Lately I’ve been slowly reading through a book called “The Art of Communicating” by Thich Nhat Hanh.  Why would I read such a book?  Well, because I often feel like I’m pretty terrible at accurately communicating my thoughts to people.  When it comes to the written word, when I have time to think about exactly what I want to say, it comes out pretty good most of the time.  But, there are instances where I feel helpless to communicate exactly what I am trying to say even then.  I tend to write very haphazardly as well.  While I’m writing a post such as this one, I will go back and insert a new sentence or paragraph here or there, or decide a different order works better and copy and paste things around.  So when it comes to speaking, where I only have one shot at it, I just am not as good.  I tend to hang on to whatever I have to say perhaps a little bit too long as I think it over before I actually say it.  I think this certainly CAN be a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing.  At the very least I rarely blurt out anything that I immediately regret.

A couple weeks ago I began studying Japanese.  I’m not sure why I suddenly got the motivation… I mean, I can point to reasons why I think it would be cool/useful to know, but there’s nothing particularly new.  In part I think it was because I was speaking with a friend on Facebook about it and he just sort of suggested “well why not learn it then?”, and I guess my thought was… “yeah… why not?”  And so I set about doing so.

My friend got me started a little bit and then I sought out some iphone apps to help in the process.  So fair I’ve been using Mirai Japanese and iStart Kana (which is also made by Mirai).  I feel like they’ve been pretty helpful thus far.

My only experience with other languages prior to this was a tiny bit of French (I switched schools and the school I switched to did not have a French class, so, I did not continue), and then Spanish.  Both of those languages use roman letters, so there is nothing new to learn in that regard, and it’s just vocabulary and grammar.  With Japanese, one must learn 2 syllaberies, hiragana (ひらがな) and katakana (カタカナ) and then also kanji (chinese characters), which I haven’t even really started on yet.  I can recognize a handful…  the main one being Japan (日本).  Kanji is rather intimidating as there are literally thousands of them… so I’m waiting until I have the kana down before I really make an effort to start learning it.

Since I started I have to say I have found it extremely interesting, if confusing.  Looking at a completely different language and thinking that to someone else your language is the strange foreign thing that is confusing and doesn’t make any sense is sort of fascinating.  It’s really sort of bizarre that these sounds and symbols are sort of intrinsically understood by us…  and in our native tongue, without us even thinking about it.

It’s also interesting to see the reasons why Japanese speakers have the accents they do when speaking english.  One of the things that I found interesting early on is that there is no tone change when asking a question in Japanese.  In english, consider the difference in how you would say “Follow me.” (a command) vs. “Follow me?” a question.  Japanese uses the question marker か to indicate a question… if I am speaking it to myself (I wouldn’t try to speak it to anyone else at this point.. haha) and I know I am asking a question, I find it very hard to NOT use the rising tone.  I don’t know if that changes the meaning at all in Japanese, but I know it’s not used to indicate that you’re asking a question.

Anyway, I don’t know how long it will take before I’m able to actually read or speak anything of use in Japanese, but for now I’m happy with the progress I’m making on learning hiragana.  I actually recognize most of the characters now.  Considering when I first looked at it I wasn’t convinced my brain would be able to remember any of them…  that gives me hope that I might actually be able to learn the rest of this stuff yet!

It’s been 24+ hours now from when I deactivated Facebook. I had an accidental reactivation briefly this morning when I logged in to Spotify… it seems my account is inseparably tied to Facebook, so, I had to create a new one. No big deal. I went into Facebook and immediately clicked the links needed to deactivate again. So there’s no need to restart the clock on it.

At the end of the first full day, I have to say I feel pretty good about the decision. I think I was generally more focused today on anything I was doing. I definitely kept having recurring urges to flip over to a Facebook tab in my browser that is now nonexistent, but after a while those urges made me start to think that it really is a good idea to cut it off. In addition to that, I would sometimes come across information that gave me that “I need to share this” feeling. For instance, some article debunking the whole iPhone bending issue thing. I started thinking about why I would want to share such things, and in all honesty I think it’s out of some need for validation

I thought about maybe using twitter or something else which provide part of what Facebook does with less of the negative impact I feel Facebook has on me, but, I decided against it. I also decided on a minimum timeframe to abstain from all of what I will define as “social media”. For the record, things like instant messengers and Reddit don’t fit in how I am choosing to define it, but anything approaching Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc, do. I guess the difference being things like Reddit aren’t primarily about me or interacting with people who I know. And with instant messengers, well, it’s a much more personal form of communication than Twitter or Facebook.

Additionally, I’m going to keep mum on the blog. I will keep updating it, but I’m not going to say anything to anyone about it. So, my guess is, the readership has dropped and will remain at an average of 1 (that 1 being myself). That’s good though, because I really just want to be writing this for me anyway.

I did it. I pulled the plug on my facebook account. It’s something I’ve pondered doing before, but never did before now. I don’t know how long I’ll stay away. Permanently? I’d say probably not, but who knows. It’s kind of an experiment.

So what would make me want to kick Facebook to the curb?

Well, let’s start with the reason I talked myself out of deactivating my account for such a long time. When the subject of Facebook came up in real world conversation, any time someone would speak of it in a sense such as “I don’t really use it,” I would generally say something like “Yeah, I probably wouldn’t use it at all if it weren’t for it letting me keep in touch with people I otherwise probably wouldn’t.” That was a true statement, that is what convinced me that I should stay on.

I kind of hate shallow relationships. I’m an all or nothing kind of guy. If I like you, I’m in it 100%. I’m not a big fan of small talk and the like. Now, since I’m in it 100%, but I’m all or nothing, it gets weird when it becomes difficult to maintain that 100% (say, you live on the opposite side of the country). Well, Facebook offered this neat little thing where I can be “in it” in the world of cyberspace, but not so much in the real world. And that is kind of OK in some circumstances.

However, I feel like in some situations Facebook has been stressing me out on an almost subconscious level for some time. That can be for various reasons. There’s that whole effect of seeing the best of one person’s life and comparing it with the worst of yours, which can definitely mess with your head. It’s certainly a kind of addiction because it makes you feel that you need to see what is going on with people. Certainly, I was far less addicted than many people are, and also probably the least I have been at any point in my own life. Still, it consumed time and attention… and I’d flick over to it randomly so often that it really feels weird that I can’t do that right now.

The biggest reason goes back to that staying in touch with people and my hatred of shallow relationships though. I sort of realized Facebook is just sort of fostering ultra-shallow, casual, passive, not really real relationships. There are some people who I just sort of felt like I was bothering them when I’d message them, and well, I don’t really need that. Sometimes I’d want to actually talk to the person and I’d just get a few minutes of sporadic messages of fluff and then nothing. But I’d still feel compelled to send messages to certain people if I noticed them on and hadn’t talked to them in some time.

And so, I decided to rid myself of it. No more stress. If you have my email address, you can email me. If you have my phone number, you can call me or text me. With the exception of a short list of people, I’m not likely to contact you more than once without you contacting me, because I’m tired of being more in it than you are.

So we’ll see how this goes. Maybe without Facebook in the mix I’ll be better at all of this.

It is safe to assume that everyone is familiar with the philosophical mandate to “know thyself.” What is seemingly a simplistic and easily achievable direction turns out to not be that way. Identifying who you are and why you are the way you are is a process that takes years. It may even take stepping aside from that mandate and answering another: “know thy kind”.

I find that my struggles have less to do with the reality of me than they do with my perception of others to include my perception of how they perceive me, which brings us back to me as the source of my own problems. Because in a certain sense self awareness *IS* easy. Conclusions can be drawn about things pertaining to one’s self comparatively easily because we have all the facts available. While we may delude ourselves for a time, if we’re seeking the truth about ourselves we will eventually come clean. But to know our kind, or to put it another way, to know others, is another proposition entirely.

One of the first conclusions that I can draw is that in many ways other people are exactly like me. It seems that most people probably assume that people are like them in most ways. As an example, people who lie generally have trouble trusting other people. Obviously, just because someone has trust issues that doesn’t mean you can simply assume they are a liar, but it is worth making such observations about people. So in a certain way the way that I see you is as a reflection of myself, just as you see me as a reflection of yourself. It would be nigh impossible for either of us to perceive the other as we are.

My thoughts on this were sparked by a talk given by Aaron Weiss. The thing that I like about his speaking, and also his lyrics, is that he has this ability to be so honest about who he is that it causes me to see who I am. He spoke of our perception of love versus I guess the reality of love… if you believe in God then you might say the sort of love that we believe God has. I’m too lazy to go back through the video to get the exact quote, but to paraphrase him, we treat love like a business transaction. You can watch it yourself if you want: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_EJZZHVKhI (the audio is terrible, but I promise it’s worth it).

He further elaborates that to us love isn’t really something that is selfless and unconditional. The thing that we call love is almost entirely based on selfishness. This is the case in both the love you have for a friend as well as romantic love. If you are my friend, I love you because of the things you do for me, or because you are pleasurable to be around, or because you are nice for me. If you were mean to me, or if you were miserable to be around, I don’t think I would have love for you. And it’s the same with romantic love, and it’s why so many relationships end in crushing depression. We all want love but none of us seem to have any idea what in the hell that means.

And so there is this game that we play, where we use that part of which we know to try to make people love us. And, at least for me, I can only assume for you, it all based on this obsessive need to have this thing called love. But if it’s based on how that person makes me feel, and on how I make them feel, or on what we do for each other, or us generally being nice to each other, that’s not going to be enough. The thing is, when I heard Aaron Weiss say that, I thought what I have to assume you are thinking: “well that’s not love!” But then, as I tried to mentally formulate a rebuttal as to why he was wrong, nothing really came to mind. I can choose to love someone in the sense that I can choose to do 2/3 of that list, even when the first third, the feeling, isn’t there. But I’m just not sure that is real love. But I lack any other definition.

So I put expectations on people. If I buy you a drink I expect to be thanked. Perhaps if I go on a certain number of dates and do the right things I expect reciprocation. If I do something nice for you, I expect that you will later do something nice for me. I don’t think I’m saying anything here that isn’t true about everyone.

There are things that I do or don’t do based on how I believe that you see me. I probably act differently around you than I do around someone else. When I think about it, the anxiety I feel in large groups probably mostly has to do with me not being able to figure out how I should be when I’m around person x, person y, and person z. And none of this is conscious. I don’t intentionally act differently, but at the same time, I know that I *DO* act differently.

My next thought is of why I think that is. The answer is that I think you’re better than me. I really do, almost regardless of who you are (yeah, I could probably think of a few people who I don’t think that about). The reason why I think that is pretty simple… I know all the bad shit about me that I wouldn’t want anyone to know. And well, generally speaking, I don’t know any of that about you. Just like I put my best foot forward in social interactions, so, I must assume, do you. And yet I seem to assume that I am somehow special and I’m the only one with that going on as I interact with people.

There’s a line in the song “Messes of Men” that goes “I’d never want someone so crass as to want someone like me.” Now that is a line that I can connect with. But I guess the real truth is that we’re all a mess, we’re all crass.

And so I wonder if love really has something to do with truly understanding each other… with somehow overcoming any distance between us. One of Jesus’ prayers was for us to “become one”. And it’s my view that he was speaking of something a bit deeper than agreeing on theology, and I don’t think there’s any danger of complete theological agreement happening any time soon. Another Biblical usage of this idea of oneness is presented for a man and a woman in marriage, and so it does seem to be connected to love. Perhaps seeing each other as reflections isn’t quite right, perhaps the lines should be blurred just a bit more, until we can’t tell us apart.

I mentioned in one of my early posts since rebooting this blog that a very long post would be coming.  This is that post.

This is a very personal story.  Obviously, if I weren’t ok with all of it being common knowledge I wouldn’t post it here.  As with most things here, it is mainly for the benefit of my own reflection, but I hope that it might help you in some way.  Also, it represents one side of a story, I’m sure there are differences on the other side.  Probably only a handful of people know the story in its entirety, but here it will be very complete.

5 years ago, life was very different for me.  I lived in Maryland.  I worked as an integration technician for a government contractor.  Oh yes, and I was married to a girl (yes, I think girl is an apt description) named Holly.  I was generally quite content with life.  Then something happened.  That’s kind of the setup for most stories.  We have our hero, and all is well in his world, until one day, something happens that threatens the wellness of his world.  Not that I’m a hero, but, well, screw it, I’ll be a hero in my version of this story.

As was the norm, I woke up and got ready for work.  The night before Holly had seemed a bit down.  I approached her about it and she told me she was just tired, so I had decided to let her sleep, and left the bedroom so as not to disturb her.  However, that morning was not particularly memorable.  I’m not a morning person, so I’m sure that has a bit to do with it as well.  I do remember that we drove separately that day.  Oh yeah, we worked at the same place.  She was the receptionist in the building.  No, we didn’t meet there, I had helped her to get that job when I learned it would be opening, but that’s not important to the story.  Anyway, driving separately didn’t seem that significant, sometimes either she or I would be running late and rather than both of us being late, we’d just do that.  So, that day she seemed to be running late.  Fair enough.

At some point during the day, she told me that she wanted to meet and talk somewhere after work, and we decided to go to Baker Park. I arrived there first, and sat on a bench by the road and waited for her to arrive.  After several minutes, she drove up and walked over, sitting on the other side of the bench.  She told me that she wasn’t happy, and that she needed some time apart to think about things.  She also handed me a page from her journal that she had written the night before.

“I can’t sleep.  This is the first time I can remember something bothering me so bad I can’t sleep.  I keep thinking… about the countless nights I go to sleep alone.  About how far apart we truly are.  We still have our pet names and hold hands and kiss, but it’s all just habit.  For the past 7 months I think both of us have tried more than ever.  To understand, to love each other as man and wife.  My patience is waning.  How much longer should we try and hope against hope?  How much more can we put ourselves through?  What are we missing in the meantime?

The last time I had this gut feeling was 10-14-2005

It’s not very fair to either of us to go on like this.  How much happier would he be with someone who likes LOTRO and games and movie theaters and his friends?  How much longer can I tell myself “No you fit in.  It’s all in your head.”  Do I want to let my pride win by saying “I don’t care the cost, I’m going to stick it out.”  Even if it costs both our happiness.  I’m going to prove to everyone we’re going to stay together.  Even if we would both be happier with no one at all.

When we first started dating we said if we ever split up, it would be mutual.  I wonder if he still feels this way?

Also, if this would really be better for both of us… why do I feel that knot in my throat?  Why do I feel more pain now than when I left home?  Is it because I’m overreacting in PMS or is it because I’m facing a truth I’ve known about and ignored for years?”

At some point in the conversation she talked about how she had left the room after I came down to bed, because she hadn’t been able to sleep.  She said she hoped I would realize she had gone, and come up and talk to her, almost as though the fact that I didn’t was a sign of some kind.  For my part, I don’t recall her leaving the bed, and so I can only assume I was already asleep by the time she did so.

Oh yeah, an explanation is due concerning that date she wrote.  That refers to when she left her home in Texas to come and live with my family in Maryland.  She had… not the best home life, which no doubt contributed to this situation.  Anyway…

I can’t remember what I did say, but I do know that I was taken completely off guard, and needed to gather my thoughts.  After all, just maybe a month before for Easter she had given me a card in which she wrote “I love you more than ever.”  And generally by all appearances things seemed to be getting better between us, and not worse.  Regardless, we agreed to meet up the next day to talk.

That night was pretty rough.  I don’t think I slept much, and I thought a lot about what I wanted to say to her, and really what I could do to make things better.  I was determined to make things better.

The next day arrived.  It was a workday.  Being that I was miserable, I called in to say I couldn’t make it.  I can’t recall what I did that day, but I do know that when I tried to get Holly to meet me, she said that she wasn’t ready, and so, we didn’t meet that day.

Here is where I’m going to interject a bit of history.  This is a part that I don’t talk about really ever, mainly because even if the fact that I was married comes up in conversation (which is pretty rare), this part certainly doesn’t.  Very shortly after we got married, I found out that she was talking to some guy online, which included “cybersex” and the like.  This bothered me, and I confronted her about it, and it stopped.  It then went into the past.  Ultimately, it was only an online thing and she didn’t really know this person, so it wasn’t quite “real”.  I don’t recall exactly how much later, perhaps a year, maybe a bit less, and I again find out she is talking to someone online, doing similar things.  This time with a guy that was from her hometown.  I can’t recall exactly how I initially stumbled upon it, I think I was using her computer for something , but at any rate I saw something and then started digging and found several damning conversations.  The thing that actually bothered me more than anything about it was how hateful and mean a lot of what the guy said about me to her was, and that she didn’t defend me at all.   But, to make it as short as possible, this time there was a bit of a bigger blowout, but it ultimately resolved again.  Then there was the third time, just a few months later, but this time not online.  I still don’t know for sure how far things progressed, but it involved intimate talk and at least some physicality for sure (this is to say, I don’t believe they went so far as to actually have sex, but I have no way of knowing for sure).  This was with a person at work, who I worked with.  This time I was pretty enraged by the whole thing.  It’s hard to remember all the details, and summing it up it sounds pretty simple, but, after some time it sort of got patched up, with an understanding that it just simply couldn’t happen again.

Obviously, in hindsight, it seems odd that this would happen with any regularity and I would be caught off guard that something was wrong some 7 months later.  However, it is those 6 months in which I genuinely felt that things were getting better and better.  As she had said in her letter, we had both been working on it harder than ever, and to me it seemed to be working.  Evidently not to her, though she never told me about that prior to this letter.

Ok, so back to the part where it’s basically the worst day of my life and she’s telling me she’s not ready to meet up the day after she gave me the letter.  During this time, I later found out, she was in fact with a guy that she had been talking to and hanging out with (not secretly, I knew she was friends with the guy, and aside from one day when she was just gone an exorbitant amount of time I was perfectly OK with it).  Turns out, she had decided she might want to be more than friends with him.  So, that day she was spending with him.

We both went to work the next day.  Walking past reception was more than a little awkward.  Being in the back room with the guys was also uncomfortable, as I was fairly certain they knew something was up.  Over instant messages, I asked if we could talk at lunch, and she agreed.

We met in the cemetery  (fitting, I suppose) where she liked to walk around sometimes.  As a reminder, this is less than 48 hours from when she said she wanted to spend some time apart.  Apparently that day with the other guy was all that she needed to figure out that she didn’t just want time apart, she wanted to be divorced, and there was no room for any discussion on the matter whatsoever.  It was quite a departure from what I had been led to believe from our previous encounter.  We were going to talk about things, and from the sound of it try to work through some issues with some distance between us.  In fact, she had referenced our agreement to end things amicably if we had ever parted ways.  I realize that might seem a bit odd, because I don’t think most people make such agreements, but, it was something that I took pretty seriously.

The actual wording of what we agreed was that if we broke up, we would do so by mutual agreement.  Here is what the agreement meant: You can’t just get pissed and bail, or for any reason just leave without sort of giving the other person a chance to convince you otherwise.  The whole point was to convince the other person that it was for the best.  That she referenced it, and then made no attempt to abide by it was a bit shocking to me.  She basically told me what she had decided on her own before talking to me, essentially told me that she didn’t love me, and, in fact, had never loved me, and gave my back her ring.  Then, she left.

It’s difficult to describe exactly how I felt.  I wanted to be somewhere  that felt hopeful, and so I started to drive to the spot that I proposed to her.  It’s not a difficult spot to find, and I went there often enough, but my mind was such a flurry that I  kind of got lost, it took me quite a bit to get there.  I don’t recall much of what I did once there, but then I went to a mutual friends place to tell them what was going on. To that point, no one had known anything about the separation at all.

That night was, I believe, the most torturous night of my life.  I’m positive that I didn’t sleep at all.  There has never been a moment of more intensive self-examination in my life before or since.  I knew that it was possible that I had fucked up in some way without realizing it, but I was going to fix it, no matter what that meant.

Then a few days later, my cousin received a phone call and learned that Holly was in an accident.  As it turns out, Holly was so shaken by it that she accidentally called the wrong person (my cousin shares the same first name as the person she intended to call).    I was on my way to work, and I in fact got all the way there, but then, conflicted about whether or not I should go to the hospital, just went, because I decided that was what I really wanted to do.  It was at this point she was a bit shaken up, and she seemed to loosen on her apparent resolve to end things.  We had a pretty good conversation there.  I don’t recall the specifics of most of it, but the phrase she said that I remember taking away from this was that “you’re still my best friend”.  If that was true though, she had a funny way of treating her best friend.

We talked a few more times, with my primary goal being to understand the situation, because it just didn’t make any sense to me.  Her ultimate statement was that she needed to find herself.  She wanted to know who she was as a person on her own.  Due to her past infidelities, I had some suspicions about this being over some other guy.  I in fact specifically asked about this at that point, and she told me that she was not seeing anyone, and she didn’t want to see anyone.  She wanted to be alone.  I accepted that for that moment.

Shortly after this she informed me that she wanted me to basically not talk to her for a month.  Given what she had said before, I reluctantly agreed to it.  During the course of this month however, I learned from mutual friends that while she was telling me that, she was telling them that she didn’t want to speak to me ever again.  The reason for that was entirely unclear, and ultimately lead to our mutual friends no longer being her friends, because the reasons were unclear to them as well.

Also in the course of this month of not talking to her I discovered that she was in fact seeing that aforementioned guy.  I did not take that very well. I recall sending some very angry text messages her way because she didn’t answer the phone.  I also recall that her first response to me telling her that I knew was “Oh, so I guess we don’t need to do counseling then.”   (I guess I left that out earlier, at some point I had convinced her to reluctantly go to counseling, but it never actually happened.)

It was at this point that I took the unsavory action of informing friends and her family of exactly what her actions were, because, well, I was pissed, and I wanted people to see her for what she was.  In hindsight, it’s not the best possible action I could have taken, but, I think it was understandable and justifiable.    She was not happy about it.

I guess not much happened for a while following this.  I wrote an enormous letter which I still have a copy of on my computer…  I’m not sure whether or not she ever read it, but I am sure that she never replied.  It was sort of my last-ditch effort to show her that I genuinely cared about restoring the relationship despite everything.    It’s a little hard for me to understand why at this point.  As much as I would prefer that none of this had ever happened, as it did happen, I don’t know why I still wanted to be with that person.

After that not too much happened for close to a year, and then out of nowhere she sent me an email asking if I would be willing to meet up and talk.  Of course I was willing.  After I agreed, she sent another email asking if I could bring a copy of the marriage certificate.  I can’t remember why she said she needed it.  Anyway, I brought it and spoke with her, again I was trying to understand the situation, and again she said that she would like to be friends.  We spoke one more time, and then shortly after that conversation she sent me an email saying that she in fact did not want to be friends.  Well, OK then.

It was at about that time that she started up the divorce process and had me sign papers. At the time I was happy to sign them, because honestly I just wanted the process to be over with since it was clear that she was not going to try to make anything work.  There’s a small part of me that is a little bit vindictive and wishes I would have not signed them so she would have had to wait another year for the divorce, because as it turns out, while during that last conversation we had she told me that she just didn’t believe marriage was for her and she would never get married again, she did get married again.  Less than a year later.  Probably so that she could go to Germany with the guy that she married (he was in the military, so my understanding is, if she was not married to him, she wouldn’t be able to go with him).

Anyway, that’s the main thrust of the story.  There are lots of little bits that I do remember that I guess don’t have much bearing on story overall.

So it’s 5 years later, since we were separated, and functionally divorced, if not legally (legally divorced closer to 4 years, I don’t even know the exact date of that).  How do I feel about it now?

Well, I still feel like it is the worst experience I have ever gone through.  It was absolutely miserable and lonely and painful.  I also think it’s caused me to grow more than anything else in my life to date.  I am most certainly “over it” at this point.  I don’t long to be with her, or anything like that, but that said, I think that it still affects me in terms of how I approach relationships, and I do think it has given me some trust issues.  And there’s also still a definite part of me that wants her to get what’s coming to her.  I have no interest in trying to make that happen mind you, but I’d be lying if I said hearing that her life had fallen apart wouldn’t feel like vindication to me.  That’s probably wrong of me, but it’s also the truth.

I still miss being married, though, as I said, I don’t long to be in a relationship with her.  I do wish that she would speak to me.  It still feels like an unresolved issue in my life, and while there are people who I have grown apart from before, she is the only person where things ended pretty chaotically.

I had to fight to keep from becoming jaded toward marriage for some time…  as much as I miss being married, I think I am reluctant to pursue it again, not so much on an intentional level, but I guess on a subconscious level.

Wow that’s a long post.  If you read this entire thing you deserve some kind of award.  If you comment I’ll assume you read it all and buy you a coffee sometime.  You’re on the honor system.

That’s all I have to say about that.