Category Archives: Social Rules

7%

03/02/2017 X Teri Leave a comment

After you’ve been married long enough, there’s no need to wait for your significant other to say, “I told you so.” It’s easier just to say, “You told me so” preemptively and steal their thunder. It’s one of the few pleasures for those in the AARP spectrum.

For those who aren’t married, it would help you to know that at least 7% of all married life is spent saying some version of “I told you so,” or “Duh!” -albeit in more cleverly-concealed word packets. You have to choose your battles, with most of them being silent and snickering skirmishes along the periphery of your partner’s attention span. I’ve heard fables of those with the ability to just directly smack-talk their spouses, but I presume these are distraction stories planted by some nefarious society for the abolition of living husbands.

After moving, I swore off fixing the neighbor’s messes, including the inevitable neighbors who let their lawns and fences start to look like Isla Nublar from Jurassic Park, after 100 years of abandonment. My wife Dawn told me ignore the encroaching wilderness or pay someone to do it. (Remove it, not ignore it, although one camp of thought firmly believes that ignoring a problem either solves it -or solves you from being around to need to be involved.) The afternoon we were expecting powerful weather, I convinced myself that the foliage hadn’t had time to mature enough to trick me into making contact with it. I not only trimmed it all, but carefully cut it and compacted it into compost recycling collection bags – and thereby ensuring that it touched every square inch of my body, just as an idiot bonus. Thinking back, I wish I had sneaked over to the neighbor’s house and shoved it through the side windows where, according to the hoarded collection of things shoved there, Bigfoot was probably already living.

At the Cottonwood house, I had some epic struggles with skin rashes caused by some unknown plant, ones which made me resemble the ‘before’ pictures in leprosy photos. Even wearing a bee suit under an astronaut’s gear, I still broke out. We paid thousands of dollars for tree and foliage removal, after which I continued the Sisyphean and quixotic task of removing everyone’s else mess. While wasting my time keeping other people’s messes at bay, I (mostly) silently practiced my barrage of creative cursing, inventing newer and cleverer ways to imply my neighbors were lazy cretins.

At this new house, we have zero trees and zero bushes, so our landscaping ideology could be best described as ‘Spartan.’ The upside to this is that we can’t be accused of allowing our choices to encroach on other people or their property. When I bought this house, I had to shame the home builder into clearing the property to back line as I had been promised, trees, bushes, and any remaining squirrels included. Almost immediately, however, I noted my neighbor’s were more interested in smoking foliage than in maintaining it. Lest the wacky weed fail to dull their senses of duty, they also drown the remainder of their responsibility in small, conveniently packaged cans of work inhibitors.

Wednesday morning, I awoke to skin that felt like it had been dipped in fiberglass itching powder and spread on my body. My right eye looked like I had stepped in the ring for Rocky Balboa for the Clubber Lane fight. And, of course, I had scratched in my sleep, spreading the fun into my unmentionable nether regions.

I tried to work, but finally went to the doctor and admitted that I had ignored the admonition of my wife and ventured into Isla Nublar again. If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to sleep on a fiberglass insulation mattress, come over and I’ll have you toss about in the neighbor’s fence line.

I realize that it would have been much, much cheaper to hire semi-professionals to cut the fence line back, even if they, too, contract my irritating case of itchy-nethers instead of me, rather than me miss work and pay for the privilege of a doctor basically telling me, “Don’t do that and you won’t have this problem again.” He should have handed me a “Here’s-Your-Sign” sign a la Bill Engvall in addition to the prescription for 5,000 steroid pills.

Next time, I’ll grumble dismissively at Dawn and heed her words of advice as she counsels me against doing something else stupid. I’ll listen, though. (She preaches ‘advise and no dissent’ instead of ‘advise and consent’ as Congress does.)

If you hear about a 911 call from the boundary between Vanleer and Green Acres, don’t worry, it’s me. I’m ordering plans now for building my own DIY flamethrower, the kind that can blast waves of fire 20 feet. I could use machinery to trim the neighbor’s neglect, or hire innocent bystanders to do it. I think, however, that a tower of flame, held in my maniacal laughing hands of destruction will send a better message and make for better optics, even if the fire department comes and puts me on the wagon. I’m going to blame it all on the massive dose of steroids the doctor gave me.

Social Rules, Writing

Insert Badly-Titled Title Here…

02/05/2017 X Teri Leave a comment

It’s easy to see who values the internal mechanisms of one’s life. On social media, I write many introspective or narrative pieces. They glide past the superficial and lay bare parts of me. The people who know me best and appreciate me for who I am invariably read or participate in those discussions. Yes, I know that some of my posts are lengthy – but so are conversations and shared experiences. I don’t expect people to clamor to show up at my house each Friday evening; likewise, I don’t anticipate each friend deliberately using his or her limited time to come find my posts and inhale them, either.

If I were to construct a Venn diagram of introspective narratives versus superficial posts, there is almost no overlap for several of my social media friends. It’s not a question of time involvement, either, as demonstrated by participation on other equally engaging timelines or interests. I’m obviously not including those without social media or those who never participate in time-intensive engagement.

This is a sign that I’m being monitored by some friends instead of appreciated.

This isn’t a call for “look at me;” rather, it is a reminder that social media provides a multitude of windows into our friend’s lives. Like our lives, the totality of interaction and value leaves a wake behind it. An observant person can’t help but to draw inferences from those signs. It’s true that some inferences are wrong, mainly because we jump to conclusions without direct connections based on the evidence. But we have our personal instincts which usually serve to point us in the right direction.

A sociologist who loves these trends and studies them tells me that this a trend which affects the frequency of people’s posts, as well as the depth of what they share of their personal life. It’s like the son who is gay who calls his mom and she chooses to discuss the banal stories about work instead of the son’s intense desire to adopt a child in opposition to social forces. Or if someone personally writes about his or her dislike of social policy and only those motivated by the desire to tell him how wrong he is opt to comment. If people are arguing with you about social policy, it tends to indicate they don’t agree with a lot you are doing or saying about your personal life, either, as obvious a statement as that might be. It’s a tough sell to get people to see this nuance about sharing and interacting.

If friends comment on your superficial posts but mostly ignore what you have to say when you’re sharing parts of yourself, they aren’t really interested or invested in you as a person. It is more likely that are self-validating, which is a very human reaction. It’s just each of us must decide to what degree we are comfortable with this. Even with this point, I have to make an exception for those who have larger followings of those interested in them solely for a specific topic.

It would never occur to me to comment or interact on superficial or political posts if I consistently ignore the personal ones. I’m doing a poor job explaining exactly why this seems indecorous to me, though.

My experience tells me that if you aren’t unilaterally participating with the range of my posts, you aren’t really that interested in me or my life.

There are exceptions to the above, of course, and always, I haven’t expertly fleshed out my argument.

Biographical, Personal, Social Rules

That’s Still Not My Name…

01/31/2017 X Teri Leave a comment

As you read this, give me the benefit of the doubt, just as I strive to do as often as possible. I’ve got the respiratory crud and my usual sweet temperament leans toward riotous today. The errors are all mine, as always, especially since I’m both increasingly blind and lazy about proofreading.

I’ve shared a volume of stories about my past, about my birth name, and about the process I used to change my name and I how I chose it. I hammered a large nail in the coffin of my previous life when I changed my name. I got a whole new set of documents to go with the rejection of my former life, including a new birth certificate, passport, driver’s license, and school records. (No, I wasn’t actually in Witness Protection, although I’ve told a lot of people that one.) I haven’t always handled well those who used my old name like a dagger; overall, however, I’m confident I gave most of them more benefit of the doubt than they deserved. Had I to do it all over again, I would’ve adopted the final season Walter White persona to deal with them. Much of the nastiness leveled against me made for great stories. I can’t have those stories without having been on the receiving end of the behavior – life provides stories most often when things don’t go well, as you know. Sharing those stories put the spotlight on those very people who hated being illuminated.

PS: (1) Due to the Malcolm X movie in 1992, I literally got a truckload of free merchandise with my new name on it: shoes, socks, shorts, gym bags and at least 50 t-shirts. (2) When the radio station 104.9 The X came online, I had a lot of fun, too, and another round of free stuff. (3) I landed on the no-fly list for a while, just as much for my crazy politics as my name. (4) For a couple of years, I lived in Apartment X, which confused EVERYONE who thought it was a joke. (The complex of 4-unit duplexes used letters in lieu of numbers on their units.) Changing my name resulted in several great stories, a more interesting life, and a better outlook for me. My name in and of itself announced to all to stop expecting someone normal to be the face associated with the name; many thought I was black or a member of the Nation of Islam. (If it made for good fun, I would encourage such erroneous conclusions). I’m sure that my name closed a few doors to me as well, to be honest, but those doors were not ones I was particularly interested in anyway.

At least I didn’t have a large leg/arm/neck/face tattoo to startle people. I guess I could have put a large “X” on my forehead like Charles Manson did. I embraced my weirdness and if I could repeat those steps, I’m afraid I would have embraced weirdness earlier and with much more aggressive creativity. Most of the truly happy people I know somehow learned to disconnect the fuse that connects their self-worth to the outside world and the judgment which accompanies it.

The common element that flows through it all is that my birth name was and is a symbol of abuse and ignorance. As young as I was when I opted to change my name, I waited too long. While I came to a place of acceptance about my dad, I never once enjoyed my birth name or the thought that I shared such a bond with a person who demonstrated such brutality. It’s not within my ability to convince you that it was the right thing for me to do; it was the only thing that got me past the lingering nonsense of my youth. Absent a childhood and story similar to mine, you can’t bridge that gap without losing something in translation.

If you can imagine having a name that you loathed, one that caused you to cringe or want to hide away in a dark corner each time you heard it, or one that causes actual pain, that’s the feeling elicited by the name my parents threw on me.

I’ve been X for way more than 1/2 of my life now. I rarely see my old name and hear it even less. And when I hear it, it’s because I am probably back in the cradle of the indifference and passive-aggressive hostility that spawned me. I alternate between irritation of those who ignorantly insist on using it and pity for the lack of understanding on their part. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. The decades that have shot by should have eradicated any reasonable attempt to use my old name.

It is obvious that I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time explaining to people why I hated my name and that it is the equivalent of verbal ammunition when used against me. I can’t force people to be good, compassionate considerate people; only they can lead themselves to that course of action.

As for my family, time has marched past most of them, leaving me to fend off a few stragglers. As they age, their logic weakens and their actions belie the prejudice toward me that failed to conceal their contempt for me and my choices. I mostly chose the person I became, while they became victimized by their own pettiness. I suffer the infrequent flare-up of derision. Now, though, I am adept at using the tools in the family toolbox to hold a mirror to such ignorance. It is true that much of our shared time was wasted arguing about something that was not for them to decide. I tried to get them to see that but haughtiness and arrogance held them to their attitudes.

I also have a couple of people who lash out in my defense at those who still want to be asses about my name change. My wife is one of them. She knew me when I was young and still had my birth name. It angers her that people can be so petty. There are times when I almost fail to notice or worse, don’t have the energy to pick up the battle-ax and fight on a particular day.

Here’s a list of acceptable reasons to call me by my birth name. This list is one a friend objectively and half-jokingly wrote for me:

1) You don’t like me and using my old name is a means to backhandedly express it.
2) You haven’t seen me in forever and your brain used its old pathways. No harm!
3) You are writing my biography and your mind slipped for a second. No harm!
4) You don’t like my name and you think that using my old name somehow not only negates my life choices but also allows you to use it without coming off a little mean-spirited.
5) You just forgot accidentally, which can happen to anyone. No harm!

As always, though, the cardinal rule is this: if you are asked to stop doing it and don’t, it’s not a failure to communicate; rather, it is a failure to emancipate – to let everyone be who they are.

Regards, X

One of Several Older Blog Posts About My Name

Personal, Politics, Religion, Social Rules

A Modern Hymn

01/27/2017 X Teri Leave a comment

Alternate words written for one of the few people who reaches even heathens like me. The words are written to replace the hit song, “Sister Christian” by Night Ranger: “Sister Christian” by Night Ranger –Link

(If you would rather hear the instrumental version, click here: “Sister Christian” Instrumental –Link

The greatest folly for anyone is to believe he or she along possesses the answer for all others sharing this planet. It is the certainty of thought that leads to the certainty of action. Each of us distrusts that hidden thing in others which draws them into a narrowing path of lesser acceptance, especially in matters of faith. Even among believers, there is no consensus for all matters which affect our shared world.

Instead of shouting the answer: be the answer. Be the example which requires no explanation. If you are the beacon, people will see your joy, your love, and the example of your life and come to you, asking what divine secret powers your life. That moment is the truest means to open your way of life to them and share it.

People are capable of viciousness regardless of race, religion, color or creed. I use ‘vicious Christian’ as a metaphor, rather than an accusation. Regardless of our specific beliefs, few people would deny that the example of Jesus exemplifies the best qualities we are capable of practicing: ‘do unto others’ and compassion in word and deed. What you believe is a whisper compared to the shout of your daily interaction with others, especially towards those who don’t share your views. We can’t know what resides in your heart, but we can easily measure the content of what emanates from your life.

vicious Christian
oh the time has come
to pretend you’re not the only one
with a say, okay?
why you arguing
and shouting so much
you know this world
don’t want to fight no more
with you, it’s true

it’s dangerous
what’s the price to fight
if we lose what’s in sight
no one can claim the right

soon enough
it might be you outcast
but we’ll protect you
down to the last
ok, let’s pray
vicious Christian
we all love our lives
don’t forget that it’s over soon
it’s true

it’s true…. yeah

dangerous
we don’t need to fight
let’s be each others light
so we’ll finally unite

Personal, Social Rules

Moment of Mirth at Market

01/25/2017 X Teri Leave a comment

This is a small story of an unusual moment. I’m not proud of the resolution but each of us has a moment of clarity which belies our better natures.

Today, I went shopping and stopped at a local market. As I attempted to check out, I realized I needed the Alcohol Lane, because I was buying a 50-gallon drum of spirits for my wife. I’m just kidding – I exaggerated to get her attention. My wife drinks hard liquor, which the grocery store doesn’t sell. Still kidding, but I did have alcohol to purchase.

As I walked up, an older white woman came up, muttering to herself, looking for an open lane that was quick, or perhaps even a brick to throw through a plate glass window. She had a terrible case of R.B.F., with the exception of her face not being at rest. A short, older Hispanic lady had arrived at the register first. Although the cashier wasn’t Latina, she spoke Spanish to her. (My part of town has a lot of Latinos and Marshallese, so it’s normal to hear several languages at the grocery store, which I love.) This seemed to incense Mrs. White, (so named because she was an older white woman) who mumbled that Americans speak English. I addressed the older Latina lady in line in Spanish, to let her know I’d throw a belt spacer between our orders. I looked toward Mrs. White and said, “Good afternoon, ma’am” to her and made eye contact as I smiled, to avoid a potential concealed carry situation and to let her know she was dealing with human beings who weren’t interested in being rude to her or one another.

Inexplicably, Mrs. White pushed her way between the first lady in line and me, still mumbling in barely suppressed anger. Her voice sounded like Gollum just a tad. I let her through, smiling. I could clearly hear her saying unpleasant things, implying I was a Mexican. I toyed with the idea of being clever, but decided that perhaps she was having a bad moment. As I almost always do, I let it go.

A cashier approached me and waved, indicating, “Come up and I’ll ring you up.” He said it to me because everyone else was trapped in their spot. Mrs. White seemed to spew steam from her ears in anger, so I invited her nicely to go ahead as I backed up and moved over. She seemed to be waiting for the older Latina lady to move up, which was impossible. “Go ahead, ma’am” I told her again.

“But I’m going up there,” she hissed, oblivious to the fact that she was opting for climbing Mt. Everest instead of just stepping around me and going to the open register. As she maneuvered with all the dexterity of a wounded rhino, she spewed an impressive stream of derogatory epithets. She had a fairly rounded arsenal, honed for everyday use, it seemed to me at the time.

As she stomped away, I apologized to the cashier and lady in line. I did so in Spanish, because I knew that they both spoke Spanish but not necessarily English. Mrs. White’s head swiveled back toward me like the girl in the Exorcist. And for a moment, I awaited a stream of green pea soup vomit to come hurtling at me. Instead, she turned her wrath onto the poor gentleman who opened a new register. He had no choice but to attempt to ignore her wrath as she continued her tirade. I felt sorry for her, both for her anger and for her apparent love of racist commentary. (But I would’ve given her at least a 9 for consistency, if I had only possessed a large white rectangular card to indicate my evaluation of her ability.)

In my defense, you’ll note that I behaved myself and avoided any rudeness.

As I left, I noticed she was stuck at the register still, as she was trying to use some unusual coupon. Miraculously, she was silent at that point. But murder was written large across her face. All that was missing was a hat emblazoned with “Redrum.”

As I walked to the car, I took my time, waiting for the race cars to speed past the crosswalk with the intent of breaking the land speed record. I loaded my stuff into the backseat and as I plopped down into the driver’s seat, I looked up.

To my right was the cart corral, with the cart entry to the far end. I could see Mrs. White approaching, once again angry about something.

And while I’m not proud of the moment, as Mrs. White angrily pushed her cart into the opposite end of the cart corral, an invisible and irresistible force overtook me, one guided by the spirit of chaos and pure evil. As she gave the cart that last angry push, I hit the car horn for a solid two seconds, just a mere few feet from her. My car horn has never bleated as loudly as it did in that moment. It was as if the clouds had parted, emitting a thunderous echo.

It seemed as if Mrs. White’s hair stood on end, pointing toward the sky. She shrieked and then her gaze pivoted directly to me with a fiendish intensity.

She raised her right hand and gave me the biggest middle finger I’ve ever seen. It seemed to pulsate in righteous mean-spiritedness. Flame should have shot out of her upraised middle finger.

Shockingly, I laughed and waved at her, as if I hadn’t just attempted to give her a massive coronary.

I know as she drove home, she was cursing that foul Mexican man at the grocery store. If her windows were rolled down, I bet a satellite could’ve detected a black cloud slowly rolling behind her.

(I was surprised by how far this story reached on social media.)