amanda_lodden | Oct. 31st, 2005

Oct. 31st, 2005

Today is a very scattered day. I can't say that I'm happy about that-- since my usual Monday stuff is cancelled for Halloween and we don't get any trick-or-treaters, I was kinda looking forward to hanging around the office tonight and getting stuff done, and thus far the "getting stuff done" part hasn't been happening. Instead, snippets of lots of different, unrelated things keep coming to me. Currently a lot of the snippets are things I'd like to write about before I lose the thought(s). So hopefully writing for a while will calm those demons and let me get back to what I ought to be doing.

The weekend was eventful, and not just for the events. A conversation with Shane sparked the realization that no one tells him about his good qualities. So I did, in a rather lengthy email. I expected the effect it had on him, but I was unprepared for the effect it had on me. Writing it forced me to focus on just Shane for a little bit (although "focus" is probably the wrong word, since I started writing it on Saturday and stopped in order to go on a hayride... with Shane, among other people. It's a little disconcerting to be in the middle of writing how wonderful someone is when they're sitting right next to you. I felt like I ought to just stop writing and SAY it, but there were other people around and I decided it would probably make him feel awkward. Even though the other people probably would have just joined in and come up with more great things about him.) I didn't finish it until Sunday. The thing is, I didn't really finish it, I just ran out of things I could put into words. Most of the strong memories I have are short snapshots of a few seconds or a single conversation (or just a single line out of a conversation), but they wrap up a lot of emotions in them. (This is true of most everyone, not just Shane). I can't even find the words to describe them to myself, much less find enough words to string them together into something coherent.

Afterward I started to think about how little we tell *anyone* how much we like/respect/admire them, and how many people there are who mean more to me than they know. And suddenly I want to write a lot of those letters. (And at the same time, I don't, because I know that many of the people will react to such a letter with suspicion, and I will spend far too much time explaining why I wrote them in the first place. Which just made me realize that I left "trusting" out of the note to Shane. I like that he just accepts my various insanities without making me explain them. And "trustworthy", because I like not having to hide my various insanities from him, too.)

Did I mention scattered? Yeah, just checking.

I'm torn about the previous entry, the letter to the people who live in my house. Right now my house is actually quite clean, since Bill's party didn't destroy it (it could use a good vacuuming, though). And he took the garbage out without having to be nagged. And the dining room table was cleared off again on Sunday (which is very unusual; I thought for sure that I was going to end up doing the usual "throw it all in a box and dump it in Bill's room" next week). So it seems overly bitchy to send it out right now, when most of the points on it have been handled. I've had fleeting rants that would qualify as "Tenth", but I've lost them by the time I got someplace where I could write. I find that frustrating, because I can remember that there WAS a "Tenth", and that means that I know without a doubt that there's more in my life that's bugging me. I just can't put my finger on it.

I ache. I hate fall. My foot hurts too, because I didn't wrap it yesterday. I figured I wouldn't need to, since I was home all day and didn't even run around the house much. Apparently going up and down the stairs for the couple loads of laundry was enough to piss it off. Live and learn.

I'm biting my nails again. I'm not sure why; I actually feel more stable emotionally, physically AND financially than I have in a long time. I didn't start biting them again until after the big financial crises had passed. Little nagging things usually result in one or two fingernails being sacrificed (sometimes repeatedly); right now only three of my nails have escaped the mass slaughter. WTF?

Yesterday was good. I did some coding, and managed to stay focused on it enough that I feel like I made real progress. And it was progress on some of the pages that really need to be done-- I keep wanting to improve some of the pages so that they work better than they do now, but what I really really need to do is get the pages I haven't touched yet into the beta version with the same functionality that they have now, so that I can put the beta version into production and actually USE the pages that I've already made improvements to.

Saturday I came back to B's party after the hayride. I got to see Mia (who has finally gotten to where she can talk about something other than her pregnancy once in a while, thank goodness). Somewhere along the lines someone (and I don't think it was Mia) wondered why people who don't get scared at haunted houses bother to go to them. Damned good question. Personally, I go for the company, though I usually phrase that as "I go to laugh at [insert most-scared-person in our group here]" (in reality, I go to see everyone, not just to laugh, but I don't feel a need to admit that publicly). As a side note, it's interesting to note the differences between Shane's clogging groups-- Friday night there were 7 of us, and we drove mostly-separately to the event, but it seemed like there was more conversation between us all while we were standing in line and going through the attractions. Going out for food afterwards was treated as a given rather than a "should we?", even though more cars means more confusion and planning in order to make it happen. Two more people joined us at the restaurant, adding to the planning headaches, but no one ever thought of not doing it. In contrast, on Saturday 4 of us met up at one person's house and then drove together to pick up the other two (who then drove separately and we followed, which kinda makes me wonder why we didn't just get directions ourselves, but sure). There was conversation while we were standing in line, and I'll assume that the difference in the tone was just me, since I don't dance with the group on Saturday. However, when we were done, we just split up, and the four of us went back to where we met up. Even though we all agreed that the hayride was a lot shorter than we expected, doing something else afterward was never even brought up.

Where was I before the long side note? Oh yeah, the question of why people who don't get scared go to haunted houses. That got me thinking about fear in general, and why certain people don't get scared. At one point Helen described me as "brave", and I know that's very much not the case-- I have plenty of fears, they just don't include people with lots of face paint and entirely too high insurance liabilities. But Saturday I watched one pre-teen girl who screamed at every little thing, and it was pretty obvious that she was scared mostly because she really wanted to be scared.

Some insight was gleaned from a mailing list, where a friend posted this link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/health/psychology/25essa.html (free login required). NY Times takes their articles down after a while, but the gist of it is that people tend to get frightened of far-off diseases, because it's easier to be scared of something that you're unlikely to ever really get than it is to face the things that are already wrong with you. The key paragraphs, in my opinion:

But the avian flu - now there's a health scare a person can sink his teeth into. So scary and yet, somehow, so pleasantly distant. So thrilling, so chilling, and yet, at the same time, so not here, not now, not yet. All in all, a completely satisfying health care fear experience. Unlike his actual illness [established earlier in the article as emphysema, and the patient smokes and refuses to quit].

Scary movies give children nightmares. Scary health news gives adults the extraordinary ability to ignore the immediate in favor of the distant, to escape from the real (and the really scary) into a far easier kind of fear.

So in essence, people seek out scary-but-fake things like haunted houses to escape their real fears. Okay, I can buy that. Except that by that reasoning, I should be screaming my head off at haunted houses. There's gotta be more to it than that.

And that's what got me thinking about the nature of fear. From here on out (or at least until the next side-track; I did mention the "scattered" thing, right?), this is strictly my opinion and not backed up by any sort of scientific fact. But my ego prevents me from couching it all in "in my opinion"s and "I think"s, so I'm stating it as fact anyway.

There are three kinds of fears:

1. Fake fears. Anything that you're afraid of that you know can't really hurt you. There are the "escape" fears, the things you're afraid of so that you can forget what you're *really* afraid of. Haunted houses fall in here. So does anything that might likely happen but the negative effects are easily mitigated-- there's a pretty good chance that at some point in my life my car will be damaged while in a parking lot, but I have insurance so the potential for pain is limited to a little bit of hassle while it gets fixed.

2. Motivating fears. Most of us ultimately go to work because we're afraid of starving to death, or having our house or car re-possessed. Personally, I keep getting out of bed because I'm afraid of having the business go under and having everyone else starve or lose their homes because of my failure. When we're really sick, we go to the doctor in large part because we're afraid it won't get better on its own. These fears are good to have, because they keep us going when we know we ought to but we just don't want to.

3. Crippling fears. These are the fears that prevent you from living your life to the fullest. Motivating fears that are taken to ridiculous extremes become crippling fears-- it's great that you go to work because you're afraid of losing your job, but not so great if you go to work for 18 hours a day every day. Some of them are a variation of "I'm afraid I'll get hurt", and some "I'm afraid I'll get hurt" fears are actually motivating-- you don't step out in front of a bus because you're afraid you'll get hurt, and that's generally a pretty good thing. On the other hand, if you refuse to walk up a well-worn path to a scenic viewpoint with a guard rail because you're afraid you'll fall to your doom, it's crippling-- the likelihood of you actually getting hurt is pretty slim, whereas you're guaranteed to miss out on an awesome view. Many crippling fears boil down to "I'm afraid I'll look like an idiot"-- "I couldn't possibly get up and sing at the karaoke bar, I might sing off-key," or "I can't dance, I don't know the steps," or "Wear white after Labor Day, are you mad?" or the worst of all: "I can't express my opinion, someone might disagree with me."

The thing is, when we're using fake fears to escape from real fears, it's almost always the crippling fears that we're escaping from. And the crippling fears are just as fake-- once you accept that the company your friends are paying good money to in order to jump out of a plane couldn't stay in business if their customers died, skydiving becomes less scary. And who cares what other people think of your singing? The people who love you will love you anyway, and the other people in the bar you'll probably never see again anyway. As Marsha likes to say, "Live outside your box." (Which is why I find it ironic that Marsha was one of the most-scared ones at the haunted house.)

I suspect that had I started going to haunted houses five years ago instead of two, I might have been scared. But in the last couple years I've started to shed a lot of my crippling fears, mostly because I've acquired so many motivating fears that I just can't dredge up the energy to support the crippling ones any more. Sure, I *could* get worked up over how bad my body looks and how I don't want to show it to anyone, but after a while it's just easier to say "Fuck it" and jump in the pool naked. And once you've done it and the world didn't end, it becomes that much easier to say "Fuck it" the next time.

So there ya go, you've gotten my treatise on fear. Don't you feel special now? And now back to our regularly scheduled side-track....

I'm thinking of putting some of my old emails up on livejournal, since I discovered that you can backdate entries. I don't know why, but I feel like some of my best writing has been in email. No, I take that back, I do know why, it's because I don't really write much outside of email. (I've done more paper journal entries as props for live games than I have as actual journal entries. And yes, I do have a deadtree journal-- it has one whole entry in it.) Before the days of blogging, I had various email lists of friends. I still do have one of them, although the number of "journaling" emails dropped substantially after half the people on it got livejournal accounts. I remember back in college we had an informal list (i.e., a bunch of addresses in the Cc field that we all just used "Reply All" on), on which we'd ask questions out of a very nifty book called, rather appropriately, _The Book of Questions_. I got a lot of milage out of that book-- I originally bought it because one of my writing classes required me to keep a journal, and after struggling for a week to make one entry I realized there was no way in hell I was going to turn in a real journal for some stranger to critique. So instead I asked one question from the book, and then answered it as my "journal entry". And when the class was over, I still had the book. The questions were designed to be thought-provoking, and somewhere along the lines some friends and I decided it would be cool to turn it into an email discussion group. I don't have any of those emails any more, and that makes me rather sad because they were far more interesting than the usual "I feel like I ought to send email to keep in touch but I really don't have anything to say" drivel that I tend to get (and, in fairness, send) nowadays.

I should see if I still have that book. It might be interesting to ask some of the questions on livejournal, or if there's actual interest, in another email group.

Where was I? (pause to re-read) Oh yeah, old emails. Anyway, I have thousands of old emails that I need to sort through. Most of them are crap (the upside of keeping a copy of all your sent email is that you have a complete record of everything you sent. The downside is that you have a complete record of everything you sent, including the pointless stuff), but every once in a while I run across something that sparks a memory, or I find particularly touching, or is just really well written, and I want to keep those. But I'm tired of having a bazillion email folders that I can't find anything in. Plus, it was written as an email, which means it was written for an audience (sometimes just an audience of one, but an audience nonetheless). Perhaps it's just my ego, but if I have something that I think was well-written and designed for an audience, it ought to have an audience, dammit. Er, as long as it's not overly personal. There are still limits.

Much of my previous writing has been emails to various friends (or groups of friends). While I've been making an effort to clean out a lot of the pointless crap that I've accumulated over the years, some of the emails are things that spark a memory or are particularly interesting or funny to me, or that I just think are well-written. Since I'm tired of having those writings spread all over the place, I've decided to start posting them here as backdated entries (yay backdating!) So if you stumble across something very old that you don't remember (or *do* remember from a different venue), now you know why.

I started poking through my old emails and put a few of them up on livejournal. One of them was the email I sent the day my grandmother died, and that sparked a whole lot of memories. The thing I remember most about her dying was that for months afterward, the only picture of her I could bring to mind was her corpse lying in her bed, the way I found her. Eventually, I could bring up the image of her lying in the coffin afterward, but it wasn't until almost a year later that I could remember anything about her life without first remembering her death.

This trend has continued in the memories tonight. The first memories to come back were the ones I wrote about in the email: finding her, trying to stay calm for my grandfather's sake, having a sheriff's deputy gently walk me through the process of actually dealing with a dead body. And then the ones the email was too early to know about: picking a coffin, picking an outfit for her to wear, picking flowers for the top of the coffin, sitting at the funeral with Grandpa asking every hour or so who the woman up front was (Alzheimer's is horrible), and longing to hear the words that I had utterly hated less than a week before: the crack-of-dawn, shrill "Mandy, it's time to get up" that had greeted me for 7 very long months.

And then the realization that filled me with terror: someday, I was going to come downstairs one morning and find my grandfather's body, just the way I found hers. Grandpa lived with us for a month after Grandma died, until he went into the hospital, and for that entire month I absolutely refused to go downstairs until John had checked and made sure that Grandpa was alive. (It's worth noting that John wasn't allowed to grieve for his mother when she died when he was 2 and a half. Consequently, he has a huge problem with death in general and grief in particular. Proof of how much he loves me? He checked for Grandpa's corpse every single day, without fail.)

And the other fear, less rational but no less gripping: I couldn't handle being in the front room in the dark, or turning my back to the door to their bedroom. It was actually worse in the front room, where I could see their bedroom doorway but not into the room itself, than it was to go into their bedroom. If I was IN the bedroom, I could see there was no body in there, but if my imagination had control of the room's contents.... This was exceptionally problematic because the stairs up to our bedroom face directly into the doorway to theirs. In order to go up the stairs at night to go to bed, I had to have so much light that the house looked like the Vegas Strip, which meant that John had to go downstairs afterwards and turn all the lights off. The breaking point came one night when we went to B's for the evening (before it was B's and AJ's). It was fairly late when we left, and dark out. John and I had driven separately, so we had to drive home separately. I drive faster than John does, which meant I got home first. I pulled into our driveway and realized that everything was dark. I was uneasy but okay at first, because I knew John would be along shortly and I could make him go in and turn on some lights. Even so, I couldn't bring myself to turn off my headlights and sit in full darkness. The problem was that John had misplaced his shoes at B's house, and left a good 15 minutes after me. The longer I sat there, the more "uneasy" turned into "scared silly". By the time he got home, I had had a full-fledged panic attack and had pulled the car up to the porch so that it was perpendicular across the driveway with the headlights (still on) pointing into the front room, which gave me enough light to get to a lightswitch and turn every single light in the house on. When he found me I was sitting on our bed with my knees up to my chin, sobbing and inconsolable. The next day, he bought me an X-10 keychain with a button that turned on every X-10-enabled light in the house. (He also bought a lot of X-10 modules, so that "every X-10-enabled light in the house" was about 8 lights.)

We still have some of the X-10 modules hooked up. I still don't like going up the stairs at night. I have, however, misplaced the keychain, and that does not cause me the slightest bit of panic. Time heals all wounds.

The next wave of memories is a mish-mash. Some of them are of happy memories, like driving around trying to get lost because we were bored. I'm certain that my sense of direction and my ability to get home from just about anywhere are a direct result of all the times we wandered around aimlessly and didn't head home until we weren't certain which way "home" was. Some of them are less happy memories, like her telling me that I'd never attract a husband unless I lost weight. (With as much as John did for them, for her sake it's a good thing that she was wrong.) Some of them are downright painful, like when we were moving them into our house-- since the Alzheimer's had robbed them of anything resembling an attention span, we moved our household and theirs mostly in mini-van loads, because they were antsy and fighting with each other (or bugging me incessantly) if I tried to load anything larger. On one of the trips out to our house with just Grandma, she was having a pretty lucid day, and we were chatting happily. Until she forgot a word. The thing is, she KNEW she'd forgotten the word, and she got frustrated about it and yelled "Why can't I remember anything?" And I had to explain to her that she had a disease that made her forget things, and she kept asking questions about it and I couldn't lie to her about it but every answer I gave her just increased the pain and sadness in her eyes. She asked me if she'd ever get better, and she cried when I told her the truth. I should have lied.

I remember her teaching me how to sew when I was a little kid, no more than six or so. It took me a long while to get the hang of anything more complicated than a straight skirt, and she never did manage to get me to understand sleeves. I still get the urge to sew now and then (almost always in the fall, but I don't understand the timing-- there's nothing particularly special in the fall that I can remember), and I did finally figure out how sleeves are supposed to work, but I went through a lot of failed attempts over the decades before it finally clicked. Her own sewing degenerated over the years, but it wasn't until she died that I realized just how much; the outfit in the back of her closet that I picked for her to wear to her funeral turned out, on further inspection, to be one she'd sewn herself before I was even born. It looked so professional that I had to check it three times before believing it was handmade.

I remember playing in the back of the Mercury station wagon for countless hours as we drove out to the campground where we spent most of the summer, and then drove back for doctor's appointments or weekends with my mother. I remember sitting on a cooler on the side of the exit ramp on I-94 when that station wagon's engine caught fire, too. And I remember that my grandparents were both such practical jokers that when she called their friends at the campground to come pick us up, the friends thought it was just another prank and went to the bar instead. We sat on that cooler for a long time, until they got back from the bar and discovered that we still weren't there, and the realization that maybe it wasn't a joke finally sank in.

I remember Grandma telling stories about her that she really ought not to have been telling to a child. Like when she and a bunch of friends had arranged a group trip to somewhere (they traveled a lot together, so I don't recall which trip it was, and I doubt she did either), had all piled into someone's van to go to the airport, and she made the driver stop at a drugstore and made the entire van full of people wait because she forgot to pick up her birth control pills and she'd be damned if she was going to go on vacation without them. Or when she and Grandpa (before they were married, while he was still married to his first wife and she was his mistress, which is its own story) got completely drunk and drove around a hotel swimming pool in a golf cart, right up until they drove the cart INTO the swimming pool.

I remember helping her fill out a health questionnaire when I was in my early-to-mid twenties. I had been filling out the blanks as I read the question whenever I knew the answers, and I came to two questions that I thought I knew. The first was "Number of children", and I knew the answer was "One" (just my mother). I read the next one aloud: "Number of pregnancies". I had already started writing "one" in that blank as well when she said "Four." I didn't ask. I didn't want to know the answer, because I wasn't 100% sure it would be "miscarriage".

I remember her rule when I was sick: I got 10 minutes and one laundry basket, and I could collect whatever toys or books or what-have-you I wanted, but after that the rest of the day was to be spent in bed. It worked remarkably well; if I was really sick, I'd spend a lot of time sleeping and didn't need much to entertain myself, but if I wasn't very sick then one laundry basket wouldn't be big enough to hold enough entertainment to keep me amused, and thus faking sick to stay home became very boring very quickly. Not that I did fake sick at that point; I liked elementary school. It wasn't until middle school that I had any desire to avoid going to school, and by then I was living with my mother, who didn't have the laundry-basket rule.

I remember Grandma always being at school, too. She didn't work outside the house, so she ended up being the "room mother" pretty early on, and she found that she rather liked it. Every party, every holiday, every craft day, she was there. And sometimes she was there just because. One of my teachers was a big fan of laminating things, and Grandma was usually the one to take all the stuff down to the machine and run it through. Sometimes I got to help, and that was awesome-- nowadays there's tabletop laminating machines that are fairly cool to the touch, but in those days it was this great big behemoth of a machine that took rolls of plastic three or four feet wide, and it ran at some obscenely high temperature. There were signs all over the room that students were Not Allowed to be there, but as you might have guessed from the golf cart story, Grandma wasn't always a big fan of following the rules. So I not only got to watch, she let me run a couple of things through.

I miss my Grandma.