Lunar Obverse

Over a week ago, the thought occurred to me that I was angry. About a lot of different things. Personal things, professional things, political things, even some things that didn’t fit into a category that started with the letter “P”. I figured I could turn that idea into a post. The post was going to be a listing of all the things lately that make me angry.

I even started working on this post. As the list lengthened, I decided that, since I was going to be posting this publicly, where in theory some of the people and institutions mentioned on the list might see it, I should try to make it more effective. I decided that I was going to add, to each item, what would have to happen in order for me to not be angry about that item anymore.

Constructive, see? Honest and direct. “Hey, buddy, if you would just do this one thing, I could stop being angry and we’d both be better people.”

It was a beautiful dream. I was finally laying it out there for anyone to see. Baring my soul and hopefully shaming some folk into shaping up.

At least, it felt honest…

But I had, in the back of my mind, some reservations about posting this “Anger Wish List”.

As a side note, let me say that, a lot of times, anger is funny. Think about the funniest comedians; they’re all angry, angry people. Some may display a cool, collected exterior, like Jerry Seinfeld or vintage Chevy Chase. But for most of them, the anger is like a raw, exposed nerve: Sam Kinison (damn, I miss Sam); John Belushi; Rodney Dangerfield (I’m just listing my favorites here so it might just be my perception). Even Ben Stiller or Adam Sandler, with two completely different approaches to their humor, share that bedrock of anger that makes them, well, damned funny. And, apparently, when I get “rant-y”, especially about something that I find very serious, like governmental abuse of power, my friends’ reactions are often to… laugh. Which sometimes makes me angrier (and therefore, funnier), and sometimes I see the humor and the spell is broken.

And that connection between anger and laughter started to shine through the items in my list. Or maybe it clouded over it. I’m not sure. But at a certain point, I started seeing the list in a whole different way.

For one thing, I started to wonder if my goal in writing the list and trying to shame people into making me not be angry anymore wasn’t, well, funny. Would that even work? Would I be able to feel my internal upset-O-meter read lower and lower levels of angrions until I was at peace with the universe, as I checked items off the list? “OK, she apologized for the lies… great, that makes me 15.3% less angry!”

For another… well, I was putting a lot of power into other peoples hands. Power over me, and my thoughts and feelings. And, considering that these people have pissed me off and therefore make them almost be definition my enemies, means that they are probably not going to treat all this power as a great responsibility, to be approached with caution and respect, now, are they? No, more than likely, at least some of them are going to start yanking on that anger lever even more, trying to see if they can jack up my anger levels until I literally explode… or, worse, trying to see if they can sustain the anger levels at a high point, just below where I would burst, trying to prolong the process…

OK, maybe not. That could just be my anger and paranoia talking. But, honestly, to a certain extent, it’s true: I was ceding control of my happiness to people I don’t particularly like.

After pondering this for several days, I knew I needed a fresh approach to this list. I think the initial impulse was good: to try to figure out what I was so angry about, to put it all into one place, to ponder it all and see if there was a pattern, and to give it all a name.

But the other parts, pushing the solutions off to anyone else but me, and to make it all public? Not the right choice.

I asked myself, “Self, why are you angry about [X]? What was it that made you angry? Was it a failure on their part? Or was there some expectation you had that wasn’t met? Where did all this freakin’ anger come from, anyway? Could there be an upside to anger? Is anger automatically negative, or is it neutral or even positive? Does it depend on the circumstances? Which parts do I control and which parts are out of my control?”

Yeah, I had a lot of questions.

I don’t have a lot of answers yet, but this is the place to which I’ve arrived: Anger is the flip side of passion. If I’m angry about something, it’s because I care about something that doesn’t seem to be going well, or started out going well but took an unexpected turn, or I just thought it was going well but I was really fooling myself. Or maybe all of the above, or parts of the above, or none of the above. I. Don’t. Know.

What I do know is that for every angry-making-thing on my list, there is or was a corresponding passion. And instead of blaming the event, person, institution or thing for betraying my passion, I’m going to try to re-connect to that original passion, to figure out why I felt that way, and if it was reasonable for me to feel that way, and if it’s reasonable to now modify my expectations to bring back that passion.

Doesn’t mean that the passion is still going to be attached to the same person, event, institution or thing, mind you. What is past will remain in the past. But the qualities or ideas that I recognized at the time, and became enamored of, may now continue to bring a smile to my lips and a light in my eyes, instead of a grimace and a dull angry glint.

I’m going to work to convert my anger into a positive force again. I’m going to use the emotion as a signpost that says, “You’re feeling this way because, dammit, you LOVE TOO MUCH.” Like seeing pain as a positive signal for change, I’m going to try to use my anger in the same way.

…I just hope that I remain funny in the process.

Congratulations

to Ken and Merry and Aleyna

and the newest member of the family…

DEX!

…I hope Ken doesn’t mind that I stole his picture. But it links to his Flickr pics, so he shouldn’t.

I ran last night after work, in my new shoes, and it felt great! It’s so funny how much difference new shoes make. I don’t realize, over the course of 6 months, how much cushioning and flexibility a running shoe loses. Plus I’m not convinced that the Asics are the right shoe for me. They never fit as well as the Brooks do – I had fit problems with the Asics from the beginning but just endured it. Shouldn’t have done that – my feet were signaling something important.

I have half a mind to call Emily at Fit Right NW and thank her!

Anyway, grabbed some dinner, then caught a bus home. Then Christi called with a favor to ask, and Tracy called, and Smacky demanded some attention and food (equal parts of both). I gave some time to my friends (I include Smacky in that category) and then I took some “me” time.

I sat down to play with my new keyboard.

No… the musical keyboard. The one I bought for my 3-year-old New Year’s resolution? Yeah, that one.

And, I finally got to the good part of my music theory book.

I was learning scales. And it’s so cool.

I always knew, in a general way, that music had a mathematical underpinning. And way back in grade school and junior high, I took some music theory classes, but for whatever reason, the whole idea didn’t gel in my head. And 15 years ago or so, I tried to learn harmonica, since it seems to be the easiest instrument to learn, but again, I was just memorizing what I was being taught. I couldn’t break out of that to see the basic idea that would allow me to create new songs.

Either the book I’m reading now is written by a brilliant teacher, or I’m finally ready to learn, or some combination of the two, because last night was an epiphany.

I learned about how notes are just vibrations (yeah, I knew that already) and how vibrations that are exactly double or half of each other sound alike (didn’t know that) – so that a note that’s, say 100 vibrations per minute has a similar sound to one that’s 200 vbm and one that’s 50 vbm.

That explained how people have broken up the notes in-between those similar sounds into discrete, evenly-spaced notes – the familar C-D-E-F-G-A-B scale.

It gets a little more complicated with flats and sharps (the black keys on a piano) but that’s just for convenience and language – the basic idea is that each key is the same “distance” from the keys next to it. So there are twelve steps from one C note to another C – that’s the chromatic scale.

The part that made me sit up and go “wow” is that each type of music only uses a few notes out of those twelve, usually 5 or 7 of them. And if you restrict yourself to those notes, you can improvise that type of music. There’s the major scale and a minor one, that’s the basis for most Western or European music, there’s a scale for Blues, there’s the pentatonic scale that’s the basis of Country and Western music. And rock is either based on the Blues scale or the C&W scale – the difference there is the chords and the beat.

This is probably over-simplified for any musicians out there, and might not be interesting to any non-musicians. Sorry ’bout that.

But man I was having fun last night, recording a simple chord (which is three or four specific notes in a scale played together) and drumbeat in GarageBand and picking out random notes in a specific scale and being amazed at how much like an actual song it sounded like!

Holy freakin’ cow! I’m a musician!

I know, I know, I have a long way to go before I could play anything live. But now that the essential concept has taken root in my head, it’s like I have a brand-new brain. I’ve been given a new way to look at the world, a new sense to complement the traditional twelve. I’m hearing songs on my iPod as if for the first time!

I don’t know why it took me so long to get this. I’m just glad I did.

Oh, man, this New Yorker piece totally skewers Bill O’Reilly.

In the book, O’Reilly goes on, “No one ever told me or my sister that we were pretty far down the social totem pole while we were growing up in 1960s America. We took for granted that it was normal to buy cars only when they were secondhand, that every family clipped coupons to save money, and that luncheon meats were the special of the day.” And so on: “When our family went out to eat, a rare treat, we didn’t waste money on appetizers, if only because we didn’t go to the kind of restaurants that offered appetizers. Typically the pasta dish was spaghetti, and that was it. No linguine, fettuccine, rigatoni, etceterini, etceterini, to confuse the issue.”

I never saw Nassau County, Long Island, where O’Reilly, who is fifty-six, grew up, in the nineteen-sixties, but I’m guessing that restaurants so unpretentious that they wouldn’t serve a soup-of-the-day didn’t actually exist. Still, the idea of such a restaurant captures O’Reilly’s idea of himself. As soon as he left home—to go to Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, New York—O’Reilly had occasional encounters with members of the fortunate classes, in which, inevitably, he was put down. At Marist, he longed for the girls from nearby Vassar, but “the Ivy Leaguers up from Princeton or down from Cornell got the dates; we were treated like hired help.” By O’Reilly’s account, wealth and fame have not changed the pattern. Even now, when he wanders within range of the “swells,” which he does surprisingly often for a guy who despises them, they sneer at him, just as they would sneer at any ordinary American.

I was downtown today.

First I noticed the cops. Everywhere.

I noticed the “No Parking” signs along Broadway.

I went about my business and then, when the drums and the chants started, I remembered.

Iraq War protest today. Three years.

I agreed with the protesters, but wondered if protest marches are really very effective.

I snapped a couple of pictures.

Then I got on the bus to head home.

Delays. Streets blocked off by cops and marchers with signs and drums and chants.

And, during the delays… whining from the passengers and bus driver.

Honking horns from the other drivers.

The march went on and on, and circled around and then came around again. Blocking traffic. Because they went in a circle it made them seem infinite, never-ending.

I was comfortable, I was inside, I was sitting down. It was Sunday. And the marchers made me think about why they were there: men and women, American and Iraqi and Afghanistani and others are all dying somewhere in the world. Because of lies. Because of a Republican power grab. Our leaders claim to make us “safer” but I don’t feel safer.

Who are the black-body-armored, mirrored-visaged police protecting? The protesters? The bystanders? Or all the pretty corporate-owned buildings? Who feels safer when unarmed citizens are voicing their concerns while armed nervous men stand around and uninvolved citizens are only seeing their own selfish delays?

An old bearded man on the bus, in well-worn faded jeans and a denim jacket and a jaunty leather hat, made a comment every time he heard a horn honk – “Oh, now they’re getting nasty.” The bus driver agreed with him. They both complained, noisily, for the cops to “do their job” and let everyone through.

They didn’t think about why there was a protest. They only thought of themselves, being inconvenienced, being impeded.

A middle-aged lady in front of me kept calling people, apologizing for being late, explaining it was the protest that made her late.

A lady behind me snapped pictures with her camera phone, sent them to others, called them and explained.

Two white vans with riot cops looking like giant black beetles clinging to their sides drove past us, lights strobing hypnotically.

A girl in her early 30s, frustrated, carrying shopping bags, asked the driver to let her off. She was tired of waiting and wanted to move. Another passenger joined her in leaving.

Frustrating for me to see them so blithely unconcerned about the reason for the protest. It seemed that they were confirming my earlier thought – the protest does not awaken any consciousness of the ongoing deaths and destruction. It only irritates people, people who take it out on the protesters, of all people.

Old man with the beard said, “That’s what those cops are doing there. They’re afraid someone’s going to start a riot.”

I had to speak up. “You mean we’re afraid the cops are going to start a riot.” My voice was raw and low and shaking. I don’t normally speak up. I had to force the words from my head down into my lungs and out again, push them up beyond my normal soft-spoken-ness in order to be heard. I wanted to be heard. I wanted to make these impatient unseeing people think.

“No,” the man said, “those protesters might riot.”

“Right,” I said, again forcing the words out, “all those unarmed people might cause some damage to those armored police.” Sarcasm: “Scary.”

The old man with a beard turned back to the bus driver, the one in agreement with him, the man who felt his impatience and didn’t think beyond their own little world. “Why won’t those cops do their job? Let some people through?”

Again, as loudly as I could manage, I spoke up. “Yeah, it’s really tough to have to sit for 15 or 20 minutes… while men and women are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

At that moment, I had everyone’s attention. There was a pause. I felt the people in front of me and behind me shift, uncomfortably in their seats. The old man had turned to watch me, his eyes guarded behind his glasses and shaded by his hat.

Then, as if they were all one person, I felt them all ignore me. They tuned me out. They didn’t want to think about the reason those people were holding up traffic. They didn’t want to think about some far away land and our sons and daughters and foreigners alike, dying daily from bombs and bullets.

Rather than think about that, they simply… erased me in their heads. I could feel myself become invisible.

The old man commiserated with the bus driver, but this time, he tossed in something he thought would absolve him of his selfishness, something he had not mentioned up to that point. He said it to the bus driver but I’m sure it was meant for my ears, because he said it sadly and softly, not proud. “Y’know, I served in Vietnam, and it messed me up good, but…” His voice trailed off. He was unable to complete the thought, because thinking it would remind him of the people in the far-off lands dying and killing.

Until he could get back to what was important, his plaintive whine: “Why don’t those cops do their jobs?”

This morning I ate the best blueberry pancakes I’ve ever had.

So light and fluffy, it was almost a shame to put butter on it – I was tearing them up even as the butter softened and melted over them.

The only downside is that they were gone so fast.

In fact, the entire menu at this place looked amazing, I had a difficult time choosing one item. So I’ll just have to go back and try everything on the menu, one meal at a time.

And, no, I’m not telling you where they were. I don’t want anyone else to know. The owner will be mad but that’s how it has to be.

If you really really want to know, use contact form, ask me nicely privately, and swear to keep a secret.

Here’s something a little odd. Since I’m counting calories, I have a small anxiety about going to someplace “new” for lunch because I want to know how many calories I’m consuming, preferably in advance. If I don’t know in advance, then I try to order “simple” things that are easy to estimate calories.

And, after eating someplace new, I have a bit of anxiety (just a touch, nothing to see a psychologist about) until I do finally figure out what I just ate. Can’t really eat anything else until I know where I stand.

So, that being said, I still wanted to try this place downtown called Chipotle for lunch today, even though I didn’t know the calorie count for my meal. I figured it would be easy enough to guess. But, I was meeting a friend and it was between where we worked, so it was a good choice.

When I got back to my desk, I realized that Chipotle’s is a chain. And often, chains have nutritional information posted on one or more of the internets. So I googled it.

And as it turns out, there are fan sites that let you calculate the calories and other nutritional information for their food (this is the one I used). But the main site does not post nutritional information at all.

Funny… Who has ever heard of a fan site for a restaurant chain?