Man Note: Love's Cowardice

Thanks for the quote, Bob Marley!!!

I'm a monster.

My love makes me a monster.

My use of love for my own purposes makes me a monster.

This post is going to be hard for me, but it is one that I must finish.  Before I begin, let me emphatically state that this post is about me and my capacity for love, and NOT the objects of my love.  This is an introspection and not an accusation.  In my recent self-evaluation, I've been looking at my behaviors and trying to find things I can improve on, ways of getting out of my own way.

In evaluating myself, I came to a realization about my roles, which is largely the reason I started this blog.

I am a husband and a father.  These are two of the biggest roles I have ever taken on in my life, but I have been abusing my roles.  It is a two-fold abuse.  I have been abusing myself in my roles and I have been abusing my loved ones.  I use the word abuse because it is accurate, it conveys what it is I mean to say, but it makes me wildly uncomfortable.

I have willingly chosen my roles, but lately I have been using my roles as a way of excusing myself from my life as opposed to a way of enriching my life.  I have put the anchor of "responsibility" so heavily around my neck that I have had very little room for anything else.  Instead of seeing my marriage and my child as the blessings that they are, I have used them as a downer, an excuse for not living up to my potential.  I have shouldered myself with the burden of doing all things for them.

What is funny about this, is that I have probably been at my least helpful during this phase.  I have been surly, combative, and depressed.  I have not engaged in my normal activities with the family.  I have stayed away instead of joining them in activities.  I have buried myself in work and called it "working for my family" when it has been doing anything but "working for my family."

This quote is for my family.  They don't deserve my disrespect.

I have been burdening myself with an over-proportioned sense of responsibility.  The sun and the moon do not rise and fall because of me.  I am not responsible for all things.  I can do what I can do, and that's about it.  I have been abusing myself with my inflated sense of responsibility and its been crippling.

I mentioned the flip side of this inflated sense of responsibility earlier.  I've been surly, combative, and depressed.  The depression has caused me to want to place blame.  I've been silently blaming my family for my actions, and the sheer injustice of this does not escape me.  It is so unfair to them that I have been projecting my sour feelings on to them.  Most of the time, they don't have any idea as to why I am so surly.  This realization has been one of the hardest for me to deal with.  The thought of causing my loved ones pain, and all because I've been struggling with my self is horrifying to me.

But this isn't about making myself feel bad for past sins, it is about moving past this depressed phase and getting my feet underneath me.

So here's where I stand on this: I've been a coward.  I've used my love as a way of avoiding risk, of avoiding myself, and I vow to stop.  I vow to use my love relationships as a way of filling my cup instead of capping it.  I vow to treat my loved ones in the way they deserve to be treated.  I vow to treat myself the way I deserve to be treated.

And I vow to take a pin to my inflated sense of responsibility when it gets out of control.

It's going to be hard work, but I want this.  I want it a lot.  I deserve it, and my family deserves it.

For now, I simply ask their forgiveness.  And patience as I work through this.

Another piece of wisdom from Gandhi.

Personal Note: What Vacation Teaches Me

The View from my cabin at Odell Lake

I just got back from a short 4-day vacation at Shelter Cove Resort at Odell Lake in central Oregon.  It was 4 days without cell service, without alarm clocks, without commutes, work days, and all the accoutrement that goes with the modern life.  Here are 3 things I was able to take away from those 4 days.

1. No one but me will defend my time.

I need downtime.  Everyone does.  But I am terrible at protecting myself and insulating myself from the pressures of work.  I almost always say "yes" to requests from work, and it is starting to become a barrier to my own personal desires and the relationships with my family.  When I did some poking around and reading about work/life balance and overworking, I ran into this quote:

We often hear of people breaking down from overwork, but in nine out of ten they are really suffering from worry or anxiety. - John Lubbock

This is very much true for me.  I have a tendency to put off my personal desires in pursuit of work, or of tending to my family, which is not to place blame on them.  It is a character fault of my own.  I need to be a better defender of my own time and to be more disciplined in accomplishing my own goals.  

This is the first lesson.

2. Reading is still one of my favorite pasttimes.

I finished a book and a half in the 4 days I was on vacation.  It was marvelous.  Almost every morning I awoke before the others in the cabin.  I turned on the coffee pot and sat with my book.  I pounded through the last half of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck and I almost got all the way through One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B.J. Novak.  

It takes me back to grad school where my advisor, John Rember, once told me, to paraphrase, that "the writing life looks like sheer idleness from the outside."  When I spend 4 days in the woods reading and ruminating, I feel like I've gotten something done.  I feel like I can breathe and work and create.  

In the time I spent in the large windows of the cabin, bathed in morning light, I came up with a couple of new ideas for the TV series I am writing. I got myself unlocked from a plot thread that had me pinned for a moment, and I was able to actually dedicate a portion of my mental real estate to my own creative endeavors.  The words of others help me with this.  Reading helps me with this.  Being submerged in the waters of others' creative works gives me hope that my own creativity has a place in the world.  

3. Sleep is my friend.

I'm a terrible sleeper.  Well, once I'm sleeping I'm fine, but I am a terrible self-manager when it comes to putting myself to bed.  I can distract myself with this, that, or the other for hours on end in the wee hours when the rest of my family sleeps.  I used to think this was my most creative time, but I am slowly learning that this is probably not the case.  

Many times, I will find myself distracted by the television, by the internet, by a stiff cocktail, or any number of other things.  What I need to be doing is putting myself to bed so that I wake recharged with the energy to dedicate to my own creative endeavors.  

Self-care...not my strong suit.

I have an eye mask that I know works to put me to sleep, as well as some lavender pillow spray that helps me fall down into sleep, but I don't use them.  I somehow allow myself to engage in "mindless idleness" instead of "mindful idleness."  It's time to change the way I behave in order to encourage more of the latter.  In fact, that may just be my next blog post..."Mindless Idleness vs. Mindful Idleness."  More on that soon.

So, for me, next steps are to remember my lessons, to rededicate myself to the process of working hard for a creative life, which sometimes means indulging in pure idleness.  Thanks, John Rember, for the permission.

Personal Notes: Principled Pleasures vs. Pleasure as Principle

Image Sourced From all-free-download.com

As a result of reading The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by blogger Mark Manson, I've been thinking about the idea of pleasure lately.  Pleasure is a large word to throw out there, but I will be using it in this blog post to address physical pleasures (i.e. food, drink, sex, etc).  In reading Manson's book, I've been thinking about pleasure in relationship to entitlement, a word that gets thrown around a lot these days, and I think I've stumbled upon something that helps me clarify the "issue" of pleasure for myself personally.  It all hinges on the use of the word "principle."

A principle is the building block, or foundation, or a system of belief.  In mulling over the idea of pleasure, I found myself using this word in a couple of different ways, and I decided that I'm going to start using the metric of "principled pleasure" in my personal life.  I need to work on striving for "principled pleasures" as opposed to using pleasure as a principle.  Here's how I seem them as being different.

A person who uses pleasure as a principle is looking to achieve pleasure, in all its myriad forms, as a moral "good."  He/She is looking to achieve pleasure as a result or outcome of action.  By using pleasure as a principle, it is then easy to choose any action that results in action, no matter if that action is good or bad.   It sets the end result as priority over the evaluation of the individual action.  By using this framework for decision making, one could justify any number of actions as long as it lead to the end result...pleasure.  I'm uncomfortable with this framework, and I believe it leads to sloppy decision making.

In contrast, if one is seeking "principled pleasures," then one is seeking to prioritize individual principles as a basis for achieving pleasure.  The moral "good" in the eyes of the individual becomes of greater importance than the outcome.  It is only through the choice of the moral principle that one would be able to achieve pleasure.  One would feel good about decision making, and, therefore, achieve the feeling of pleasure one is seeking.

Some practical examples are necessary here.

1. The lawn needs mowed (unpleasurable).  The completion of necessary maintenance of the house, the chipping in of time/effort on communal household chores, and the desire to be physically active are all principles the individual holds. Choosing the easy pleasure of an afternoon spent "Netflix and chilling" would be more pleasurable than mowing the lawn, but upholding the individual's principles provides a deeper more sustained pleasure than the easy, passive pleasure of streamed entertainments.
2. Having a drink after work provides pleasure at the end of a long shift.  It is the culmination of a day's work, but returning home and spending time with family is a principle the individual holds.  While it is easy to write off the post-work drink as "harmless" and "earned," the prolonged satisfaction of having a close knit family and spending time with loved ones trumps the easy pleasure.

These are two simply examples of the distinction in action.  Holding this framework for decision making will help any individual (but especially me) become better at accomplishing life goals and living a life that fulfills in the long term and not simply in the short term.  

Manson's book is challenging my basic precepts.  I'm starting to look at my life in a new way that is reminiscent of some of the best times of my life.  I've been lazy in my thinking (or lack thereof) and I need to continue to challenge myself in order to achieve the quality of life I desire.  

I sat down today to blog about my thoughts, even though the easier pleasure would have been to simply pick up my book and continue reading.  I hold creativity as a life principle.   It is something I always want to have present in my life.  So...instead of making a sandwich and curling up with a book, I've set myself in front of the computer and written this blog post.  It is much more satisfying.  By living the principle I set for myself, I was able to achieve a deeper sense of pleasure in my day.  By living my standards, instead of flauting them, I was able achieve a sense of satisfaction that otherwise wouldn't have been present.

I'm beginning to think I'm on the right track here.

Man Notes: The Days Since

My Agent for Change

It has been a couple of days since I last posted here, where I revealed a personal truth about myself, about my enduring depression, and it's been a couple of hard days.  My work life is at the peak of our high season, with lots of additional responsibility coming down the pipe.  It has also been a time of doubling down on my new outlook.  I've decided to "not a give a fuck" in the way Mark Manson discusses it in his book.  I've decided to get out of my "Feedback Loop from Hell" as Manson calls it.
I'll give you a couple of scenarios.  First, I was covering vacation for a coworker.  I was in an environment that was out of my ordinary.  Then, the systems in place to make the place run smoothly broke down.  All kinds of problems arose from this situation.  I don't want to go into specifics as that would be an inappropriate use of this blog.  Basically, what happened was that I was forced to either let these things get to me, or to "not give a fuck."  I chose the latter.  I had to actively choose to not let other people's drama affect me personally.  My job is my job.  It is the mechanism that provides for my family, for the things I love to do, and I need to stop taking everything in my professional life personally.

The other part of this is that I've chosen to use my free time better.  I choose to not simply wile away my free time on my phone playing silly games.  I choose to feed my brain, to feed my heart, to feed my soul.  As the first crusted layers peel away from my unused heart, I find myself having a deeper sense of forgiveness, of trust, of love.

Lately, I've felt a sense of amnesia.  A sense of not remembering myself and my life, and this "amnesia" has left me disconnected from parts of myself that are, and remain, important to me.  In an effort to remember myself, I've also been listening to music through an iPod.  I've been digging through albums from the 90's, and it has reminded my of my earlier self in ways that don't feel melancholy and saccharine, but in ways the feel important, like remembering my own identity.

In the end, the greatest agent for change is my own family.  My wife and my daughter remain the best motivators for being true to myself, to being my better self.  Working around the house more assuages my guilt for not being a better partner to Tracy.  Spending some time with my daughter teaching her how to draw connects me to my creative loving self, and shows me why art is important in all its forms.

It's been a busy couple of days.  A good couple of days.

Man Notes: Unintentionally Intentionally Miserable

Life is good when working from the patio.

It's been months since I've posted here, and I can tell you exactly why.  I've been silently, ashamedly unintentionally intentionally miserable.  The last year has seen me working against myself in almost every single way imaginable.  I have been doing NOTHING for myself.  I've been working as little as possible on the things I want, on the things that bring me joy, and I've been slowly dragging myself down into the pits of depression.  

Recently, some people have been reposting a former post from this blog.  It is a post about moving past grief, and it was a piece written from personal insight about depression.  When the post made its way around Facebook, I was forced to go back and reread it.  I wondered what made this one blog post stand out to my family and friends.  I am so glad that I read it.  It may have just saved me from many more months of depression.  

Today?  Today I am feeling better.  The reason for this?  Choosing.  Choosing small moments, small ways in which to participate in my life.  I've been a lazy slug around the house lately, blaming my work life for my level of participation in the house.  The other day, without being asked, I came home and mowed the lawn.  That's how deep into my depression I had sunk.  Mowing the lawn was a BIG deal for me a couple of weeks back even.  I was engrained into the couch, unmoving, unmotivated, and slowly wasting away.  Today?  Today I am feeling better.

So, what have been some of the other remedies to getting out of depression?  

1. Making more time for the things I care about.

2. Making more time for me.

3. Actively choosing to get out there and do things I love, or talking to people I love.

I've been to Powell's bookstore twice in the last week.  I've finished one and a half books in the last week, and I am feeling invigorated.  The book I am reading right now is for sure helping me.

This book is not about being dispassionate and indifferent.  On the contrary, it is about accepting pain as the agent of change.  It's about choosing the pain you want, the pain you can sustain, because it is the pathway to the change you want to enact in the world.  I got it yesterday and I'm already almost a 1/4 of the way through it.  Every now and again you get the message you need in the moment that you need it.

Another book that reignited me was "Waiter Rant."  This book felt like looking into a mirror for me, and I am so grateful that I found it. 

The last two days have truly felt like a turning point for me, and I am excited to see where my new choices will take me.  

Personal Note: Picking up the phone

Image Source

The universe has been calling me.  It happens to me more than I like to admit, but lately it has been a full court press.  I don't know if others experience this phenomenon the same way I do, but my life has a way of reminding me what I'm supposed to be doing when I lose my way.  These calls often come in the form of chance encounters, unforeseeable opportunities, and unexpected people.

In the last couple of months, I've seen a resurgence of old friends I met during my MFA program.  They've been reaching out to me to get a coffee date, a phone call, or a writer's group going.  I've also had old friends from unknown quarters in my life offering me the opportunity to engage in creative projects.  The universe is trying to tell me something, and I'm trying to make myself available to listen and participate.

Image Source

In the last two months, I've been asked to participate in an oral storytelling project, a writer's group, and, now, a side project that includes writing for the screen.  I'm over the moon about it.  The trick now is to find the time to engage with all of those opportunities.  All of them are worth while.  All of them are being orchestrated by good people.  I have an immediate and powerful creative connection with each and every one of those endeavors, and all of them ask that I return to the keyboard, that I return to the state of empathy that writing requires.  All of them require that I open my heart to the world and begin listening again.

For a long time, I've been very career-minded.  I've been stressed about titles, money, and pride.  All of those things were about me, which is never where I succeed.  When I am narrowly focused on self, I am not at my best.  When I obsess about my position, my notoriety, how I appear to other people, I usually wind up in a box that I have to struggle to escape.  That's been the case in the last couple of years, and I've seen my creative expression dry up as a result.  It's time for a change.

It's time to listen to what the universe is telling me about my own purpose and to stop trying so hard to direct my life to where I "think" it should go.  All of this means taking a risk, putting myself out there, being uncomfortable in certain situations, but that is always where I find personal growth.

There is that famous expression, "Jesus take the wheel."  Well, I'm not overtly Christian, but I can identify with the sentiment.  It is time to allow the universe to take the wheel and guide me a little bit.  Sometimes the best form of direction is submission, submission to your life's calling, to what you are meant to be as opposed to what you want to be.  I'm going to try real hard to allow myself the freedom to do so.

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For any of you who are experiencing the same thing, I hope you find the courage to do the same, and I'd love to hear from you in the comments below.  Knowing that others are experiencing the same thing brings me strength, as I hope this post has done for you.

Man Notes: Opt Out

Image Courtesy of Massapequa Observer

The other night I spent two hours "opting out" of email notifications, social network notifications, and unsubscribing from email lists.  It took me two hours and I still have more work to do.

Part of what got me into this trap in the first place was either not thinking about these kinds of things when I signed up for a new social media platform, or it was when I signed up for every news outlet, literary magazine, or news aggregate newsletter.  I stopped checking my emails, and I was missing personal communications. I had "opted out" of a legitimate way of communicating with people near me.

The reason?

I had too much information pouring over me at all points.  I had 2 email accounts to manage, at least 5 social media platforms to manage (personally and for work), and text messages on top of everything else.  This is just what comes to my phone.  This doesn't even include what would happen when I logged in to a computer.

It was getting to be too much.  Too much for anyone to manage.

So, I cut back.  I went through my emails after weeks of neglect and I unsubscribed from every advertiser, news outlet, and literary magazine.

I logged on to all of my social media platforms and I unsubscribed from email notifications.

I tried to pull the plug on unnecessary and redundant notifications.

I couldn't do it anymore.  I was starting to feel like there was this mountain of electronic notification building above me that I would never surface from, and so I needed to minimize. I needed to back away for a moment in order to get my head on straight.

I have many jobs.  I wear many hats, and I love participating in all of these aspects of my life, but I need to make sure that I am taking care of myself first so that I still have the energy to get up and face the day, to reply to my friends when they write, to respond to birthday invites when they come in, and to just be a better participant in the parts of my life that matter and not spend so much time deleting email notifications that a friend of a friend liked something that another friend once posted from a website I don't follow.

Image Courtesy of Online Trust Alliance

It is always important that we guard ourselves from unwanted intrusions into our personal life.  It is something I'll think about before I hit "accept" on the next web subscription.  I think it is important.

Peeling the Onion: A New Encounter

To borrow a line from the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother, "Haaaaaaaaaaave you met Ted?"

Ted Ramsey is a newer edition to the Wild Hare family, and I've had the pleasure of getting to know him over the past couple of months.  He's a vivacious, pleasant young man who is quick to smile and quick to engage with other people, but I didn't really get to know this young man until I sat down with him over a beer after work the other night.

It is so easy to assume that you know people from the sparse interactions you may have with them throughout a day.  You work side by side with them, so you think you have an idea of who they are and what they are about.  I have to tell you that Ted was one of those surprises that caught me completely unaware.

Let's start with what I thought about Ted in the beginning.  He seemed nice, charming, and good for a laugh.  I thought him young, fresh, just out of college, and, while smart, maybe not that worldly in his experience in life.  I was wrong.

When Ted and I sat down to have a beer together, it became quickly obvious that this was a young man with potential! He had a diverse range of interests and a lot of experience for one his age.  For example, Ted worked as a singer on a cruise ship for a year.  He worked for years in Washington D.C. on public policy issues, aaaaaaaaaaaand there is this:

Ted was a part of the University of Oregon a capella group "On The Rocks" that was featured on NBC's Sing Off a couple of years back.

It's amazing what happens when you put your assumptions aside and actually engage others in conversation.  I had an overly simplistic view of this young man in my head, and I'm glad I got the opportunity to be corrected.  Stereotyping and snap judgments are easy to do, especially as we get older and feel like we "know" more, but I was glad to be wrong in this case as I got to better know a nice young man who I might have overlooked if I kept my blinders on.

Plus, and you know this is true, I just wanted to post that Youtube video and see if I couldn't get people to embarrass Ted at work.

Promisary Note: Tiny Hands

In 2014, I took on the task of fulfilling 52 promises over the course of a year.  It was meant to be a promise a week.  In the end, I failed to keep the timeline and I eventually lost track of the task.  That isn't to say that I failed utterly though, for there were some interesting things that arose as a result, and I think I can trace many of them back to the 52 promises.

First, I wanted to take a year's end accounting of the promises.  In the end, I failed to complete 11 promises, that's almost three months worth.  Although, another way of looking at it is to say that I completed over 9 months of promises.  While I stopped blogging about my promises, I still engaged in the exercise.  What I found when I looked back through the promises was that I didn't complete a lot of the promises that had to do with a couple of subjects: exercise, writing, and those oriented toward personal (not social) time.  It looks like I was dedicated to making time for others, but not for myself, which brings up some things that I look forward to working on in the next year.

The question may arise as to how this all wound up coming up now, conveniently at the end of the year.  The answer is simple.  I was cleaning up my office in preparation for a new term, which includes a new adjunct teaching position, when my daughter found my bowl of promises.  She remembered the activity and asked if she could draw a promise.  I told her, "I'm not really doing that anymore, honey."  She then gave me this face...

I couldn't say no.

So, she drew a slender piece of paper from the bowl.  It read, "Surprise your daughter with something fun."  Shea read it in her slow 2nd grade thoughtful way, looked up at me, and said, "You already did this, Dad."  I thought about it and agreed.  I had made an effort to surprise Shea on occasion with a thoughtful activity or gift.  She recognized that fact immediately.

"Can I draw another one?"

I told her she could, and she dipped her hand back into the bowl to retrieve another slip of paper.  She drew out, "Do some home improvement."  I thought back and remembered my fight with a pipe leak under the house.  It was a long term home improvement project I finished on my own.  Done, I thought.  Shea drew again.  The next two promises had also been fulfilled.  I was on a roll.  Something I thought I had failed at turned out to be something I had naturally incorporated into my personal life.  By paying attention to these promises across the first seven months and blogging about it, I had naturally worked this sort of attentiveness into my way of living.

The next thing that unfolded was that I began to make bigger and bigger changes in my life.  I incorporated a lot of new changes into how I taught my writing class.  I went back out into the job market in search of a new adjunct position.  I quit drinking.  I began working on improving myself in new and revolutionary ways.  As I finish out 2014, I can see a difference in myself.  There is a new attentiveness to the "now" of my life.  I try and allow myself a greater presence in the moment, without dread of the past or fear of the future.  I'm looking forward to implementing these changes in 2015.

As I formulate those goals in greater detail, I will try in earnest to return to the page.  I'm hoping you, my audience, will still be there in all the lovely ways you were in 2014.

All of this grew out of the movements of one tiny set of hands.  As I am discovering more and more in my life, those tiny hands are my greatest motivation to become a better and better man for the future.  Both hers and mine.

Man Notes: Former NFL Lineman Joe Ehrmann

I'm fascinated by the idea of modern masculinity.  The idea appears again and again in this blog, but it also appears repeatedly in my fiction.  Even when I'm working through an idea that is, at least on the surface, not about this theme, it finds a way to exist in between the lines of my creative work.

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On my way home yesterday, I had the pleasure of listening to an interview with Joe Ehrmann, former defensive lineman for the Colts.  He had some fascinating views about masculinity, sports, and spirituality.  The interview began with a quick mention of the three words most men have encountered throughout their lives, "Be a man."  These words, while often used as a way of trying to salve, or suppress, an emotional moment, often find a way to lock men into a box.

The interview quickly expanded to include three lies of masculinity: "athletic ability, sexual conquest, and economic success."  He goes on to talk about how culture sends messages to men about these three categories of life and prioritizes them in destructive ways, especially in the modern era of social media and internet and access.  He speaks about the dearth of "moral clarity and moral courage" and links this back to the Steubenville rape case.  While I assume he understands and deplores the heinous nature of the crime, he expands his analysis of the situation to include the people not directly connected to the crime that occurred that night, but to those complicit in either covering up or advancing the scope of the crime through the sharing of pictures and tweets in the case.  He points to these actions and, rightfully, attaches them to a lack of "moral clarity and moral courage" in the larger community.

When asked directly about what masculinity is, he responds by saying, "It can only be defined by two things.  One, it is your capacity to love and to be loved.  Masculinity ought to be defined in terms of relationships.  Second thing it ought to be defined by commitment to a cause.  That all of us have a responsibility to give back, to make the world more fair, more just, more hospitable for every human being."

This interview brought me an overabundance of comfort for many reasons.  The first is that I wholeheartedly believe in Ehrmann's message.  The second is that Ehrmann speaks with real credibility for men who have a predisposition to the "lies" he mentioned earlier, specifically to the lies of athletic ability and economic success.  I'm always seeking role models in the world, men who stand as positive forces within the world and actively demonstrate the full spectrum of what it means to be a man.

At times, media feels like a cyclops, a singularly-visioned creature that can't see in dimension, in depth.  I applaud NPR, All Things Considered, and Joe Ehrmann for putting this discussion out into the world.  At the end of a long work day and after allowing the interview to wash over me, I felt affirmed and contemplative in all the best sense of the word.  Media reflected something back to me that felt authentic and sincere, which is too infrequently the case.

The discussion is happening out there.  We just need to find it.  I realize now that All Things Considered is doing an entire series on Men in America, and I can't wait to catch up on streaming segments that will, hopefully, allow me to hear a spectrum of voices on the subject of modern masculinity.  A good song possesses more than one note, and a discussion of a complex topic like this requires a range of notes, a choir of voices, in order to bring the richness and vibrancy it demands out into the world.

Again, thanks to all the contributors and producers for making this happen.  If Joe Ehrmann intrigues you, you might think about picking up his book.

Personal Note: Fear and Silence

I've been offline for a couple of weeks now.  This hasn't necessarily been intentional, but it has been necessary.  I recently had a health scare that sent me spiraling into a pit of anxiety, covering all the necessary stops through denial/isolation, bargaining, etc.

It was a lump.

I found a lump on/near one of my testicles.

It scared the hell out of me.  This was weeks ago.  I didn't tell a single person.  Not one.  At first I denied it was there.  Then, I bargained with myself and said, "I'll give it a week or two and if it doesn't go away, then I'll go to the doctor."  Eventually, I realized that it wasn't going away, and I had to do something.  I resigned myself to calling the urologist who did my vasectomy.  I figured skip the general practitioner and head straight to the specialist.  When I called to set my appointment, I set it for the earliest possible date.

I couldn't handle waiting another day or week.  Once I had accepted that this situation was real, that is was worth examining, there was nothing that could have held me back from that appointment.

The appointment revealed that I have a spermatocele, a relatively harmless condition brought about by a blocked tube in my testes.  It is nothing to be alarmed about, nothing that needs any further medical analysis, and I was free and on my way.

This was last week, a week ago to be exact, and for some reason I am still working my way through the news.  While I am in perfectly good health, I still get the jitters, an uneasy anxiousness that sits within the pit of my stomach and reminds me, maybe for the first time, that I'm mortal, really mortal.

The most extreme medical treatment I've ever had was to get my tonsils out, maybe when I had my wisdom teeth removed, but I've never had anything serious, nothing that made me really concerned for my overall well-being.  Those weeks when I didn't tell anyone were some of the most anxious of my life.

The only person who really picked up on it, the only one who really looked me in the eye and said, "What's going on with you?" was a twenty-year-old hostess at my work who often reveals herself to be an astute observer of people's personalities.  Because she persistently asked me what was happening, because she kept insisting something was "going on," I realized that the lump was starting to effect the way I carried myself throughout my day, and I decided to take action.

The first person I told was my wife, and the moment I had the news out of my mouth, I was on the internet and looking up my doctor.  I had an appointment for three days later.

There was no reason for me to delay the appointment, besides a fear of the unknown, a fear of recognizing that there was something potentially serious happening with my health, and I was a fool to let it go on so long.  As I sit her typing these few choppy paragraphs, trying to work my way through the residual relief and fear, I realize, as I often do, that writing would have helped me through all of this.  Writing is processing.  Writing is putting things in order, puzzling out knotted threads, finding a way to navigate difficult situations, and I shouldn't allow things like this to keep me from the computer for so long.  I am really backed up on promise posts (yes, I'm still doing those, even though I've missed two during this time), and I may just march forward instead of trying to catch up on the back log.

I'm feeling more and more like myself with each day.  Today will help.  I'm watching a friends daughter for a couple of hours, allowing Shea and her a couple of hours of play.  In the background as I write this, the girls are creating an original song with an electric keyboard, a pen, and a small pad.  Their giggles and their earnest efforts to commit words to the page serve as an inspiration for this small effort, my effort to somehow capture the complexity of what I've experienced in a blog post.  I have a feeling I'm not done with this subject.  I'm done with it for the blog, but I have a feeling it will find its way into my writing in other forms.  Writing is processing after all.

Thanks for listening.

Man Notes: Yard Work

Electric hedge trimmers, sledgehammer, power drill, the dump, demolition.  These are just some of the things I encountered yesterday while working around my house.  After I woke up and got going, my wife asked if we could spend the day trimming the 10 foot hedges that border our backyard.  I groaned as I didn't want to work away the afternoon in the yard, but it turned out that I was ready for it.

Tracy and I tackled the hedge immediately, trimming the huge shrubs back from the fences and topping them off into a neat line.  Ladder work while holding an electric hedge clipper is one way for me to get the blood pressure up.  After trimming two-thirds of the hedge tops, my arms were killing me from one-arm swinging that trimmer up and over the hedge while holding a straight line.  I came down off the ladder and asked Tracy if she could take over for a little bit.  My wife is no stranger to hard work, so she grabbed up the trimmer and up the ladder she went.

As I stood watching Tracy for a moment, I started looking at Shea's play structure and how truly aged the thing had become in the years since we installed it.  The wood was rotting, ladder rungs were warping, and a couple of bolts didn't look very secure to me at all, including those holding the swings.  

Shea's sunshine Lego time under the umbrella

I marched over to Shea, who was playing with her Legos in the shade of a patio umbrella.  "I'm thinking of taking down your play structure.  You want to come and play on it one last time?"

Shea didn't even mope or whine at all about it.  She considered the play structure in the distance, decided to go down the slide one last time, and went back to playing with her Legos.  After that, the demolition project was ON.

I quickly unbolted all the plastic pieces from the structure, taking down the slide, the "rock" stairs, and the swing.  Panel by panel, I disassembled the roost at the top of the structure, and then the heavy work started.  The remaining portions of the structure were solid posts and beams, some with new screws from when I installed it in my back yard, and some original screws, which were part of the original installation in my next door neighbor's yard.  Not one of the old screws would budge.  The ones I installed reversed out without difficulty.  

So, I got as far as I could with "civilized tools" like power drills and socket wrenches for as long as I could, but it eventually came down to the sledgehammer.  There's something thrilling about swinging a sledgehammer and watching the damage it inflicts.  The play structure soon lay in manageable pieces on my lawn and I stood above it sweating and panting, but satisfied.  While I was playing Johnny Deconstructer, my wife and her mother had taken the hedge clippings and the first parts of the play structure to the dump.  When they returned, we loaded up the remainder and I hauled it all away to the dump.  

For me, there is something infinitely satisfying about the dump (even while I marvel at some of the wastefulness I see at the dump).  I unloaded the wood, plastic slide, swing, paid my dues and came home.  When I returned, the back yard had a whole new feel to it, bigger, wider, less cluttered.

The negative space where the play structure used to stand

I was reluctant to get out in the yard, but I wound up going above and beyond my wife's expectations for the day.  I didn't call it a day until 6:30 that night, but I could feel the day residing in the ache of my back, the sore arm from swinging the trimmer, and the satisfaction at accomplishing more than I set out to do.  

I'm not always the first one to jump at the chance for home improvement, but I often like the days I get to spend with power tools and plain labor.  When I finally sat down at the end of the day, I was treated to this:

Putting down a shandy after a day's work

And this:

Traeger-smoked Lamb and Cauliflower with Roasted Potatoes

Not bad, y'all.  Not bad.

Man Notes: Re-purposing

This last year has taught me a lot about promises, about commitment to a life desired, and my ability to work my way around the things I want in life.  I've made some bad decisions since the new year, decisions that had implications I couldn't see in the moment, but that will have lasting effects on the rest of the year.  The thing I've learned about all of this is that I need a bit of re-purposing, a bit of re-direction, or re-commitment, and a myriad other "re" words.

The promise post has gotten me blogging again, which has gotten me writing again, which has rekindled the fire in me to create, to live a life that is purposeful, intentional, and self-directed.  The problem, as I see it, is that I've done a backslide into a way of life that is not exactly conducive to what I want.  Thus, I need to redirect myself.  Here's how I see it.

I do not read enough.

I do not write enough.

I do not spend enough quality time with my family.

I work too much.

I spend too many off hours thinking about work.

I spend too many off hours thinking about work and not engaging in action that will allow me to stop thinking about work in my off hours.

I am not living as healthy of a lifestyle as I want.

I spend my time engaged in activities that cause me to feel guilt.

I feel guilty about how I spend my time, which causes me to further ignore the things I want.

This is a simple list, but an honest one.  It is a list I'm ashamed of if I'm going to be truly honest with myself.  So I come to solutions.  To me there is only one: choose.  I must choose what it is I want from my life and actively choose it every day.

This is where the promise project comes into play.  I've chosen to commit myself to my promises.  I've chosen to dedicate myself to fulfilling a promise I made mostly to only myself.  So why are the other things any different?  They are not.  So this leaves me with a new purpose, a re-purpose of my earlier self.  

I am committing the next three months to actively choosing to live the life I want to live.  I need to be better.  I need to be better for me.  I need to be better for my family.  I need to be better for my students and co-workers, for my friends, but, mostly, just for me.  I'm tired of choosing to do things that bring me active shame.  I'm tired of not living up to my potential.  I'm going to revisit my remaining promises in the bowl and I might just do a new batch.  I'm facing a new set of challenges that are deeply personal and potentially life-altering, so I must engage with them while the energy is high. 

The energy is high right now, and it is imperative that I seize the moment.  I've had a series of truly honest conversations with my loved ones recently, and I want to live up to the promise of those conversations.  Wish me luck, you'll probably be hearing more about this in the coming days/weeks/months.

Promise-ary Note: Revising a Promise

My promise this week was to "tell someone a hard truth."  I don't know what mindset I was in when I created this promise, but I am now kind of aghast at the ego I possessed when I wrote it.  Who am I to assume that I possess some form of truth that someone else "needs" to hear.  I know myself well enough to know that it was an exercise in honesty more than any innate desire to be bossy, but the promise still makes me shiver a bit with shame at my hubris.

As the week unfolded though, I came to understand my promise a bit differently.  So, in the method of an English teacher, I revised the promise, but this wasn't an intentional move until the moment presented itself and I realized that what I wanted to do was to confess something, to reveal something about myself more so than directing advice toward another.  As such, my weekly promise now reads like this:

I had a difficult conversation this week with a loved one.  Due to the personal nature of the conversation, I am forced to talk about it in the abstract, omitting the person's name and the nature of the conversation, but I will be able to get at the root of the promise I made and why it changed.

In the course of a phone call to check up on a loved one, things got deep.  Real deep.  Unexpectedly deep.  And heated.  I found myself locked in a verbal skirmish with this person, and I could tell that they were on the defensive.  I was on the offensive, so I can't really blame them for their reaction.  I took it upon myself to tell this person how their life was, how they should operate, and things they should do in order to "be ok."  As I typed out that list, I am again struck by how large my ego must be if I believe I can tell someone that kind of thing.

In the midst of the conversation, the other person turned it back on me.  They began pointing out how egotistical I was (not in those exact words, but the sentiment was the same).  I backpedaled in an effort to correct my loved one's impression of what I was doing.  I was trying to get them out of a funk, to light a fire of joy, to get them out in the world to try new things, but I had framed my "argument" in all the worst ways.  I was getting nowhere.

At one point, this person questioned my motives, and I found myself saying this, "I guess I'm just in mourning myself.  Mourning the old you, the person I want you to be, which is my own baggage."  The moment I said these words I knew them to be true.  I knew that I had just gotten to the heart of an issue I didn't know I had.  In pushing the person to embrace the things I wanted them to embrace, I was trying to mold them into something they were not.  A person they were not.  That is my fault.  That is my emotional work.  This person does not have to be the person they were, for they have had big experiences in the past couple of years that has fundamentally changed who they are.  My responsibility is to love them for who they are now, without caveats.

I'm actually still reeling from the confession, reeling from an epiphany about myself that has forced me to look inward in order to understand my own relationship with this person, and I realize now that my relationship is broken.  Not irreparably, maybe not even drastically, but it shows me that I have work to do.

Relationships are a two way street, and I was asking my loved one to shoulder all the responsibility for it.  The load would be too much for anyone to bear, and so I am left puzzling through my place in it, sorting through the mutual baggage and checking I.D. tags for which ones are mine.  I can't ask this person to carry everything, and so I sift and sift through my own responsibility here, looking for a porter to help me.

That's how the conversation ended.  I sought a porter, outside help, and I offered to go to counseling a couple of times a month in order to improve the current conditions I find myself in.  That was my olive branch.  That was my solution.  That is me carrying the load.  Now it is time for the other person to debate whether or not that is a working solution for them.  I hope it is, for my ego is humbled enough now to admit that I don't have the answer.  I don't have the magic bullet that is going to "fix" things, and I now realize that the problem doesn't lie outside of myself.  I am implicated.

Telling someone a hard truth was a misstep in my promises in that I didn't phrase it right.  I hadn't captured the exact meaning of what I needed to do this week, but I was observant enough to catch the error in the sentence, and so I set about revising.  I confessed a truth this week, and while the other person was present for the confession, I was both confessor and recipient of the confession.  This week found me being honest with myself in a way I hadn't expected.  My promise changed me, which, at its heart, is the entire reason the promises exist.

Next week's promise should be a little "lighter" in tone.

Promise-ary Note: Fashion Foibles - Picture Post

The "uniform"

This is how I normally look.  Casual jeans, t-shirt, fleece jacket (hat is optional).

These are some of the looks I tried out this week.

Super layered hot box.

When I was working with casual free time looks, I tried the layered look.  Overdid it by about two layers.  Undershirt, t-shirt, button up, hoodie, sport coat = sweat shop for this kid.  It seems like whenever I look at fashion magazines (which is not often) the models are always layered.  When I talked to my fashion expert, Celina, she told me to lose the frat boy hoodie under the jacket and to try for something a little more age appropriate.  My friend Celina is a model in the big NYC, so she got tapped to serve as my fashion consultant.  I want to thank her for her patience as I sent her an inappropriate amount of selfies this week.

As I thought about how I was going to pull of "dressing up" for the bar, Celina sent me this picture as a suggestion.

Image Source

Here's my versions of the look without necessarily adhering to the original.  I liked this look.  It almost reminded me of old-time bartenders with the arm garters.

Mirror selfies.  Really?  Super awkward!

The one interesting thing that resulted from dressing up at the bar is the customer reaction I got.  I had a couple of people thank me for my professionalism, and some regulars comment on how good I looked.  One guy, a business traveler who travels all the time, said it was nice to have a "pro behind the bar" because he himself was a "pro."  While I take all of these comments with a grain of salt, there was something happening outside the norm.  People were responding to me in odd ways.  I had a TON of people shake my hand on the way out the door, something that is outside my normal routine.

Dressing up was changing the way I was treated, and it was changing the way I felt about myself.  Sometimes I feel like I'll get caught in a situation where I'll be woefully under-dressed.  Much of this is because I've been in that situation before and found it uncomfortable.  When I dress up, I don't get caught in that situation.  Instead of feeling stuffy and uncomfortable, I found the opposite to be true.  This surprised me a lot.

In terms of office work, I found a new sport coat at a Goodwill by my house.  It's the one pictured above, but I used it to dress up for school too, which was a good thing as I had an informal meeting with fellow faculty.

Shea and I in our school "uniforms."

I found myself shopping more and more over the course of the week, looking for a way to transform casual into something that went beyond shorts and a t-shirt (the weather was in the mid-80s).  Something that would take me from around town to an informal dinner without feeling under-dressed.  In my exchanges with my fashion expert, Celina, my friend who models in NYC, I found out that socks are a no-no with casual shoes, and she pointed me in the direction of some simple shirts that can work for me.  The end result looked like this...

Finished casual

None of these things are going to set the fashion world ablaze, but they did help me make some changes that felt substantial to the way I dress.  On the way to work today, I had an epiphany about this whole process.  I'm dressing my age.  Not only that, but I'm dressing how I feel more.  I'm slowly abandoning clothes that are part of the younger me, a man I no longer am, and working toward a look that feels natural for where I am now in my life.

It was one of those epiphanies that actually cascaded further into all kinds of other ideas about the self, about my work, about what is the job and what is the career, and a solidification of a creative idea for a writing project that I think I can tackle now.

It's all appearances.  It's all fashion and fickle, but it is also more than that.  It is the way an individual conceives of himself.  It is not just how I appear to others, but how I feel about myself.

This post was actually one of the hardest ones I've had to write in a while because there were so many things that linked into it.  So many different directions I could have taken it.  That's probably why this post feels so incomplete and scattered to me now.  I might have to revisit this topic a couple of times in order to tease out all the threads the grew from it, but that's something I'll have to save for a later date.

In the meantime, here's the next promise.  This one scares me a bit for a lot of different reasons, but I'll log that in later.

Promisary-Note: Fatherly Fashonista

"Clothes make the man."

"Dress for the job you want, not the job you have."

Or, to quote the hilarious Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother, "Suit up!"

This week's promise is all about appearances in a way, but also not.  Fashion and the choices we make in how we present ourselves has a big effect on a person, whether they like to admit it or not.  This week's promise is an attempt to live a little "classier" that I normally do, to take some extra care and pay some extra attention to how I present myself.

I am born and raised in the American West, which is quite possibly one of the most casual places on earth.  As such, I am a jeans and t-shirt kind of guy.  I'm all fleece jackets and sandals, shorts and baseball hats.  I love that kind of attire.  I feel at home in it, but that doesn't mean I have to do it all the time.

In preparation for this week's promise, I took some time out of my day to actually break out the ironing board and iron some of my shirts for the week.

Dressing up is about care and attention to detail.  I work in pretty casual environments, so it isn't always going to be about suits this week.  Can you imagine me serving burgers and fries in my best suit?  I don't think so.  Because of this, I'm going to have to consider what it means in all kinds of separate situations.  At school I can wear my suit, or a sportcoat, but that won't do in other situations.

So, this week has me considering fashion and how it changes the way I move through the world.  I'll keep you posted.  I'm getting geared up and ready to go.

Personal Note: Moving Past Grief

I've lost a lot of people over my lifetime.  It's the perils of living in a small town, I guess.  I've attended a lot of funerals, officiated a handful more, and dealt with grief both as a person trying to bring comfort to others and as the mourner.  It's a formidable life experience to deal with the nearness of death, to see someone close to you slip past the veil of life and into the "after," whatever your conception may be here.

Recently, I've dealt with a lot of this and had to preside over the services of those close to me.  Granted, they were people of a generation older than me, which allows me the distance of relative "youth."  It allows me the cool remove of "I have time," but that too is a lie, a trick of the mind to push away the reality of death.  So, lately, I've been thinking a lot about what comes next, what survives death for the living?  The answer to this is Hope.  Yep, captial "H" Hope is what I land on.  But where does one find it in the midst of darkness, in the throes of depression?  The answer is simple.

It is everywhere.

For the depressed and grieving, this may appear to be a snide remark, a flippant response by someone who doesn't understand the depths of his/her personal pain.  I know. I've been there.  As a young man, I dealt with a lot of darkness, a lot of personal pain, and it  effected me deeply.  It may be that those early experience wore against my heart like an ill-fitting shoe, leaving a callused patch of skin that now protects it, but I don't think so.  It is my firmly held belief that I chose my way out.  I chose the path I wanted to take out of the darkness and I've been becoming a better man ever since.

Hope is everywhere, but it is a matter of choosing.  Many people in the throes of grief plunge themselves backwards into the river of time.  They exist on the edge of memory, looking backwards toward the past, and because of this they are unable to sometimes experience the pleasures of the present, the promise of the future.  One way is to choose to turn your gaze.  This is a Herculean effort at first.  Shifting one's gaze toward the present, toward the future, sometimes feels like a treacherous act, an abandonment of the person we love, but it is far from that.  I've been reading the book "Dreams of Gods and Monsters" lately, the final book in a trilogy, and two of the characters keep bandying around the idea that the dead do not want vengeance from their survivors.  The survivors are the ones who want vengeance.  This caused me to think about my recent experiences with grief and some grievers who are close to me.

Photo courtesy of Linda Thomas

Here's my revision of the idea.  The dead do not want our tears, our grief.  They want our fond memories, a place in our hearts, and our enduring love, but, more than anything, they want our continued happiness.  In all of my experience with death, I've never met a dying soul who wanted anything more than that last piece.  I've lost grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, classmates, mentors, etc.  In all of those experiences, I've never known a one who wanted their loved ones to endure the prolonged pain that is grief.  Not one.

So, how do we find the hope?  How do we move past this stagnation of forward movement, of minutes ticking away from our own lives?  We choose to...tentatively at first.  We venture outside ourselves and choose to have one good visit.  One good afternoon with your child, your grandchild, a friend, a loved one of any stripe.  We get outside of ourselves and we invest in another.  This, for me, has often been the easiest way to move past grief.  Give yourself fully to another.  Invest in them, give them your time, attention, and help them to navigate whatever troubles they may be experiencing.  When I do this, when I reach out into my community, into my social circles, I typically get swept up into a current that draws me forward.

Photo courtesy of Jodi Sunitsch

As I get swept away, I begin to make connections to things outside of myself and my grief.  I begin to learn and discover new things.  I get surprised, which causes me to emit a bark of a laugh, a thing which is also a surprise and can sometimes set me backwards in my momentum because I feel that sense of shame that I am rediscovering joy in the face of my grief.  But, one laugh typically leads to another, which leads to another.  A friends laugh will remind me of my lost loved one, or something they say will stir a memory in me, and it will soon not be tainted with a sense of shame or guilt, but it will remind me that my loved ones would have sat right by me given the chance and they would have laughed just as long, or just as loud as I did.

Soon, my emotions shift from lamentations to celebrations.  When I remember my loved ones, I remember them fondly, which is usually accompanied by a story, and I start to tell the stories.  In this way, my loved ones get what they want, what I stated earlier.  They get my fond memories, they get a place in my heart, and they get my love.  In the end, I also get something too.  I get a new strength, a new way of moving forward, a new understanding of the beautiful bittersweet majesty that is a lived life.  I get this because they left me.  I get this because they loved me.  I get this because I loved them back, and I wouldn't trade that for any other material gift anyone could give me.

In this way, our grief is a gift, for it tempers us into a stronger version of ourselves, and that strength is built directly upon the life and memories of the people we had the courage and blessing enough to love.