Scandalysis

Part 4 of TBD

New year started on an interesting, yet familiar, note
with (two accounts thus far of) young* beautiful men approaching me IRL, rather than my mind feeding me those during my sleep.
This is not a precedent but is nevertheless strange and unexpected,
and was I vain this woud surely be wonderful fodder for my vanity
but in the circumstances as they are this is more of a burden.

Why is this a burden?

Actually, this looks like the best time to think about this out loud, since there's noone that could take offense as my time is my own and I'm in no fault with any allegiance or commitment.

Of course, I cannot be completely sure, but few traceable facts and educated guesses are that:
- I'm very often told I look quite younger than my age (by people of both genders and many ages)
- young people approach me because they are deceived by my looks (and probably drawn by my openness)
- they did not approach me before just because there was no opportunity since I was usually accompanied by friends (which acted like a barrier both due to socializing constraint and also because it was probably easier not to mis-assess my age in the reference group),
- and now that I usually go out alone the comparison is lacking so I appear as an potential mate

It is a burden because my wish for transparency dictates I should reveal the disproportion
(and there is one, even if it proves irrelevant AFTER informed consent is given)
but it nevertheless feels like going from conflict to conflict
(as it trims short their flirting opportunity by revealing waay too early potential resolutions of the interpersonal situation).

One more interesting bit:
not only young MEN approach me
but young women do not care of the age gap since it is not so strictly socioculturaly penalized in LGBT community like it is in hetero community.


I may be biased but it looks to me that liking someone means more in LGBT community, since it obeys no convention. And I'm not saying this because it would be more beneficial to me in this situation but rather because I think hetero convention could (and ultimately will have to) learn from this approach.

*and when I say young I mean 15 years my junior so at this time this would be 25 as I will be 40 in a month and a half. So I'm not old enough yet for 15 years junior to be truly irrelevant :D

What I think I would like is more questions and less shortcuts

After this prolonged period of blog silence
blog hiatus so to speak
brought on by my unwillingness to share
(alleviated by writing food notes with some recipes in Croatian here on my other space)
I feel I want to air the contents of my scull
by verbalizing my thoughts
which is an exercise I rarely take part in.

Maybe it is time to clear the cobwebs and see what's in the corners.

Since I wrote my last post here on Tuesday
people have expressed their compassion and wished me well
which is all great and I encourage it
but I also think we're speaking different languages
and maybe that this should also be addressed
in an interest of clarity of this here situation described in the last post
and also other instances of emotion inference.

I am not hurt, angry or remorseful or disappointed,
am not wishful or riddled with doubts
and when I say that hollow muscular organ that pumps the blood through the circulatory system by rhythmic contraction and dilation skipped a beat and that my hands shook
it means I sensed the effect of stress in my body
and not that I felt bad.
This a common misconception, I feel,
in many many situations
and it is not brought on by my need to rationalize
but with unclarity of language and personal interpretation of physiological, sense-ladden and not emotion-ladden speech.

What we sense
(opposed by what we "feel" - which is clearly not sense related but thoughts/interpretation-related)
is the input to our cognitive system
and we, on occasion, emote subsequently
yet this emoting is rarely straightforward and often prone to interpretation.
Same wet palms are sometimes sign of stress
and other times proof of love
and I do not really care much about jumping the conclusion
emotion-wise
mostly because I see that lots of people are fully inept to understand or take responsibility for translating senses to responses to stimuli and prerequisites to actions.

Did I or did I not feel bad when I sensed the effect of stress in my body by way of hollow muscular organ that pumps the blood through the circulatory system by rhythmic contraction and dilation skipping a beat and by my hands shaking?

I felt...
startled, surprised, stressed
but also I felt certain I've made the right decision at the time
and sure that by consequence of that decision our eventual meeting would be unpleasant and unfavorable for any of parties involved,
not like earth-shattering extinction event but rather exercise in futility.

Anna Silvers

Marriage is an institution of beauty. Or despair.

As a psychologist and also as a divorced person I read a lot of stuff on marriage and personal relationships. It is a prolific field of research and even more prolific field of abundant anecdotal evidence and heated  unsubstantiated opinions. No other area holds more interest for me than interpersonal relationships and it is as much labor of love as it is the quest for quenching intellectual curiosity thirst.

With that being said real live examples, often quite immediate, are falling close to the heart so to speak, engaging me on levels both private and professional - bringing true discomfort along with captivation.

In the second ever episode of Life there is a great exchange in the beginning, one that captures in its essence the internalization of societal expectations in its full terrifying ridiculousness, one which ends with Dani Reese kneeling over a dead person in a wedding apparel. As we, the viewers, pick up from there it is so easy to overlook that in daily life we may not always encounter complete people lying like that but frequently there are bits of our beliefs left thusly; betrayed expectations, un-communicated fears, hopes given up upon that finally leave us void of our ticking mechanism, nonfunctional. Broken.

At this time in my close proximity in real life there are two open "case studies" so to speak, one with male and one female party being undone by a destructive relationships right in front of our eyes. It is truly disconcerting how little can be done to help other than making ourselves available for them in some possible future event of actual need.

The Solace Pill

"That day, slow and warm, a beam of sunlight caught in honey."

Sometimes I fall in love with a book so strongly I just don’t want the reading to end. Ever.

…And yet it feels so sweet to thread through the pain of the last page and into the sea of appraising complete work afterwards, arranging opinions, weighing impressions, cataloging new entry in great library of my mind.

I really, really loved The Solace Pill Trilogy (omnibus edition containing Solace Inc, Solace End and Preparation 162) by Jason Werbeloff.

Original book cover taken from Smashwords book page.

I found my way to it through weekly NoiseTrade newsletter and I loved cover illustration so I downloaded the book. I started to read it on my iPhone (I find MegaReader app excellent for some reading on the go) and I instantly got enamored with the story so this mode of reading fast, short hits resisted transition to bigger screen for a long time and only when I entered Preparation 162 I decided to ingest the rest of the book in one final big gulp.

It is truly a wonderful idea, this choice of term solace pill. In a time already battling heightened stress conditions and dawn of #firstworldproblems concept this interplay of identity topics with sociological and psychological issues involved is both fascinating and food for the mind. Since science fiction is my favorite genre it is not that I did not encounter transportation/cloning identity issues before but the elegance with which the author Jason Werbeloff had resolved some of opened questions is absolutely endearing and gives this topic fresh look and feel of originality.

What I liked most?

I loved how the author gives us enough details about characters so we can remember their names and put their stories in context but not enough to make us distort the story so we can empathize.

I loved how relationships between characters are straightforward, showing genuine, visceral feel of human motivation. Not all behavior is rationally explainable when it happens and narratives are often chosen post festum, to justify rather than describe.

I enjoyed George and Kora storyline most, its dirty and unsophisticated veneer and rich and personal multitude of difficult questions beneath the surface. Being that personal relationships are always in center of my attention, both as a player of the game and as a psychologist specifically keen to research personal relationships I enjoyed gritty and down to earth process author decided to use for this particular dyad, making it a perfect small-scale example of every topic of the book; from identity to emotion, autonomy to dependence, from personal to social.



This is one wonderful story and I warmly recommend not only reading it but also reading it mindfully and thinking about happenings inside; inside the book and inside your own mind and inside the society present here and now - society already pregnant with solace pill seed.

* Book Review also on my Goodreads page here

It Must Be Love

Last few weeks I have been ruminating on this here blog about men’s  stories, especially relationship narratives (not necessarily romantic in nature) and about self-perceived shortcomings that can be remodeled at will. Many posts are connected to song lyrics and all of them are things I think about when awake, and feel even when asleep. If you’re into this kind of tales go and see other posts with tag “On Relationships”.

And now, let’s continue.

Illustration taken from http://www.windturbinesyndrome.com

It is not easy to find songs to illustrate relationship narratives before everything has gone awry. One could say that  humans are prone to “not rocking the boat” when things are going well. Objectively, there is, of course, logical explanation of fact that we’re not spending much effort describing time when all is well; predictive value of positive events is a lot smaller than for negative events and also we are 3 times as likely to complain then we are to praise.

And yet, most people do not intentionally, with forethought, enter anything, lest relationship talk. They just find themselves in situations and are directed by winds of change much more then with goal-oriented actions. That is why I love this song - It Must Be Love by Labi Siffre  - so much; because it illustrates rarely cool-headed approach to questions of the heart. Being a psychologist I’m acutely aware of people being extremely poor judges of their own states and desires but still it surprises me how rarely observation is used to access one’s own emotional states.

Like noticing that one could do with much more contact with particular people:

I never thought I'd miss you
Half as much as I do
And I never thought I'd feel this way
The way I feel
About you
As soon as I wake up
Every night, every day
I know that it's you I need
To take the blues away

… and to use this observation to base theory on:

It must be love, love, love
It must be love, love, love
Nothing more, nothing less
Love is the best

To further this pursuit of truth one must only follow scientific method some more; by making predictions based on newly established theory:

How can it be that we can
Say so much without words?
Bless you and bless me
Bless the bees
And the birds
I've got to be near you
Every night, every day
I couldn't be happy
Any other way

It must be love, love, love
It must be love, love, love
Nothing more, nothing less
Love is the best

You only need to evaluate evidence: If person/relationship makes you happy, if motivates you for action and makes you a better person this is a good thing. Good things are to be celebrated and maintained so they continue to give pleasure and happiness. It is that simple. And you need no better gauge to measure this then your own self.

As soon as I wake up
Every night, every day
I know that it's you I need
To take the blues away

It must be love, love, love
It must be love, love, love
Nothing more, nothing less
Love is the best

It must be love, love, love...

Noone is on his/her best behavior every day and "accidents" happen that put us in the doghouse but way out of the doghouse is just as simple; observe, theorize, make predictions, direct actions, evaluate evidence.

I love love.

How To Get Rid of Fear of Failure?

I took this picture of cake top in one of Zagreb malls. I love how they look each other as if speaking without words :D

I had an interesting discussion yesterday about the issues of love and, more closely, issue why I see this question of fear of failure wrecking relationships so important.

“It is a question of expectations.”, my friend said. “It is a question of you being hurt by someone so it grows into resentment that makes you see men in an unflattering light.”

Well, no.

I have been hurt by that at some point, but I have been hurt by other things too. And being bisexual I have been hurt also by girls, and I would say that I liked being hurt by girls far less than being hurt by men. But that is all just personal preference.

As I have already said before I like men’s stories more because I feel them more comparable to my own. It is not resentment, it is compassion that determines my emotional reaction to them. It is that I feel I can understand those experiences better because I too feel them firsthand; not at the receiving end of the hurt, but at the giving.

Even though I usually don’t give the impression of having fears of any kind (or so I am told) I do harbor a fear or two that could be classified as crippling fears that f%#k up performance. And they have cost me both gratification and relationships.

That I really did not like.

I did not like the losses, I did not like the consequences and I especially did not like being responsible for allowing the fear to control me.

That was just unacceptable.

I come from the long lineage of people who do not rock the boat and are perfectly content to live their whole life in unsatisfactory conditions all the while complaining about them, but not changing anything. I am in position to see firsthand what are the consequences of choice of that lifestyle and how my life would look, decades into the future, if no changes are made. As all men must make that choice for themselves - to proceed with life by inertia or to swim against the current - I made my choice and I’m living this choice now.

How do you get rid of fear of failure? And, even more - how do you get rid of fear of responsibility? (what used to be my biggest problem, and sometimes still is)

You start by baby steps;

1. Identify the behavior that causes the problem and admit that there is an emotion of hmm… unpleasantness that propels that behavior. Understand that emotion you may not be able to tackle directly, but behavior is completely in your power to control. You could carry that emotion with you for some time more, even after you change behavior, but this will not last forever. You should know this and should not let yourself be discouraged by this lingering feeling. Everything in life takes time (as it also took time for your fear to disrupt your daily life) so it is understandable that this does also.

2. Find example to emulate; someone who you would like to be like. Someone who shows consistent behavior that reflects values you would like yourself to reflect. It can be real person or character from a book, series, movie, game.

3. Imitate. Imitation is first stage of acquiring any new skill and it is also sincerest form of compliment. Mold your behavior to look like behavior you admire and grow closer to the person you wish to be.

4. Build on that. Be vigil to feedback, every some time ask yourself is there something else you wish to change or simply stop for a while and admire the good work you’ve done. Reward yourself with some experience you thought inaccessible to the person who you used to be.

Some people will not support the change and you will have to leave them behind. Don’t worry, everyone who really is your friend and not a parasite will welcome the improved you. Some parasites will also join you later, learning from your example (and showing you how excellent your quest really was). Some days will be easier than the others and some will stink and be boring and hard and “Why the fuck am I doing this?!” but they will grow fewer and fewer and further apart from each other and you just need to persevere.

Once or twice you will “fall of a wagon” and fuck up a situation or three but in time you will learn to enjoy those instances because they will show you how far you have come in your quest to be…

Free.

Stressed days

I work in clinical trials field for just a month less than seven years now. It is a high stress job but also very challenging and educational, so I am pleased with it because it feeds into my highest values.

And yet sometimes, like this week, stress is quite overwhelming and if I weren’t focusing all my mental efforts into dealing with work-related issues I would try to multitask and would end up spreading myself too thin.

I do not wait to crack, I inform close ones in advance that I’ll be less readily available and it works well, cutting on misunderstandings and additionally getting a heaping portion of social support.

I like this modus operandi, one that is product of years of trial and error.

In the evening I cook dinner and listen to offspringess drone on about school issues and Minecraft and youtube tutorials and I have myself some high-fiber date sweetened oatmeal carob cookies and I roll myself in blanket and kittens come and sleep on top of me while I read a book.

Life feels sweet and well-portioned and I thoroughly enjoy it, even with the stress and all.

Under The Skin

Recently I read Michael Faber’s novel Under the skin and I loved it.

Original book cover in Croatian (Publisher: Celeber)

As I have precious little time that I can invest in quality reading between full time job and full time single parenting I read it at night, when house grew silent. Usually I am too tired to read at this time but not while reading this book; from the first page it captured my whole attention and I was coming home looking forward to picking it up when possible.

I loved it.

I loved the atmosphere of practicality, of natural state of things. I loved how Faber showed us the world through Isserley that is very true to reality; between small islands of doing “stuff” there are vast oceans of nothingness. Idling. He successfully avoided the need to over-explain and to fill natural gaps with babbling.

I loved the clever details, thrown around the book like Easter eggs, indicating this and that, left hanging for us to put into perspective. I loved thinking how similar her experience is to ours, or better, mine; if I was a person in similar circumstances how would I behave? Would TV give ME enough to work on? Where does my morality draw its arbitrary lines at the table? How much could necessity mold me and how pliable do I believe I should be?

I loved scarcity of details that gave the imagination wings to fill the blank spots describing her life before, her comrades here, differences that were bridged to make everything possible.

I loved the blurring of borders between “us” and “them” and how writer discuses some of human practices openly hiding them in plain sight.

One of the things I loved most, thing that is maybe (in my opinion at least) most difficult to imagine or to replicate is game changer (rape) scene and it is extremely well envisioned and described. It feels eerily real and it is difficult to imagine that anyone not already familiar with the situation could describe it so … real. We see a lot of them in the movies and vast majority of that scenes are plain stupid, staged and over pronounced but this one is … is correct. Cold and fright and survival instinct being brought forward from below. Shudder.

And about the end I loved that there was duty before survival. No bargaining and no negotiation, no vanity and no empty hopes. No pathos, just life - back to basics: us versus them.

* Book review also on my Goodreads page here.

Oz the Great and Powerful: The Prize for Greatness

I’ve seen Oz The Great and Powerful on Saturday and I can’t stop grinning ever since. This is one great and powerful movie if I ever saw one. Now that my general impression is out of the way and I told you I loved the movie, let me get into more details.

Original Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) Poster - owned by Disney

Oz the Great and Powerful, Frank Baum and the Wizard of Oz

I have read gazillion reviews, some of which you can find here on Metacritic, but I haven’t find even one addressing meaningful questions about this movie. Fans and critics both have fallen into same simple trap of not watching the movie before them but feverishly desiring to fulfill one’s own expectations.

This is not really unexpected but is nevertheless funny. So I grin.

Reviewers/commenters (both critics and layman) say that there is no Oz. No Judy Garland. No patting audience on the back and no fodder for nostalgia. That is, of course, true. But on the other hand this is an example of pure brilliance of using psychological validity in making something out of nothing. Something unexpected. Magic. There is magical product inside magical package prepared by process no less magical because few of us can recount its constituent parts.

I can almost see some past meeting in some high-end back yard with selected few guests from movie industry, fashion maybe, some realtors and some know-it-alls and there happened to be few guys from Disney production company, maybe Mr. Franco, Mrs. Williams and Sam Raimi over some lovely catering spread and some cool drinks and with conversation going something like this:

Disney guys: We’re just recycling over and over and that is cool, I mean, but I wonder if there is something more we could do with all this material. Not that we need it, but we’re - kinda - bored.

Sam Raimi: Anything particular you have in mind to transmute?

DG: Well, no, not really, now that you ask. Anything. Everything. It just feels so dead.

James Franco: Don’t say things like that in front of almost PhD in English literature! [laughs] You have classics there, both cinematic and literary: Caroll, Barrie, Kästner, Baum - there’s ton of stuff you can do with them. This in pure gold.

SR: Dead, you say? I am specialist for dead [grinning widely, eyes glaze over with the flood of idea].

So they did not recycle. They made new stuff. Stuff that will be family entertainment, that would contain moral values we all could use and many of us miss dearly, stuff that does not “answer questions nobody asked” as one reviewer nicely puts but just the contrary - tries to give guidelines on how to grow up into honesty and integrity many of today’s adults-by-age sorely lack. And they do it all with cunning style, making use of long known psychological law known as Mere-exposure effect. They harvest the controversy, reap expectations, monetize nostalgia. They have used shroud of implicit contextual knowledge (social knowledge, no less) to bring forth bouquet of freshly picked CG enhanced flowers and not dried-up mementos of times passed.

To say I’m impressed would be to underestimate greatly.

James Franco:

I just love seeing how much people are blatantly underestimating his value as an actor due to his exquisite beauty. This guy is for real, kids! Not only that he is one of the most intelligent people in show business, he’s also intelligent enough not to make a spectacle of his IQ. We have a saying here in Croatia and it goes:”Tiha voda brege dere” (silent stream tears away mountains, very akin to “Still waters run deep”) and after seeing many of his films and reading many an interview I can say that this saying fits him like a glove.

I love how they have (actor and director both) made Oscar approachable, understandable and satirically over-expressive because, as Oscar Wilde finely put it so long time ago: “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you”

Mila Kunis:

... is just perfect as a person that loses her naivety at the doorstep of adulthood and finds herself filled with nothing but malice and spite. It is a rookie mistake that can still be corrected and I love how it was pictured like that in the movie also. Those tear-filled eyes one cannot fake without tasting despair once or twice for realsies and I congratulate to whoever picked her for this role.

Rachel Weisz:

... did a wonderful job being thief of opportunity. Evanora (Nomen est omen?) is not really evil but just in a position to claim things that doesn’t belong to her because no one is contesting her for them. She is not really evil but she has never had to be good. She is beautiful, manipulative, tactful and bored to tears. Bureaucratic evil.  In the end she falls prey to her own inability to adjust, rather than strength of an opponent - she just wasn’t prepared to defend her own - because she never learned how - because she never had to. One more character type we see every day of our lives if we only just look.

And finally, Michelle Williams. The good witch.

I don't like Michelle Williams. I find the discrepancy between her angel-like appearance and flat nihilism lurking out of her eyes disturbing, but this is what made her perfect for this role (just like many other roles before, like Cindy or Alma, to name a few). Sardonic remarks coming out of her mouth somehow make the perfect poison dart and yet I suspect there could be many a male (and quite a bit of females) who could not read the spoken from her lips, and could not hear it from too concentrated watching.

So, what is this all about? 

SPOILER ALERT! Do not read below if you would not like to know details from the movie!

Oz the Great and Powerful is a story about a man not wanting to grow up. It is very smartly made, using every dramatization trick and psychology gimmick there is. The only character in this movie is Oscar Diggs/Wizard of Oz and all the others are NPC's (= Non-player Character - I'm borrowing gaming lingo in lack of a better term), personifications in service of illustrating the point in question. Point in question is beautifully stated by our own protagonist and it is as follows: "Oscar Diggs died, so that the Wizard could live."

Right from the very first moment, shown in black and white, all of "real life" is shown colorless just like the protagonist sees it; small, frustrating, unimportant, boring. He is immoral, mean and petty and makes others feel as insignificant as he finds himself to be. Among other things he leaves behind a slew of broken hearts with nary a worry in his mind, using one and the same stupid pick-up line on each of them and consoling himself with the notion that they will get over him "as all of the others did", not really ever accepting responsibility for his actions nor showing a least bit of empathy for anything that surrounds him.

Then, he is faced with great fear (from death) and a change of scenery, into colorful and magic world of all things that could be. This is the world his great fear pushed him into. The world that exists only in the realm of his overinflated escapistic dreams - but he does not know that yet.

He slowly learns that not many dream stuff is what he expects it to be; that many beautiful things are in reality poisonous and that many relationships he took for granted in the real world were actually undeserved perks. It doesn't take long for him to begin to doubt his choices - things seem uncomfortably real when you have to say them out loud and not just implicitly take them as they come. This culminates when he meets Glinda and "recognizes" her as Annie, the woman who loves him in the real world and whose love he dismissed just before his terrifying trip to Oz. In one heartbreaking and magnificent scene all that he is is put in plain sight before him:

Oz: [whispering to Glinda, as her city celebrates his arrival] You know, I should tell you. I might not actually be a wizard...
Glinda: Yes, I know.
Oz: Oh?
Glinda: Well, at least not any kind of wizard we were expecting.
Oz: Uh, you could tell?
Glinda: Yes. I can also tell you're weak, selfish, slightly egotistical, and a fibber.
Oz: I see. Anything you don't know about me?
Glinda: Whether or not you'll save my people.
Oz: Ah, no, I just told you I'm not the wizard.
Glinda: But they don't know that. If you can make them believe, then you're wizard enough. (sadly) These are desperate times, after all. Can you make them believe?
Oz: (nervously) Um... Will I... still get that gold?
Glinda: (surprised) Ah. [nods her head yes]
Oz: [to the crowd] Good people of Oz. Your wizard is here!

And this is really what life is. Life is nothing until we give it meaning, and here he starts to learn how he can add meaning to his life.

Being mature is not a question of age or we wouldn't have so many 30 and 40-somethings squealing on social networks and victimizing themselves over mundane tasks and making a mess of both their own and their parents/partners/children/co-workers lives. Being mature is a question of realizing the connectedness of society and one's own power to positively influence their surroundings and to guide their life instead of just endure it. Being mature is taking responsibility for one's own actions not because this is "the right thing to do" but because it is the only way to live life. "If not now, when? If not I, who?" as Rabbi Hillel concisely said.

Awakened Oscar learns he does not have to start from scratch to turn his life around. He realizes all the things he already knows can (and should) be utilized in uniting his dreamworld with real world. And then we come to seeing through this unification, by words: "Oscar Diggs died, so that the Wizard could live." His weak, shortsighted and fake personality had to die so he himself could live. The illusionist was finally seen as an act, a persona and not a person and when seen for what it really is it could no more be sustained (this is one of the greatest psych gimmicks used here - my favorite: curse of knowledge)

What we really got is the best Oz we could get, because all of those squealing 30 and 40-somethings I mentioned above are just the ones that remember The Wizard of Oz best and they are the ones that can learn most by seeing this film. Film about family and about meaning, about taking responsibility and prioritizing, about how rare and precious is to have somebody believe in you (all the while knowing who you really are).




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Update:

I found  one review addressing meaningful questions from this movie and you can find it here.