you have been licked on the mouth by a dog that has eaten shit.

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As every parent of a small child knows, the main character in Pixar’s Toy Story is named (for better or worse), Woody.

Brendan and I were in the toy department of Target the other day, looking for a toy for him when he spyed a realistic-sized Woody doll from the movie.  He already has a Woody doll, but this is what he said to convince me that he really needed this new one.

“Dad, I know I’ve got a big Woody, but this one is so much bigger.”

“Well, it’s true your Woody isn’t that big,” I said, “But you still can’t have it.”

File this one under “kids say the darnedst things.”

Our neighbor stopped over for a bit this afternoon, and as we sat chatting in the living room, Brendan was playing with the dog. Her favorite toy is a small, brown beaver with a squeaker in it. The beaver was Brendan’s idea; Lynn dind’t want it, because of the possible embarrassing double entendres that would no doubt result. But it was the toy Brendan picked out for the dog when we first go her.

Sure enough, the neighbor asked, “What’s that she’s playing with, Brendan?”

“Oh, that’s her beaver,” Brendan said.

“She’s playing with her beaver?” The neighbor said, smiling.

“Yeah, she likes to chew on her beaver.”

“Oh really?” The neighbor said, starting to laugh.

“Yeah. And guess what?”

“What?” The neighbor asked.

“Mommy washed her beaver. It’s soft and fluffy, now.”

At that point, it was all over. We all cracked up laughing.

Growing up in a family where my mother was not afraid to whip me, sometimes with a belt, one of my concerns has always been how do I discipline my son without resorting to the same techniques as my Mom. I can remember quite a few times that she whipped me in a fit of anger, and other times when she would let a transgression go unpunished immediately, except for a sour look or a threat, and much later–when we got home from a store, for example–only then would I get the whipping.

However, despite my generally mild-mannered demeanor and my attempt not to emulate the worst aspects of how I was parented, I do have anger issues. I tend to suppress it, which probably isn’t good either because it tends to come out either in a fit of unexpected rage, or in a slow trickle of bitter, sarcastic, and hurtful comments.

Anyway, I am getting to my point. Which is, as usual, an anecdote.

As my readers know, about a month ago we adopted our first puppy. For me, this is my first dog since I went away to college. For my son, it is his first pet ever. We have a cat, but the cat was already five years old and unsociable when Brendan was born. It doesn’t really count as “his” pet.

Some days, it seems like all I do is yell at my son for his treatment of the dog. He doesn’t mistreat her; he loves her very much. But that love is sometimes, literally, choking. He picks her up and carries her around too much, for my taste. If she is lying on the couch next to him, that is not close enough; he feels he needs to hold her on his lap. And sometimes when playing, I feel he gets too rough, pulling her tail or fur, grabbing her by the collar, squeezing her too tightly.

“Be gentle,” seems to be my constant refrain, in greater or lesser degrees of panic depending on what I perceive to be the desperate straits of the dog.

That word “perceive” is important. I’ve come to realize how much my reaction, either anger (yelling) or fear (a panicked plea for him to let the dog go), is conditioned by my own experiences growing up, rather than whether Brendan is actually doing anything wrong.
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Listed below are ten things I most dislike about public transportation. For some reason, the excessive heat we’ve been experiencing in Washington has really made these annoyances even more annoying. Plus, whether also because of the heat or not, I’m not sure, but the trains have been uncomfortably crowded in the evenings when I go home from work. There are few things worse than being crammed into a sardine can of a train car with lots of sweaty, tired people. All the annoyances that, normally, one can live with, become heightened and more annoying.

1. People who sing, hum, or whistle loudly.
2. People who talk loudly.
3. People who talk loudly on a cell phone.
4. People who beg for money.
5. People who play the penny whistle (while begging for money).
6. People who place their bags on an empty seat beside them and then look at you coldly if you seem like you might want to sit down.
7. People who stretch out over two seats so that they can sleep better.
8. People who eat or drink on public transportation.
9. People who turn up their iPods or CD players to such a volume that neither headphones nor train noise can muffle the sound.
10. People who pushily crowd in front of you to get on a train or bus.

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All night I dreamed of games. First, I was playing some sort of charades-style guessing game with my best friend and his wife. My friend cheated blatantly and without any attempt to disguise his behavior, but in the dream I laughed about it. This dream went on repetitively for what seemed like hours.

In the second dream, I was an audience member on the show “Wheel of Fortune.” There seemed to be only two older women as contestants. Both were probably in their seventies and reminded me of the cranky lunchladies in all the school cafeterias in which I have ever eaten: large, gray, wig-like hairdos, floral-print silk blouses, and a grim wart on the side of their cheek.

The two women were competing to guess the title and author of a book. Enough letters were turned over that the book title was apparent (I don’t remember it), but the author was more ambiguous.

Nonetheless, one of the old women tried to solve the puzzle; however, she missed the author’s name the first time she tried, then blurted out the correct answer after already getting it wrong. The other old lady smugly told Pat Sajaks that she would like to solve the puzzle, and she did so, correctly identifying the author as “Barbara Walrus.”

The two old women then got in an unseemly argument, the first old woman commenting harshly that the other would not have guessed the puzzle if she had not inadvertently blurted out the correct answer after it was too late.

Pat tried to defuse the situation by asking the women to tell the audience a little about themselves. The first woman, still hurt from losing so embarrassingly, merely told where she was from, the name of her husband and kids, and that she was a lifelong homemaker. The second woman, quite proud of herself, told Pat that she did a passable impression of Marlene Dietrich singing the old German drinking song, “Lili Marlene.”

And then she proceeded to offer an impromptu concert.

Let me just say, if our native language is the language in which we dream, German is not my native language. I’ve heard the song “Lili Marlene” many times, but even subconsciously I could not reproduce it as anything but gibberish, with the words “Lili Marlene” uttered at the appropriate place.

Nonetheless, the audience applauded respectfully when the the old woman finished her song.

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