Problem Solving vs. Crisis Abatement

There are multiple approaches to problem-solving. I like solving problems, but my patience for it is in inverse proportion to the messiness of the problem. I like to find a solution that relates directly to the problem, and whose solution is ordered, sequential, and foolproof. I doubt that there is ever such an instance in interpersonal affairs. Perhaps that represents a significant portion of the reason that I have a tendency to abandon human problem solving techniques once the crisis is past and my emotions have settled.

I have learned that like minds, when coupled, have an extraordinary ability to extend the workability of reason in human problem solving; but I was resistant to the idea that it could work when only one of those involved in the problem participated in the technique. Then it was pointed out to me that problem solving that is only aimed at crisis management does nothing to prevent future problems. It is therefore preferable to take steps to prevent future crises.

Not every human problem seems to have a rational basis. Some things seem to be purely emotional. But even emotion has a pattern that can be discovered, if observed calmly. It has cause and effect. Therefore it can be reasoned and problem solved on a rational basis.

At first, solving a problem that involves two people seems like it should necessitate the active involvement of both parties in rational problem solving, but I've discovered a major flaw in that supposition. It supposes that both parties experience the problem identically and contribute to it identically and equally. In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. Both my contribution to the problem and my experience of it are likely to be vastly different from his. It would be useful to precisely identify and understand the inner workings of his perception and experience, but it is not entirely necessary. I can use what I do know of what he feels to alter my reactions in a way that gives him the perception of improvement.

This is who I love. Now how can I do it better?

I need to speak his love language to him. It is the medium he understands. It is what he uses to make me feel loved. It is what will give him the experience of feeling loved. Using methods that I understand to show my love to him will make me feel more satisfied that I love him, but it will not address his feelings. A dear friend likes to say "right feelings follow right actions". It's a phrase that I was never particularly fond of, but today I find myself rethinking its meaning. It makes sense that if I behave in a loving way it will result in experiencing a loving feeling.

What does he do to show me that he loves me? These are the things that will make him feel loved if I return the action. I should show my love with a gift that has value to him rather than one that has value to me.

rc

a visit- dream journal

I went to therapy where I was being counseled by a man whose wife sat in on therapy and kept giving her opinion. While I was there, I ran into the children of a friend. They invited me to come home with them. There was a very roundabout journey, at one point we were going the wrong direction on the freeway, then I found myself at the top of a freeway ramp that led nowhere. The therapist's wife was shadowing me, but not very sneakily. At my friend's house, a choir was practicing. They were planning to record a demo the next day and they sounded terrible. I forgot that so many people were there and went to take a shower. Members of the choir were coming and going and I had to scramble for a robe. There was a group of women in the sunroom having a conference on something to do with the hospital. I dropped a cabbage behind the buffet. Eventually I sat down in the armchair. Little, blonde, twin toddler boys climbed into my lap and fell asleep and a girl with dark curly hair wedged herself into the space that was left and fell asleep too. I was contented. Later I went outside to eat a popsickle. The girl came out and invited me back in where they were having ice cream before leaving for school.

sronnoc esor

Tualatin Hills Nature Park

Sharing is Fun

Okay, so the title is tongue-in-cheek. I never learned how to communicate about feelings as a child. I recently learned that my siblings' code word for Father was "Baron". I was pretty much scared to approach him about anything. If I needed something, I'd cajole Mother into asking him. I certainly didn't have open conversations of any kind with him. While I was confident in Mother's love for me, maybe there just wasn't time for sharing for her, with all the responsibilities of a household. Or maybe it was something else.

Religion taught me that feelings are secondary to controlled impulses, that one should do what is right, whether it feels good or not. I still believe that. I believe that I should control my emotions, and edit them if necessary. I believe that I should mercilessly cull inappropriate feelings. Does this put me in control of myself, or does it simply serve to detach me from my true self? I can walk around all day thinking about how I feel about something without any threat. I can reason with myself about it, consider the facts, change my mind if I want.

I still remember the first time jc wheedled me into admitting that I loved him. It was certainly premature, maybe even on the phone before we'd actually met. Love takes many forms; and the love I confessed then, that barely formed feeling that I wanted to talk to him every day, share everything with him, knowing that he shone a bright spot on my busy life, is worlds different from the way I feel about him today. It was the seed of a tree that is still growing. I admitted it hesitantly, and it exposed a part of me that left me vulnerable. That exposed part of me has grown over the years. In a few weeks it will be 8 years. But jc has never made me sorry that I opened that spot to him. He's given me his own insecurity too, but that's another post, and one that will almost certainly never appear here.

The response to our childish game of, "loves you to deff, baby-baby" is often, "but, why?" There's no good answer to that. Your handsome face, pretty eyes, accepting heart? How nice it feels to hold your hand, to walk arm in arm down the street, to lie together in the afternoon? Presents you buy me, perhaps? That you don't criticize my slovenly housekeeping? Maybe it's still the reason that I actually fell in love with him in the first place, because I trusted him never to hurt me. My answer is often to stroke his lovely face and kiss him softly. I need no reason.

That often-unspoken simplicity of love has kept jc and I from ever needing many conversations about our feelings. There have been some hard times. In some of those times we've lost patience, raised our voices, but we're both careful not to utter words that are impossible to take back later. In the really hard times we've banded together more strongly, done what was needed, and come out on the other side. Certainly those interchanges have forged a love that talking could not do.

But none of that really helps me with anyone else, does it? My therapist is the least threatening person I've ever talked to, but I still can't meet her eyes when there's a really difficult subject to discuss. That's my tell. Avoiding the gaze. Recently I've had to grapple with the difficulty of discussing feelings that are unreasoned, unsummoned, unwelcome even. Feelings that rob me of power and make me vulnerable when revealed. The risk exists of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It would be too easy to discard the inconvenient feelings completely, with all that is connected to them, but how cowardly. How much better to follow the habit of a lifetime and do a revision.

Is it really like Voldemort?? Never saying the name makes him ever more frightening? Uttering the word is the first step, turning him from an otherwordly, all-powerful demon into a manageable, defeatable entity.

I am not bound by formless, volitionless impulses. I am bound neither to blindly accept their existence, nor to run wildly from the fear they invoke. There is middle ground. There can be first, second, third revisions, ad infinitum. The draft will never be ready for publishing. That's the way life goes when you're living it and not sitting on the sidelines watching.

Rose

Chemistry is frustrating- dream journal

I was sitting on an ottoman in a college chemistry class with the kids I graduated from high school with. The teacher kept doing calculations on the board, but I didn't understand anything. I kept raising my hand and asking for explanations, but he couldn't help me. After class, I went up to ask him what I could do. "My math is weak." I explained. He just gave me a set of homework figures to work on. The frustration was palpable.

sronnoc esor

a Record

I've neglected this poor blog ever since I joined Facebook. Yesterday, inviting a friend to read my archives here inspired me to read over them myself. I wanted to see what I had to be embarrassed by. I guess I've written my share of whiny posts here, but I always figured that venting was an important use for a blog. If sharing some of my inmost thoughts seems slightly embarrassing, it is nonetheless useful to be reminded of things I would have otherwise forgotten. Reading back over the last four years of my life, I appreciate the journey, and wonder if the next four years will take me as far. In 2009 I went on a diet, lost 25 pounds, started biking, and renewed a lease for the first time since jc and I have been married. It's nice to have a record.

rc

old man- dream journal

I was at work. I went down the hall to ask the old man if he wanted to take a shower. It was still very early in the morning. I noticed that he had forgotten to flush the toilet, and flushed it on my way into the room, calling out to him. I had to move his aluminum Klein bicycle to get into the bathroom, and noticed that the tires were flat. I had to move two wheelchairs, too, before moving the shower chair into the shower. He was sitting on the toilet, but said he didn't want a shower. When I tried to convince him, he jumped up and ran off. I chased him, jumping in the cab of the truck just in time for him to take off. I briefly noticed a woman who looked like she was running away, walking beside the road before my attention was diverted by traffic. Suddenly I was the one driving, but I couldn't reach the controls. We were going way too fast on the narrow road on the side of the mountain. We finally came to a stop, somehow winding up in a room. The woman who had been running away had an accomplice now. She panicked when she realized that we had seen her, pulling out a gun. I ducked behind the stairs and motioned the old man to get down. She fired a shot way too near the old man, but still missed him. He crumpled to the floor in a heap, too scared to move. The woman and her accomplice ran off down the hall, and I picked up the old man and walked off the other direction, trying to find my way back through the maze of hallways. In a place where two building seemed to be joined together, I asked someone in the hall for directions. She pointed me the same way we were going. When we got back, no one had even missed us. I insisted that we should call the police about the shots that had been fired, but no one seemed concerned. The day shift was arriving. Time to go home.

Sronnoc Esor

Spring is Here! (not technically)

It was a lovely, sunny day here. Buds are out on the trees. Spring flowers are blooming. Folks are eating lunch at sidewalk cafe tables. I had an iced coffee.

My ink was finished yesterday. After about two hours work, I have a lovely piece of artwork with deep meaning for me.

Life is good.

Rose

Escape From the City

As I sat sipping my latte this morning, it began to snow. Delighted as a child at this development, I decided to go for a ride. It snowed huge flakes the whole time I was on the streetcar. Later, when the train emerged from the dark tunnel, the hillside was covered with snow, fluffy flakes sticking to the firs.

I got off at Tualatin Hills Nature Park and walked down the path into the forest. It had stopped snowing, but the day was dark, with scattered raindrops falling. A doe and her year-old fawn stepped out from the trees to browse on new leaves emerging from dry shoots. The stark white belly of a brown creeper rivaled the face of the black-capped chickadee as the brightest spot in the dark wood. A ruby-crowned kinglet flitted about, acrobatically dangling from the underside of the branches. The marsh wren, with it's striking eye stripe danced along the boggy riverside.

As I admired the chest-jutting song of the winter wren, the sun broke through, sparkling off the new raindrops clinging to the branches. I lowered the hood of my jacket, delightfully drinking it all in.

Rose

Rock Dove

English Sparrow

Crow

Progress

Those of you who talk to me regularly already know that I found a therapist. I consider it (in a way) a very good milepost that she didn't make me dig deep this week because she thought I seemed to happy and didn't want to wreck my happiness.

We're starting to have warm days. Spring is on my mind.

rc

I'm Okay

It's occurred to me that I write far more introspective, angsty posts than I do happy, contented ones. There are obvious reasons for that. If you read my high school diaries, (which you can't, because I destroyed them) you'd see that tendency clearly exhibited. Anyway, as far as I know, no one is eternally mad at me and things aren't really as bad as I made them sound. Thanks to the readership for tolerating a little bipolarity at times.

We're enjoying an amazing amount of sunny weather for January in Portland. I'm loving the new job, and even found a new bus route that cuts my transit time by twenty minutes or so. I'm making a tentative start at an exercise regime-only two days in, we'll see how that goes.

I've even been thinking about writing the dreams again. There have been some real doozies lately.

Rose

Deja Vu or Emotional Rambling

I wonder. Am I destined to go through life making all the same mistakes over and over? Because I'm starting to see a pattern. Can I outlive the mistakes of the past? Can I right the wrongs I've instigated? Can I earn back the trust of those who love me? There's so much work to be done. I'm afraid of what might happen. Now, more than ever, I'm grateful for jc's seeming unconditional love and support. I'm not sure that there's any sense in apologies, because there's no way to undo what I've done. It's been my rule not to regret the past, but I find myself regretting my behavior nonetheless. I need help picking up the pieces.

rose

Forty Year Blizzard

I was so excited when the weather forecast a few weeks ago predicted snow. The morning I woke up to see white, fluffy flakes coating everything and still falling I went out with the camera and trekked all over. We only got a few inches that day, but the cold weather stuck around in a very uncharacteristic fashion. We wound up with something like a foot of snow, an odd inch or so of ice, and plenty of steadily below-freezing mercuries before Christmas week was over.
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I braved the worst of the storm to trek to work by streetcar, bus, and train, with a fair amount of walking tossed in for good measure. The city slowed to a creep during the worst days, with lots of hospital employees sleeping at work, most of the restaurants closed, and skiers and snowshoers in the streets.
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I woke yesterday to pleasant temperatures near fifty, and a Portland that looked more familiar without its coating of snow. The detritus left behind made it look like people had believed the snow would remain forever: cigarette butts, trash, and other messes that people would normally pick up, now exposed by the thaw.
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Rose

Another Park

Everything is so closeby here. I went for a walk, intending to catch the bus to the park. Before I knew it, I was there. It was a lovely, warm, sunny, fall day and Imeandered through the park snapping photos to my heart's content. jc was up when I got back, and we went to Marrakesh for a lovely Morroccan five-course meal, complete with ritual handwashing by the server. I sat on a cushion on the floor, and we ate with our hands. At the end, our hands were sprinkled with a fragrant scented water, and mint tea left a pleasant taste in the mouth.

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Another perfect day.

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Rose

The Park

This park is just a few blocks from the apartment. There is a fountain in summer, with children cooling off from the heat. Yesterday, people were playing bocce, tossing the football, and walking their dogs. There's so much to see and do!

Rose

Fight Hate

I woke up in time to walk to South Park Blocks for the GLTB rally, stopping for a pumpernickel salt bagel on the way. I was disappointed by the size of the crowd and the lack of organization, but it was heartwarming to see gays and lesbians who had shown up to let their voices be heard, so many of them with children. It makes me smile to see these beautiful, loving families with happy children. It angers me that people who sit at home taking their own civil rights for granted would try to strip others of the simple right to marry and adopt children into loving families. There is nothing more hypocritical than that. The Harvey Milk biopic premiered here last night. The top picture is a quote of his. Below is a straight family who showed up to join the protest. Here's hoping that future years find us repealing proposition 8 and similar measures and giving equal rights to all.

a bit of the Pearl

I stepped out to the Jewish deli this morning for their Nova lox on a pumpernickel bagel. On the way back, I snapped a few random shots of the neighborhood. I've been dying to get out and photograph foliage, but I've been busy with the new job every day this week, and moving before that. Today it's raining a little. Maybe the sun will come out later.

rc