Tolerance and Altered States

I have a very low tolerance for drugs and alcohol, so I avoid them. I can't take so much as a decongestant without unpredictable and often drooling results. I have a very scientific theory about this, if you're interested. I think that my natural state is altered enough, thank you very much, and if I add any sort of chemical enhancement to this, things go completely haywire. I am afraid to mess with my equilibrium.

Altered states and tolerance.

Tolerance has become a buzzword. Generally it is trotted out when you think I am wrong and I want you to shut up. You should be more tolerant. If you were tolerant, you would just admit that I'm right. When we practice tolerance, it's usually of things and people with whom we already agree, or of whom we already approve. I am tolerant of children if they are well behaved. I am tolerant of people who disagree with me on matters about which I don't care a whole lot.

Tolerance. It sounds like it should have a "p" in front of it, like Ptolomy. Ptolerance. Maybe if we put a "p" in front of it, it would remind us to p-p-practice it. It would elevate it from a mere retaliatory talking point to an art, a science, a Philosophy.

Inherent in the definition of tolerance is disagreement. I would argue that it implies a sort of structural, atomic disagreement. I would argue that in order to tolerate something, you must reject it. Wait a second, that doesn't make any sense. No, it doesn't. But neither does tolerance when you think about it. It's unnatural. It is an altered state.

An example is in order here. I absolutely hated and despised the book Eat, Pray, Love. I thought it was whiny and self-indulgent; I thought the writing was only mediocre; I thought that the author spent a lot of money and a lot of time to learn nothing at all. Do you want to know how I really felt about it? The book was a bestseller. It was highly recommended to me by people whom I respect and love. Enough people loved it that Julia Roberts agreed to be in the movie version of it. I cannot fathom at all how all of these people could be so wrong. I have tried very, very hard to understand the liking - even loving - of this book and alas, I cannot. I fundamentally disagree with anyone who says it was a good book. Therefore, they are all idiots and I shall never speak to them again. I will degrade them and belittle them for having such abysmal taste in literature at every opportunity I get.  I will create opportunities to tell them how awful it was. This, of course, is ridiculous. What kind of jerk would act that way? Don't answer that.

When it's boiled down to something as relatively silly as an opinion about a book, it's kind of obvious, isn't it? Of course I can accept a difference in perspective. I don't have to believe that my assessment of it is wrong to understand that other people might have reached a different conclusion. Nor do I have to believe that my assessment is the only correct view of the book. Of the friends who recommended the book to me, one was at a particular place in her life where elements of the story "spoke to her", another just liked the descriptions of the food and the places. Fair enough. There needn't be any judgement in that, really. They live in their heads, in their lives and they know what works for them. We practice tolerance of each other's points of view because we love each other and because that's more important to the greater good than whether or not we enjoy the exact same books.

It gets trickier, though. I know this. The root of intolerance, I believe, is fear. We are intolerant of things that we perceive as a threat to our well-being or way of life. We don't want our equilibrium upset. We are afraid of the unpredictable, perhaps drooling, results of the viewpoints of others.

There are some things that shouldn't be tolerated: murder, dishonesty, theft, injustice. Yet, we sometimes find ourselves tolerating them by default. My jBird told me a lie a few weeks ago. I will admit, I completely lost it, folks. "I will not tolerate lying in my house!" boomed the Mama voice. But I do, don't I? What can I do but put up with it when it happens? I can correct, instruct, fume and rage about, but when it comes down to it, I must tolerate it because I have no control whatsoever of the things that my jBird chooses to say. I can only control how I react, the input I give her, and the encouragement I show for doing what's right. The rest is up to her.

That's the root of that intolerant fear, isn't it? The rest is up to her. We are so convinced of our rightness. We are so sure that ours is the way things should go. If only they could just see how it is. If only they would just admit they are wrong. It is frightening to leave it up to them. It upsets our equilibrium. Except when you realize that you are them. To someone else, you are them. You are the they who have it so backwards. I don't care what your stance on anything at all is, you are someone's them. The idea of you making up your mind on your own is keeping someone else awake at night. And you know what? They are every bit as committed to their viewpoint as you are. They believe with all their hearts that their beliefs are valid. They fear for their future just like you do. They worry about the state of things, they get excited when things seem to go their way, they have their doubts, their discouragements, their concerns, just like you.

So, tolerance. Or, if you prefer, ptolerance. Does it mean you lay aside your own opinion, your own beliefs? Absolutely not. Who are we if not a product of our beliefs and preferences? I guess that's the rub, though. We are all that product, which means we are all as different as the ingredients that make us up. We can't control anyone except ourselves. The rest is up to them. And that's tolerance in a nutshell, isn't it? I may think you've misjudged. I may not be able to understand at all where you are coming from in spite of trying. I may believe exactly the opposite about something and you won't be able to persuade me otherwise. I may even offer suggestions to you about how to see it my way. But when all is said and done, tolerance is my understanding that the rest is up to you and that's all right.

I am speaking of personal tolerance, here. In the end, it is the only sort of tolerance there is. As fanciful as it may seem, there is a vast human civilization out there who operate or have operated for millennia under immensely different codes of law, types of government, living conditions. We can legislate all the tolerance we want, but if it is not found in the hearts of the citizens, the law is difficult to uphold. I am not talking about voting here. I am talking about how you decide to live regardless of circumstance. Expressing your tolerance with your vote is a terribly important thing, but even more important is expressing your tolerance with your life. With your everyday interactions. You cannot blame lawmakers for your reactions to those who disagree with you any more than my jBird can blame me for lying to me. That part is up to you. It is always up to you.

Tolerance is seeing the person behind the belief; it is thinking in terms of individuals rather than stereotypes. It is accepting your own doubts and understanding that you could be wrong, but you choose to believe you are right. It is knowing that other people are doing the same thing. It is listening for what people are actually saying rather than hearing what you expect. It is disagreeing right down to your very core and accepting the possible validity anyway.

It is not our gut reaction, it is an altered state.

In Need of a Clipboard

It would seem of vital importance today that I procure a clipboard.

This talisman of industry is exactly what would make my life complete. It speaks solidly of one who is in charge. Observe me writing things while standing up; perhaps even while walking.  Look at my important papers. They are too manifold for mere paperclips.

Every job I have ever had required a clipboard in some way. Except that one temp job at the bank. Clearly, it was Unimportant. My lack of clipboard would explain why I showed up kind of late in last night's clothes and stared out the window while writing angry poetry and dreadful prose. Clipboard-less, I could never answer the questions on the phones I picked up, only put them on hold for the people who had clipboards and then spill coffee in my keyboard. But all the others, those were clipboard-worthy jobs: there were cakes to decorate, equipment lists to check, diesel engine parts to bar code and package, attendance to take, progress notes to write, therapy group summaries to complete. Oh, there was that other job, too. The one where I worked for the postal service. There were no clipboards for me there. Only late-night hallucinations and buzzing fluorescent migraines. I had to ask the clipboard if I could go to the bathroom. But I digress.

I need a clipboard.

It will collect all of these fluttering bits of me and hold them to something solid. I can take inventory right now while I charge about, clicking the top of my pen. I can store the importance of things in a tidy stack in plain sight and tick off all the right boxes to draw a picture of subtle accomplishment.

When questioned I can look back through the notes, peeling back the layers to what's gone before and peer over the tops of my glasses at the charts and notes and squiggles and dots I've labeled "Meaningful" and find the answers there.

I, with my clipboard, will have the authority to check schedules, discern production and give myself permission. To tell myself when I need to show up and when I can get off.

I will have, at my fingertips, all that is Important. I will have a comprehensive list of all the equipment I need to function in this world. I will never forget my patience again. I will remember to pack that emergency box with safety pins and duct tape and gratitude in case I hit a snag.

It will give me preview of things to come: reminders of times to celebrate and to coat the world in sweetness, icing flowers and curly fancy writing. It will keep me looking forward, seeing the work ahead.

It will have simple directions for packaging the things that are hard, impossible and strange, greasy and for someone else. It will house the codes for sending those things away from me and to where they need to go.

I could record while I walk, the notes of small progressions. I opened my eyes and acknowledged the presence of another human being in the room. I attended Anger Management Group and participated in the discussion. I did not eat cigarette butts and throw up my lunch. I've borrowed these from clients, but they seem to be important progress to make for anyone, really. I could record these and see where I was static, where I grew, where I failed. I could code them all on a Leichert Scale and find a way to turn behavior into math. A simple equation wherein I add up the things that I do and subtract the things that I don't and have a definitive answer for my worth.

I think I need a clipboard. Then I would finally feel in charge of all this. I would show up early and smartly dressed. I would direct the people in my charge where to go with certainty and fortitude. I would feel prepared. I would hold the answers in my hands.

Company Retreat

One time at a company retreat, we did personality tests and then separated into groups according to our personalities to accomplish a task. I was the only person in my group. That sounds sad, but that is exactly how I would prefer it most times (which is, of course, a function of my personality). When we were presenting our finished tasks to the group, the company accountant yelled at me and told me I did it all wrong. She vented her entire spleen (and I suspect part of her liver) about how creative people just thought they didn't have to follow any rules and they could do things however they wanted to and they made it hard for everyone else. It was fascinating.

You know how when someone is hollering at you and there's that point, that certain shift in perspective, where you realize they aren't really hollering at you. If you cross your eyes, you can maybe even see their own demons floating somewhere in the middle distance. Don't cross your eyes for real, though. They might think you are making faces at them. I thought the "life coach" who was leading the retreat was going to faint. I felt bad for her. I don't think she expected the accountant to flip out. I waited until the tirade was done and asked the accountant if I was turning in my billing late or wrong, was I making her life harder? It turns out I wasn't, so I was in the clear. She just didn't like me. Fair enough. We had to have a five minute break for the group facilitator to get herself together.

I just thought of this all of a sudden. It would explain my distaste for company retreats. Stuck in the woods with fellow employees and touching each other - trust games and whatnot - and having to watch them wear jeans and eat. Too intimate and strange. It also serves as a reminder that I annoy people with my methods from time to time. I'm not a Point A to Point B kind of person. I take detours and trip and fall into pits and check on Points W and ! and 6 while I'm at it. I get to Point B eventually, and usually on time. It requires a good bit of discipline and note-taking, list-making, heart-breaking along the way. Not really heart-breaking. I just liked the rhythm of that and three is stronger than two. I'm a good note-taker.

Somewhere in the bowels of a box are a couple of giant binders with all of my notes from college. Perhaps in the box that is labeled "Excess Chewbacca fur, fondue pot, & some things I forgot what they were". My literal little jBird is bothered excessively by that label. "Open it and look!" she tells me. "Maybe I will, but won't it be a nice surprise?" It drives her nuts. "But what if you need something in there?" she demands. She wonders how I ever did anything until eight and a half years ago. "Well, then I suppose I'll find it." This is a digression of sorts. Somewhere in one of those binders is a photocopy of a study that really stuck with me. I can't remember the specifics of the experiment, but I remember the outcome. It would seem that people who suffer from depression are actually more apt to see things as they really are.

I can hear all of the accountants and the Virgos yelling at me again. Apparently, though, depression sufferers can look at a situation and make a relatively objective assessment of what's happening. This is startling news. Because we all know depressed people and sometimes we want to strangle them because they seem so bleak about things: I am unattractive, I am useless, what's the point of all of this? and so on. What it would seem, though, is that non-depression sufferers have more mechanisms for window dressing the truth to make themselves feel better. This is not a bad thing, within reason. I'm thinking about this today because perspective is a persnickety thing.

I am currently working on a piece about the distant past. It's about a time that was powerful in my life. Do you have those times in your personal history? The ones where you look back and see the watershed? Where you maybe even felt it at the time? Those times may be brief and intense and mortifying, but they are like giant chisel-blows to your psyche and help shape who you are? I don't think I'm in a group by myself on this one. But then when you look back, you cannot help but have the layers of years and changing perspectives to see through. Those layers can cloud and obfuscate some things, they magnify others. And then you get to sit and sort out all the images like a dream and put them on paper. Maybe you don't. I do. I can't help it.

It's this kind of perspective shift that fascinates me today. No matter what kind of writer you are, you eventually have to dig into that box that's labeled "Some things I forgot what they were" and find something you desperately need. For fiction, it may be to get the dialogue just right, to understand how your character feels and would react to something. For non-fiction, it would seem more straightforward, but it's not really. Because really you're writing a character anyway. It's the character that your present self sees as your former self. Maybe you're not making it up, but you are not just reporting facts, either. So you do things like spend the morning listening to nostalgic music that brings your lizard brain right back into a certain time and then you walk around in there and listen to the conversations. Does that sound insane? Well, probably it is. Sometimes there's an accountant in there who is yelling at you and telling you're doing it all wrong. Maybe there's a depressed accountant in there who is tearing down the pretty displays of memories that you've constructed and screaming at you to get to the point. Certifiably insane.

It is a given that my perspective will be different from yours; that it will be different from the accountant's, that it will be different from my jBird's. It is a strange thing to examine how my perspective differs from my own. Noodle that around a bit. It might even start to make sense. I am wandering toward Point B. Bear with me, please. Sometimes you need those layers of intervening perspective to sort things out. Sometimes, in the heat of the moment, everything is too raw and chaotic and new and unresolved to think clearly about it. Sometimes you need the safety of years to wrap around yourself like a HazMat suit to wade into particular moments in time and return unscathed. Sometimes by writing from a distance, you can really get up close to things that were too hot to touch before.

Point B was a mirage, it turns out. I've been re-writing this paragraph for an hour and I can't get to the point of it. One of my brilliant readers should do it for me. Show me how this works. I need to get my billing done on time and correctly. I don't want to unduly annoy people. I am interested in your perspectives. Just pretend we are at some kind of awful company retreat together, all up in each other's lunch and in our play clothes in the woods with the uncomfortable proximity to each other. How does your group accomplish the task? How do you label and unpack those boxes? 

Hubbub

Hubbub.
I was just going to write a post about a certain hubbub that has surfaced in my consciousness and I looked up the etymology of this word. Everyone does that, right?

So, for some reason it was stuck in my moldy cheese that hubbub was either a Yiddish word or was of Turkish derivation. Not so. I'm also not sure where that notion came from or why I was so sure of it.

Whobub. Say it with me now. Whobub. I've got the quiet shaking giggles going on now. That is even more fun than hubbub. Apparently it's believed to be Irish in origin, dating back to at least the 1500s. Whobub.

"What is all this whobub? Ye aught to be diggin' yer potatoes!"

Forgive me. That was ethnocentric of me. But funny. I could have made worse jokes. I won't. Those kinds of jokes are dreadful. Ethnic stereotyping is a terrible thing.

You know what's not terrible? Whobub. Or hubbub.

Sometimes hubbub seems terrible. It is a wonderful, onomatopoetic word for a mind-splitting thing. There has been a bit of a hubbub that has foamed into my consciousness of late. It's not my personal hubbub (I have plenty of that, but it's manageable.) It's a general jostling and jockeying about. It's a rattling and ranting on. It's a golden age we live in. Any old knucklehead with a computer or a data plan can say whatever they like to whomever they like. They don't even need a firm grip on such pesky things as grammar rules or spelling or syntax. Just a half-formed opinion and some mad skills with their opposable thumbs.

"What's all that whobub?!"
"Aye, the monkeys have got hold of the internet again."

Sorry. I said I would stop doing that.

Here's why I love the knuckleheads, though. We have this thing called the First Amendment here in the New World. It enables all of us to worship how we choose, speak how we choose, petition the government, assemble peacefully, and so on. In short, it allows for hubbub. And whobub. It allows for me to be a knucklehead and write this ridiculous blog. It allows for people to comment and say appalling or wonderful  things to people. It allows for pornography, for Bibles, for Ku Klux Klan meetings, tent revivals, worship assemblies of every stripe. It allows for Gay Pride Parades and Occupy Wall Street. It allows for Pro-Life protesters outside of Planned Parenthood and the One Million Moms. It allows for the people who stand on street corners and ask you to sign petitions for everything from legalizing marijuana to saving puppies. It allows for cryptic "Oh woe is me, dark is the night!" status updates on Facebook, it allows for photoshopped pictures of kittens to be circulated ad nauseum. It allows for you and it allows for me. We are, all of us, knuckleheads.

This Hubbub Amendment is annoying, isn't it? It means that anybody can say anything. People say some really offensive things. With social media and 24-hour news cycles and the great Habitrail of the internet we can all talk a lot. It gets so noisy sometimes. There's a riot of information and mis-information right in our living rooms every day. You can choose the flavor of the pick-up fight (gay marriage, mommy wars, animal rights, legalization, reproductive rights, did you know that Tom Cruise's pet cause is keeping widescreen formatting on films when they are released on DVD?) you want to get into and throw yourself into the fray. If that's your thing, by all means, don't let me stop you. It is your right to shout long and loud about whatever you believe in. Or to quietly snark around leaving comments. Or to print your own fliers and hand them out to passersby. It is my right to completely ignore you. It is my right to not like you, even. What is not my right is to decide that because I don't like you or what you have to say, you don't get any rights.

I was in traffic behind a car with a custom license plate holder that said "Honk if your horny!" I did not honk. Blatant, sophomoric displays of sexuality and misspellings do nothing for me. Chances are, the owner of that car would bug the ever-loving crap out of me if we sat down for coffee. But I love him. I love him because he's a human. He's a person who expresses himself in the way he sees fit. He's a fellow traveler in this life and I wish him well. May he have all the horny honkers he seeks. But please, oh please, don't let it be me.

If there was a proposition up for a vote banning tacky license plate holders, I would vote that sucker down. Does that mean I would run out and put one on my car? Absolutely not. Does it mean that I approve of every last thing that people decide to declare with the butt ends of their cars? No way. "We're spending our grandchildrens' inheritance" is especially offensive to me. What it also means, though, is that I might have to inadvertently read dreadful cliches while I'm sitting at a red light. It also means that I don't decide that everyone who gets a custom license plate holder is an idiot and worthless as a person and has no right to have one because clearly if we let this kind of nonsense carry on, what will it lead to?

Hubbub. All these voices. All these words, images, ideas, beliefs. Often contradicting, diametrically opposed. Frequently ill-informed, ill-reasoned, illogical. Gut reactions made gospel. A lot of times, if you stop and listen to the hubbub, one voice at a time, it doesn't even make sense. In the theater, if you are part of a background crowd that needs to make some noise, you do a little trick by repeating "watermelon, watermelon, watermelon" or "rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb" over and over. The voices overlap and it sounds like conversation. I took an American Studies class in high school and we would frequently get into intense debates over Alexis de Tocqueville and Dave Barry and the like. My Canadian friend would wait until the conversation hit a fever pitch and nod his head sagely and interject "penis!" into the hubbub. This was always hilarious. What was even more hilarious is that sometimes, people would be so caught up in the hubbub, they would agree with him. That's how you know when the argument has lost any productivity whatsoever. When we are so wrapped up in what we will say next that we will nod agreement with a Canadian (!) shouting "penis".

Sorry, that was also ethnocentric. I love Canadians. Some of my friends are Canadians. I've got no problem with Canadians.

I don't mind the hubbub. I choose what I will listen to, what I will read, what I will believe. I will choose when to speak and about what. I will grant you the grace to do the same, whether I like what you have to say or not. Whether I like you or not. I may even listen. I won't always agree with you, but I will always accept you as a person.

It seems a lot of what passes for discourse in our society today is the equivalent of everyone shouting "rhubarb" or "watermelon". We have the rhubarbs on one side, hide bound and determined that they are righteous. We have the watermelons on the other side believing the same about themselves. Occasionally we have a weirdo stand up and shout "penis!" but no one is really listening and it gets lost in the rhubarbwatermelonhubbub. Sometimes I get bent out of shape about all of this. But then I remember I have my own personal volume control. I can choose not to listen. Not to speak. Not to be a rhubarb or a watermelon (or a penis, for that matter). I'm glad they're all out there shouting though, offensive as they may be. It means they're using their First Amendment rights.

The right to create a hubbub. Or whobub.

Gnaw Thyself

A while back, Masked Mom reviewed the movie, Catfish. So intrigued was I that I immediately reserved it at the library. I won't go into the details of the movie, you'll just have to watch it, but at it's heart, it's about who we are versus how we represent ourselves. It also explores the idea of online socializing, online personae and how these things can become tricky. This is part one of the worm that has been gnawing at the back of my brain.

A while back I had a discussion with a fellow blogger in which I tried to explain that because of the nature of blogging, there is a potentially wide gulf for misunderstanding between blogger and reader. My writing style tends to be somewhat intense and lends a feeling of intimacy with the reader. I have been accused of being manipulative and duplicitous because of this, but that is not ever the intention. I mostly write pictures of things, I paint a thought I want to explore, I want to draw the reader into that thought and swim around in it for a while. People write for a number of reasons, in infinitely different styles. This style just happens to be mine. I like the interior view and I'm not a very good storyteller, so there you have it. This is part two of the worm. Chomp chomp.

I'm reading Jonathan Lethem's Ecstasy of Influence right now. The book explores the relationship of the writer to his own writing, to the writing of others, to the art, music, and presence of others, to the writer's world, both interior and exterior and how all of these things influence each other almost inexplicably. One of the most fascinating ideas that keeps recurring throughout the book is the notion of what Lethem calls his "public avatar". He writes novels, essays, and articles, many of which contain personal information about him, about his childhood, about his life. One could conceivably sit down and piece together a timeline of his life based on his published work. One could also know how intensely he felt about different events and people throughout that timeline. He does interviews on television, on the radio, and in print. In many of these interviews he answers personal questions about himself. All of this lends fans the idea that they "know" Lethem. His reaction to compiling this public/private information about himself, from himself, is interesting. It is a separate Lethem. It is the Lethem that readers know. It is not the man himself. This is the end of that brain worm that is now crapping out this halting essay.

Where, exactly, in this whole mess is the Self? How often do we presume knowledge of another person based on scant evidence? What if the evidence is copious but not complete? Would the evidence ever be complete? I can confidently say that my husband knows me better than anyone else. One of the things that I have adored about him from the start is that I can be fully "myself" around him. I have maybe two or three other friends with whom I feel the same. I have plenty of friends with whom I feel comfortable and amiable, but I spare them the full disclosure. I have someone I consider a dear friend, whom I have never actually met in person. I am completely open and candid on a variety of subjects in our written communication, but there again, is it complete? Is it possible to know someone without having ever spent time in their physical presence? There are people in my life with whom I spent way too much time in person, but never really got to know who they were. There are several men that I've dated that never, ever even had the tiniest idea who I was. All of these people, however, see me in different lights. Their assessments of my characteristics would overlap to some degree, but would each paint slightly skewed pictures. If this makes me duplicitous and manipulative, then so be it. But I don't think I would be alone in wearing those descriptors.

Perhaps the Self is the person we, and we alone, know? Fair enough. But do you know anyone who seems to be completely deluded about their Self? A talkative person who says "I'm shy." An intense and tightly wound person who tells you that they are easy going? Who has made the errant perception? You or your friend? Are they perhaps privy to interior information to which you have no access? On the other hand, I have known several people throughout my lifetime who spent a great deal of time and energy telling people how wonderful they were. This is a behavior I find off-putting and strange, but in almost every case, people believed them. "Oh, So-and-So? She's wonderful." I have nearly bitten off my tongue to keep from asking "Why?" Is it just that this sort of person is better at PR? Or are they really as wonderful as they tell everyone they are and I just can't see it? Maybe it's just me, but I find the greater the dissonance between my perception of a person and what they say they are, the less I like them. In these types of situations, is it I or they who don't know that Self?

Is this whole concept of Self further muddied by our assorted profiles and online accounts? Blogging is a relatively new means of communication. It's less personal than an email, longer than a status update, and virtually limitless in its reach and subject matter. We post the pictures on Facebook of the days when everyone's smiling. We list the preferences and hobbies that we want. We expose only the dirty secrets that we feel like exposing, some not at all. We use screen names, acronyms, nicknames, pseudonyms. We tell stories, divulge information, give the impression of intimacy, but there's a difference, isn't there? For one, I think it would be pretty boring to look in on people's every move. "Going to the can now, probably should bring a magazine." We paint with broad brushstrokes the pictures we want others to see: for some it's a constant string of dramas, a litany of woes; for others it's the opposite - everything's great, the children are adorable and I never sweat. For most of us, it's something in between. Does all of this add another layer to the Self that didn't exist ten years ago? Or is it just a digitized facet of something that was already there?

I have no definitive answers to any of these questions, in case you were wondering. They've just been composting back in the waste heap of my brain and I throw the worms on when they come up and they gnaw away, turning it over and over, hopefully into something more viable. If I had to hazard a guess, I would suppose that the true Self lies somewhere in the middle of the perception gap. That if we took all of these varying accounts and lay them one over the other like overheads on a projector (remember those) that the picture that emerged would probably surprise us all. Maybe most of all, my Self.


This was written for GBE2's topic this week: Self

Tangled Names

You know how when you say a word too much, you start to forget what it means? Everyone does this. It's really fun if you do it with your own name. You find yourself sitting there thinking: Who is that? How can that be the name of anything? How can that have been my name my whole life and I'm only now just hearing how ridiculous it is?! Or at least I do. My name is not ridiculous. It's not terribly common for my particular age group. It is related to a much more common name which I get called quite often and it grates. Oddly, though, my real name doesn't get used much.

My mom calls me by it occasionally, but as we mostly talk on phones with caller ID, she already knows it's me and just says "Hi." or "Hi honey."

My dad rarely ever called me by my full name. He was the only one who was ever allowed to shorten it or make a diminutive out of it. He also called my by my sister's name or sometimes my brother's as parents are sometimes apt to do.

My kids call me Mama, sometimes Mom. Never Mommy. Sometimes they call me by my first name. It sounds so funny in their little mouths, so I let them. I don't hold to old notions of disrespect and it is, in fact, my name. They probably use it more than anyone, but even they don't use it that often.

My punk-face junior high students call me Mrs. and I let them. They think I'm old and horrible because I have gray hair and children and no iPhone and I make them read things for understanding. No one else calls me Mrs. That is someone else's name.

The parents, teachers and students at my daughter's school call me jBird's Mom, which suits me fine. She is far more memorable than I am and any capacity in which those people know me, it is unnecessary for them to know me personally, only the function I serve as jBird's mom. Ditto my son's school. Except the children there are mostly at an age where they don't know anyone's name anyway, or care. And I avoid their parents because they frighten me with loud baby talk and fur coats.

I have a friend who calls me Roxy, a friend who calls me Buttercup, a friend who calls me Esther, another who calls me Special K. All very old nicknames from different origins, times and places. They are perhaps the only ones besides my husband who have had nicknames adhere to me.

My husband calls me Lou. I call my husband Lou. It's a habit started in our first year of marriage. It comes from One Legged Lou - the name of the finger I use to poke my husband when he's sleeping, just to startle him. I'm annoying that way. It also comes from Lou Dominguez - the man whose mail my mother-in-law started to receive after living in her house for well over 20 years. We created a back story for him and my mother-in-law that was profoundly funny. At least we thought so.

We have called each other Lou so long that we forget when we say it in front of other people and they are surprised. When both kids were first learning to talk, Lou was among their first words. My jBird would stand in her crib and holler "Llllooooouuuu!" in the sweetest little voice if ever I dared to put her down for a nap in that little baby cage. The Hooligan was much more terse. He would point to me and say "Wou!" and then point to his daddy and say "Wou!"

My dad tried to call my husband Lou once and it was so awkward that we all just blushed silently for a minute and then never spoke of it again.

We knew before we were ever pregnant with the jBird what her name would be. The Hooligan's name was not solidified until a few hours after he was born. We carefully chose their names for very specific reasons and then after they were born proceeded to call them by a series of nicknames anyway. My sister-in-law said that jBird wouldn't know what her name was because we never called her by it. But she did. Very early on, she did. Same for the Hooligan.

I protect our names online because you never know who might be reading or what they might do with the information they do read. I find this a little silly and paranoid, but I'm told it's a good idea. I will be silly if it means protecting my children. I am silly for far less important reasons sometimes. So online I am Tangled Lou, decidedly silly. Tangled because that is the state of my mind, my tongue and my writing a lot of times. Tangled because of my knitting obsession. Tangled because the play on words is too irresistible with the Bob Dylan song, Tangled Up In Blue.

But somehow in this state of tangled names, with each their own source, their own piece of me, there in the center of it all is just Me. The Me that no matter how much I repeat it, does not begin to sound ridiculous. The Me that friends from grade school still recognize. The Me in whom my mom still sees shadows of the baby I was. The Me that I recognize no matter what the outward circumstances of my life. The Me that does not change. This is the Me that I embrace with all of her flaws and idiosyncratic ways, with her brilliance and her silliness, with her monstrous thoughts and tender heart, with her knowing and her wonder, with her naivete and her wisdom, with her intensity and heat, with her hideousness and beauty. This is the Me that has been there for as long as I can remember, the Me that no one can touch. And honestly, I don't really know how to pronounce her name.  

Relatively Fictional

One time when I was four, I stuck a button up my nose. I was watching Saturday morning cartoons with my brother while my parents slept in and that button fit my nostril just perfectly. I was showing my brother how I could use it to make a nostril cap and the next thing I knew it was too far in for me to dig out.

One time when I was four, I chewed an entire pack of Grape Bubble Yum, stretched it out into a rope, and then wound it around and around my leg. When I tried to get it off, it stuck everywhere. I finally had to go get my mom and show her my purple leg. It didn't come off. I wasn't allowed to chew gum for a very long time after that.

One time when I was four, I was watching Romper Room. Snack time was over and they were getting ready to dance with Mr. Do-Bee and suddenly the action stopped because a little girl was crying. She didn't get a chance to finish her cookie. I cried too. It was horrible.

***

I was looking over a bit of fiction for an acquaintance the other day and feeling the lizard in my brain getting a little feisty. Her fiction was gorgeous in its simplicity - engaging characters, believable dialogue, a clear setting, a story that moved. I was impressed and I was jealous. Why can't I write fiction? I have tried so many times and it comes out stilted, cliched, boring, unreadable. Certainly nothing I would package up and send anywhere except the recycling bin. No fair! This is a discussion I have with myself a lot.

I read a remarkable short fiction piece on another blog. She had written the piece in the first person and it was personally evocative for several of her readers. She apologized for the immediacy and intimacy of the first person perspective because it seemed too real. I think some people didn't realize it was purely fictional.

I say it frequently enough, I don't write fiction. I don't write short stories, I don't write novels. I don't "have a novel in me" as some claim to do. I write... what? Nonsense, mostly. Stuff I've been thinking about, memories, observations, elaborations on a few moments in time. Technically, if it were bound in a book and gathering dust on the bargain rack of an independent bookstore someplace, it would be considered non-fiction if it would be considered at all. But here's the thing: isn't the very act of conjuring these thoughts, stretching them out, dressing them in pretty words, turning them this way and that to make a point, isn't that creating a form of fiction?

Consider: I write about very real moments with my very real children, but I select the moments carefully. I choose moments that speak to me, things I can write well about, things that make a larger point. I don't make up the characters or setting or dialogue, but the overall picture that's painted is not technically accurate. It's a small moment in a day full of other more mundane or more regrettable moments; but you, the reader, get a picture of a gentle mom with the right thing to say, not the fuller picture of a mom with plumber's butt and dirty hair who has mastered the art of the strategically placed "mmm-hmmm" when a small person tells a long story she's long since tuned out. Does this not create a kind of fiction?

Consider my memories above. Three separate instances of complete childishness from over thirty years ago. They are my memories, they really did happen. If you ask my mom, she may say they happened differently or she may not remember that they happened at all. Which is true? Isn't the act of remembering simply creating the story of our lives?

I was talking to a friend today about a folk dancing class I took in college. I got a D and blew my 4.0 because during the final I turned the wrong way and smacked the girl next to me across the bridge of her nose with a tambourine. My friend thought this was hilarious and was appropriately indignant that my GPA was ruined by a folk dancing class, but as she was laughing she said "That sounds like something out of a book!" This notion rankles. We look to fiction for stories, for fantastic happenings, for entertainment. And it does provide all those things, but what about the non-fiction? People's lives are full of entertaining stories, fantastic happenings that embellish with the telling.

These are the questions I've been mulling, so I'll put them out there and see what gives. I have no point today, just a lot of open-ended questions and a growing restlessness. I will own up to a certain gift for writing, but writing what?

One time when I was four, I dressed up as Barbara Walters and interviewed my brother who pretended to be a famous boxer. I had a blond wig, a speech impediment and everything. That's got to be worth something.