Analog by Night

“It was John Kenneth Galbraith, the hyperliterate economic sage, who coined the phrase “conventional wisdom.” He did not consider it a compliment.

- Freakonomics, pg. 89

If you can see what’s going on you can do it yourself, Seeing what’s going on is challenging though, especially for the patient. I’m clearly no expert, but perhaps I can provoke the reader into response, no?

The therapist asks you to describe everything, tell your story, open up, explain, define, detail etc. They allow you to paint the landscape, but they’re not just looking for the painting, they’re looking for the brush strokes. Hidden, sometimes better, sometimes worse, are the mechanisms that we use to create and tell ourselves the story of our lives. The creation of one’s own identity, is done with one’s own brushes, and the brushes are our metaphors, our analogies, our reasons, and our own explanations. Many layers can be painted at the same time.

If the therapist can discover your brushes, the tools which you use to create your own identity, he can flush out the broken ones, the problematic ones, the brushes that create swathes of pain, or confusion on our lives.

My therapist once discovered that I didn’t use emotional language. I only detailed my experiences as logical equations. I would recount an event and explain why it happened. I didn’t spend any of my words on my feelings about what had happened. I simply used my dominant analytical skills to render a judgment of the event as to prove that I had been wronged. But I wasn’t in a court, I was in pain. What he helped me to do, with force, was blurt out how the event made me feel. Then a light went on in the room. All of a sudden I had two languages, and I knew that I needed to be able to tell the story in both. To say what happened in the event, and then to take full account of how it made me feel. I could then see that I could learn to protect my happiness, my well being, by avoiding events, and patterns of behavoir or even patterns of interpretation that would yield painful emotions. I could see that the construction of the story in my head, of my life, of my personality was a manifold affair. It was much more complicated than simply showing up and responding to what happens. If I wanted more from my days I had to approach things with both ears turned on. The rational and the emotional.

To this day though, my emotional conversation isn’t the dominant one. I do believe that it is rich, and I do believe that regular English does a poor job of an emotional language. To paraphrase Ken Robinson, “We only educate people from the neck up.”

One of these days I’m going to make a little chart that proves to people that I’m not as emotionally shallow as I appear, it’s just that I’m polyphonic. I’m like everybody else, but my music, I believe, is at a longer, slower wavelength than others.

Obviously the point was to convey mood. I was in a weird spot, and am still in the afterglow of that weird spot.  I mean it’s a weird spot I’ve been in for nearly a month now. There’s a pile of turmoil in my life, and for any of you that know me, know that it can only be one of two things, people and work. Typically, female people and work. I try to keep the female stuff to personal conversation rather than public blogging out of simple discretion. Personal lives damaged by fast feelings and even more slippery fingers are harder to forgive. Work, well, work is scary, but hey it’s just work, and it’s just a fucked up economy.

I don’t mean to be too glib though, about work. My workplace is my best opportunity to help other people, have fun, make cash to fuel my private dreams and to try and creatively solve problems. That’s a lot to me. There are other avenues perhaps for those things singly, but it seems difficult to have them all and play outside the business stream. Work is a centerpiece for my life. It’s not the whole table setting, but it’s a significant consideration for my hourly existence. I’m not going to walk you down all the tentacles to make the point, you can imagine what your own life would be like if the merry-go-round developed a weak axle.

Some of you have families to protect, investments, and other things that you care about and they’re depending on you, day to day, but you also work in high tech, and there’s still a lot of demand for your skillset. Things are ok for now.

Which is the most frequent thing I’ve heard lately. “We did some damage…pre-emptively, but because of this, or not, things are ok.” Three times I’ve heard this and three times it’s been said in somewhat good faith. I’ve been inclined to believe that good faith, because I DO believe that the actions taken were painful, and why would you make THREE major painful cuts over the span of a month? I’ve heard the reasons, and alone they make sense. When it’s the explanation after it’s all said and done, it makes sense. But somebody knew it wasn’t all said and done the first time and the second time. Why should I, or anyone else believe that they’re done now?

But that’s ok. What am I to do? I’ve been through this before a couple times. I’ve got a lot of baggage, and a fair amount of burnout going on too. A couple months away from tech may not be good for my bottom line, but it might be the best thing for my soul.

For those of you that I work with, I’m not trying to go anywhere voluntarily, don’t panic, but I think If I lost my job tomorrow, I’d look seriously at taking out a loan and going to a vocational school to get my ASE certification. Then seeing where that took me. It could take me back home, who knows.

I’ve dreamed, in the last few years, that maybe I could open my own repair shop someday. There are interesting problems to solve, and cars are getting more complex all the time. Especially as they get more electric.

Lately all of my dreams have been of somewhere else, some other time, and just pure fun. It’s winter. It’s the time when things get quiet, sleepy, contemplative. I’m looking forward to warm spicy food. Fireplaces, smells and far away sounds. I look forward to at least one weekend of sleeping through an entire day.

I’m thinking of wild ideas, more reading, more writing. Introspection, reflection, inflection. Dredging up the past. Thinking of craft. I’ve also been thinking about fugue states.

Until the wheels fucking come off, and the whole busload of screaming children goes careening across four lanes of traffic through the paper-thin barrier and into the river 200 feet below.  Where the children are instantly quieted and the bus driver wakes up to the horror of a giant wet metal box full of sleeping angels.

And the rest of the traffic goes on around it, careful to avoid the whole in the bridge, except that a few feet ahead the whole road comes to an end in a fiery inferno like you might see in a 70′s horror flick.

Fuck it, i’m drinking tea. Putting down the kool-aid.

“You deserve to be loved and to receive the attention that you are putting out there.”

Simple as that. Charming, true. This is one of the reasons she’s my best friend.