Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

The culture's alright, the kids are alright

I’m a Gen Xer, age 37. With one child. Looking across the landscape of people my age, I have some news: We’re doing a pretty good job of living our lives and raising our kids. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors were in Europe, Africa, Asia, North America, South America, and elsewhere. A bunch of people reproduced, and here we are today, doing the same work. We’re doing alright; the human race will be fine.

Thousands of years ago, people had the same complaint: the kids are different, the kids have looser morals, the kids don’t get it. Looking at the teenagers and kids of today, what do I see? That ol’ myth is busted.

Kids in high school are doing their thing–studying, playing sports, listening to tunes–the same as it ever was. Young children like my daughter are watching TV, reading books, taking a look at the world–the same as it ever was. We, as parents, are lending a helping hand. It’s working. The kids are fine. Or pretty much as fine as they ever were.

The culture is fine; literacy is fine. There are plenty of intelligent people out there digesting the wealth of culture that is the gift of the past to us; there are plenty of people thinking about and blogging about all manner of things. If anything, we have greater access to, and appreciation of, our ancestors’ accomplishments than ever before.

All the decrepitude we ever feared–drug use, sexual immorality, violence, laziness–was there back in 1950, in 1850, in 1750, and in 50 B.C. Now, as then, we have for us the daily work of building and preserving civilization and keeping the barbarians beyond the gate, but we as parents are not particularly bad, and our kids are not particularly bad. Indeed, a lot of things are better than they used to be. I have read that, for example, in 19th century England perhaps even a third of the population was drunk all day long. Sexual immorality? There was open prostitution everywhere (in Europe and in the US). In 19th century America, there was a significant percentage of the population severely addicted to alcohol, opium, or morphine. A common medicine–available at apothecaries everywhere–was laudanum, a powerful tincture of opium in alcohol.

It is difficult to keep things in perspective–things can and do get worse. Back in the 1940s, people were slaughtering each other. We’re not there today (WWII ended just 28 26 years before I was born–hmm, not that long ago). There was a fairly awful period in our country after WWII when cities got more violent and ugly and society frayed more than just a little. I remember New York City in the 1970s, visiting with my father, who was from there, and seeing the graffiti on the subway and not feeling entirely safe. But we’re not there today.

They say it’s the worst economy since the Depression and there’s terrorism and did you hear that–but give it a rest! If you’re my age, you’re probably a parent, doing a decent job at your job and raising your kids decently well. That’s life, my friends–that’s what it’s about. Perhaps in the year 2008 at last we’ll accept that the present generations are competent–that we’re as good as any that came before us. Only then will we truly have accepted our mission of preserving the past, managing the present, and preparing for the future.

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Brilliant rule of thumb: if the energy's not coming toward you…

A very wise man passed this piece of advice along to me earlier in the year. I think he got it from someone else, so I’ll have to ask him about his source, but here’s how it goes:

If the energy is not coming toward you, then there is almost no skill or wisdom you can apply to the situation to make it succeed. On the other hand, if the energy is coming toward you, then you can lack skill or wisdom or fail to apply them and still succeed.

To wit:

  • If you really have to sell someone hard on a new relationship or business partnership or your idea or product–give up.
  • If you really have to carrot-and-stick someone to stay in a relationship or partnership or put effort into it–give up.
  • If you really have to sell yourself hard on a relationship or business partnership or opportunity or idea or product–give up!

That’s putting it negatively. Let’s try the positive side:

  • To find love, put yourself out there–online and in person. But don’t sell yourself. Wait until you meet someone who is as crazy about you as you are about him or her. The person who gets it without too much strain is the person you want.
  • Advertise your product appealingly and honestly. Get out and talk to a lot of people about it. Sell to those people to whom you really want to sell and who really want to buy; work with those people with whom you really want to work and who really want to work with you.
  • Spend money only on the things that practically demand that you buy them. Spend time on the people that practically demand that you be with them.

The beautiful thing is that the rule is so easy to understand and apply. For example, you have a friend who is hard to get hold of, who always gets five phone calls when you do, who never has room for you on her schedule… and so on. Stop calling her! When and if she feels the need or the desire to get in touch, she will. In the meantime, spend that effort on the friends who are blowing up your phone. If you don’t have any such friends, go throw it out there and meet some new people.

Back in May or so, I decided to stop fighting the world, and people especially, and the less I fight, the more easily and abundantly things come to me. It’s been a little Napolean Hill, a little Dao De Jing. Give this rule of thumb a try; I think you’ll see immediate results.

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My daughter is healthy; some kids aren't–UPDATED

Happy, healthy Eleanor RougeHospital interpretation for two Japanese families.

At St. Vincent’s on 86th, both kids have pneumonia and asthma. The four-year-old boy gets to leave with one inhaled drug. The girl is worse and stays in for several more days. She leaves with two inhaled drugs and an oral steroid. Again and again and for several days I go over the doctors’ instructions about which drug is which, what they do. This family will be okay: the asthma is going to be a pain, but there is the hope that it won’t affect the kids that much in the future; after all, it was only after they had gotten really sick that it was noticed they had the condition.

At Riley closer to Downtown, a fragile-looking eight-week-old baby has jaundice. He also has two holes in his heart, but they aren’t the immediate worry. The parents have just become parents, but their reality is a thick pack of problems, actual and potential, with obscure names. The doctor fears biliary atresia: no path for bile from the liver to the intestine, treatable with a Kasai procedure (a Japanese doctor’s discovery might save the infant), but many thus treated still need a transplant later. The father’s face grows dark from the burdens the future is pressing upon his child, his wife, him. But an ultrasound reveals that a heart hole has closed up, and suddenly the biopsy is saying that atresia seems highly unlikely. Things will probably be okay. Today I am going back to interpret for another test, and I hope the okay-ness progresses.

Japanese people quite often possess a wonderful stoicism, and it’s painful for me to see the pain and fear ready to breach the barrier of strength. I want to do something to help, and I end up being a kind of therapist. I explain that, in the US, doctors feel obligated to describe every risk, to consider every possibility, no matter how slight or remote. I tell them I’m praying for a swift recovery.

Riley Hospital for Children is big. All around me are children whose diseases seek to define them or even take them from the world. I pray, “Let this cup pass them by,” but my intention is so small in comparison to those of the parents, the doctors, the nurses, and the children themselves.

My daughter Ellie is happy and healthy. This is something I have never taken for granted and never will. She’s in Japan and I miss her.

UPDATE (12.18.08)

I interpreted for the family whose baby had the liver problem again yesterday, and the plan was to discharge them today. The doctor thought that the child did not have biliary atresia, liver function had been compromised by a virus, and time would fix the problem. I’m hoping she was right!

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I got over you today

Three months ago you made my heart sing: you told me we were getting back together after a seven-month hiatus. Within a week you found out you were pregnant. I made a trip to Nebraska to help you, yet within six weeks we were no longer on speaking terms; my last email to you was on September 22, 2008.

It has been a torment to reach into the ether and feel you out there and know how much you’re suffering. But two days ago or so ago I reached out and all I perceived was cold and mean. This is not how I wanted, or expected, to see you, but this is how I saw you. It was not, to be sure, all of you, the whole you, but it was a part of you; is; and I saw it very clearly and felt it most deeply.

Yesterday and today I have been dealing with a person whom, like you, I love deeply and want to see succeed in life, but who, reminiscent of you, has been using and taking and not fulfilling promises. I got angry. I got frustrated. And I thought, “I’m done with this.” And I really was done, and I’m not going back.

Being done with her means being done with you: I thought, “If I get rid of promise-breaker B, then I am emotionally done with promise-breaker A.” And so it was: I became emotionally done with you, not merely by dint of the logic of the situation: I wasn’t convinced that you were not someone desirable, not someone to clutch within the white corpuscles of my spiritual heart; rather, in elegant extension of the negative emotion I felt for this other person–to wit, frustration, anger, and resignation–I finally rejected you, threw you out of my heart as someone undesirable, as someone who fails to meet the standard and feels like someone who so fails.

That’s not all that has caused this; there are other bits and pieces. I saw a woman the other day who just looked so beautiful and cuddly and kind; I just felt such a warmth in my heart toward her, and, after a long time of not finding anyone toward whom I could feel such emotion–even in such an admittedly low-information, fantasy-based manner–that feeling was like a shot in the arm: it reminded of me of my ideals, of why I loved you so much and gave so much of my heart to you in the first place.

I also did the Reiki Level 2 class with you-know-who yesterday. It’s sad, in a way, that such a class would (if I perceive my own experience correctly) catalyze not beneficence, not magnanimity, but instead a pissed-off desire to take out the garbage of the soul; but that, apparently, is one of the things it did for me, and I do think it to be something that will lead to greater health in me.

No, I had never expected the emotional transition described above to be the method by which I finally got over you, but I am happy that I have. That’s not the whole story, however. I still love both of you; I still want both of you to succeed. I also perceive, however, that your success at this point is up to you. I gave what I could; I shall not give any more, I shall send myself into the ether toward you no more.

That does not change the fact that you are most intelligent and intellectually gifted woman I have ever met. You are stunningly brilliant. You have powers and gifts about which the average person can only dream. You have beauty and charm. In this blog post I offer my final prayer for you; I send out my final increment of energy toward you: I pray, Great Spirit, to all the powers of goodness and wisdom in the Universe, that you become a light to yourself and your child and the world and fulfill the potential of your gifts and your magnificient soul and achieve happiness in your journey. I love you forever. Buona fortuna!

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Rouge Political Musings for November 6, 2008

This is not a political blog, but so much of what has just happened in our country affects Spirit that I am impelled to comment somewhat in detail.

About Obama’s victory I will be brief. It is a great thing for our country, for our planet, and for our species. I voted for the man with utmost enthusiasm (i.e., not as the lesser of two evils this time) and think he will be a truly great president.

On NPR yesterday, there was a senior citizen who said he had said to his children (paraphrasing), “Now that Obama had been elected, I think we will find a cure for cancer.” I was struck dumb by the truth contained within this statement. This is how karmic shifts happen. Let me get into this a little deeper here.

I recall seeing a book in a resale shop in 1988 or 1989 called The Miracle of Jimmy Carter (which was of course from 1976). People had high hopes for Carter, and, although I don’t totally agree, the convential wisdom is that Carter was a failure. I had a friend opine to me yesterday that Obama would be “our Jimmy Carter,” to be followed by “our Ronald Reagan.”

But no, Obama is different. Everyone can see the mark of greatness on the man; most of those who oppose him (unlike my friend) don’t fear that he will be ineffective, but rather he will be too effective in going in what they consider the wrong direction. I think it ironic and yet entirely proper that the first African-American president has so many superlative qualities that his historic blackness will be seen, in retrospect, as an attractive yet relatively minor part of the whole he will have offered the nation.

Obama’s election is a great shift for our country–no, I should say for our species. Naturally, the fact that people of all races joined together in choosing him is a very great blow to racism, and yet–there is so much more at work here. Obama’s perhaps greatest gift among many is his ability to channel and mediate the talents and strengths of others (which is to say, leadership, but of an extraordinary kind). He has demonstrated this gift through his many political accomplishments, including his magnificent campaign, maybe the best run in all of world politics to date.

Indiana came through for Obama–that makes me proud.

§           §           §

On the negative side, California’s Proposition 8 is a disgrace. California? In Indiana, which is supposed to be so conservative, we have already rejected the nonsense of such a constitutional amendment. My friend pointed out to me that one big difference is that the California Supreme Court had its ruling permitting gay marriage, and thus the conservatives or wingnuts or whoever in California were motivated to do the whole Proposition 8 thing. In Indiana, no such situation pertains.

That is true, but other states have already done preemptive strikes, so to speak, of one type or another, and Indiana, to its credit, deep-sixed such an idea without too big a fuss. The argument that seemed to work in Indiana against such appalling bigotry is that a constitutional amendment would scare away gays, who tend to be educated and have money and–oh yes, they have money! It may not be the most altruistic and pure motive of all, but there are worse. Indiana may have its conservative side, but it also knows on which side its bread is buttered.

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Rouge Musings for November 3, 2008

This is my first “Rouge Musings” post, in which I just write about what’s on my mind without forcing too much discipline on the process. I hope you enjoy it, and–

Did they change the recipe for M&M’s Peanut Butter? I bought a bag recently and they seemed bigger and cruder, with more chocolate and less peanut butter. Indeed, the chocolate therein tasted pretty poor (whereas it seems better in the M&M’s Peanut–maybe for reasons intrinsic to the chocolate, maybe because the combo of cruddy chocolate and peanut and shell just doesn’t taste too bad).

We’re talking Hershey bar-level grunge chocolate.

Went with friend to Noblesville this evening, and people in a long line outside the county building to do some early voting. It’s good to see people participating in politics with enthusiasm. I am not a pessimist about our country or my generation, or the next several generations working their way up in age. Things are OK.

In the line was one of my friends, who said he was going to follow me on Twitter, and I started following him. Should you care to follow me, you will find my Twitter profile link on this page. Enjoy.

I’m not one of the many people who are worrying about the election (which is to say, I’m not worried that Obama will lose). Obama is going to win; Obama has “winner” written all over him right now, and, the beautiful thing about this man is that he gives all of it, or nearly all of it, back to the people in love and service. Sound corny? The next eight years will demonstrate the corn level; I’m patient.

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World's ugliest pumpkin

The world\'s ugliest pumpkin, carved by Matt RougeI feel ashamed to admit I carved this thing.

O crude visage!

O foul squash thug!

No one cares jack- about an o’-lantern the day after Halloween.

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Darts can teach you a lot about yourself and reality

The dart board of Matt RougeI first really played darts in 1999 when I was interning at Schering-Plough and spending a lot of time in Brooklyn with my best friend Tom. Thereafter, I didn’t play until 2006, when I joined the Columbia Club in Indianapolis. That got me back into it. I bought a dart board in early 2007, which entertained me a bit when I was snowed in, but I lost interest and didn’t play again until late August of this year, when I drove to New York to hang out with Tom, who now has very cool pad in Manhattan.

I think I’m hooked on darts for good this time.

Darts is a great way to meditate. It’s all about you, your mental state, your skill, and your relationship to physical reality. In other words, it’s just “you” and “not-you.” Whether “you” and “not-you” are in harmony or disharmony is up to you–and not-you.

Why did you let yourself hit the target this time and not that other time? Does “zoning out” allow you to hit the target better? Or are you just aimlessly firing and taking what comes? Do concentration and careful, conscious aiming help you hit the target? Or does focusing too much produce the opposite result? Why does a certain mental state help you sometimes and not others?

These are the questions you might ask yourself, and often answers come to you.

One thing I have explored through playing darts is how the self allows the self to succeed or not succeed. Practice certainly has the effect of honing actual skills like aiming and throwing, but the negotiation the self engages in with reality (not-self) while practicing is extremely interesting to observe.

Self: “Is it okay for me to hit the bullseye this time?”

Reality: “I’m not sure. You’re really quite inconsistent. You need to prove to yourself and me that you can hit it so many times in so many throws. Let’s work up to it a bit.”

Self: “But I’ve got mojo this time. I can feel a kind of electric charge on the board; it’s going to suck the dart right into the bullseye.”

Reality: “Okay, I know how that feels, and I can accept that. But on the throw after that, as a kind of recompense for success, you’re going to throw wild. Can you live with that?”

Self: “Yeah. I guess.”

Reality: “Go for it then.”

Thunk. Bullseye. So much in life works this way.

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The words "sympathy" and "empathy" are ruined

Now and then an English word gets ruined. For example, according to Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language (The World Publishing Company, 1959–this is my favorite old stand-by dictionary), “livid” means,

1. discolored by a bruise; black-and-blue: said of the flesh.
2. grayish-blue; lead-colored: as, livid with rage.

How many people imagine “grayish-blue” when they say things like, “He was livid”? Nearly zero, I suspect; in fact, I suspect that most people imagine that someone who is “livid” is red and excited with anger, as that is how we normally experience very angry people (the word “livid” used to be, I assume, useful precisely because being ashen-gray with anger is an uncommon but recognizable phenomenon).

For my point to have meaning we do not have to enter into the old argument of whether the dictionary definition is “right” or common parlance is “right.” Rather, it need merely be the case that the common usage is chaotic or empty; that is, one can turn neither to the dictionary nor to common usage to know the meaning of a word. In the case of “livid,” it is not so that, pace the dictionary, there is wide agreement as to what the word precisely means; instead, it has merely become a word associated with anger but not portraying the mode of anger in any specific or definite way. It has, in short, become a non-value-adding word. Ruined.

“Livid,” however, is a word without any political import. In contrast, “sympathy” and “empathy” have normative connotations to their modern and chaotic usage: “empathy” is good; it means really feeling what someone else feels and reacting to that feeling in an appropriate way. In the movie Species, for example, Forest Whitaker plays “Dan Smithson, Empath,” a character who readily feels as others do and is deeply affected thereby. In modern usage, if you cannot empathize, or “really feel” what others feel, you are insensitive.

“Sympathy” under the new usage is less definite in meaning but somehow less desirable than “empathy” and sometimes downright bad. Perhaps it is seen as a more superficial, less sincere version of “empathy” in which one doesn’t really get inside someone else’s skin or walk in his or her shoes.

If we turn to the same dictionary quoted from above, we will see that the classic definitions of these words differ from their vulgar cousins (I quote the most relevant definitions):

sympathy

5. the entering into or ability to enter into another person’s mental state, feelings, emotions, etc.; especially, pity or compassion for another’s trouble, suffering, etc.

empathy

1. the projection of one’s personality into the personality of another in order to understand him better; intellectual identification of oneself with another.

In vulgar parlance, the definitions of the two terms seem to be more or less switched: empathy is the “true feeling” and sympathy the colder, more intellectual function of the mind.

The Wikipedia article on empathy is for the most part in harmony with the classic definition and starts off thus:

Empathy is the capacity to recognize or understand another’s state of mind or emotion. It is often characterized as the ability to “put oneself into another’s shoes”, or to in some way experience the outlook or emotions of another being within oneself.

It is important to note that empathy does not necessarily imply compassion. Empathy can be ‘used’ for compassionate or cruel behavior.

In a bow to what I term the vulgar usage of the word, the Wikipedia article also includes the following:

In addition to the above use, the term empathy is also used by some people to signify their heightened or higher sensitivity to the emotions and state of others. Empathy may be here conceptualised as the ability to fully “read” another person, completely translating each movement into understandable conversation. This, reportedly, can lead to both positive aspects such as a more skilled instinct for what is “behind the scenes” with people, but also to difficulties such as rapid over-stimulation, or overwhelming stress caused by an inability to protect oneself from this so-called ‘pick-up’.

This would seem to be what is classically termed “sympathy”: people resonating with others just as in sympathetic resonance (Wikipedia):

Sympathetic resonance is a harmonic phenomenon wherein a formerly passive string or vibratory body responds to external vibrations to which it has a harmonic likeness. The classic example is demonstrated with two similar tuning-forks of which one is mounted on a wooden box. If the other one is struck and then placed on the box, then muted, the un-struck mounted fork will be heard.

Zig Ziglar uses the words “sympathy” and “empathy” according to their classic definitions in his sales training materials, explicating and contrasting the two concepts. The salesperson who sympathizes with the prospect is less effective because he or she not only suffers along with the prospect but also is inclined to feel and therefore accept the prospect’s reasons for not buying: can’t afford, etc. In contrast, the salesperson who empathizes with the prospect fully understands the prospect’s situation and does his or her best to improve it, typically by selling a problem-solving product.

Zig’s explication of “sympathy” and “empathy” strikes me as genuinely useful, and I have adopted his philosophy of trying to help others without “feeling their pain.” Understanding pain and desiring to ameliorate or eliminate it is not the same thing as feeling it directly and suffering by dint of “sympathetic resonance.” One presupposition of the vulgar concept of “sympathy” seems to be that such mutual suffering is good.

Again, it matters not if the usage of the words “sympathy” and “empathy” agrees with classic dictionary definitions so long as clear, distinct, and widely shared concepts are in use. To me, this seems not to be the case. As with the word “livid,” one cannot use the classical definitions of “sympathy” and “empathy” and hope to be correctly understood, and yet one cannot use the “popular” definitions of these words and hope to achieve clarity, as there is no general agreement as to what they really mean.

For now, the words are ruined.

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In honor of Amy

To see you make your bags is to understand your insight into the ways things work and your approach to the world. The final turning inside out to produce a thing of practical beauty. Everyone sees the style and knows that you know something they don’t.

You studied the methods of the engineer; you are an engineer. You used CAD; you will use it again. You have peered into the machine and conquered it on more than one occasion, as when you fixed the garbage disposal recently (prosaic? admirable!).

I don’t take such wisdom for granted, nor your love. I see how you care for your children, encouraging and managing but never fettering. You’ve done a good job; they’re doing well. You’ve stood up for me and beside me when I wasn’t doing so well. Many, many times.

The world has not always given you what you deserved; I alone perhaps cannot pay the debt it owes you, but I have tried to prove that an understanding and appreciation of you is possible to a high degree. Your spirit shines, and your ambition, if I may influence the outcome sufficiently, will be rewarded. I will not forget all that you have given me; may you never forget the depth and goodness and greatness in you that have made such gifts possible!

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