Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Since losing last month any hope of being with the person I had thought was my soul mate, I have been unable to peer into the future. I am grateful that work is going well, but I do not feel my soul mate coming, which means that I do not feel I am about to accomplish my great goal.

I do not see anything new or exciting happening in my personal life until next year. Perhaps I should be grateful for this, too.

My job is writing, and right now I write mostly for one of the top three Japanese automakers. While I have no mechanical ability and can do little more to a car than add fluids and change the spare tire, I do understand cars from a marketer’s perspective. I also drive a lot: since June 2007 I have put 37,000+ miles on my Prius (I have not regreted buying that car!).

I will start off by conceding that the stretch of interstate lying between the eastern border of Ohio and Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and comprising parts of I-70 and I-76 is not the worst road I have ever experienced, nor the scariest. That honor belongs to the part of I-80/94 between Merrillville, Indiana, and where I-80 and I-94 go their separate ways. This latter stretch of interstate is a congested, truck-bulging, suicidal nightmare, full of wrecks and intimations of wrecks.

But I-70 and I-76 in the geography described above (hereafter, “the Road”) truly is awful, as I experienced on my recent trip to and from New York City. Let me tell you what you get.

Enjoy road construction in every conceivable form

They are repairing the Road the whole way through, it seems, but not all at once. Every five to ten miles, the bag-ballasted orange-’n'-white signs convey a new warning. Half the time, these signs, along with their friends the speed limit sign and the threat sign (FINES DOUBLED), seem to guard nothing at all. Half the time, there is some actual work going on, constricting the usable surface area of the road and producing white-knuckled driving environments.

I don’t like dodging cones and other doodads placed down the middle of the two-lane freeway–scratch that, make that doodads placed a little within your lane, forcing you to drive uncomfortably close to the wall that serves as the median (more on this in a sec). I don’t like driving half in the lane, half on the shoulder of the road, which I also experienced.

When I drove back home at night, all the yellow arrows and other flashing things were almost pretty.

Watch out for the median, which is a wall

Instead of a grassy median, for a good part of its length the Road sports a wall made out of those concrete spacer things. This means that there is no shoulder for the left lane, and when you are passing slow trucks and whatnot your side view mirror threatens to scrape the wall (of course, the distance is probably greater than it appears, but it is still an unusual and uncomfortable driving environment. It is terrifying to imagine what would happen if a wreck occurred). This also means that, when you are in the left lane, opposing traffic feels a wee bit close.

I am genuinely curious why the government could not construct a highway with a grassy median in the middle of Nowhere, Pennsylvania. To be sure, a lot of the Road is in the mountains, and perhaps it was cheaper and easier to do it the way they did, but as I looked around most of the time there seemed to be no reason for no median.

Visit the wilderness of Pennsylvania

It’s a great state and all, but your experience of it on the Road will be big and boring. Most of the time you will be on a toll road that goes through no big cities. The mountainous scenery is not particularly impressive, yet the driving environment the geography creates is rather stressful. Exploded deer are common (at one point in my recent journey I saw a bright crimson circle whose diameter crossed both lanes, accompanied by chunks of scattered flesh identified as venison by inductive logic, not by visual recognition).

In short…

It’s a long, boring, and stressful drive. I recently drove from Indianapolis to Lincoln, Nebraska; as boring as that was, it was a far less stressful, far more pleasant experience.

One more thing…

What’s with the preachy yellow signs in Pennsylvania? SLOW DOWN, SAVE A LIFE. Uh, I’m doing the speed limit–isn’t that slow enough? BUCKLE UP EVERY TIME. I do! There are more, but I can’t recall them.

My friend and I came up with the concept of “good-way-bending” probably about 15 years ago. Since then, we have observed it in action and refined it. We originated the term before the concept of “spin” was prominent in the public’s consciousness, but now the two concepts can be seen as related. In a relationship, especially at the beginning, good-way-bending occurs when your love interest sees you, your actions, etc., in a positive way, i.e., ‘bends” things cognitively in a good direction. It is positive internal spin about you.

Another concept that covers the situation in which good-way-bending occurs at the beginning of a relationship is “honeymoon period.” The reason for good-way-bending is not difficult to surmise: in general, people like exciting new things and go into them with high hopes.

Bad-way-bending has, naturally, the opposite meaning. Often you see the phenomenon occur after the relationship has soured a bit; your love interest suddenly sees everything in the relationship in a negative light, as if to convince him- or herself that it just isn’t worth the trouble. Bad-way-bending can also occur at the beginning of a relationship, as when a person approaches the new romance in a spirit of extreme caution or negativity, not giving credit where it is due and throwing water on the fire of romance.

Good-way-bending is pleasant in the main. It can be worrying, however, when love interests paint a picture of us that is extremely unrealistic in its positivity; we may worry that a demystification or disillusionment is coming that will bring about a case of bad-way-bending, which is always frustrating and demoralizing.

I have two other related concepts to offer today: the positive ratchet and the negative ratchet. In the case of the positive ratchet, the good things you do bring substantial joy and happiness to your love interest while your mistakes do not bring much pain and unhappiness. In other words, your efforts to bring good things to the relationship pay off, and you don’t get slammed for your missteps. The negative ratchet brings misery: no matter what you do right, it’s no big deal, but if you make the slightest mistake, punishment is swift and substantial.

The positive ratchet may easily be combined with good-way-bending, but it is not necessarily so. It may be your SO sees your behaviors in a realistic light but nevertheless is appreciative of the good and doesn’t sweat the small stuff. Likewise, in a negative ratchet situation your SO assesses the good and bad properly but simply is slow in approbation and swift in disappointment. It is theoretically possible for good-way-bending to be combined with the negative ratchet, and vice versa, but I have not experienced it myself and suspect it is unlikely.

Woe betide the person in a relationship in which both bad-way-bending and the negative ratchet pertain! Sadly, I was recently in just such a relationship. The good things in the relationship was very good, the kinds of things upon which very healthy and long-term partnerships were based. She recognized these things, but celebration was slim. On the other hand, to her all my faults were magnified, all my mistakes immediately noted and never forgotten. The bad, as she perceived it, seemed to accumulate like a debt and grow with compound interest. In the end, bad-way-bending became so extreme as to be comical and delivered the relationship its death blow. (I did not handle the relationship extremely well from the beginning; I emphasized long-term plans when she was not ready for that discussion, and had I chilled out more overall the relationship would have had a better chance. Still, the negative ratchet was so prominent that I don’t think it could have lasted.)

All of these concepts are also useful outside the realm of romantic relationships. For example, their applicability in the world of work should be readily apparent: bosses engage in good- and bad-way-bending all the time, and positive and negative ratchet situations in the workplace can also be quite common. The concepts are also helpful in friendships, familial relationships, etc.

I wish I were immune to good- and bad-way-bending; I wish I were able to assess any interpersonal situation in complete justice; but I am not and cannot. In general, I think I tend to engage in good-way-bending and the positive ratchet when it comes to romantic relationships. Doing so is better than the opposite, I suppose, but I think I hurt myself sometimes by perceiving things as better than they are. In other words, I can be a wide-eyed romantic who rushes into things too quickly, too enthusiastically. I must take care not to do so in the future.

I got the concept recently from one of my advisors, and I have both run with it and clung to it, you might say.

In the realm of sexual relationships (I am thinking of heterosexual relationships, which is what I know, but I suppose a similar distinction would apply to homosexual relationships), people are either runners or clingers. As the names imply, runners run away from relationships quite easily, even ones that most people would consider pretty normal and good, whereas clingers stick to them, sometimes even to ones most people would consider pretty abnormal and bad.

Doing a bit of off-the-cuff sociobiology, I deduce that we humans have evolved to be clingers in the majority; were it not so, males and females would not stick to each other long enough to have babies and raise families. Runners are therefore somewhat rare, and their behavior can therefore be difficult to understand and anticipate.

As you know from a previous post, I am currently helping a friend skip the devestation of his breakup. Both of our relationships started at almost the same time, and both of them ended at about the same time (albeit mine ended after a brief relapse of unofficial something-or-otherness that came after a seven-month hiatus, whereas his ended after solid stretch of many months). Both of our SOs were runners.

The end of my friend’s relationship came when his request for relationship clarification was pounced on and blown out of proportion in the way one does when one is intentionally looking for the Big Fight. Her method of breaking up was to leave an incoherent note in his apartment with her engagement ring atop it.

My SO used a somewhat similar method. Although just days before she had called her mother without any prompting from me to tell her we were getting married, one night she picked a fight, demanded to be taken to her car that was parked in a different location, and expressed her desire to commit suicide. In other words, she consciously or unconsciously behaved so poorly as to ruin the relationship and have an excuse to leave. She was gone a few days later (admittedly, with considerable help from me, as she seemed truly psychotic and dangerous at that point).

This was not my first experience dating a runner. I had dated a Chinese woman while I was in graduate school. She literally ran from me on several occasions for reasons I think most people would consider insubstantial (one time she bolted from the car because I had, in her view, insulted Chinese people. Merrillville, Indiana, however, is a good distance from West Lafayette, Indiana, and I was able to coax her back). Her method of breaking up with me was to tell me of a trip she was taking to North Carolina to visit another man.

In my mind, however, I simply identified this person as “nuts,” failed to acquire for future use the concept of the runner, and therefore failed to avoid involvement in a similar situation. Runners can indeed seem crazy inasmuch as their behavior seems abnormal and self-destructive to us clingers, but it’s important to identify their particular characteristics and avoid getting in relationships with them. Why? Because there is almost no way to make a relationship with a runner work. Thus:

How to identify and understand a “runner.”

1. They’ve run before. They’ve been in big-R relationships and not stuck around to try to make them work. Look especially for literal running away: I “saved” my SO from her bad boyfriend by moving her out of their apartment when he was working the night shift. My friend’s SO had been living with another man mere weeks before she met my friend and got engaged to him.

2. They see themselves as victims. Runners externalize the causes of their behavior. They don’t know that they are runners, and to them their running is just a normal response to situations in which they are the victims. Although my SO did not think of herself as a runner (like me and most of us, she didn’t have that concept in the first place), as a highly intelligent woman she nevertheless perceived that she was not always acting in a normal and productive way within the relationship.

3. They make and break big promises without hesitation. My friend and his SO were engaged within a month of getting married. My SO and I also decided to get married, have a family, etc., within weeks, perhaps just days of her moving in.

As Paul Simon tells us, there are fifty ways to leave your lover, and some of them can be pretty base and mean. It is not, however, the crudeness with which runners leave that makes them runners. A person who gets sick of a relationship after several months and “slip[s] out the back, Jack,” is a coward, maybe, but not necessarily a runner. What distinguishes runners is that they go “all in” and then quit the game without following what most of us would consider proper rules of play.

In my case, I felt (and she agreed) that we had a pretty incredible thing going on; we had identified each other as soul mates and partners for life, admitted our fears of abandonment, and explicitly promised that we would never leave each other because of our deep love and concern for each other. In fact, she told me that I would have to do a series of incredibly awful things to her just to make her consider it. We had had our issues, there were aspects of the relationship that caused me considerable pain and concern (see below), but there was absolutely nothing that I didn’t think we could work through.

4. They’re disloyal, dishonest, and not open about their thoughts and feelings. I had “saved” my SO from her awful druggie boyfriend, but she nevertheless kept calling him to console him, etc. His number remained on her speed dial. After we broke up, she eventually got back together with him. Never before had I been in a relationship in which I worried about what my SO was doing (the relationship with the Chinese woman was so short that I learned of her disloyalty as it was ending), but on this relationship there was always a negative electric charge of uncertainty and fear. There were times when she seemed extremely unhappy but could never talk about it honestly.

My friend’s SO denied to various of her friends that they were engaged. She canceled their wedding plans suddenly, and the topic of marriage became taboo. She made vacation plans for herself without consulting him, and so on.

Runners do not necessarily plot against their SOs in a conscious fashion. They often seem out of touch with their own motives and goals.

5. They keep you hungry. Almost by definition, a runner needs you less than you need him or her. They are often chary of verbal and physical affection and use withholding it as a weapon against you.

6. They fool you with their good qualities. Both my friend and I had felt we had met the most beautiful and brilliant woman we had ever met. My SO is probably the most intelligent, perceptive, and deep woman I have ever met. It was simply beyond my capacity for belief that such a person could behave as she did. This is why it is so important to understand the concept of the runner, lest you be fooled and crushed.

If you’re with a runner, run. Or prepare to be run from.

I think it would take a big, long-term psychological study of the runner type to see if they can eventually overcome what makes them runners and find stable relationships, but my guess is that the prognosis is poor. Runners have big psychological problems that make them act as they do. I will omit the details, but my friend’s SO and mine both had some pretty scary patterns of behavior that implied bipolar or some similar issue. The trouble is that, as stated above, runners weave their problems into a narrative of victimization and often cope well enough that they do not hit rock bottom in such a way that would warrant forcible treatment (i.e., institutionalization). Further, because they run once fairly minor problems ensue, they are not with loved ones long enough so as to be influenced to get help.

How long can a relationship last with a runner? Mine lasted about two months at first with continued communication after that and a three-week relapse recently (albeit mostly as a long-distance relationship). My friend’s relationship lasted nine months; however, she canceled the wedding plans after just six months, and the relationship deteriorated pretty quickly after that. My feeling is that a relationship with a runner will last at most about a year; my own SO was technically married for five years (although how long she was sincerely engaged in that relationship, if she ever was, is open to speculation).

In short, runners manifest such serious character flaws and behavior patterns specifically prone to destroying relationships that by definition they cannot have healthy relationships over the long term. Understanding the concept can help prevent great pain and suffering. I know that I am determined not to make the same mistake again.

(And I will say that I still love this person and find it deeply unfortunate that we could not work things out. She truly is a woman of great brilliance and talent, and my prayer is that she finds true happiness in life.)

UPDATE (9.3.08)

My friend mentioned in the article pointed me in the direction of the Cass Elliot-sung, Laura Nyro-written song from the early 1970s, “He’s a Runner,” which has the following chorus:

He’s a runner. Woman ain’t been born that can make him stay. Woman, get away!

So, the concept certainly isn’t new, but I do think it needs to be more widely known.

Junko has been one of the great lights in my life and one of my great teachers. She was there from the very start of my adventure in Japan: I remember her at the party thrown for new English teachers in August 1992, 16 years ago, in what now seems like a different Japan and a different world. I was 21 and she was 20; I have known her for nearly half my life.

Junko taught me Japanese and the ways of Japan. She saw me go from someone who spoke nary a word to a top advertising/PR translator, and she supported me all the way. She has helped me find jobs three times in Japan and is a person without whom my career as it exists today simply wouldn’t exist.

Such help, however, pales in comparison with what she has meant to me on a much more personal level. Despite being from a different culture, she understands me to a degree perhaps higher than anyone else in the world. We have been married since 2000, and in 2005 she gave birth to our daughter, Eleanor, the world’s greatest child. She is an absolutely wonderful mother to our daughter, allowing her to be free and joyful even while instilling in her excellent manners and an altruistic perspective.

I wonder: How many meals has Junko cooked for me? How many times has she taken care of me when I was sick? How many times have we sat watching TV together? How many times has she worried about me? How many times has cleaned the toilet and done other housework?

There is no way to honor her enough for all she has done for me or repay the debt. Sometimes all we can do is be grateful for what we are given. I am immensely grateful for all that she has done for me and our child and for my family and friends in general. I offer her the highest honor and appreciation and celebrate and validate her being. I wish that there were an easier concordance between her happiness and mine; I wish I had the wisdom required to think, feel, and act in such a way as to give her everything she wants and needs in life.

You are the world’s greatest child and give me strength every day. Happy third birthday, Ellie-chama!

That’s the motto my friend and I came up with yesterday for his breakup.

He may have the power to avoid the slow, agonizing crash and burn I have endured for the past eight months. He perhaps can borrow my foolishness, transmute it into wisdom like a soul alchemist, and walk away without the debilitating pain.

If you are getting over the ending of a relationship, here is some homemade pop psychology that might be of use to you.

We get hurt because we don’t get what we want.

The pain of a breakup comes not from what SOs have done to us but simply because they go away and we don’t want them to do so. It is not a matter of justice or fairness; it is a matter of our desires not matching the external world.

This sounds simple; it’s a no-brainer, isn’t it? Yet how often people talk about a person’s leaving as though it was something done to them.

In almost every case, of course, there are matters of justice and fairness thrown into the breakup mix: the SO cheated, was abusive, broke promises, etc. These complaints may all be legitimate. If a person makes a promise, as in marriage, to stay forever and be loyal, it is indeed not fair and not right when that promise is not kept.

I was given such promises in January of this year. Emphatic, repeated, believable promises. She was my soul mate; she was going to take care of me, just as I was going to take care of her; I was set for life. The promises, and the promiser herself, evaporated practically overnight, after two months of a relationship that I had considered the best and most important of my life. Over the next several months, I experienced the greatest emotional pain of my life.

Since the day of that breakup, there have been other SOs and other breakups, but none affected me in that way because I did not want the SOs to the same degree (in actuality, I have remained friends with all of them and rooted for them in their new relationships).

True soul mates keep their promises, don’t leave, and don’t make you miserable. They are not brick walls against which you bash your head in futility. They don’t allow themselves to make you hungry for love and affection; instead, they anticipate your need and fill you up before you reach a bad place.

Regardless of whether your SO has promised to be your soul mate or not, if you are bashing your head or hungering, then they are not, and the bashing and hungering are, in effect, your responsibility. If your SO has left and you are in misery because he or she is gone, then that pain is your responsibility.

All of the above thoughts underpin the concept of “skipping the devastation.” I am not so naive as to think that sheer force of will can deliver the desired result of a breakup without pain. I failed to do so myself for three reasons: I didn’t have the concept of skipping the devastation, I hadn’t yet worked out the thoughts I have outlined above, and, lacking these two, I lacked the focus by which willpower could have been useful in the first place.

I do believe, however, that the above thoughts can be of use, for, if we recognize that the causes of breakup pain are internal, then we can attend to them without needlessly and inefficiently mulling over externalities.

Thus, with the above thoughts in place, my friend has a fair chance of getting through this breakup without crippling pain and a very good chance indeed of reducing his pain level by an amount that makes a difference. I also need to keep these thoughts in mind should I once again have high hopes in a relationship.

I think it is human nature to fill in the blanks. If one reads the writings of ancient Rome, or China or anywhere for that matter, one does not get the impression they felt lacking in knowledge of how things work: on the physical level, psychological level, spiritual level–they seem to have felt they knew it all. Millenia later, so do we.

How often we get up in the morning and subsist on style. We don’t really know what effect our proposal, if implemented, will have on the company, but we have our suit on and a certain manner of presenting and speaking. We talk about the motives of people and predict their actions based upon a variety of templates. After the election or latest economic report, we talk with erudition about why things happened precisely the way they did, and it feels right because it’s on TV and in blogs and in whatever medium gives us confidence and comfort. I have myths about myself that make sense to me, and who can forcibly change my mind regarding what is interior to me?

But so often what we have is phlogiston and calx, a model of things that is not completely wrong but nevertheless very far from the truth. How many papers are there in the world, written by great minds in lucid prose, arguing for things now proved wrong or recognized as irrelevant?

Peering beneath the gauze of myth, of the comforting style of life, is both disorienting and frightening. To do so is to move away from the things that make life safe and ordinary. All the while, the media are pulling you back, even blogs like this one are calling you back to the false home, for the MSM is corn-fed choice beef and blogs like this are a spritz of lemon on your grouper, if not the fish itself.

We do know a lot. We know a lot more than we used to know. But our hearts are going to beat despite the universe of ignorance that remains for us, and our brains are going to fill in the blanks to make stepping out into the streets of NYC in 08 as “of course” in feeling as was strolling the Roman forum in 08.

The soul of knowing, therefore, is to realize I do not know. I lack wisdom. I have a fraction of the answer but not the answer itself.

I drove out to Lincoln on Saturday to help a person who may accurately be described, I suppose, as my ex-girlfriend, although it has been a relationship that has altered my life in ways far beyond what that meager title implies.

It was about an 11-hour drive from Indianapolis. Illinois is wide enough, but let me tell you, Iowa has even greater girth to offer a driver. You just drive and drive, and all you see are fields and flat land. Nebraska would seem to be more of the same, but Omaha is right across the river from Iowa, and Lincoln is only 45 minutes or so further into the state.

The funny thing is that, if you drive enough, you eventually reach your destination: something obvious but surprising in its truth. In February, two of my friends and I took a road trip to New York City, driving all night through a blizzard so as to arrive on time to see my play performed the next day. Drive 15 hours (when the weather is rotten) and reach NYC; drive 11 hours (when the weather is beautiful) and reach Lincoln. I have been back and forth on airplanes to Japan; it is strange that one can conquer that distance by renting a seat and waiting. But the autonomy that the automobile offers can be stranger still: pick a destination, pony up for gas, drive safely, and there you are.

I listened to The Look by Roxette and string quartets by Franck and Brahms. I stopped four times. Then I was in Lincoln. Then I was in the coffee shop where she was, hugging her after more than seven months of not seeing her. It felt like a miracle to be in her presence again. Is a phone call going to do this? Is an email going to be this? No.

Lincoln has several things to say. The houses of the grid talk about a day when this city had to be here. I am ignorant of how the population has changed over the years, of how the economy is doing here; but, as in every city, there are the supermarkets and restaurants; it’s a college town, so there are students for whom this city and its school and the red of the football team are just a given. You must visit the capitol building if you go there: beautiful architecture and amazing art inside, lots of it. The use of yield signs instead of stop signs on the residential streets struck me as unusual. Also, the numbered streets (e.g., 27th St.) go north-south, and there are streets named after the letters of the alphabet (e.g., O St.) that go east-west.

The most important thing in this city, however, is my former soul mate and her struggle. I don’t know if the help I offered will have any long-term benefit; I don’t know if I have bent the world’s karma for the better by traveling there. I have no knowledge, no wisdom. I can only think, “I love you, Great Spirit, and wish you could see beyond the struggle and love me as I love you.”

I drove back Monday, seeing that she wanted to focus on her struggle and not on anything the two of us could be together.

For my many international readers, allow me to explain (hello, Buenos Aires!). Getting the munchies is when suddenly the hunger just overcomes you. Now it’s not like major hunger you get when you haven’t eaten for a few days (or, Heaven forbid, a few months!). No, it’s a craving in the tum-tum you get (for my international readers, let me explain: your tum-tum is your belly, the stomachy part), usually for “junk food,” that starts a-bugging you. Your eyes shift from side to side: where is food? Is there a bag of junk food in the house?

You see, it wouldn’t be the munchies if the craving weren’t for crunchies: salty snacks like potato chips, Fritos, or good ol’ American pork rinds (in LA they are called chicharrones, which sounds to me like cucarachas, but whatever). Your eyes shift from side to side like the dissatisfied peepers of the cicada, searching like an insect for sustenance! Suddenly you rip open a bag of Fritos in front of the TV and douse your mouth with the chips, as if to put out a fire.

I think it’s of greater than theoretical importance to ask whether you can get just one munchie instead of a whole pack, and I think the answer is… yes! In such a case, your tum-tum fillips your awareness just once, one of your eyes shifts just once, and you eat just one chip. It’s a small need, easily satisfied. Can you imagine, then, a bag labeled “Frito” with just one Frito in it? Go eat some snacks!