SubscribeDecember 23rd, 2010
workplace humor
Hah!
via wimp
December 2nd, 2010
aggression in women and the pouting princess
I’m an aggressive person. And female. That seems to be a problem. I keep getting counselled to “let it go.”
Certain things make me really mad and to be truthful I suspect that at least some of the things that make me mad are the result of my pedophile “uncle” (hereafter known as “P”).
Yuck, I know. (Please relax. I am not going to tell you about that set of experiences, rather I would like to briefly meditate on the outcome today, all these decades later.)
I acknowledge that some of my aggression is the result of trauma and emotional damage. However, I suspect I would have been aggressive whether or not P turned up to the family property that summer. My father was a terrier with an attitude. He was, frankly, terrifying in his rages and drunken affection and I have inherited some of that disposition, although not the alcoholism. (I associate the feeling of being out of control with the hurt of others and therefore do not partake to the point where I feel that instability which precedes drunkenness.) What I suspect is that P narrowed the focus of the natural aggression. I react poorly, for example, to threats to my physical or emotional safety or to the safety of children or others under the power of a “well wishing” majority.
One time, as an example, a boyfriend thought that pushing me into a corner was the answer to my anger at a bit of his behaviour. Before I knew quite what was happening I had a pair of scissors in my hand and the points were headed for his throat. He had very long (and fast) legs. Last I saw of him he was booting it down the road outside the apartment.
I have fought very hard to control the actual outcome of my anger. I did not kill the bugger above, for example. And as soon as the threat was gone, so was the anger. I will not tolerate what I consider to be abusive behaviour. Even things as simply juvenile as snides, snarls, slammed doors and tossed heads in the work place I consider worthy of disparagement, nay, outright scorn. I recognize it makes me an uncomfortable, and vaguely threatening person to be around and there is no cure for that I’m afraid. I just stay away as much as is possible from people who are afraid or threatened by my presence. I don’t really care if a 30-something year old acts like a 10 year old except when I have to both witness it and suffer its effects. If you want to be a princess do it away from me. That’s all I require. I don’t think it too much really. And if you do decide to sport your tiara and flip your hair at me, I will attack.
A lot of people see that as a problem though. I keep being told that I can be assertive without being aggressive, for example. Actually, I’m not sure that this is really possible, not without changing an important component of what makes me me. It’s who I am, welded, now, to the bones of what I would have been.
I am a badger. Leave me alone and I am kind of fun to watch. But I have enviable claws and a disposition to dig.
I do like being me for the most part. While I have had several rather nasty things happen to me in my life, I feel more than compensated by my “gifts.” I hear the sky singing, for example, and when the brain shifts sideways I can also experience yellow as a “ting” sound and other such cross-modalities. I can think; I can reason. I can flow in and out of the experience called “art.” I have wonderful children and friends. I live in a country that will take care of me should I need it. And perhaps most importantly, I have a strong sense of ethics.
This last – my sense of what is OK and what is not OK in the commerce between people – I thank P for that. The horror that was his life, his actions, his pain and inability to control it, left me (and others) irrevocably changed. I can never be what I would have been, but I don’t think of justice as pertaining to the outcome for the transgressor but justice is rather the eventual outcome for the transgressed. And I think justice has been achieved: my life is a good one all told.
I am aggressive and not simply assertive, it’s true, but I suspect that my justice achieved is really due to my agression, so it is not something I would forgo for others’ comfort’s sake. I can’t help but think of the time and current places where the chucking of full grown women under the chin, the silly diminutive names and bottom pinchings that highlight genderized power disparities and the people who counsel the few outraged women to accept what men are like for the sake of peaceful co-existence. Rage has its problems, of course, but it is also the social change engine.
For me one key to living with rage is the control of my behaviour. Yes, I make most people uncomfortable but I never actively set out to hurt except in self defense. Rage is a form of power and it must be controlled. P taught me that. Still, I don’t think social ease is something that should be overtly fostered, rather the self awareness that must underpin any real acceptance of others should be the focus of our joint efforts. (I mean, the vocalizations of the deaf make many hearing people visibly uncomfortable. Whose problem is that?) Hair flippers that gain self awareness stop being hair flippers. Since I see the source of hair flipping and its generalized form, princess pouting as emotional immaturity and as such an emblem of emotional damage in a woman that should have achieved a higher level of maturity, I think that addressing that damage is the way to achieve justice. So I leave it alone until flipped and then inquire if the person realizes that she isn’t really a princess. “You do realize that daddy wasn’t really a king, don’t you?”
Don’t you think that should be warning enough? Certainly it’s better than smacking her upside the head.
The other key to living with rage is a profound respect for the nature of what is. Slipping into the easy but empirically incorrect comforts of belief is dangerous to self, but more importantly, dangerous to others. The princess pout limits the pouter but it actively hurts the eye and ear of the one witnessing the shocking loss of decorum. To be more serious, I do find that my ability to feel joy, to fall into awe, is directly relational to my ability to accept how I actually am, where from I, in fact, came and where to, in fact, I will go. Princess pouters cause me pain and while I can moderate my response to that pain, I cannot stop the pain itself. Nor should I have to really. It’s not that I expect the princesses of the world to stop being affected assholes, just that I expect them to do what I do and control their natural propensities. In other words, pout all you like, just don’t do it near me. I mean, really, all of us need to shit but most of us learn to do it in a way and place set apart for such unsocial needs. Princess pouting is just a sort of emotional defecation. Do it in private please.
I suppose you can see why I am not universally liked. Oh the joy of living with others.
October 24th, 2010
My new hero – Barbara Ehrenreich
I’ve always felt a mild case of disgust for these kind of people. Now it just more pronounced. Wonderful video.
via Wimp
September 19th, 2010
Too much to think about
As a brief perusal of these pages will establish, I am interested in a number of things. My main obsessions are poetry, poetics, 18th and 19th century American history and literature, the importance of the esoteric in the development of the American psyche and its expression as religious history, the concept of imagination and its philosophical history, the concept of wilderness, Phenomenology especially when it speaks to the arts, embodied cognition and perception (and where perception and imagination diverge), plants, beading, indigenous technology, music, tarot and alchemy.
And that list is considerably diminished from the one I would have made a decade ago.
The problem is that following (even modestly) these interests is time consuming. And I’m writing poetry at the moment – a raft of stuff all about one subject, telling one story. So I think I’m going to have to put my books on imagination, history, alchemy, etc aside for the nonce. Even my reading on poetics is getting in the way. I suspect that all I can really do is write and bead for now.
What that means for tailfeather is that you are likely to get a bunch of angsty moans about how hard it is to find a way to tell the truth (which is what makes poetry readable) and maybe some more pictures of my beading and quilling in progress. I apologize in advance.
I suspect this putting-aside might be hard to do since I find myself continually circling the idea that imagination is an intentional act that positions one with regard to the Other. That is, imagination is not a static thing, not a theatre where images are displayed, but more the projector, and simultaneously the energy that it takes to run “the projector”, the images that are created, the (ir)reality it creates in the process and the real world from whence the power and audience originate.
Oh well. We all know writing is difficult and I am just not the kind of person anymore who can carry it all, juggling whilst running a marathon. Nope. Can’t do it.
September 18th, 2010
Analysis with a sweet bite
I was futzing around again and ran across writerly advice from someone named “Sugar.” Now you may be long aware of this person’s column but it is new to me. What a sweettart delight!
As someone who recognizes her own self pity and its underlying arrogance, I was both moved and glad of this:
I’d finally been able to give it because I’d let go of all the grandiose ideas I’d once had about myself and my writing—so talented! so young! I’d stopped being grandiose. I’d lowered myself to the notion that the absolute only thing that mattered was getting that extra beating heart out of my chest. Which meant I had to write my book. My very possibly mediocre book. My very possibly never-going-to-be-published book. My absolutely no-where-in-league-with-the-writers-I’d-admired-so-much-that-I-practically-memorized-their-sentences book. It was only then, when I humbly surrendered, that I was able to do the work I needed to do.
What an old professor of mine called the “attach-bum-to-seat” sure-fired writing methodology linked to the “get-over-yourself” philosophy!
August 14th, 2010
It should be de rigueur
for all city hall crossings. It might remind us of the limits of corporate-style authority.
via The Daily Dish
August 11th, 2010
Commentary on work
My son sent me the link. It is wonderfully apropos to the day. The thing is everyone who knows me knows I am no good at all at games. No interest. No talent.
from: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
August 1st, 2010
Stress and power
There is a really good article in Wired about stress and its relationship to power by Jonah Lehrer in . The basic conclusion:
The moral is that the most dangerous kinds of stress don’t feel that stressful. It’s not the late night at the office that’s going to kill us; it’s the feeling that nothing can be done. The person most at risk for heart disease isn’t the high-powered executive anxious about their endless to-do list — it’s the frustrated janitor stuck with existential despair.
and
feelings of enjoyment — the ability to find meaning in our work, even if it’s stressful work — may counteract the toxic effects of glucocorticoids. These molecules might also explain why not every janitor dies of heart disease at a young age and why enjoyable forms of exercise are good for us.
and this particularly nice sentence
Chronic stress is like a slow-motion stroke.
Damn.
June 20th, 2010
The urge to defenestrate
A pet peeve of mine is an organization that makes a push to produce more client-friendly information bulletins, pats itself on the back for being so culturally/politically/ethnically aware and then uses phrases like “an urge to defenestrate.” Imagine a leaflet speaking to a generally vocabulary-challenged client base and further that the whole point of that particular leaflet is to foster the sense of inclusivity of said clients. The manager responsible for the final version of the leaflet strikes out “want to jump” and replaces it with “urge to defenestrate.” Why? Because that’s the term in the policy that underpins the organization. Imagine further that in all the back-clapping for “speaking like the common man”, no one gets the deep irony, nor the underlying offensiveness.
The thing that strikes me is not that the average manager thinks they can use words effectively outside their personal comfort zone, and without any training or study, but rather that the average manager doesn’t really understand that there is anything outside their personal comfort zone. Those ones out there – those clients, or customers, or user group – they are viewed as assets. The only point of view is from the bowels of the organization. Even when the mission of the organization is to provide a service for that group, and being able to understand from the point of view of the served would be clearly valuable, managers often simply cannot do that. People become assets because the manager’s point of view is tied (seemingly irrevocably) to the heart of the organization. Having being nurtured on the policies and procedures that are the nerve pathways and circulation network of the corporate body, interaction with clients is moderated through them. The assumption (usually unconscious) is made that the client should come from the same stand point. Bad assumption, but there you are.
Of course I understand that policies and procedures are critical to the success of the venture, but the whole idea of management is (or should be) to steer a course between the needs of the people the organization exists to serve and the policies which limit and order what those interactions can be. So if you run a suicide prevention organization that targets people who largely come from the less educated portions of society, then just because your policy manual uses the term “defenestrate,” that doesn’t mean you should use it in the documentation that tries to convince your client base to believe that you want to include them, that you want them to feel included in the world that they wish to leave. If you are any kind of decent manager, then you need to give up the language of the manual and cling to its meaning: use “want to jump out your window?” If you don’t then you have proven that you value position above person.
Now it may be that you do value position over person. In fact, if you are a manger, that is probably because you do have that value set. Despite how you may imagine yourself, the fact is that to get to where you are you have probably had to maneuver past others who equally deserved what it is you seized. You have almost certainly ceased being friends with those who no longer match you in status. But whatever, right? You’re there. The thing is, do you also want to do the job you landed? Do you want to serve your clients? Then you need to grow some empathy, even if it is a learned response. Learn to let the manual go long enough to say “please don’t jump.”
June 19th, 2010
Dreaming the obvious
A couple of nights ago I had a dream. I have escaped from a prison along with a young man. We are flying over the country side, no control, having been shot out of some sort of weapon. I can see the land streaming under me. We cross the coastal lands and I realize that the arc of our flight is going to dump us in the ocean. As the dream opens I see below me small farms and acreages with rusted-out cars, deep pockets of weeds next to broken wood sheds and other signs of poverty and I feel a sense of comfort from the place. I don’t know this land but I feel comfortable with its apparent freedoms, space and its silence.
As I fly past these coastal lands I see the ocean and below the surface a great many ovoid shapes that I know to be creatures. Whales probably. I get no sense in the dream that these are sharks or other killers but that they are dangerous simply because of our relative size. The fact that they may kill me after I drop amid them would be a matter of impersonal circumstance. I am stoic about this possible fate. This is not something I want but at least falling into the water is not necessarily fatal as falling to the earth would have been.
And then the young man and I are in the water and the point of view changes. I can no longer see the beings below, the water is dark, the grey-brown-green of the sea. I also cannot see the land. I cannot control what may happen in the sea. All I can do is swim. So I turn back toward the way I have just come and begin.
I have worked with dreams since I was a young girl and because it is such a long time, my working with them goes in great arcs. At the nadir I obsess, write down every image, sensation, colour flare in my sleeping. I list all the elements, translate them into narrative. I compare the symbols to past dreams. Turn them into poems, drawings, song, movement. Interpret.
At the zenith of my psychological bow, I surface inside the dream and it stays with me, gently. Like balm on sore hands the images remain mostly invisible but work nonetheless. Often – acknowledged but left alone – a friend that needs a period of respectful silence before speaking – the dream will resolve into meaning and present itself as something so obvious, so crystalline and ordered, that one wonders how something so obvious was necessary to be spoken.
But it is necessary and, from experience, there is another, and another, layer of insight that will present itself when the initial action of the dream has been played out in waking life. So for this one, the swim is what I am being called upon to do and once I reach sight of land, or landfall itself, the dream will reappear and I will understand more.
Welding dreams to waking life is an act of art. Interpretation always is. The world has no meaning intrinsic to it, at least not any meaning in the human sense of the word. Meaning as we know it is our creation. Yet despite this, a good meaning, one that works for us in our lives must be linked to the actual world. Meaninglessness has at least two components. One is the obvious fact that humans are the source of human meaning and so there is no outside resource by which we can ascertain the Truth. Humans are not interlocutors between heaven and earth. We are in a dyadic relationship with that which is our source. The earth and its patterns are sometimes the nadir and we the zenith and other times we are beneath our own feet.
The dream I had told me a few things. I am finally out of prison, but I am still not in control. I have been shot out of that terrible place and I am passing over that which was for me. In other words, my job is over and I am temporarily immersed in Rez war and politics. And this has dumped me back into the sea of feeling.
I am not an emotional person and there are whale-sized unresolved issues that swim in my unconscious. I am in pain a good deal and of late I have felt despair, and an understanding of how people wear out, how pain can cause even a strong woman to lie down to die. But here in the dream, despite my lack of personal control – my life’s lack of a apparent navigation device – my natural stubbornness has been restored. Often in my past, in a dangerous situation, my mind narrows, and my focus remains locked on getting to safety. This is the feeling I am left with in the dream. All those dangerous huge creatures below me – there is nothing I can do about that. I may be killed by the vasty size of that which I cannot control. This is true – but meaningless since it is not mine to write. All I can do is swim.
This is key in the dream but so too is direction. At the very end of the dream I am in the water beginning the swim to shore, resolute, fear harnessed to forward motion, but where exactly is shore? And what does it represent in waking life?
The question to be answered by subsequent acts of interpretation: Where in waking life does safety lay?
And what I would really like to know – can I stop being shot out of other people’s guns?