Answers--those were easy! (Mostly.)
Jan. 19th, 2006 10:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
weaselmomThank you for playing! I really appreciate that you took the time. I know that I am very withholding of myself and who I am, and even those of you who know me best say you still don't know me very well. Deep down, I--like most people--really do want to be known. Rather, I want to be known and still valued for who I am. It might be the current state of affairs in the world that makes me reluctant to reveal any personal information or thoughts, or it might be that I am afraid (of what? that you will find me dull and unlikeable?), or it might be that those are just excuses and stories. At any rate, I present to you:
Easy one first:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jeanineers asks if I have a favorite quote or "words to live by." It just so happens I do! Our friend Tim sagely states that "You never truly own anything you can't carry on your back at a dead run." So true! I also like "They can kill you, but they're not allowed to eat you."
Next,prncsmoonbeam realized that after all these years, she still didn't know how Shawn (my partner of some 13 years) and I met. It was at the end of 1991, when an extremely disreputable friend suggested we go crash the apartment-warming party of some people he knew. When we got to the apartment complex clubhouse, a bunch of people were sitting around doing some sort of uber-geeky verbal RPG session. Bored beyond belief, I sat in the back with my bottle of Jagermeister, quietly heckling and wishing myself elsewhere. But the person running the session, a pleasant-looking blond guy in a blue Cosby-esque sweater, seemed nice enough, if a bit of a virgin. (When you are all done rolling around on the floor laughing, we will continue. Take your time. And the sweater was a Christmas gift from his mom, so he felt obligated.) Afterward we trooped back to the apartment that was being warmed, and I ended up talking to Shawn for much of that night. The Purity Test was taken, as so often happens at this kind of thing, and boy howdy, was my initial impression wrong. He is funny and smart and interesting, and he has a very solid sort of groundedness that I had never encountered before. We became friends that night, and I feel so very fortunate that he is still my best friend.
mckitterick had the courage to ask this, so I will do him the courtesy of answering here, although he gave me the option of answering offline. Chris, you know I'm going to re-word this a bit to say, where is an area of your life that I could see a new possibility for you. I would say start to build an awareness of the extent to which you don't listen. Consider the possibility that you don't listen, you never have, you never will, and you aren't listening now!* Recall how recently I've been challenging you to really listen to what people are saying, not what you think or wish or hope or choose to interpret what somebody is saying. This is so tricky, because sometimes the actual words truly are expressing a person's communication, but sometimes the words are masking the real communication. As for how to go about this, well, I got present to this in the Advanced Course, but I think this option would not please you. Just go out there, pick somebody who is important in your life, let him or her know you are working on really listening, then *listen* to the person and then tell the person what you hear is being said, and see what you can learn from it.
You gave me a two-fer, so let me answer your second question of "what makes you happiest these days?" I can't tell you how happy and delighted I am to have the girls (ferrets Kaylee and Fiona) in my life. I love them *so very much* and had waited so long to have animal companions again. I wouldn't presume to compare them to human children, but when I'm holding one of them and she's curled up asleep so sweetly and trustingly in my arm, I'm speechless with joy and love.
reannon asks the simplest and yet most complicated question of all--"what is a day in your life like?" Each weekday starts at about 6:15 a.m. after maybe four or five hours of sleep. I am the poster child for chronic insomnia and have difficulty falling and staying asleep every night. It takes me an hour and 15 minutes to get ready to leave for work. (Factor in some ten minutes for playing with the ferrets, as I let them out to run around while we're getting ready. They're very playful after a night of sleep.) I hate getting ready for work and spend that first hour or so bitterly resenting every loathsome second of it. Shawn and I both work in downtown Seattle, which is about 23 miles and a 35-minute bus ride away from our suburban apartment (which abuts a wetland--there is a forest 20 feet from our back porch). I work for a corporation with multiple large-scale projects and enterprises; specifically, I work for the venture capital investment group. We're located in the International District, or Chinatown if you want to be non-PC about it. However, this being Seattle, we call it the International District. It's not a great part of town, and honestly I rarely wander farther afield than the Starbucks downstairs. The work itself is typical administrative stuff. It's not particularly fulfilling, although I like my immediate team very much, and they try to let me take on whatever interesting new tasks I have time for. (That would be "not many.") I'm deliberately vague about work because too much detail would not necessarily be a good thing. After work, we commute back home through Seattle's dreadful traffic. And here is where life gets weird. S and I live more or less like wild animals, because neither of us is what you'd call domestically gifted. We might go out to dinner, or we might forage naked in the woods for roots and berries. Okay, I made that up, but because I cannot cook at all (no, not even a little bit), I usually fend for myself in the freezer and microwave. Usually we are both kind of beat from the workday, so we fritter away our leisure time on such productive and world-altering pursuits as Heckling American Idol, Playing Computer Games (make mine Chuzzle, please!), Surfing the Web (especially LJ and eBay, the greatest timesinks ever invented), Reading Trashy Magazines, Watching Anime, Avoiding Housework Like the Plague, and Playing With the Ferrets. Bedtime is usually after midnight, because I am in no hurry to get to bed and vainly pursue sleep while Shawn drops off in 90 seconds. Of course this routine varies depending on the time of year. For example, when the weather is nice, a day might include more outdoor activities and less sheer time-wasting. But here in Seattle, with so many gray and rainy days, we as a people tend to den up until the weather changes. (We have a saying about summer in Seattle: If it falls on a Sunday, we like to have a picnic.) It's also completely different on the weekends, because those two days are my only chance to get some freaking sleep so I don't just die from sleep deprivation. I probably sleep 14-16 hours on both Saturday and Sunday unless we have plans to go do something. Although your life and mine are very different, we might both agree that neither of us lives the life we had envisioned. Sometimes I feel really guilty that I'm not working to make the world a better place or bringing up the next generation. All I can say in my defense is that at least I'm kind to animals, which I hope counts for something.
I hope some of this makes sense. If not, ask for clarification! You've caught me in a rare kimono-opening mood, so run amuck, my little end-tables.
*BTW, Chris, the "you" here refers to all of us. People. You know, peeps. So don't take it personally.
Easy one first:
jeanineers asks if I have a favorite quote or "words to live by." It just so happens I do! Our friend Tim sagely states that "You never truly own anything you can't carry on your back at a dead run." So true! I also like "They can kill you, but they're not allowed to eat you."Next,
prncsmoonbeam realized that after all these years, she still didn't know how Shawn (my partner of some 13 years) and I met. It was at the end of 1991, when an extremely disreputable friend suggested we go crash the apartment-warming party of some people he knew. When we got to the apartment complex clubhouse, a bunch of people were sitting around doing some sort of uber-geeky verbal RPG session. Bored beyond belief, I sat in the back with my bottle of Jagermeister, quietly heckling and wishing myself elsewhere. But the person running the session, a pleasant-looking blond guy in a blue Cosby-esque sweater, seemed nice enough, if a bit of a virgin. (When you are all done rolling around on the floor laughing, we will continue. Take your time. And the sweater was a Christmas gift from his mom, so he felt obligated.) Afterward we trooped back to the apartment that was being warmed, and I ended up talking to Shawn for much of that night. The Purity Test was taken, as so often happens at this kind of thing, and boy howdy, was my initial impression wrong. He is funny and smart and interesting, and he has a very solid sort of groundedness that I had never encountered before. We became friends that night, and I feel so very fortunate that he is still my best friend. mckitterick had the courage to ask this, so I will do him the courtesy of answering here, although he gave me the option of answering offline. Chris, you know I'm going to re-word this a bit to say, where is an area of your life that I could see a new possibility for you. I would say start to build an awareness of the extent to which you don't listen. Consider the possibility that you don't listen, you never have, you never will, and you aren't listening now!* Recall how recently I've been challenging you to really listen to what people are saying, not what you think or wish or hope or choose to interpret what somebody is saying. This is so tricky, because sometimes the actual words truly are expressing a person's communication, but sometimes the words are masking the real communication. As for how to go about this, well, I got present to this in the Advanced Course, but I think this option would not please you. Just go out there, pick somebody who is important in your life, let him or her know you are working on really listening, then *listen* to the person and then tell the person what you hear is being said, and see what you can learn from it. You gave me a two-fer, so let me answer your second question of "what makes you happiest these days?" I can't tell you how happy and delighted I am to have the girls (ferrets Kaylee and Fiona) in my life. I love them *so very much* and had waited so long to have animal companions again. I wouldn't presume to compare them to human children, but when I'm holding one of them and she's curled up asleep so sweetly and trustingly in my arm, I'm speechless with joy and love.
reannon asks the simplest and yet most complicated question of all--"what is a day in your life like?" Each weekday starts at about 6:15 a.m. after maybe four or five hours of sleep. I am the poster child for chronic insomnia and have difficulty falling and staying asleep every night. It takes me an hour and 15 minutes to get ready to leave for work. (Factor in some ten minutes for playing with the ferrets, as I let them out to run around while we're getting ready. They're very playful after a night of sleep.) I hate getting ready for work and spend that first hour or so bitterly resenting every loathsome second of it. Shawn and I both work in downtown Seattle, which is about 23 miles and a 35-minute bus ride away from our suburban apartment (which abuts a wetland--there is a forest 20 feet from our back porch). I work for a corporation with multiple large-scale projects and enterprises; specifically, I work for the venture capital investment group. We're located in the International District, or Chinatown if you want to be non-PC about it. However, this being Seattle, we call it the International District. It's not a great part of town, and honestly I rarely wander farther afield than the Starbucks downstairs. The work itself is typical administrative stuff. It's not particularly fulfilling, although I like my immediate team very much, and they try to let me take on whatever interesting new tasks I have time for. (That would be "not many.") I'm deliberately vague about work because too much detail would not necessarily be a good thing. After work, we commute back home through Seattle's dreadful traffic. And here is where life gets weird. S and I live more or less like wild animals, because neither of us is what you'd call domestically gifted. We might go out to dinner, or we might forage naked in the woods for roots and berries. Okay, I made that up, but because I cannot cook at all (no, not even a little bit), I usually fend for myself in the freezer and microwave. Usually we are both kind of beat from the workday, so we fritter away our leisure time on such productive and world-altering pursuits as Heckling American Idol, Playing Computer Games (make mine Chuzzle, please!), Surfing the Web (especially LJ and eBay, the greatest timesinks ever invented), Reading Trashy Magazines, Watching Anime, Avoiding Housework Like the Plague, and Playing With the Ferrets. Bedtime is usually after midnight, because I am in no hurry to get to bed and vainly pursue sleep while Shawn drops off in 90 seconds. Of course this routine varies depending on the time of year. For example, when the weather is nice, a day might include more outdoor activities and less sheer time-wasting. But here in Seattle, with so many gray and rainy days, we as a people tend to den up until the weather changes. (We have a saying about summer in Seattle: If it falls on a Sunday, we like to have a picnic.) It's also completely different on the weekends, because those two days are my only chance to get some freaking sleep so I don't just die from sleep deprivation. I probably sleep 14-16 hours on both Saturday and Sunday unless we have plans to go do something. Although your life and mine are very different, we might both agree that neither of us lives the life we had envisioned. Sometimes I feel really guilty that I'm not working to make the world a better place or bringing up the next generation. All I can say in my defense is that at least I'm kind to animals, which I hope counts for something. I hope some of this makes sense. If not, ask for clarification! You've caught me in a rare kimono-opening mood, so run amuck, my little end-tables.
*BTW, Chris, the "you" here refers to all of us. People. You know, peeps. So don't take it personally.
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 04:17 pm (UTC)Thank you, Lisa. I'm working on it. This is a new realization that I've just internalized a week or so ago, so I hope people are patient with me.
Love,
Chris
no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 08:03 pm (UTC)What tools do you recommend? The Advanced Course - perhaps especially because you feel it would not please me? That having to listen might be the route to learning to listen consistently and well?
Best,
Chris