December 29th, 2008

One of my gifts for Christmas this year was an "Electronic Yodelling Pickle". I wasn't nearly as excited by it as I was by, say, my large collection of new books, my binary clock, or my electronic picture frame. But my baby daughter seemed to show momentary interest in the yodelling pickle. Hmm ...

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NOTE December 30th, 2008:

(This rant was removed last night at the insistence of my wife who felt it was just kicking certain folks when they're already down. So I have heavily modified it and reposted it. Some people get all the luck.)

It's no secret to my friends and family that I am a grump. I once said to a boss of mine, "I tend to get a bit grumpy in the mornings" and he responded (rather abruptly) with, "No, Brian, you are grumpy in the mornings." He said it matter-of-fact, but I knew he could read me like a cheap magazine. I had no choice but to let it alone. He was right, after all.

That is the same boss, by the way, who told me in 1995 that he wished he had hired me two years earlier in 1993 when he had had the chance, and he regretted listening to the negative feedback about me.

For my part, learning that two (more) years of chronic underemployment and misery had been got by me was a hard pill to swallow. For reasons I won't go into here, I learned to be careful about people in general.

That probably translates in their mind to my being "grumpy" with them. I am not the kind of person to just lie down and doormat myself in the face of opposition. I bark back, I fight the power, I protest when I see fit. And though I never exact revenge, I protect myself from future injury—even if only anticipated injury. I'm a very smart man and I can see things coming sooner than most others. Because I protect myself, it looks like grumpiness to others.

But maybe I'm not so great as I seem to be saying here. So, what's the alternative?

Well, I see lots of people (I'm not talking about anyone in particular here) wandering around letting weirdness and poison build up inside themselves year after year as they hide their own unpleasantness for sake of image—better (and initially easier) to be a pleasant doormat than bark back their opposition to some shit that they are being asked to eat. But then these people either explode when they are 50, or they develop exotic diseases and 7-syllable maladies. Or, much much worse, they find themselves playing weird control-issue-mind-games with their spouses and children (thereby ensuring another generation of emotionally irresponsible idiots).

The worst thing a man can do to himself is to start quietly believing his detractors. It is a form of slow-motion suicide, and a suicide that takes down the people around him, too. I know this because, like nearly all men, I've been on that slide myself in the past. I am no different from anyone else in that I have these hurt feelings. I'm no different from other men that I know the importance of making some space (intellectual and often physical) for myself so I can decompress the anger and pent-up frustrations ... the hurt feelings of betrayals and all those little daily social "battle losses". So I take the time and space to process the feelings. That makes me grumpy—sometimes stand-offish and prickly—for a while.

But it leaves the high road open for travel. Whether or not I decide to travel it is up to me.

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