It Goes from Dogs to Plates. (It Makes Sense, I Swear.)

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The thought path on this one is a little circuitous — just bear with me.

The other week I had occasion to dig through my old photo files and, in doing so, found a bunch of pictures of me with other people’s dogs. At this point, sadly, all of the dogs in the photos have moved on from this life, and they are all very much missed by their humans and their extended human family. Naturally, I got a little verklempt over the whole thing. These were records of furry little souls I had spent time with, and it’s all I have left of them. Photos and lovely, slobbery, wiggly, tail-waggy memories.

All of those dogs were special to me, and to their families, but there’s always one, isn’t there? One that’s beyond special. One that full-body-wiggles its way into your heart, turns around three times, and settles in forever.

For me, it was Monty.

Monty was an American Pit Bull Terrier (possibly a mix, but that’s a secret known only to his mother and father). He was mostly black with a white patch on his chest and little white French manicure tips on three of his paws. He was a rescue. He was missing half his teeth, had a scar down one side which seemed to be linked to his only-noticeable-if-you-were-looking-for-it limp, and he was afraid of everything. If it made noise, he didn’t want anything to do with it. If it was unfamiliar, he hid behind what was. If it was large and male and human? Oh, that was the biggie. Large, male, and human sent him under the nearest piece of furniture or the deck or whatever was on hand to be used for hiding.

Long story short, the poor guy had trust issues.

This is going somewhere, I swear. My little foray into those photos got me thinking about Monty, which got me thinking about the origin of trust.

We’re born with nothing. We’re helpless and squalling and utterly dependent upon those around us to attend to our needs.

“But how would an infant have the capacity to trust or not? They haven’t developed that level of thought yet.”

Well, in a way, they have. They trust that if they make enough fuss, something will be done. They’re hard-wired for that.

“But is that really trust, or is that just screaming?”

Inclined as I am to classify it as ‘just screaming’, it’s screaming with a purpose (usually), and it’s a cry for anyone within earshot. Eventually — and I’m sure it’s different for everyone — preferences for caregivers manifest, presumably based upon routine and familiarity, but there’s a level of trust involved in those things, too.

“I trust these two big people because they take care of me. I don’t trust that old bag who shows up on Tuesdays because she doesn’t do things the same way as my normal big people.”

...I’m not sure if the concept of Tuesday and having the presence of mind to classify someone as an ‘old bag’ are too far advanced for a fictional infant’s inner monologue.

If one doesn’t first trust, how can one come to distrust? This would imply the existence of inherent trust. I mean, if we were all born cynical and paranoid there would be far fewer hours of classroom instruction devoted to lessons involving things like: “John can trust Mrs. Peterson because she lives next door and knows John and his mommy and daddy. John can’t trust the man in the windowless white van outside the school yard because he has never met him before.”

So are we born with an inherent level of trust, and as we grow, we refine it through experience? Perhaps along the lines of ‘We trusted Uncle Joe to toss us in the air and catch us, until one day he missed, and now we won’t play that game with him anymore, because ow’?

Or do we learn to trust only after we’ve been treated in a fashion that leads us to distrust the person or situation that was unpleasant? But again, this implies an inherent level of trust to begin with, and we’re back where we started.

Chicken? Egg?

Never mind where it comes from or how we develop it, I suppose the heart of the matter is that trust is both an intensely fragile thing, and can have the strength of an iron girder. It’s all in how you nurture it.

If we go back to Mr. Monty for a minute, he was conditioned, through unconscionable abuse, to distrust just about everything. That distrust stayed with him even after he was safely in a home with people who cared for him. I’m still, frankly, amazed at the fact that he trusted me the way he did. It took him a solid hour, but once he decided I was safe, I was safe forever. 

Like, “Hi, I’m a dog and I’m going to sleep rightnexttoyou and snore in your ear and hide behind you when the doorbell rings kthx” safe.

How? Why? What made him come to that decision? Would it have changed after the fact if I had started kicking him? (I would NEVER, obviously, but it’s something to think about.) And this is the thought process of a dog, which, according to everything we know at this point in time, isn’t nearly as complex as that of a human being.

So let’s add that layer of complexity. Human beings exist with a whole lot of gray area. We trust different people to different extents. I might trust a co-worker about as far as I could throw them, but I trust my best friend with my deepest, darkest everything. I might trust Emily to keep a secret, but not Jane because we all know she’s got the biggest damn mouth there ever was and ever will be, amen. These are things we learn as we go along. Whether we attack them from a place of initial trust or initial distrust is a product of so many factors in our lives. If we’ve existed in an environment conducive to trust, we have no trouble placing trust in others — ‘innocent until proven guilty’, if you like — and we’re surprised when someone dishonors that trust. On the other hand, if we’ve come from a place of keeping everything at arms length because experience has taught us that very little is to be trusted at the outset, we expect to have others betray us at every possible opportunity.

Though these are equally valid methods for assessing our acquaintances, the latter comes with some extra baggage that speaks to a destructive sort of nurture. There’s a meme that makes the rounds on the internet every so often. It goes something like, “Take a plate. Smash it on the floor. Now say you’re sorry”, the point being that once you’ve fucked up, the person on the receiving end is irrevocably damaged, and no amount of ‘I’m sorry’ is going to return them to their original, unbroken-plate state. Once fractured, it becomes more difficult to believe that the next person isn’t going to eventually smash you to bits, too.

Why do humans have such a difficult time just being basically decent to each other? I doubt we’ll ever know.

Moral: Don’t be the plate-smasher.

And I hope beyond hope that you’re not the plate.

The Devil You Know

Everywhere in the world has its own unique set of geographical quirks. There are monsoons in India, tornadoes in middle America, and sandstorms in the Sahara. People who inhabit these places are well versed in their local natural phenomena, and generally seem to take them in stride. It’s only to out-of-towners that things like hurricanes and blizzards are incomprehensibly frightening. I don’t particularly think I’d like to deal with a tsunami, thanks very much, that sounds like a whole lot of not fun. But to someone who hears the sirens on a regular-ish basis? It’s just another day at the office. Last week provided one of those “Oh, is that happening again?” moments.

On January 4th, 2018, at approximately 2:30 AM, the earth moved.

Not everywhere, just under me and the rest of the residents within a certain radius of the epicenter of the event.

I’m a native Californian. Earthquakes are just ‘this thing that happens’. The one the other week was a magnitude 4.5, which means nothing to you unless you’re used to riding them out or you have an unhealthy addiction to the Richter Scale.

I was in bed. The quake itself didn’t wake me up — I had woken up about three minutes prior for no apparent reason. When it kicked off I was startled, but it became almost immediately clear what was happening, so I just stayed put. About the time I was starting to consider getting up and seeking shelter, it was over. No aftershocks, the ceiling was still where it was supposed to be, everything was fine.

So I rolled over and went back to sleep.

I consider this to be a perfectly reasonable response to an earthquake. People I know who live in areas not prone to tectonic plate movement, on the other hand, think I’m off my head. “OMG, earthquakes must be so scary! How can you react to them so calmly?!”

Darlin’s, I remember Loma Prieta. Ladies and gentlemen, THAT was an earthquake.

October 17th, 1989
17:04
Magnitude 6.9

I was three-and-a-half, and spending the day with my maternal grandparents in Los Gatos while my mother was teaching at the Yamaha store in San Jose. (Pianos, not motorcycles. I do not have a badass, motorcycle-riding mother. At least, not yet. I’m still waiting for the call to say she’s finally embarked upon her mid-life crisis.)

My grandmother and I were in the kitchen. The way their kitchen was set up didn’t allow for a table, so the counter on one side was like a diner counter. There was a pass-through so that if you sat at the counter you could see anyone in the living room. Or, you know, the TV. Above the pass-though on the kitchen side was a glass-front cabinet full of commemorative wine glasses. My grandmother had me sitting on the diner counter underneath the aforementioned glassware while she fixed my dinner. I’m sure we were having a conversation of the sort you have with three year olds.

When the house started to shake — after the initial WTF?! moment — my grandmother grabbed me off the counter because I was under a literal wall of glass, and those tend to shatter if disturbed. The next part is a little weird. I think she must have originally intended to take me out the front door, but changed her mind once we were out of the kitchen and headed for the dining table. The kitchen opened at both ends, so she could very easily have gone straight for the table to begin with, but what the hell do I know, I was three and freaking the fuck out. In any case, we made a circle, and I know this to be a fact because to this day, I can vividly see my grandmother falling on top of me in front of the living room sofa. The next thing I remember after that is being under the table for a reeeeeaaaallllly long time with her and losing my shit every time there was an aftershock. Actually, both the aftershocks and me losing my three-and-a-half-year-old mind went on for a couple of days after the initial quake.

Needless to say, it took my mother longer than usual to collect me that evening, and my dad longer to get home from the Cottle Road IBM campus. Mom had ended up taking refuge under a piano to ride the quake out, but my father’s story is the best. He was on a conference call with the IBM office in Rochester, MN, and when the building started going and didn’t immediately stop, he dived under his desk with the phone and said, “Sorry, guys, I’m going to have to call you back. We’re having an earthquake. Bye!!!”

Sixty-three people were killed, all told.

Property damage was estimated between five and six billion dollars.

But the Oakland A’s stole the World Series victory from the San Francisco Giants. Silver lining!

So, yeah. A 4.5 in the wee hours of the morning? Piece of cake.

Locate Sand, Insert Head - or - Christmas was Stressful.

***Just a quick note — I’ll be back to flippancy and fuckery next week. This one’s a little more morose than you’re probably expecting.***

Here we are! We made it! We ate too much, we drank too much, and we somehow miraculously refrained from telling Great Aunt Constance where she could stick her thoughts about how ‘Hitler had some good ideas, you know’.

Last week I told you about my one and only Christmas tradition. There used to be a bit more to my holidays in general, but as I’ve gotten older they’ve become considerably less holiday-y. At this point I thought I’d be a bit more put out by that fact, but honestly, it’s really turned out to be something of a relief.

By the time I was seven or so, we (my parents and me, only child that I am) dispensed with Christmas decorations pretty much all together. We would designate a houseplant to serve as a present repository and that was sort of that. My mother, a music teacher, would have her annual holiday student recital. We would go to the carol singing party. We would go to my maternal grandparents’ for Christmas Eve and to the home of whichever of my paternal relatives was hosting on Christmas Day. It was all very comfortable, even if my peers thought we were weird for having a ‘Christmas Houseplant’. Things morphed a bit over the years. Eventually, my maternal grandparents were included in the Christmas Day festivities with the paternal side, too, though we still did Christmas Eve most years as well.

Things changed significantly somewhere around 2006, however. My father’s two sisters (he's the oldest of five) had a major falling out, and that was the start of the power washing of the veneer. I was on my first year abroad in England when everything exploded, which meant that I left the country with a cohesive family and came back to a war zone.

The short version is that it’s only gotten worse. Everyone hates everyone, very few people are on speaking terms, and you never know who or when, and I’ve just gotten stuck in the middle of it all. For a while, I tried to ‘take the high road’, to be equally involved with everyone because none of this was my fault, but then, somehow, someone decided that some of it was my fault, and at this point I’ve given up caring.

So, no big family Christmas is definitely one in the blessings column these days.

Eleven years and minus three out of four grandparents after the original incident, Christmas this year was just me, Mom, and Dad, in a house on the Northern California coast. No aunts, no uncles, no one-remaining-grandmother. For all intents and purposes, it could have been any long weekend at any time of the year. Well, apart from the fact that I forced them to sit through How the Grinch Stole Christmas (always Karloff, never Carrey!), The Muppet Christmas Carol, and Desk Set. (It’s a Christmas movie. If you all can claim Die Hard, then I can claim Desk Set!) But that was about as festive as it got.

Now, I know this is going to sound ungrateful because there are so many people who are alone or lonely this time of year, but I’d much rather have just stayed home. I have an interesting relationship with my parents — almost as interesting as the relationship they have with each other. The word ‘tolerate’ is the best descriptor. We tolerate each other. Sometimes barely. You can imagine how much moral fortitude is required to tolerate each other for four days with a minimum of external stimulation.

If I’m honest, I’m getting tired of tolerating. It’s exhausting.

“So why don’t you talk to your parents? To the rest of your family? Tell them how you feel?”

Simple. We’re not that kind of family. I’d have thought that was obvious, considering the massive clusterfuck that is presently my father’s side thereof.

No, at this point, we’re just going through the motions because it’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to be joyful and thankful and hopeful and bursting at the seams with love and good cheer - so what do you do when you can’t muster up any of those things? You go along anyway and you put on your public face and you make the best of what you’ve got. You try to keep the conversation light, you try to keep your parents from chewing each other to pieces, and when you fail at those things, you just get out for a while — in my case this year, taking solitary walks on the beach and very long naps.

You do what you’re supposed to do, because you’re supposed to do it.

You put up with things as best you can, until you can get away.

And you feel thoroughly empty inside.

The Elf on the Shelf — KILL IT! KILL IT WITH FIRE!

The other day, as is now tradition, I was subjected to my boss’ annual rant about The Elf on the Shelf.

For the uninitiated, allow me to explain. The Elf on the Shelf is a yuletide gimmick used by parents who can’t be bothered to keep their children in line through traditional methods and have to rely on “the magic of Christmas” to keep their rugrats from going feral in the throes of the “gimme gimme gimme” season. (Okay, okay, that’s a bit draconian. But not entirely inaccurate…)

The elf lore states that when you adopt an elf (who comes in an eminently giftable set with his or her own storybook and adoption papers), that elf becomes your family’s elf every Christmastime. He or she shows up after Thanksgiving/around the first of December and lives with your family, watching the children and reporting their behavior back to Santa each night until Christmas Eve, when he or she returns to the North Pole until next year.

How do you know he goes back to the North Pole every night?

Because every morning, he’s somewhere different in the house.

Because Mom and Dad have to remember to move him into some new and interesting pose every morning.

For an entire month.

I take issue with this atrocity in two major ways, the first of which is the fact that parents can be unwittingly committed to this charade by (possibly) well-intentioned relatives or friends. My boss has two little girls, now six and two-and-a-half. Three years ago, her mother in law gifted them the dreaded Christmas abomination, and, of course, the then-four-year-old saw it and knew about it and therefore Mom and Dad were shit out of luck. Now they HAD to do it, or risk the wrath of Mom-in-law AND the small human.

For parents who don’t decide to participate of their own volition, this ridiculous pretense is simply an added chore during what is, for most people, an already very busy time of year. The rules state that NO ONE can touch the elf or he loses his magic, which means that Mom and Dad have to be awfully sneaky when they change his location every day. And God forbid they should forget! Small humans can be keen little observers, and I’ve heard about plenty of fits of brokenhearted wailing at the sight of Mr. Elf in the same place two days in a row because that meant “He didn’t got back to the North Pole and now Santa won’t know how good I was and I won’t be on the Nice List!”

You can only blame inclement weather so many times for Mr. Elf’s non-movement.

And if he’s not somewhere different EVERY TIME, EVERY YEAR? Oy…

The thing is, if you make a gift of this farcical toy, you get to fuck off elsewhere and leave the recipients to deal with it. You unthinking bastards.

Now, the second reason I take exception to The Elf on the Shelf is the concept at its core. When you plug it into Google search, you get a little thing at the side of the screen which shows things “People Also Search For:” and one of those things is George Orwell’s 1984, a novel set in a futuristic dystopian society with omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation.

That’s right, kids, Santa is Big Brother. “He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake.” Santa’s already a fuckin’ creeper, and now we’re training subsequent generations to toe the line for future despots when the revolution comes and we’re all turned into mindless, government-worshipping drones. (Again, draconian, but, I mean, come ON.)

Your children aren’t behaving because they know that it’s the right thing to do. They’re behaving because the threat of a fat man in a red suit not bringing them things because they got tattled on by a plastic-and-fabric effigy of a mythical humanoid creature is more motivating than their parent’s approval of their life choices.

There’s something wrong with this picture.

BUT, there’s a way out!

So, you’ve ended up with one of these elves, and you don’t have the time or the inclination to deal with it. Here are some creative (and incredibly, incredibly messed up) Get Out of Jail Free cards!

Kill it! Kill it with fire!

The kiddos come out in the morning, bright-eyed and excited to see where Mr. Elf has ended up today! The fireplace in the living room is roaring, and there’s Mr. Elf clinging for dear life to the handle on the damper. His elf uniform is happily toasting, his plastic face melting away. “Oh, dear, looks like he came back from the North Pole just as Daddy started the fire this morning! What? We didn’t know he came down the chimney like Santa! Now stop sobbing and eat your cereal.”

Elf Leprosy

Play the game for a week or so, and make sure that one of the places Mr. Elf ends up is very, very wet. Then don’t dry him out properly, and expose him to some sort of mold. One morning, the little angels will follow a trail of elf bits down the hall to the remains of Mr. Elf’s mangled corpse. “This is what happens when you don’t take baths! Your parts fall off! We’re going to have to send him to a special place for people like him where he can lose his remaining limbs in peace and not infect anyone else. Now, go to school. Mommy has to bleach EVERYTHING so we don’t all DIE.”

And finally,

The Dangers of the Outdoors

“Where’s the elf? Where’s the elf?!” they cry. “I don’t know, darlin’s. I’m sure he’ll turn up.” And then he does. On the front lawn. Impaled on a strategically placed and totally-not-on-purpose sharpened stick stuck into the ground. “Uh-oh. Looks like when he was trying to come back down the chimney from his trip to the North Pole he slid and fell and ended up as an elf-kabob! Well, what have we learned from this, kids? Don’t play on the roof!”

You’re welcome.

Schadenfreude!

Note: This post was originally written on November 21st, 2017.

Schadenfreude — German for ‘happiness at the misfortune of others’. Here, have some examples.

Even before I learned that there was a word for it, I knew the feeling. Let’s be honest, we all do. It’s part of human nature. We’re relieved when something not-so-nice happens to someone who is not us. Obviously there’s a point beyond which you’re actually a monster if you’re elated when something gawdawful happens to another person or group of people, but there’s a lovely big playground of middleness from which you can derive a whole lot of laughter.

A lot of it is on television.

With people doing it on purpose.

I mean, come on. Reality TV is a breeding ground for schadenfreude, and we can’t seem to get away from it. There’s an audience. There’s an audience because there is something in all of us that, perversely, likes to see the other guy fail.

You might be sitting there thinking “No, actually, I don’t get any sort of elation from other people’s failings,” and maybe you don’t, so I guess you’re just a better person all around. Or you’re lying because you feel bad about the buzz you get when someone slips on the pavement and nearly falls but rights themselves at the last minute and tries to play it off like nothing happened but eeeeeeverybody knows it did.

The chances of that person feeling bad for not feeling bad about the same thing happening to you are slim to none, my friend. I don’t care how nice you are on a regular basis, if you don’t at least smirk when the guy feeding the ducks gets chased by an overly-amorous swan, you need to reevaluate your life choices.

I could keep wittering on about all of this, but I’d rather tell you a funny.

My commute to and from work every day is just full of douche-canoes. Usually in very expensive vehicles. (Seriously. I got passed by a McLaren once. Teslas are as common as pigeons. And Porches? Oh, puh-LEEZ, they’re practically passé!) As you can imagine, I am liable to witness an egregious amount of fuckery on my commute as a result. Clearly, these people are far more important than the rest of us, and we should be falling all over ourselves with gratitude that they allow us to partake of their personal asphalt pathways to and from their Very Important Places. We should all pull right over when their two-seater Jaguar comes into view, and then wait an appropriate five minutes to get back on the road once they’ve gone, lest we come just a touch too close to them for their liking. We should always allow them to cut into our lanes at the very last moment because they’re too important to keep track of the fact that they’re in an exit-only lane, and it isn’t the one they want. I mean, usually their butlers would take care of that for them, but occasionally even Jeeves needs a day off, don’t you know.

And sometimes, they just run up your ass and try to run you off the road, even though you’re already going ten miles per hour over the speed limit in the slow lane. ::tears out hair, screams, and throws things::

Generally, all of this is just cause for plenty of swearing on my part.

This morning, however, the law was on the side of the mild-mannered motorists.

I was toodling down the freeway in my usual manner, and the traffic started to slow dramatically (which is very normal along this stretch of road because Californians don’t know how to deal with curves in the road, but that’s a story for another time) and, oh look, here comes Mr. Lexus barreling down behind me.

Off he slips into the new toll lane to get around things.

Oh, look, there’s the FastTrack reader!

::SWERVE:: Mr. Lexus is back with the rest of us.

This repeats once more while I can still see the Lexus. I had a lovely shout at him, just for my own health and recreation.

Then comes Chippie, casual as you like, trawling the toll lane. (California Highway Patrol = CHP = Chippie. You learned a thing!) I cheered Chippie on, knowing full well he could see Mr. Lexus from his patrol truck.

After that, my lane slowed again, and they left my line of sight. Obviously I hoped I’d see them off to the side at some point later, but figured I probably wouldn’t.

But I was wrong!

Just after the exit before mine, there was Chippie and Mr. Lexus off to the side. I may or may not have done as much of a happy dance as is possible when driving a car.

Call me a flawed human being if you like, but the whole thing just made my day.