Reflection: A Response to Dr. Laura

My sister-in-law sent me a book by Laura Schlessinger, and I read the whole durn thing. Now I’ll concede Dr. Laura a few points: Yes, there are things one shouldn’t put up with from another human being; yes, there are wrong reasons to ’put up with’ things. And yes, one’s primary attachment should be to one’s babies. That said, I’ll spend the rest of this post arguing with Dr. Laura. She argues against “stupid attachment” -- attachment to flawed human beings who aren’t your little kids -- and then describes scenarios that don’t involve attachment at all. I remember an acquaintance, some years back, saying you were not attached to something if you were willing trade it for something else of greater or equal value. Boy, do I stand with him on that one! The I want somebody, I need somebody mentality is an example of dependency; it has nothing, but nothing, to do with attachment.

Now I wonder what Dr.Laura would say about the prairie voles. Prairie voles have been in the news much more often than the average rodent. It’s partly because of them that scientists know that monogamy is a drive, supported by its own neurochemical systems. There's a volume of research that goes back years: scientists wondered why this one species of vole was monogamous and nurtured its young for a long time, when other closely related species weren’t (and didn’t). What was different about this vole’s neurochemical systems -- and were some of those same systems at work in human beings ?

The short answer is yes. Those same systems are in place in people, though they don’t function identically. One of my all-time favorite movies is A Beautiful Mind. The woman in that story… well, there are different types of strength, but hers is the type of strength I can admire. Of course a Dr. Laura could argue that life isn’t the silver screen... and that an over attached person has only themselves to blame when their attachments cause pain. That’s a valid argument. But it’s not valid to equate over-attachment with dependency, or to suggest it’s an affliction of women who lack their own strength, their own self-worth, or their own voice. I think that often -- I’m not going to suggest always -- it's the people who don’t have strong attachment/monogamy drives themselves who most self-assuredly and vocally mistake attachment for weakness.

In-Between: Librivox Link

And I’ve got such a long way to go, just to make it to the border of Mexico/ So I ride, ride like the wind… Psss, wanna cross the border into Canada and... and, well, and record audio for The Little Prince? That particular book is not in the public domain in the US, but I hear it is in Canada! I'm not planning on going to Canada right exactly now, but I did put up a new link: Librivox. You can download public domain (think: old) books in MP3 format, or you can voice-record and upload old books yourself with just free software from Audacity. The Librivox slogan is 'acoustic liberation of books in the public domain': Gotta ride, ride like the wind, to be free again…

Reflection: The Blog Cklog

“But I like to eat cake in the tub,” said the cat (in the hat).
“But I like to publish myself on a daily basis,” I said.
Actually I’m trying to publish myself a bit less than that -- otherwise who would actually read me? I expect I'll not feel the need to write so much as time passes, but right now I have a web log backlog… a blog cklog. Evidently there are lots of people who live life without narrating it -- I'm not sure at what point in childhood I figured that out. As for me, from the time I was a little girl, I narrated the events of my life as they were happening. I would often have some favored person who I talked to inside my head. Cat Stevens has a song with the refrain, “Always talking to you, always talking to you…” Boy, do I know that always-talking-to-you feeling. I've never written for therapy, and the manual process of writing or typing is not, for me, a matter of self-discovery. I do most of the composition in my head before I ever sit down to type or handwrite. I also do some of the editing -- cutting and pasting, moving paragraphs 'round my head like a human version of Works. (No, my brain doesn't have Word 2007, but it was outfitted with quite a good copy of Works.) By the time I sit down in front of a computer, it’s about expression and connection. Sometimes I am writing to connect with just one person -- but I am always writing for an audience of some sort.

Reflection: Friends Who Run Fast Without 3G

I have a friend whose name is spelled the same way forward and backward.
Long after the fact -- long after I had gone so very far away -- he expressed some regrets...
"I got scared," he said.
"Why?" I asked. "Everything I expressed was real."
"I knew that," said my palindrome-named friend. "That's what scared me."
If you are, like me, the kind of person who loves with every breath you take -- or not at all -- it can be hard to control your energy. Another person may pick up on that note of desperation and not know what to make of it; they may be able to see anything and everything but the truth, or they may glimpse something real that scares them.
Referencing the ad I quoted in an earlier post (3G: faster friends) ... Now why would someone want faster friends? Some of us have friends who run plenty fast without electronic enhancement.

In-Between Reflection: Faster friends?

First of all, meet my computer: It's a bitty Acer One netbook that runs XP: the kind of computer you want to talk baby talk to , not because it's a lesser computer, but because it's cute. As soon as I turned the thing on, it started sniffing around for wireless connections (now that seems like major technology to me!) and sending messages: "Google would like to install a toolbar here. Please let Google know whether it can install a toolbar here." The computer seems so competent, it made me wonder: just what are those important tasks the expensive laptops do that this bitty wittle computery-wutery (please do excuse the phrasing) does not do. I was thinking about that when I passed a sign -- "3 G: faster friends" Faster friends??!

Reflection: Authors of Each Other's Lives

If you've read other stories in which my mother appears as a character, you may be surprised by "My Mother's Black Dress". That's a different mother -- or is it?

We are all mixtures of such different things; in disjointed snapshots taken over time, we would likely not impress a stranger as being the same person. Now I'm going to draw an analogy from a particuar book -- though I am not comparing my mother or anyone else to that particular character.

In the closing scene of Stones from the River, the main character sees, in a vision, her first friend: She sees him not as the war-scarred, drinking, wife-beating man he's become, but as the child of thirty-odd years back. She wonders if story still has the power to salvage something of worth: "It had to do with what to tell first - though it hadn't happened first -- and what to end the story with. It had to do with what to enhance and what to relinquish. And what to embrace."

Few people express the power of story -- or their own authorship -- that eloquently. Yet aren't we all, in careless and not so careless ways, the authors of each other's stories? When we describe a person's physical attributes, or quote their words, we're making observations. When we attribute mental states, we're making inferences. And when we share our inferences with other people, we may alter the course of the story, becoming, for good or ill, the authors of each other's lives.