The second New Year’s began with a series of minor domestic disasters.

The moment N started carving the turkey, the plate cracked and the stuffing (that’s quite mushy because it consists of alcohol-drenched currants) started spilling all over the table.

At that very moment, the chimney started – for no reason whatsoever – to send clouds of smoke into the house. Fire alarms on all 3 floors started blaring.

N rushed to save the turkey. I rushed to open the door to let the smoke out.

And, of course, at that moment I slipped and fell flat on my back.

And, of course, N freaked out, dropped the turkey and rushed to pick me up.

Ultimately, I’m fine, the chimney came to its senses, the turkey was salvaged (and turned out to taste sensationally good) but it took us about an hour to straighten everything out and get on with the dinner.

As a result, there are no pictures. Maybe we’ll have to do a third New Year’s that will be a little less eventful.

So remember this blogger whose personal life we followed? New year, new guy, and what do you think? Three minutes into the relationship, she’s going out of her way to be useful to the fellow, cooking, cleaning, babysitting, acting some sort of a bizarre 1950s wife fantasy. Of course, the fellow is creeped out and withdraws.

People who don’t value themselves are of little value to others. But a person who is not capable of self-awareness will never even try to figure out why everybody keeps running away. She’ll hide from the truth behind inanity. “Dating is difficult. Relationships are hard work. That’s the way things are.” And it’s not about education or intelligence. This poor woman described her interactions with her family, and it became crystal clear why she is so beaten down and lacking in self-awareness.

This is all very sad. But even though she’s not helping herself, she can help others who will see these patterns and decide to stop being self-destructive.

In our second year of life, we select and consolidate our worldview. . . This happens before we acquire the necessary life experience and maturity to understand the nature of the obligations we assume in this way. . . For most of our lives, we strengthen this worldview and protect it from any threat. We avoid all situations that threaten this worldview.

-Eric Berne.

If for years you seem to be stuck in the same intolerable situation – constantly running out of money two days before the paycheck, always ending up with uncaring and cold partners, remaining stuck for decades in a job you hate, feeling permanently frustrated in everything you undertake, hating your living situation for years on end –  the only way out of it is to ask yourself these questions:

1. If I didn’t have to be constantly miserable about and struggling with this situation, what would I be doing instead?
2. What specifically is so scary to me about this thing that I’d be doing instead?

Accepting that one remains in the intolerable situation because its familiarity is comforting is hard because a feeling of guilt immediately follows. “If I choose to live this way, then I must be to blame,” people think. But this way of thinking is precisely one of the defenses that Berne is talking about in the quote I gave above. There is no need to feel bad. This is an adaptive mechanism that everybody uses. All it means is that you are human, and that’s definitely not your fault. 

An example of how this worked for me is under the fold.

Continue reading “Escaping Permanent Misery” →

Carnival has existed for centuries as a space where people could shed their inhibitions, forget social conventions, laugh, stop trying to look serious and respectable all the time, and instead be irreverent and disrespectful for a change.

We don’t have carnavalesque spaces any more. Whenever anybody tries to make a joke, an army of sour puss prudes emerges to lecture on some entirely idiotic distinction between “punching up and punching down.” And then some idiot begins to share tales of horrible trauma caused by the joke, and all fun dies under the angry glares of the self-righteous.

The congenitally humorless publish endless exhortations denouncing people for not taking every one of their neuroses into account when trying to express themselves.

In the absence of regular, socially acceptable ways to vent, playful, irreverent impulses curdle, rot, and begin to emit noxious fumes. When they finally escape – and the repressed always returns, no matter how much you try to stuff it under a mountain of prohibitions – they look like Trump’s mocking of the disabled and inspire a burning desire to rebel by inflicting a Cruz or a Trump on the world.

There is a crowd of people bearing responsibility for the bastardization of the political space that we are witnessing, and the prudes who trawl social networks and blogs looking for a sentence, a word or a pronoun to feel mortally offended by are among them.

There is a company that, as a reward to workers who have stayed on for 5 years, buys the employees a two-way ticket absolutely anywhere in the world they want to visit. The rewards for staying on 1, 2 and 3 years are also great.

What people don’t tell one about Uber is that it’s only partly a rideshare app. It’s also a sociability app. Drivers expect to socialize during the rides and react with incomprehension and resentment if one tries to read or text while being driven.

As a result, one gets to meet quite a lot of strangers one would never meet otherwise and discover how complex people are if one takes Uber often. 

Today, for instance, my driver was a 47-year-old fellow who started out with an anti-Michael Brown rant. That immediately made me wonder how I would stick out the rest of the 1-hour-long ride. From Michael Brown and exuberant praise for brave police officers, the talkative driver with a Bible prominently displayed on the dashboard (I’m not being critical or anything since my Bible is bigger than his Bible) segued to the subject of Muslims.

“God have mercy on us,” I thought.

But it turned out I was too quick to place the fellow into an identity box. He offered a very nuanced and insightful discussion of the Koran. And then moved on to praise Canada’s state healthcare system and conclude that, “Say what you will about him, but there are things this Bernie Sanders guy is right about.”

After that, he shared his profound dislike of Bosnian refugees (who are a large local community) and informed me that there are women who actually like working even though they are married.

Don’t think I was just sitting there quietly, though. I used the opportunity to convert the driver from a very pro-Russian stance to a more Ukrainian-friendly one.

Understanding oneself is a great luxury. And not just in existential but also in dumbly economic terms. 

For the less fortunate, there is a cheap alternative: joining an identity group! The more active people are in constructing their identity category, the more wounded they are.

Here is an interesting article on the subject. Of course, compared to its author, I’m even more privileged because I undergo a much more complex, slow, in-depth and expensive form of therapy.

Trump won. Which is good because we want him to get the nomination.

Cruz had prepared some good material and delivered it almost convincingly but Trump responded to everything with great ease. Good improv always triumphs over the capacity to recite the lines somebody else wrote for you.

Gosh, and here we all thought it was going to be a boring election. I’m awed and amazed to see an actual democratic system at work. This is very beautiful, people.

“Dad, what is this that you are wearing on your head?”

“It’s a keffiyeh, son. In the desert, it protects us from the scorching sun.”

“And what’s this you are wearing over your clothes?”

“It’s a djellaba, son. In the desert, it protects us from the burning heat.”

“But why are you wearing all this in winter in Cologne, Dad?”

“Straighten your hijab, son, and shut up, or they’ll send us back to Donetsk.”