playing the game

last night i had dinner with one of my best friends. i have lots of best friends and lots of friendships that have sprung the confines of convention. besides all of that, i also like to share the nature of our conversations and interactions.

last summer he and i started on what became a six month project of reciprocal moral support. yes, moral support, we both needed exactly that at the time we were both restricting out expenses, so there was no money available to pay expensive personal coaches or assistants; we took the matter into our own hands. i can say that i was in good hands; he is a clear thinking jurist with a training in mediation. i am a fuzzy thinking physicist with a training in high-impact-delivery coaching.

we sat down in my office to a pot of tea one day in july and formulated the goals of our individual projects. together we created a support structure that involved weekly to do lists and meetings either in person or on the phone. on the weekly meetings we took turns in reporting on the progress on the to do list, the barriers encountered, and on what the hell we were feeling at the time. often we cried, but mostly we listened to each other and asked critical questions. mostly, i repeat, we listened.

both our projects came to yield results that neither of us would  have expected, and that have surpassed our expectations. my own project brought me to milestones in what is a much longer project and it also uncovered a few parts of my life that were totally dysfunctional. it was painful to discover the dysfunctionalities and it is necessary to deal with them if i am to see my dreams turn into reality.

yesterday he shared what is one of the feedbacks on the result of his project. his project was to write a doctoral dissertation in a rather esoteric aspect of our legal system. his thesis advisor has now read the opus and he has been showered with abundant praise on the quality of his dissertation.

this legal friend of mine is brilliant, like most of my friends. however anybody who tried and found a good excuse knows exactly how easy it is to give up on completing a doctoral dissertation once you have entered the workforce and are gainfully employed somewhere. he took an unpaid sabbatical to write his doctoral thesis, and he knew that he was up against windmills of all sorts and projections. my project was no less challenging given its nature. alone and left to our devices, we both knew that we did not stand much of a chance to see it to the end without finding an exilient and  seductive excuse for abandoning the enterprise at hand.

i know for my part that there was one moment when the idea of jumping off a bridge was a plausibility. i also know myself well enough to know that such fleeting thoughts are the social ether that we unconscientiosuly breathe, and i being a iota aware do catch such thoughts as uninvited guests and can distinguish these as not being the product of disciplined thinking. he also went through ups and downs of all sorts from an attractive job offer from another firm to having his girlfriend pass the message that she was his ex-girlfriend via one of his best friends.

last night we sat for a good round of conversation, a glass of wine and a simple meal. we ended discussing some aspects of the workings within his present employer (a very well-known swiss company) and there was a lot of ranting and  comparing notes. i pointed him to the old wisdom of sun tzu the art of war and he was not thrilled. i know, it never thrilled me to think that we humans, animals of superior intelligence, interact by playing games with each other and basically screwing whoever gets in the way of our plots and machinations. it is a game indeed, and indeed some of us end up walking that moral hight ground that i know much too well, and will categorically say that we will not play the game. yeah, i have been there and i have been taking some time out to think about it. for me it is rather simple: i am not particularly interested in somebody else's game, much less in the rules of the game. i just want to win my game. this is the starting point for all: we want to win our game.

come to think of it, it is not even the rules of the game that disturb me much. it so happen that the game is laden with pitfalls. one  of the first pitfalls that most succumb to is to fall for the belief that to win, all others must loose. wrong, this is not a problem with the rules, this is problem with the attitude.

i am discovering that i like this subject far too much, and that this post is getting much too long, and the day much too short.

Technorati Tags: coach, dinner, friendship, game, legal, philosophy, rules, values, war, win

getting it right

i could get an hint from the fact that the novel with this title was written by a man labeled conservative and born in 1925. but is it an hint?

the facts are a bit simpler, and this is about me, not about some smart cookie born in colonialized land. i keep on forgetting that i am a colonist by the hazard of birth, and that i too have all the rights of any other bastard or avetrol ever conceived on the planet. so, let me get this straight from the beginning: i have a right to this as much as anybody else. whatever this is, it is my this to define.

then to add insult to injury, let me continue that marriage was a bad invention to only be topped by that of nationalism. in a world of abundance, the bad ideas are just as abundant as the good ideas, so let me start painting this world the colour that i want to paint it. you may not like it, then do not look. the fondest memories of my childhood are of those of afternoons spent building houses with the wooden blocks that were then to be the floor of my parents bedroom. i also wanted to be an architect, and somehow i never found the way to be become one. why do i cry when i think of this?

rule number one: i live here
rule number two: so does the rest of humanity and a few other animals
rule number three: figure it out!

i have been trying to figure out for the past week what has me so damned paralyzed. i can not really talk of writer's block, or lack of ideas or none of that nonsense. i called it fear, but is it fear? i sat there on my comfortable voltaire fauteil the other day and the tears started to roll down my face when thinking of what it was like to be the teenager whom i was, or at least what my memory renders of it. tears still come up whenever i think of this time in my life.

it was once suggested that my adverse sensitivities to certain foods was caused by a psychological shock sometime in my life. i heard this many years ago, and being trained in the hard sciences i immediately relegated it to the bin labeled "hypothesis" and went on denying the whole affair. denial did not work well. whatever is the cause or source, irreverent to all lack of scientific understanding, my sensitivities are real, and my organism reacts adversely in several ways with the ingestion of such "nourishing offenders."  this annoys me beyond imagination, all that i ever wanted to be was to be just like everybody else. fuck it, i am not. i can not even eat what a gluten intolerant person can, although some gluten free products are also free of all the other stuff that i ought to not eat. i immediately withdraw from any conversation in which somebody starts complaining that they must not have ONE particular foodstuff and they go on ranting how terribly limiting that is. really? i withdraw because i would rather scream at them for being such myopic averish idiots!

scream! when i miss the beach, it is because early in the morning on my run, what i do is scream. i scream at the ocean, i scream my pain away. if what has me paralyzed is fear, it is the fear of pain. how am i to embrace this fear and this pain? is fear the anticipation of pain, and is pain what i am trying to avoid?

on the back of this, i think of that image so engraved in my memory of the first time that i went to a certain ivy league school and after a most stimulating discussion with a colleague we said goodbye and i turned my back to head back to the car and drive to new york city. i could not  turn around and look back at where i had just been. yes, i wanted to be there and be part of it. for the record, i became part of it, i spent some time on the faculty at that ivy league university, and i wrote a lot of journals while there and have published none of it. what is remarkable is that i remember my paralysis and inability to turn back while coming down the steps. some power was holding me and whispering to not turn back.. what am i to make of this? why do i remember this so vividly, and why was i so present to that very moment that it seems to have turned to stone in my memory?

i am tired of the average, like i am tired of not being average. i am tired of not looking back and trying to avoid the pain. last wednesday when i got to my therapist/analyst all that i could come up with was that i was tired. she offered that i lay down. nothing hit me more strangely than the idea of laying down, i did not even seem to be able to decline the offer properly. i had already taken a nap that afternoon, and was feeling damned guilty about sleeping in the middle of the day instead of being out there being productive. what the fuck am i talking about? what on earth is going on? i am not quite sure that being productive is one of the goals in my life. i just want to write, and frankly words are for the most part a totally useless creation. the world keeps on rotating on its axis and around the sun just fine without a word needing to ever be written. there was a big bang and there will be a solar final explosion not so in the near future, but eventually that will finally reduce all of the solar system to ash. ash or whatever plasma debris the burning out of the sun will produce, that is the future.

i am not up on cosmology these days. cosmology is the other thing that had i had the guts to go for it, i would have studied it. come to think of it, being an astronomer would have been a rather cool occupation... architect... astronomer... agronomist... at least i did start with the first letter of the latin alphabet!

somewhere along the line i got it in my little pretty head convinced that i did not have a right to live, that i had no right to go after my likes and dreams, and that the only way to go about getting anywhere close to what i liked, i had to disguise it and make it somehow look like what i thought was expected of me. totally wonderfully fucked plan that was, and now i am starting to see into the fallacies and booby traps built into such a plan. it is not amusing, as a matter of fact, it is damned painful. facing my psychology, the mashed up interpretations of a collection of oxymoronic hazards that we call life, is not much of a picnic, it is both painful and a comedy. this one life - mine - is contradiction.

we do take great pleasure in sexual activity, yet when we look at genitals, i must confess that i fail to see the beauty of such appendages, protrusions and cavities. beauty is an odd invention, and it lives in a parallel world of that of pleasure. one constant universality of nature is its irreverence towards intellectual abstractions. welcome to contradiction, it simply does not exist in nature, it an intellectual artifact.

so, i am tired, and i can not even gather up the wisdom to accept to lay down. still, there are days when i feel tired down to the marrow of my bones, and then there are days when i could climb everst in one breath! that is how i feel, that is not necessarily what my body is up to. still when i am tired and sleepy and can not quite concentrate on anything and can only turn the same old stale thoughts around in my head... it may be wise to lay down and sleep.

still, lately i have been discovering another side of this: i may be totally fucked up, but it seems that i am in very good company. less than two weeks ago i listened to a friend of mine recount the sad tale of a relationship gone sour. of all the people that i would have no doubts about being able to manage a relationship as a win-win situation, he was my prime candidate. still, the present state of his affairs tell me that all his communication know how and expertise did not prevent him from ending up in what is a rather ugly situation. this evening i asked a friend who joined me for dinner about how her brother is doing, and i was just being formal and casually polite with my question. i certainly do not like to ask these questions to get information or detail, it is a matter of social protocol. surprise, her brother seems to not be doing well, and i got to hear another sad story of family scripting playing out some ugly drama. it is very clear to me why psychologists and psychiatrists must go through analysis in the course of their training. somewhere along the line, the realization of our own psychology and its deep entrenchment within our ego's entrails ought, at least in principle, to bring some enlightenment to what human nature is like, and hopefully that is one valuable asset in guiding others to that same enlightenment or peace of mind.

but when i slip into the memories of my being a teenager and again feel the pain of feeling my dreams crushed, it is painful. while the dreams may have felt to be crushed, never did i give up on them. i just began to plot a submarine strategy. how was i to reach what i want without being noticed?

this is when my flirt and love affair with deception started. i was about fifteen.

Technorati Tags: abuse, deception, depression, drama, dreams, guilt, human, leschosesfloues, life, nature, psychology

starving artists dinner for 3

last night three of us got together to our more or less regular "starving artists dinner" or something along those lines. one of us is a lawyer working in the swiss court system, another is a music teacher, and i am supposedly a physicist. this trio accounts for two writers, one sculptor, and on occasions a photographer. we gathered yesterday at the musicians atelier and i got to play a grand piano. the minute that i arrived, i could hardly wait to go bang a few discords on the keyboard. mind you, i can not play the piano beyond the scales. i had lessons while i was in elementary school because i was forced to go to them. later, much later, i discovered that i actually like the instrument.

at these dinners we always get into two subjects of contention: sex and philosophy. however we do stay clear of the philosophy of sex, and that is perhaps a good thing.

since yesterday i had given gawker and wired a good look while going through my RSS lists on shrook, i had found some interesting items, read new to me information on cyber sex. after a few glasses of wine, i mentioned cybersex. then my surprise met me in the face, my dear friends in starvation and artistic inspiration seemed unaware of all the high tech forms of masturbation available for grabs, albeit absent of groping, on the internet. or is it that they are long term users of teledildonics, and somehow could not talk openly about it?

Technorati Tags: art, dinner, cybersex, teledildonics