On Being "Mr Wonderful"

I’ve officially been Mr Wonderful for about seven years now. That’s the nickname I was given by a patron at the library where I’m the Tech Guy who tries to help you out with problems with your mobile devices and laptops (I promise nothing). But even though I only started being actually called Mr Wonderful since I started working at this library, I’m aware of having had this reputation for a long time.

The first time I clearly remember having that reputation was when I was working for a film company in New York, back in the 80s, and got a job offer from a company across town that wanted me to start in a week, rather than the standard two weeks you give for notice. When one of my coworkers asked our department head if he was upset that I didn’t give two weeks notice, he said, that his only concern was what three people he was gonna hire to replace me.

That sounds like Mr Wonderful to me.

And yet, as I think about it, even my starting to work there was a case of being Mr Wonderful. I was supposed to temp for two weeks while they found a new receptionist, and after one week, they asked if I really had to leave. I stayed for a year and a half, until I was lured away to the job across town by someone who knew how “wonderful” I was at the film company.

I was wonderful in all my other jobs too, but just never thought about it. I was just doing what I thought needed to be done, the best I knew how.

And I was wonderful in other facets of my life. I got my dream job of becoming musical director for the annual Parents’ Weekend student musical at Syracuse University because I was wonderful at learning to play three songs by ear at a time when we needed to replace a lead the night before we opened, and the only person who knew his lines, his three songs, and his three dances was the pianist. So we put him on stage, and I went to the pit for those three numbers.

In everything I’ve done, I’ve unconsciously tried to be Mr Wonderful.

But sometimes you just can’t be Mr Wonderful anymore. Or at least, you can’t be Mr Wonderful to everyone…not at the same time.

And one of the results of my having crashed and burned a few weeks ago is the realization of just that. The counselor I’ve been seeing said that you can’t be Mr Wonderful all the time. That sometimes you have to be Mr “Good Enough.” Sometimes you have to be Mr “It’ll Have to Do.” And the most freeing thing she said to me was that sometimes you have to be Mr “No, I’m Not Gonna Do That.”

I was stunned. I was like, “Wait a minute. I get to tell people that I don’t want to do certain things? Even though they’re asking me to do them because they think I’d be wonderful at them?”

This was something new, and yet it wasn’t. It was advice I always gave to others, but couldn’t take myself. And yet, when I talked to other people who had dealt with depression, they told me that I absolutely got to tell people “no”, no matter how hard they twisted my arm.

So for now, I’m gonna work on being a little less wonderful…or at least accepting the fact that it’s OK to be not quite so wonderful all the time.

And maybe by not trying to be so wonderful for so many people so often…I’ll be wonderful to myself.

People Like Me

Last week, when I mentioned my struggle with depression, I also mentioned how a friend of mine said that depression seems to follow people like me around.

What are “people like me”?

People who think too much and feel too much. Well, OK, if you think that sounds a little judgmental and isn’t helpful to “people like me”, let me rephrase that…people who think and feel intensely and deeply. I’ll talk about the thinking part next week. For today I want to talk about the feeling.

Any of my friends who knew me in grade school will tell you that I’ve been an incurable romantic since first grade. My friend Sally from college told me once that I fall in love too easily. When I was in my late 20s, I had a girl break up with me because I felt more deeply for her than she was ready for (don’t worry, we’re still good friends). I’m convinced that the problems I had with one girl in my early 20s were because I felt more deeply for her than she wanted me to, while she still had other irons in the fire.

I replay the tapes (yeah, I know…what’s a tape) of situations from my teens and twenties, and ask myself, “What if I had dealt with this differently? How did I miss that social cue? Suppose I’d said this instead of that?” Some of you might say that this goes under thinking rather than feeling. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a gray area. Maybe it’s thinking about my feelings.

Of course, this could also be called “having a great imagination”, or being able to see alternate outcomes to things I’ve gone through. And this definitely helps when I write my stories. But sometimes it just gets you “stuck.”

And it’s not always about me. Sometimes it’s about others. It’s about other people…other wonderful people…that I want things for, and my disappointment that they don’t have or never got them. For example, there’s a woman I worked with many years ago who was one of the nicest people I knew, but didn’t have anyone…that I knew of. I imagined a secret love life for her that was wilder than anything you would’ve thought about her from seeing her at work. Many years later, she’s still never had anyone…that I know of…and I think it’s kind of unfair that someone that nice never got anyone to tell her just how nice she was.

But you know something…even in that, maybe it is about me…and how much I would enjoy being told that someone thought I was wonderful…even many years later. I remember how blown away I was to find out that the younger sister of a girl I had a crush on in high school actually had a crush on me. 40-odd years later, and with both of us happily married to other people, I was walking on air! Maybe I think that other people are this way too…when they’re not. And I’ve embarrassed myself more than once...and even gotten seriously burned...when I clumsily tried to pay a compliment that I’d be thrilled to get, but wasn’t received well at all.

But, going back to the woman I worked with, maybe that’s my issue…my issue as the incurable romantic…as the person who feels deeply…and not hers. Maybe it’s my issue as the person who feels incredibly deeply…and didn’t understand until very recently that not everyone else feels that deeply, wants to feel that deeply…or wants to know that I feel deeply about or for them…and not hers. Maybe she’s perfectly happy, while I’m sad for her.

And as I said a few weeks ago, maybe knowing this means that I can let go of my desire to make things right that I screwed up in the past.

And make me right in the present.

D is for Depression

Today I want to talk about depression…because it’s something I’m going through.

Hi. My name is Keith, and I’m depressed. And I’m not ashamed to admit it. In fact, I’m rather glad to be able to have a name for this feeling of helplessness and incompetence I’ve had for a while now. Because now that I have a name for it, now that I know what it is, I can start to get help for it.

Now that I know that it is depression, I can stop trying to power through with my life held together with duct tape, and just let things fall apart…so I can start to get better.

When I first announced on Facebook that I might be suffering from depression, I was a little hesitant about it. Not because of any stigma it might carry…screw the stigma, I know plenty of people who’ve suffered from depression, and the more we talk about it, the better it is for everyone. No, I hesitated because I knew plenty of people who’ve suffered from depression, and I didn’t want to appropriate the word for their serious condition for what might merely be a “rough patch” for me.

But an amazing thing happened when I made my announcement…all my depressed friends came out of the woodwork in support, saying “We’ve been there. We’ll help you through this.” One friend laughed and said, “What took you so long to figure this out? People like you, who think as deeply and feel as deeply as you do, are prime candidates for depression.”

Whoa!

She was saying that it made logical sense for someone like me, a self-confessed overthinker, to be depressed. But she also hit on something else…that I’m also an over-feeler. OK…get your minds out of the gutter…you know that’s not what she meant.

And hearing her say this meant that I could let go of a lot of things I’ve been thinking too much and feeling too much about over the years. I could let go of the girl who broke my heart 40 years ago, and my desire to tell her that I understood and forgave her. I could let go of the girl who I hurt seven years after that, and the desire to apologize, and explain that I now understood what was going on in my head at the time. I could let go of trying to figure out what was up with the friend whose car was hit by a train on a deserted stretch of road in the middle of nowhere, back in 1977.

And that girl from freshman year who I never got around to giving the $20 to when I bought her stereo from her…I could stop calculating what $20 is over 45 years at 7% interest (it’s $392.57, by the way).

I can let all of that be water under the bridge. 

I was never one for perfection, but I was one for getting things “just right” rather than just good enough. But when I crashed and burned, it gave me the freedom to say that maybe I don’t have to be Mr Wonderful all the time, and maybe sometimes I should just let things be “good enough” rather than aiming for even just right. Perhaps good enough is good enough; and perhaps good enough will give me the space I need to breathe and get my life back together.

And of course there’s medication. I know…this a big stigma attached to taking medication for depression, but as an insulin-dependent diabetic, I see things a little differently. If there’s no shame in people like me taking a drug every day to stay alive, why should there be any shame in taking a drug every day to stay sane?

It’s gonna be a long journey, but I’m up to it. I have my first appointment with a counselor today.

And I will get better.

On Trying Too Hard

Two years ago this week, for reasons that weren’t entirely my fault, I made a total ass of myself and pissed off a lot of people while my wife Cheryl was on a mission trip to Haiti. After the dust had settled…indeed, while the dust was still settling…I tried to fix things. I tried to patch things up. I wanted really badly to make things right.

I tried too hard. I became annoying. I knew I couldn’t get a cosmic do-over, but in my attempts to make things right I tried too hard, and became annoying.

I really shouldn’t be surprised. I have a history of trying too hard. Every time I liked a girl in grade school or high school, I tried too hard, and scared them away. This little habit of trying too hard lasted well into college (and I was an undergrad for seven years). By the time I got to grad school, I had finally learned my lesson. In fact, I learned it so well that Cheryl practically had to throw herself at me to let me know that it wouldn’t be “trying too hard” for me to ask her out…or ask her to marry me.

But I digress.

The simple fact of the matter is that I tried too hard to fix things, and became annoying as a result.

But there’s something else I realized just recently. It’s something that should be perfectly obvious when you think about it, but we often don’t get it because maybe it’s too obvious, or maybe we’re too idealistic…

Sometimes you don’t get to fix things. Sometimes you don’t get to make things right. Very often you don’t even get to apologize. And most annoying and painful of all…sometimes you just have to let the record show that you were a tremendous schmuck.

Because here’s the other revelation…sometimes, subconsciously, “wanting to make things right” can be as much about your not wanting to appear to be a schmuck as it is genuinely wanting to fix things. Perhaps there’s a lot of it that’s about not wanting to go down in history as that jerk that screwed things up.

And so you want to fix that. You want to fix what you messed up, and you want to correct the record.

The counterintuitive thing is that sometimes trying to make things right on your terms makes it take longer for things to become right again on theirs. Or perhaps trying to make things right years later, when you realize what you did wrong and understand why it happened, reopens a wound that had long since healed for the other party.

I can think of a number of other people I'd like to apologize to for bad...or hurtful...behavior on my part. But I also recognize that maybe they’re so over me by now that it doesn't matter to them anymore, and that that apology might disrupt the peace that they now have.

And yet...there’s a part of me that would like for people who recognize that they’ve hurt me to apologize and try to make things right. So maybe I want everyone to do it...me to them, them to me, all of us to each other.

In any event, as I said in the beginning, for reasons that were not entirely my fault, I made a total ass of myself and pissed off a lot of people while Cheryl was in Haiti two years ago. I’ve since apologized, and have tried to make things right, but you know something…the fact that I was an ass is a historical fact that will not be expunged by my later enlightenment. And my trying too hard to fix what happened then is counterproductive for everyone involved.

So I’m just gonna let it go, leave these poor people alone, and deal with it the way I deal with all of my very human failings…by laughing at what an idiot I was. After all, time has a way of making even the most painful things seem funny in the retelling.

And…remembering that while you can’t always make things right, you can always learn from what you did wrong.

The Bad Idea of Residency Requirements

Once again, the idea of forcing Syracuse teachers, firefighters, and police officers to live within the city limits has come up, and once again, it’s time to take a look at why this is a bad idea.

First of all, at best, the idea of forcing the people to live within the city is a “feel-good” idea about what would make our neighborhoods better. At worst, it’s an idea borne of jealousy over some city employees getting to live someplace “better,” and wanting them to suffer like the rest of us do. I disagree with both of these ideas.

Let’s start with the “feel-good” idea that this would make our neighborhoods better. The people who propose this believe that having teachers, firefights, and police officers live in the city they’re serving would make them more responsive to the needs of the community. They believe that if these people were forced to live within the city, they would provide needed positive examples to the rest of the people in their neighborhoods. They believe that these people would put a little more heart and soul into their jobs if they knew that they were affecting the people that they lived with on a day-to-day basis.

Unfortunately, the reality is quite different. Forcing Syracuse teachers, firefighters, and police officers to live within the city limits is not going to force them to move to the neighborhoods where the “example of their presence” is needed most. There are plenty of homes available in Eastwood, Sedgwick, Strathmore, and the University area, far from the problems many of these people have to deal with on a daily basis. And if you think about it carefully, it makes sense that a person who has to deal with the issues that these people do should be allowed to escape somewhere else to recharge without feeling that they’re on duty 24/7, whether that’s a nicer neighborhood in the city or somewhere just across the city line.

In addition the people who use as an example the fact that when they were kids, their father, the firefighter, was able to walk to the firehouse if he was needed in an emergency don’t grasp the fact that nowadays even firefighters who live in the city probably live across town from the station they’re based out of.

Now let’s consider jealousy, because that’s exactly what it is. I don’t see people from Liverpool or DeWitt demanding that their teachers live within their communities, and I’ve known teachers from both districts who lived right here in the city. Why is that? Because for the most part people in those two communities don’t feel bad about where they live. Yet, for some reason, many of us who live in Syracuse don’t like it, would prefer to live somewhere else, and don’t want anyone else to live someplace we consider “better” on our dime.

And who are these jealous people? I’m betting that they’re not people who live in Eastwood, Sedgwick, Strathmore, or the University area. After all, anyone who lives in one of those neighborhoods could easily afford to live in DeWitt, Liverpool, or Nedrow, but chose to live in the city for one reason or another.

Not me. I’m a city kid from way back. Not this city, but a city kid nonetheless. I like being able to walk to the corner store, the drugstore, or the library; and I like having sidewalks to do it on. I love living in the city, and I have never considered moving outside of it. However, I understand that city life, even in a residential neighborhood, isn’t for everyone. Some people need a little more space and a little more nature – neither of which is available here in the city.

With these thoughts in mind, I think it’s time o give up on the residency requirement as a bad idea whose time has long passed, and just hire the best people for the job, no matter where they live.

Can We Deal With Competing Truths?

What do we do when two sets of statistics appear to tell us different things, but they’re both true? Do we ignore one set because of our own biases, while latching onto the other? Do we, because our minds are too small and inflexible, insist that they can’t both be true, and that it only appears to be that way because of smoke, mirrors, and the unethical (or ignorant) manipulation of data?

Or do we sit down, open our puny little minds a bit, and try to understand the complicated nuances that actually do allow for both sets of statistics to be true, thus walking away with a greater understanding of the issue as a whole than we previously gravitated toward when we only saw things in black and white?

I mentioned this once before when I talked about Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics About Planned Parenthood, and Unicorns. In this post I tried to explain two things could be simultaneously true.

The first was that only 3% of the work Planned Parenthood does is abortion related.

The second was that they could still be the “single largest” provider of abortions even if they only did 10%, if the other 90% were spread out among smaller independent providers.

My point there was to get each of the extreme sides to take a look at how the other side saw things, and go “Oh…” Did it work? I don’t know.

Here’s another case where two seemingly incompatible sets of statistics can both be true: Most guys are not sexual predators…but the small number of them who are do damage far out of proportion to their numbers, and cause women to not trust the rest of us.

And let me hit you up with one more related set of statistics before proceeding to my main point. Most Catholic priests are not pedophiles…but the small number of them who are, combined with the horrible mishandling of the situation by the Roman Catholic hierarchy, have done damage, once again, out of proportion to their numbers, that will last for generations.

So having given you those three examples, which I’m assuming you are able to understand the nuances of, let me now go to the main course and talk about what I really came here for.

Guns and gun violence.

And here are my two sets of seemingly incompatible statistics, both of which are true:

Most gun owners…the overwhelming majority of gun owners…are responsible, law-abiding citizens, with no anger management issues, racist tendencies, or desires to overthrow the government when things don’t go their way. On the other hand, a very small minority of gun owners, armed with some very powerful weapons, do unspeakable damage far out of proportion to their numbers.

So there you have it. Both things are true. Now the question is how do we go about dealing with the problem that we alone in the industrialized world seem to have with gun violence? Does being able to see and understand both sides of the equation enable us to maybe come out of our own well-fortified corners and out of our own ideological bubbles…to talk to (and not scream at) each other, to listen to and try to understand each other as we try to solve this horrible problem? Will being able to do this enable more people to come in from each of the extreme sides (and some of them are unbelievably extreme) to somewhere in the middle where we can all agree on a compromise?

I don’t know, but I think it’s worth a shot.

Oops.

What You Can Learn About Sex From Porn

Recently a notification popped up on my screen for podcast called What Happens When You Learn About Sex from Porn. I was intrigued by this for a number of reasons. First of all, I was sure that it was going to be all about the misinformation and bad information guys get from porn. Second, I was thinking that I learned a lot about sex from porn, and it was a lot of good information. Third, and this is where those two seemingly incompatible things tie together, I understand that the porn…or “dirty books”…of my youth are much different from what’s available out there on the internet now. The stuff I accidentally found in the back of my father’s closet would more likely be called “erotica” today, and would be considered quite tame…and almost even innocent…by today’s standards.

I haven’t listened to that podcast yet, because I wanted to share with you some of my thoughts without having any of them be a response to that.

So let’s talk about those books I stumbled across in my father’s closet. After I’d read a few of them...and took a cold shower, I was very careful to put them back exactly where I found them, so that he wouldn’t know that anyone had found them, and they’d be there for me to read some other time. Second, I learned a lot of things from those little books that put me in good stead with the girls I dated later on. I learned things about what girls found enjoyable that they definitely weren’t gonna teach me beyond the basic plumbing in Health. Not even in the rather advanced health class we had at East Orange High School.

To put it simply, in Health I learned about plumbing, pregnancy, and disease. From the books in the back of the closet, I learned *technique*.

But there’s more. The porn of my day…the erotica…the Playboy of my adolescence was, at least to my recollection and perception, not about women as sex objects (unless, of course, both people were being mutually objectified), but about people you might enjoy spending time with, and then “frolicking with” until the break of dawn.

Or maybe this was just me…and that’s where my perception comes in. Ask anyone who knew me in grade school, and they’ll tell you that I was an incurable romantic since kindergarten. So on those occasions when I got an adolescent view of an unclad Barbi Benton, as I said once before, my first thought wasn’t “Nice tits, I’d like to f*** her”, but rather, “She seems really nice. I wonder if she’d like me…and then want to do that thing you do when you really like someone.”

And even when I fantasized about girls I knew in high school or college, it wasn’t about the sex…it was about the relationship that caused the sex to happen. Relationships where I could use those techniques I learned from those books in the back of my father’s closet. Those girls weren’t sex objects, they were relationship objects. And yet, is the term “relationship object” a bit of an oxymoron? That’s a question for another post.

And contrary to the rather one-dimensional view that many women have of us as being single-minded sex maniacs, I’d like to believe that more guys were like me.

But let’s go back to the original question…of what happens when you learn about sex from porn.

Well…I think it all depends on what you’re calling porn. If you’re learning about it from some of the hardcore stuff that’s out there these days, that can’t be good for anyone. On the other hand, I think there’s a lot of good to be learned from *erotica*…erotica that takes into account the humanity and sexual desires of both parties.

OK, so now that I’ve written this, I guess I’ll go listen to that podcast.