The Mandelbear's Musings

11:21 am - On grieving

Every grief is different, and everyone processes it differently, but the broad outlines of the grieving process are fairly consistent. It doesn't matter whether you're mourning a parent, a dear relative, a child, a friend, a pet, a home, a relationship, a project at work, or something even more abstract: a possibility, a missed opportunity, or your youthful sense of invulnerability. After a certain age, losses become inevitable. It takes not only time but work to get past a loss.

Remember that the objective is acceptance. Not forgetting your loss. Acceptance. In some ways, it's even harder than forgetting.

Acceptance means coming to terms with your loss: making it part of your experience, and putting it in its proper place in your memories. This may involve analyzing what happened so that you can learn from it, in hopes of not making the same mistake a second time. It may involve writing a poem or song, or a letter you will never send. It may involve a very selective kind of forgetting.

It means putting your loss among your treasured memories, carefully, so that you're not thinking of it day by day or letting it get between you and your life, or between you and other people. You'll always remember. There will always be reminders: a chance bit of overheard conversation, a long-out-of-touch friend, a scrap of memory, a color, a flower, a name. You have to make it safe to remember. You must learn to remember the person, not the pain; the lesson, not the loneliness, the good times, not the grieving. You have to get past your loss: make a part of your past, a landmark on your journey.

When most people tell you to "get over it", they mean for you to step over it the way you would step over a mud puddle or a fallen branch: forget it, and move on. (If your friends see you wallowing in the mud, or weeping for months beside a fallen tree-trunk, they can be forgiven for telling you this.) No. Build a bridge of smooth stones across that little stream, and put a pebble in your pocket to remember it by. Take a chainsaw to that tree-trunk, and carve your name on the fresh-cut surface.

It's a healing process; wounds take time to heal. Don't rush the process, or let well-meaning friends rush you, but don't hold back, either. Do the work.

Make an entry in your journal, and tag it so you can find it again. Mark its anniversary, if it's sufficiently important. Write a song, and practice it to the point where you can sing it in public without choking up. Not a miserable song that says how sorry you are for yourself. (OK, write one of those, too; it's part of the process. Burn the manuscript as soon as you can see how awful it is.) Perhaps wistful, perhaps angry, perhaps ironic and funny. Preferably hopeful and maybe even happy. Tell the world you're OK now.

Get to the point where you mean it, when you say that. You will.

08:00 am - (re)Defining my terms: open, transparent, receptive

My recent post defining "openness" pulled in a surprising number of comments -- thank you. Thanks in particular to filkferengi's suggestion of "transparency" for the sending side of openness. I realized a few days later that "receptiveness" is a better word than "open-mindedness" for the receiving side.

So, just to get down to the roots and make the definitions explicit...

One is transparent when one is sharing information about oneself.

One is receptive when one is taking in and taking into account information about somebody else.

So where does this leave "openness"? Is it merely transparecy plus receptiveness? I think not -- I think there's a whole other aspect of it that I hadn't considered last time. (See how language affects thought? Now that I have good words for the two concepts I was trying to get at downwhen, I can pull them out and consider the remainder.) I think it's captured best in phrases of the form "open to new {ideas, possibilities, relationships}". It's less about the information than about one's relationship to that information. As we will see, this will allow us to capture the meaning of such things as an "open relationship".

So...

One is open to new information, relationships, possibilities, etc. when one is not merely receptive in those areas but ready to be receptive in them. Not necessarily actively seeking out opportunities to be receptive, but willing to persue them if they should come along.

Similarly, one is open about an area when one is ready to be transparent about that area when the occasion calls for it. (Note that I originally had "willing" instead of "ready" in these two definitions, but I think that "ready" better expresses the idea of active preparedness that I'm looking for.

It's worth noting that any kind of relationship requires a significant amount of both receptivity and transparency -- one has to be ready for both in order to be "open" in the more general sense.

A relationship is open when both parties in that relationship -- by extension all parties where applicable -- are open to new relationships. Similarly, a group is open when it is open to new members. Note that there may be -- and usually are -- quite restrictive conditions on this kind of openness.

As usual, comments are welcome. What are your definitions? Do mine seem to work, or am I still missing something or getting something wrong? Inquiring minds...

08:44 am - Experience

A recent conversation made me wonder just how many "relationships" (by some definition) I've had over the course of my life, and how many ended in "breakups" as opposed to just quietly drifting apart (or, in one case, staying together for over three decades).

So let's define a "relationship" as something lasting more than a month, with some non-trivial level of romantic involvement ("love" by some definition), mutual physical attraction and physical contact. Define "breakup" as an abrupt, major decrease in the closeness of the relationship.

The answers turn out to be seven and one.

The corresponding numbers for Colleen, who is 5 years younger than me, are four and zero.

12:29 pm - What is friendship?

One of these days there's going to be a Defining My Terms post on friendship. This isn't it -- right now I'm still in the early phases of gathering data.

But here is A Thought On The Nature Of Friendship by theferret just to get that data-gathering process out in the open. Note that I don't really agree with it. He says, "I think that, by and large, there are two types of close friends: Those who are committed to being a net bonus in your life, and those who want you to be where they're comfortable."

That's his definition of "close friendship". Or two. I've seen others recently, even more widely separated, ranging between "someone I can tell anything to" to "someone who calls me up every day to see if they can help". In my mind, the term covers such a broad range that it seems to be as much a barrier as a bridge to understanding. Like limits, it's probably something you have to negotiate up front once a relationship gets to a certain point. I've seen all sorts of havoc caused by people working from different definitions of "friendship" and "closeness". Caused some of it, too.

Something I haven't seen in anyone else's definition so far, but that's definitely part of mine and Colleen's, is the sense that the friendship itself is important to both parties. That it's something worth almost any amount of struggle, and compromise if necessary, to preserve. Worth fighting for. We work out our problems and our differences, sometimes too loudly and sometimes too long, because we're friends -- perhaps by totally different definitions -- and intend to stay that way.

10:49 am - I'm wondering...

...what effect andropause might have on Asperger syndrome. I couldn't find any obvious references on Google; anybody know of one? It seems relevant to me these days.

07:55 am - I'm just visiting this planet

The cover article in April 2nd's Computerworld was titled Asperger's and IT: Dark secret or open secret? OK, if you have to ask you haven't been paying attention. It does raise the very legitimate question of "If Aspies are everywhere among us, why isn't the IT industry doing more to support them or even to simply acknowledge their existence?"

High-tech companies, after all, have been at the forefront of supporting workers with nearly every type of social, ethnic, physical or developmental identification. Microsoft, to take just one example, sponsors at least 20 affinity groups -- for African Americans, dads, deaf and hard of hearing, visually impaired, Singaporeans, single parents, and gay/lesbian/bisexual and transgendered employees, to name a few. Just nothing for autistics.

But this isn't a song about Alice Microsoft, or even about IT.

I've noticed that I tend to approach people and relationships almost exactly the same way I approach any other technical problem, for example an unfamiliar piece of software. I don't have the automatic understanding of other people that ordinary humans seem to have: I have to treat each problem analytically.

And, of course, since another symptom of Asperger's is an ability to concentrate on one problem, and a corresponding inability to multitask, this can come across either as a possibly-disturbing intensity of focus, or an annoying inability to drop a subject. Sorry about that; I'm working on it. As a technical problem, of course.

06:52 am - Hmm...

I wonder whether this explains a few things...

11:05 pm - Defining my terms: Openness

It occurs to me that, in a series of posts about mental states and relationships, I probably ought to define my terms. It's only fair, especially in an area where peoples' personal definitions are both vitally important to them and in some cases appear to have very little overlap.

Since this is an exercise in information sharing, it seems only right to start off with my definition for openness.

Openness:

Openness is, fundamentally, willingness to share information. In both directions. One might call the receiving direction "open-mindedness", though that's probably only part of it; I can't think of a good word for the sending direction. Anyone?

So let's take the sending direction first. Openness, in that direction, is a willingness to share information about yourself with others. There are degrees, of course, both in who one shares with and how -- and exactly what -- much one is willing to share. Some people share their most intimate feelings only with their closes friends; others (like me) "publish and be damned" almost everything on the open web.

In the other direction, openness is most of all a willingness to listen. It implies both interest in what the other person is saying, and (where applicable) a willingness to consider new information and possibly change one's own mind.

There's a lot of similarity between openness in relationships and in software; a good open-source software project not only shares its code freely, but accepts bug reports and patches for that code. It's not exact; there is, unfortunately, no revision-control system for relationships.

Most of the time I'm pretty far out on the openness side of the scale, by my own measure. There's very little about my own emotional life that I wouldn't publish here in my LJ, or put into a song. There have been a couple of times when I've suddenly thought "did I just say that to the entire damned Internet?" and friends-locked a post, but it feels wrong when I do it. As if there was something I needed to hide.

Sometimes I do need to hide things, though. I won't share anything I understand to have been told to me in confidence, and I won't share anything I understand will hurt someone else or reveal information they don't regard as private. The key word here is understand -- I'm all too likely to default to my own standards of openness; feel free to whap me with a cluestick if I blunder and cross one of your boundaries.

I've run across other peoples' boundaries enough lately that I'm setting up a private journal that's just for myself, finally. I haven't had a private journal in nearly four decades, but I have to write about things if I expect to understand them, and I need to be open with myself even if I can't necessarily share those particular thoughts with anyone else. It still feels wrong.

So, just as a reminder: this is my definition. You can tell me how it differs from your definition -- I really hope you do, in fact, since one of the motivations for this is to find out how my use of language differs from everyone else's -- and I'll be glad if you point out obvious inconsistencies or mistakes, or places where I could be more precise. You don't get to tell me that my definition is wrong. (edit 5/4) You can tell me why it doesn't really appear to be the definition I'm actually using. And you can tell me why you think I should be using a different one.

Similarly, you can tell me where you are on the scale, but you don't get to tell me I'm in the wrong place.

11:00 pm - The fires of Beltane

Note to my friends: this is a much happier post than the one I'm glad I didn't finish this morning. Things are well with me. Thank you for your patience. (/me waves cheerfully at those who have had the most to put up with from me over the last couple of weeks.)

Yesterday and today had a distinct feeling of transition; many things have become clearer in my mind, and I've started putting them into practice. Events have converged, and emotional uphevals have been processed. Things are different. The ghosts are gone, as they should be, and a few hours after the April finally left the planet by way of the International Date Line I felt as though a weight had lifted from my heart. The fires of Beltane have done their work, burning away the last of the old year's dead leaves and fallen branches.

Spring is here, and by some ways of reckoning it's the New Year. Wherever you place that mark on the calendar, I hope that the fires of this Beltane have burned away your sorrows, and that the year to come brings you joy and contentment.

08:25 pm - Ghosts

Since it's come up in comments to a couple of recent downwhen posts, yes, there were ghosts in the bed with us last night. They made it hard to sleep.

These weren't nearly as palpable as the old woman Colleen claims to have seen on the back stairs from time to time. I haven't seen her myself, but wouldn't be too surprised to learn that Sarah Winchester has been walking her old estate, wondering where her lovely orchards have gone. The old almond tree in our back yard died years ago.

These are memories, mostly, I think. It's a little hard to tell in the cold hours after midnight. Insubstantial, but real enough. Not all were of dead people.

Yes, of course: one was a dead, close friend. Parents: her mother, my father, closer than they've been in several years. Crying calls them. One was a stillborn child, another a stillborn friendship. Some were more insubstantial: dreams and illusions. The ghost of a lost illusion is a tenuous thing indeed. One of them might have become a song, if it had lived.

I've written before of the veil between the worlds. Sometimes, on a night in early August, it's so thin that I can almost reach through and touch whatever is not quite there. Last night it was thicker and less transparent; the ghosts were fuzzy with distance and sleep, and silent.

They never speak plainly, the ghosts; last night they made no sound at all, but seemed to have something to say. I'm never certain whether to try to listen, or simply to wave them off. They'll be back, I'm sure, until we've learned whatever they have to tell us.

We lay in one another's arms and took turns, sleeping, and waiting for the ghosts to speak. They never said anything that I remember. They rarely do.

08:16 am - Sleepless in San Jose

Woke at maybe 2am and had trouble getting back to sleep. Brain wouldn't shut up. I'm reassessing some things, mainly about travel. (The flower_cat told her doctor about our zoo trip and he immediately wrote out a prescription for a wheelchair. His only questions were height, weight, and folding. But that's just part of it, and not even the hard part.)

About 4am the Cat woke as well; we took turns sleeping in a close embrace until the alarm went off at 6:30. Normally we can't sleep that way; I think it was just the exhaustion that made it possible. She said as I got up that I didn't even snore. She's sleeping soundly now.

Got up with my nose congested and my throat dry; I'm probably coming down with something. Make that have come down with something.

There are dry-runs all this week at work for a major technical review next week; today's is at 9am, which is an unusual starting hour for our normally laid-back California Research Center. They've also completed the process of moving the administrative staff into the offices next door, and swapping suite numbers. Starting today they'll be keeping our door locked, since there's nobody to watch it.

It'll be a little good deal less convenient, but since my office is only a few steps from the door, I was always the one who got tapped when nobody was at the front desk. So that's a win.

Every silver lining has a cloud around it, though, and right now my life is distinctly overcast.

06:55 am - Observations before dawn

The half-moon shines through my kitchen window, wrapped in a gentle hazy glow. I imagine ragged clouds, a high haze of cirrus; it's only that I haven't put on my glasses. Outside, the moon and one bright planet disentangle themselves from the sharp fronds of the dragon-tree; the gray sky is lightening toward blue to Eastward, and a lone bird tentatively warms up its voice for the morning chorus.

Once again I set out to write about something specific and recent; older memories persisted in taking over. Are you trying to tell me something, Amy? Am I being stupid? Maybe. Yes.

The roses beside the driveway fence have started blooming, struggling free of a sea of grass and weeds to preen themselves for anyone who might be watching.

Everything I touch seems to fall apart these days.

I seem to be unable to start things. Work, home, wherever; I putter around the edges of my to-do lists without getting very much done. A house full of unfinished projects mocks me wherever I look. A year into my seventh decade, I've lived in this house half my life. The back yard desperately wants weeding.

There are worse things than growing old together. Thank you, Love.

The birds are quiet now, and sunlight brushes golden highlights onto the curtains.

11:01 pm - Poem: Not a bridge

Can one mourn for something that never was
    never will be
        might have been?

This path is broad and smooth
    here beside the river.
        Brambles hide the other bank.

See that dead tree, leaning there?
    Soon it will fall and block the way,
        have to be cut apart and carried off.

Someone could have felled it,
    pushed it the other way,
        made a bridge.

Never mind the path not taken;
    here there was never a path,
        only a place where a bridge that never was

never will be,
    might have been.
        Yes, one can.

			-- Stephen Savitzky, 2008-04-25

I don't write poetry very often these days. This one just fell into my lap. I'm not sure I wanted it there, but muses are fickle creatures, and I suppose one must take their gifts as one finds them.

Current Mood: contemplative

12:23 pm - More lessons learned

More things I've learned over the last few days:

• I can get through the morning and afternoon on five hours' sleep, five cups of coffee, and a late breakfast consisting of half a block of tofu. Just barely. Probably not twice in a row. I was feeling a little weak and dizzy by the time we started dinner around 5:45; Another 15 minutes and I'd probably have been on the floor. Thank goodness for tortilla chips and salsa!
• I don't need to keep my physical cancelled checks, do I? How many times have I looked at one? Maybe twice in 40 years? I can just download images from the bank and I'll be fine.
• I don't need to keep detailed records of closed-out accounts, either. Maybe a year-end statement and the 1099's which get filed separately, with the tax records, anyway.
• If I have a close friend whose relationship to me is best described as "sister", that makes her and my wife "sisters-in-law". Good place to start from. Works for all gender permutations, obviously. Wish I'd known that three months ago, but if wishes were horses I'd have been buried in horse exhaust several decades ago.
• My time machine is stuck in "play".

08:56 am - Learning

There was a gentle rain early this morning; when I went outside the air was washed clean and sunlight was sparkling on the lingering raindrops. It felt remarkably appropriate.

I have learned many things over the last, oh, 36 hours. Here, in no particular order, are some of them:

• "Never let the sun set on your anger" is good advice. So is "never go to bed with your anger." I'll settle for "never go to sleep with your anger" -- that works, too. I know damned well who I'd rather sleep with.
• Some things are better than sex. Long, close cuddles and deep, loving conversation are in that set. Especially when combined.
• I can still cry from missing my Dad.
• There are many things to value in a relationship, and peoples' ranking of them can differ. Love, loyalty, passion, honesty... Friendship, understanding, and working through problems are high on my list. Anyone have a good single word for that last one? It may be the most important for me.
• You get higher social security payments if you keep working until you're 70. Not that I have much choice.
• A long-term intense relationship, whether physical or platonic, is time-consuming. I need to manage my time and my priorities better.

08:23 am - QOTD

flower_cat: "I think I just need holding."

mdlbear: "Does that make you an old bag of holding?"

(No, she didn't hit me.)

05:51 pm - Other than that, ...

Took the car in for an oil change this morning. They told me it would take 45 minutes to an hour, so I went out for a walk rather than sitting around. Beautiful day for it; it was just starting to get uncomfortably hot by the time the car was finished.

We'll go out for a drive after dinner. We don't say much, usually; it's just a good way of getting out of the house and spending some quiet time together. At home, there are always too many distractions: kids, computers, books... Even with gas near $4/gallon, it's a cheap evening out.

10:50 pm - Insight of the day

Realized this morning that most of the trouble I was having with $insurance_company were due to the fact that they're not set up for any way of doing business except through your own unique agent. This is not the way I'm used to interacting with large companies. I'm used to it with health-care providers, but even there it was a long time before I figured out that I had to pick a doctor at Kaiser: before that I just went in when I was sick.

As it turns out, stock brokerages work the same way -- your connection is to the broker, not to the company. This explains why I've never really gotten a handle on my investments.

Now that I understand this, maybe I can start fixing it. Or turn the investments over to the flower_cat, who does understand how to do business through a personal connection, and is comfortable with it.

10:50 pm - Phone rage

There are excellent reasons why I prefer not to transact business by phone when I can possibly avoid it. Clearly, I am one of those people who should not even be permitted near a telephone, let alone call someone he doesn't know and attempt to get anything done.

Phones frustrate and infuriate me; voice-response menus frustrate and infuriate me even more. And if I reach voice mail rather than a human I'm better off hanging up, writing out a message in complete sentences, and going through the entire sorry process again to read it to the blasted machine rather than venting my rage on the spot.

Let's not even mention the fact that missed calls show up on my cell phone minutes or even hours before the corresponding message shows up in my voice mail. Let's not think about the fact that a phone has the worst user interface ever devised by a half-witted excuse for an engineer.

Note to companies: You want my business? Have a human standing by to answer your damned phone if your web page doesn't give me the information I need. And, I can assure you, it probably doesn't.

Note to self: insurance companies don't want to talk to customers. Only your own personal agent is equipped to talk to you. If he's out of town, you're hosed, so plan ahead.

08:05 pm - Mostly better now

It was a good afternoon for a walk; I'm glad the flower_cat kicked my sorry butt out of the house and told me to take one. Walked for an hour by Los Gatos Creek, from where it crosses Leigh Avenue up to the little park in Campbell and back.

Started working on a song; nothing but fragments so far. I may just scribble them down and let them marinate for a while; if I go much further down that particular rabbit hole I won't get the taxes started until next week, if then.

The park was full of people; I had a nice little conversation with a girl who was sitting on a picnic table playing a guitar. Well, she looked like a girl, anyway, until her five-year-old daughter came over for a hug. They left when the little one fell down and scraped her hand. But I was able to show off a little, help her with a C chord (she's only been playing for a couple of months), and talk about music and kids for a while. Her name was Bonnie, if I remember correctly.

It's hard not to be at least a little cheerful with music and pleasant memories in my head. Even harder after tasty rabbit stew and steamed asparagus. We started the stew just before I left; I came back just in time to help finish it, and to empty the dishwasher.

Still no real handle on why that wave of depression hit me this afternoon, but it doesn't matter. Besides, I tend to write when I'm depressed. It might just have been the song trying to get out.

02:55 pm - See mood.

Went out with the chaoswolf to buy her a fireproof file box. Who would have guessed that everyone was closed for Easter? Well, maybe someone who celebrates it... Office Max, Staples, even Fry's was closed.

On the way home I was talking to the Wolfling about changing her name, and its relationship to her impending immigration problems (which are going to be problems no matter which side of the border they end up on), realized that I was out of my depth, and was hit by a massive wave of depression.

I was already feeling a little down because of a number of obvious problems: finances, not getting things done, frustration with software, trouble communicating with Colleen... But I was cheerful when I went out for my walk this morning. What in hell happened?

Colleen advised me to have some lunch, but that doesn't seem to be doing it -- I don't think it's just an energy thing. But I don't know what it is, and that bothers me.

08:38 am - Balance

Here's wishing a happy -- or at least a calm -- Equinox to those who mark it. It seems like a good day to talk about balance.

My life, like my finances, has been significantly out of balance for years. Things are starting to find a new equilibrium, though sometimes I feel like I've finally gotten it all together just in time to be forgetting where I put it.

Things like blog reading and IM usage are still a bit of a problem -- I always tend to do the fun stuff first -- but I'm trying to limit them and have been mostly successful. This week, anyway.

Financially, it's too early to say for sure, but I may have finally gotten both the Cat and I interested in setting up a household budget. Suggestions for Linux programs or locally-installable web applications will be gratefully accepted. (The ones I know about from "apt-cache search budget" on Ubuntu are grisbi, homebank, and equonimize; haven't had a chance to look at any of them.)

I may have been the only one to notice that last night's selection of cheeses was smaller than usual.

Balance plays a part in conversation, too. Last night's geekish conversation in the office was marked by comparatively little of it; people were more intent on making their own points -- repeatedly -- than in noting their areas of agreement and disagreement and moving on to something more interesting. Yes, scanning, printing, and vector drawing programs in Linux are broken. You really only have to say that once. Yes, human interface studies and guidelines are important. But if you dumb things down to match what your study has determined to be the "average" user's expectations, you leave off what may be a surprisingly long tail of users who aren't average and weren't included in your pitifully small study. (It's my blog -- I get to have the last word there.)

I'm blathering. Balance. Right.

(Note: The trainwreck and river tags are for discussion of financial and psychological issues respectively; there will be corresponding filters for non-public aspects of these, but I haven't started using them yet.)