Monday, July 28, 2003
Money is the root of all arguments
My wife and I have been together, married and otherwise, for almost 20 years, and not once in that time have we ever been able to discuss our joint finances in any detail without having an ugly, bitter fight.
This is not news; money and sex are the two biggest reasons why marriages end. Our sex is great both in terms of quality and quantity (or was until the kids starting showing up), and neither of us is That Guy -- you know, the one who cheats on his/her spouse. But money -- well, it taps into some powerful issues with her that she has never fully acknowledged or confronted.
I know we had fights about money before then, but the earliest fight I remember distinctly was the one we had before we got married about whether or not to have separate checking accounts. I was in favor; she was opposed. I can't even remember now what arguments we each mustered. All I can remember is that we fought so long and so viciously that I ultimately caved.
When we got married, we did what a lot of couples do and spent more than we could really afford on our honeymoon. Because we'd paid for most of the wedding expenses ourselves, that left us several thousand dollars in hock to our credit cards -- not huge money, but significant relative to our salaries. My position was that we ought to scrimp and save 'til we'd paid that debt off, then live within our means thereafter. Her position was that, no, we were in the "getting and acquiring" stage of our marriage.
"You just don't seem to understand the difference between 'want' and 'need' and between 'need' and 'need right now,'" I remember saying. And from an objective standpoint, I was perfectly right, but that one comment damn near killed our fledgling marriage.
I'll share just one other of the greatest hits: the night, soon after our first child was born, when we began discussing saving for the kids' college. Long story short, the discussion ended with her saying, "If you don't like the way I handle money, then you can just call a lawyer."
The perceptive among you might ask: So, Al, why didn't you stand up to her?
And the answer is this: She cares more than I do about the subject, and when she cares about a subject, no tactic of argumentation is too extreme. On the other hand, I'm unwilling to attack her personally to score a point of fact or logic. That doesn't make me better than she is; it just makes me different and kind of defines the dynamic of our relationship where money is concerned.
So, I had to decide: Was I going to call a lawyer?
And I decided I would not. I figured the kids were better off with us together than with us apart. Besides, arguments over money aside, we really do love each other. I figure it's somewhere between a strong possibility and a likelihood that we will end up in bankruptcy court someday; we're never more than a couple of paychecks from disaster if you ignore our (now substantially reduced) 401Ks. And when the bankruptcy judge lectures us on our profligacy, I will stand there silently and nod and act for all the world as if it really was my fault.
This is not news; money and sex are the two biggest reasons why marriages end. Our sex is great both in terms of quality and quantity (or was until the kids starting showing up), and neither of us is That Guy -- you know, the one who cheats on his/her spouse. But money -- well, it taps into some powerful issues with her that she has never fully acknowledged or confronted.
I know we had fights about money before then, but the earliest fight I remember distinctly was the one we had before we got married about whether or not to have separate checking accounts. I was in favor; she was opposed. I can't even remember now what arguments we each mustered. All I can remember is that we fought so long and so viciously that I ultimately caved.
When we got married, we did what a lot of couples do and spent more than we could really afford on our honeymoon. Because we'd paid for most of the wedding expenses ourselves, that left us several thousand dollars in hock to our credit cards -- not huge money, but significant relative to our salaries. My position was that we ought to scrimp and save 'til we'd paid that debt off, then live within our means thereafter. Her position was that, no, we were in the "getting and acquiring" stage of our marriage.
"You just don't seem to understand the difference between 'want' and 'need' and between 'need' and 'need right now,'" I remember saying. And from an objective standpoint, I was perfectly right, but that one comment damn near killed our fledgling marriage.
I'll share just one other of the greatest hits: the night, soon after our first child was born, when we began discussing saving for the kids' college. Long story short, the discussion ended with her saying, "If you don't like the way I handle money, then you can just call a lawyer."
The perceptive among you might ask: So, Al, why didn't you stand up to her?
And the answer is this: She cares more than I do about the subject, and when she cares about a subject, no tactic of argumentation is too extreme. On the other hand, I'm unwilling to attack her personally to score a point of fact or logic. That doesn't make me better than she is; it just makes me different and kind of defines the dynamic of our relationship where money is concerned.
So, I had to decide: Was I going to call a lawyer?
And I decided I would not. I figured the kids were better off with us together than with us apart. Besides, arguments over money aside, we really do love each other. I figure it's somewhere between a strong possibility and a likelihood that we will end up in bankruptcy court someday; we're never more than a couple of paychecks from disaster if you ignore our (now substantially reduced) 401Ks. And when the bankruptcy judge lectures us on our profligacy, I will stand there silently and nod and act for all the world as if it really was my fault.
Friday, July 25, 2003
People person? Not so much
Ever since adolescence, I have consistently tested on the Myers-Briggs scale as an ENTJ, with the "E" standing for extrovert. In Meyers-Briggs World, "extrovert" can mean what it means in other contexts, but it also can have a special meaning related to how one functions. In my case, it means I thrive on mixing it up, intellectually speaking, with other people. I like a good argument, I like all the facts and opinions on the table, and when I'm at work I sometimes have to stop myself from assuming that everyone else I work with -- a fairly bright group of people, all told -- functions the same way I do. I have to remember that some folks' facts and opinions have to be drawn out of them; they won't necessarily volunteer. This seems obvious, but only in the past couple of years have I functioned with this idea in mind. God only knows what damage I did before that.
But there's another sense in which I am not an extrovert at all: By and large, I'm not a people person. You know how the liberal-arts major, graduating into a crummy job market, attempts to mask his lack of marketable skills by saying, "I'm a real people person!"? Well, I'm not a people person. Most people, in fact, piss me off, although I seldom act on that feeling one way or the other. In spite of the fact that I spent my adolescence suspecting that there was a really cool party somewhere that I was missing (and in spite of the fact that I attended a lot of really cool parties and even threw one or two), I've always been happier with one or two really close friends than a whole pile of casual acquaintances.
This has become a bit of an issue as I deal with my depression. My wife thinks it would be good if I got out more, spent some more time with other people. Her two specific suggestions in this regard so far have been: 1) Go play volleyball at our church at the weekly open-volleyball night; and 2) join a Rotary Club.
Now, #1 actually makes sense, in the sense that I played volleyball in college -- intramural, to be sure, but copiously and very competitively. I'm not much of a natural athlete, but I had almost a 30-inch vertical jump in high school and college, and even though I couldn't slam-dunk a basketball, I could sky, block and spike with the best on the volleyball court. The downside to this is that I've been badly out of shape since my first child was born and I stopped exercising regularly.
And you'd have to know me to know how little interest I have in joining a Rotary Club, or the Civitans (I'm too old for the Jaycees, thank God). Nothing against those organizations, but I'm not for them and they're not for me.
No, what I'd really like to do more of is read (I read zero books, zero, during the first year after our second child was born), write and blog. That's it. But my wife worries because she thinks that these activities, if not antisocial, are not gonna help my depression and might even make it worse. I think it's possible she's right but not likely.
The way she has raised this issue has struck me as patronizing, as if she thinks I'm too stupid to know how best to use my leisure time (what there is of it). I know she doesn't intend that, but that's how it makes me feel, and I've told her that. This of course makes her angry and makes her swear never to try to help me with my depression again. Which would be cute and even funny if it weren't for the fact that her mother is so screwed up, and her relationship with her mother is so screwed up, that every other relationship she has, including ours, is poisoned by it to a greater or lesser degree, although she refuses even to acknowledge this fact, much less act on it.
So I blog after she goes to bed or on my lunch hour or whatever. And so it goes.
But there's another sense in which I am not an extrovert at all: By and large, I'm not a people person. You know how the liberal-arts major, graduating into a crummy job market, attempts to mask his lack of marketable skills by saying, "I'm a real people person!"? Well, I'm not a people person. Most people, in fact, piss me off, although I seldom act on that feeling one way or the other. In spite of the fact that I spent my adolescence suspecting that there was a really cool party somewhere that I was missing (and in spite of the fact that I attended a lot of really cool parties and even threw one or two), I've always been happier with one or two really close friends than a whole pile of casual acquaintances.
This has become a bit of an issue as I deal with my depression. My wife thinks it would be good if I got out more, spent some more time with other people. Her two specific suggestions in this regard so far have been: 1) Go play volleyball at our church at the weekly open-volleyball night; and 2) join a Rotary Club.
Now, #1 actually makes sense, in the sense that I played volleyball in college -- intramural, to be sure, but copiously and very competitively. I'm not much of a natural athlete, but I had almost a 30-inch vertical jump in high school and college, and even though I couldn't slam-dunk a basketball, I could sky, block and spike with the best on the volleyball court. The downside to this is that I've been badly out of shape since my first child was born and I stopped exercising regularly.
And you'd have to know me to know how little interest I have in joining a Rotary Club, or the Civitans (I'm too old for the Jaycees, thank God). Nothing against those organizations, but I'm not for them and they're not for me.
No, what I'd really like to do more of is read (I read zero books, zero, during the first year after our second child was born), write and blog. That's it. But my wife worries because she thinks that these activities, if not antisocial, are not gonna help my depression and might even make it worse. I think it's possible she's right but not likely.
The way she has raised this issue has struck me as patronizing, as if she thinks I'm too stupid to know how best to use my leisure time (what there is of it). I know she doesn't intend that, but that's how it makes me feel, and I've told her that. This of course makes her angry and makes her swear never to try to help me with my depression again. Which would be cute and even funny if it weren't for the fact that her mother is so screwed up, and her relationship with her mother is so screwed up, that every other relationship she has, including ours, is poisoned by it to a greater or lesser degree, although she refuses even to acknowledge this fact, much less act on it.
So I blog after she goes to bed or on my lunch hour or whatever. And so it goes.
Wednesday, July 16, 2003
Portrait of the artist as a young ER patient
I grew up in a fairly typical suburban home. My parents weren't divorced -- at least, not then -- and neither were the parents of most other kids I knew. We led a middle-class lifestyle -- nice clothes, but not too nice; nice cars, but not too nice; nice house, but not too nice. I and my sibs got along at times and fought at times, typically when material possessions were at stake and not because of any intrinsic antipathy for one another.
My brothers and I were typical boys, which meant we spent a lot of time in the emergency room growing up -- stitches from all kinds of falls and other mishaps, broken collarbones from backyard football. Then there was the weird stuff. Like, one time about 10 of us neighborhood guys went sliding down a mudslide and my brother was the one whose ass found the buried pitchfork. My other brother was once bitten, deeply, mid-thigh, by a German shepherd while both he and the dog were sitting next to each other, minding their own respective businesses. My dad once nearly severed several of my toes while shutting the bathroom door; 35 years later, neither one of us can figure out how it happened. As I say, typical.
What was not typical, although I didn't realize this at the time, was the frequency and degree to which my father resorted to whippings to try to keep us in line. Now, he didn't beat us as that term is understood today -- no punches to the face or anything like that. But every other dad I'd ever seen use a belt swung it, like, once. My dad would swing it three, four, five times. And he must've figured out early that swats on the butt don't hurt much, because he always aimed for the back of the thighs instead. Some of those welts lasted for days and stood out so vividly we'd wear long pants to school the next day even if it was early June and 95 degrees out.
As each of us got to be old enough to be confirmed in the church, he would solemnly tell us that if we were old enough to be members of the church, we were old enough not to be beaten anymore. Even at 12, I knew that meant I was getting old enough and big enough that he figured that one day soon I might kick his ass, even though I had no intention of trying. I recall shrugging after that conversation, figuring that the promise inevitably would be broken and so not placing much value on it in the first place. And so it was broken, with all of us, most spectacularly with my youngest brother, whom my father pulled a belt on in the middle of Bourbon Street when we traveled to New Orleans the summer I was 18 (my brothers would've been about to turn 17 and 15, respectively). I recall two things about that incident, both surreal: how everyone else around us on the street was trying to pretend like they weren't seeing what they were seeing, because if they admitted to themselves that they'd seen it then they'd have to do something about it; and how glad I was that I was drunk at the time.
My brothers and I were typical boys, which meant we spent a lot of time in the emergency room growing up -- stitches from all kinds of falls and other mishaps, broken collarbones from backyard football. Then there was the weird stuff. Like, one time about 10 of us neighborhood guys went sliding down a mudslide and my brother was the one whose ass found the buried pitchfork. My other brother was once bitten, deeply, mid-thigh, by a German shepherd while both he and the dog were sitting next to each other, minding their own respective businesses. My dad once nearly severed several of my toes while shutting the bathroom door; 35 years later, neither one of us can figure out how it happened. As I say, typical.
What was not typical, although I didn't realize this at the time, was the frequency and degree to which my father resorted to whippings to try to keep us in line. Now, he didn't beat us as that term is understood today -- no punches to the face or anything like that. But every other dad I'd ever seen use a belt swung it, like, once. My dad would swing it three, four, five times. And he must've figured out early that swats on the butt don't hurt much, because he always aimed for the back of the thighs instead. Some of those welts lasted for days and stood out so vividly we'd wear long pants to school the next day even if it was early June and 95 degrees out.
As each of us got to be old enough to be confirmed in the church, he would solemnly tell us that if we were old enough to be members of the church, we were old enough not to be beaten anymore. Even at 12, I knew that meant I was getting old enough and big enough that he figured that one day soon I might kick his ass, even though I had no intention of trying. I recall shrugging after that conversation, figuring that the promise inevitably would be broken and so not placing much value on it in the first place. And so it was broken, with all of us, most spectacularly with my youngest brother, whom my father pulled a belt on in the middle of Bourbon Street when we traveled to New Orleans the summer I was 18 (my brothers would've been about to turn 17 and 15, respectively). I recall two things about that incident, both surreal: how everyone else around us on the street was trying to pretend like they weren't seeing what they were seeing, because if they admitted to themselves that they'd seen it then they'd have to do something about it; and how glad I was that I was drunk at the time.
Friday, July 11, 2003
Three hundred fifty-one horses and a ton of giddyup
One of our summer interns drives a late-model, wine-red Ford Mustang. It's not the coolest-looking car I've ever seen, but it's not bad looking as cars go.
I have fond memories of Mustangs dating back to first grade, when Dad came home one day in a brand-new, lime-gold '67. It was succeeded in sixth grade by a dark-green '72 Mustang Grande' with the 351-cubic-inch V-8. I learned to drive in that car, and I drove it through high school. Lots of my classmates had faster cars, like Olds Cutlasses with the 442 V-8, or more fashionable cars, like Camaros and Trans Ams. But no one had a Mustang like this one, and for a high-schooler who wasn't that much into conformity anyway, that just made driving it all the sweeter.
I did much of my driving on a road near my high school that is now a multi-lane suburban thoroughfare but was then a two-lane country road that changed shape, form and direction after every hard rain. Particularly at the beginning of a long straightaway on that road, I used to floor the Mustang from a dead stop. The three-gear automatic transmission topped out at about 45 mph in first gear and a little over 90 in second. And when it shifted from second to high, the acceleration was like being shot out of a cannon. I have driven faster cars, and I have driven cars that got from zero to 60 more quickly, but nothing has ever flattened my seat or rocked my world like that explosive final upshift.
Almost 30 years later I still recall almost every detail: the roar of the engine, the smell of the freshly turned earth on both sides of the highway, the warm spring wind whipping through the open windows, the cold beer (yes, frequently) between my knees on the seat, the album-rock radio welling from the back deck, the taillights of other cars fading in my rear-view mirror like memories of high school from the vantage point of middle age.
Thursday, July 10, 2003
Welcome
Hello and welcome to Coffee Cups. I'm J. Alfred Prufrock, but, as the great and wise philosopher Paul Simon once said, you can call me Al.
I've blogged for years under my real name and others, at other sites, alone and as part of a team. But because of a variety of factors -- what I do for a living, how much I value my relationships, even simple politeness -- none of these blogs has been real, unadulterated me. This one will be. I hope you like it, but -- no offense -- I'm not doing it for you.
I'm a guy in early middle age, married with kids, in middle management in a medium-sized American city. My youth was quite a bit more interesting than that, including stints in the performing arts and time lived in New York. I don't mourn my lost youth; I just recall it with great fondness even as I realize, as most people do at about this age, that some things I once wanted to do I will never get to do. That's life.
My job is less creative than I'd like it to be, but the hours are civilized. So I get to spend time with my kids, and my wife can pursue her graduate studies while working full-time. Life's full of trade-offs.
From my mid-teens to about my mid-20s I was bipolar, although I didn't know that at the time. In my mid-30s I became depressed to the point of being suicidal, although several more years went by before it was properly diagnosed and six more months after that before I found the right combination of medications to get it under control. I'll be on some kind of medication the rest of my life, but I'm OK with that. Two of my sibs have type 1 diabetes and will be on insulin the rest of their lives, and this is much easier to deal with.
Besides computers and blogging, my interests and hobbies include tennis, volleyball, dirt bikes, water-skiing and photography. Not that I get to do all those things, you understand -- at least, not since the kids came along. Again, I'm not complaining, and as the kids get older and a bit more autonomous I expect I'll get more time for the other stuff ... and will probably miss the time when I was the center of my kids' worlds.
Anyway, I guess that's enough to start. Questions? Comments? Leave a comment or send an e-mail.
Hello and welcome to Coffee Cups. I'm J. Alfred Prufrock, but, as the great and wise philosopher Paul Simon once said, you can call me Al.
I've blogged for years under my real name and others, at other sites, alone and as part of a team. But because of a variety of factors -- what I do for a living, how much I value my relationships, even simple politeness -- none of these blogs has been real, unadulterated me. This one will be. I hope you like it, but -- no offense -- I'm not doing it for you.
I'm a guy in early middle age, married with kids, in middle management in a medium-sized American city. My youth was quite a bit more interesting than that, including stints in the performing arts and time lived in New York. I don't mourn my lost youth; I just recall it with great fondness even as I realize, as most people do at about this age, that some things I once wanted to do I will never get to do. That's life.
My job is less creative than I'd like it to be, but the hours are civilized. So I get to spend time with my kids, and my wife can pursue her graduate studies while working full-time. Life's full of trade-offs.
From my mid-teens to about my mid-20s I was bipolar, although I didn't know that at the time. In my mid-30s I became depressed to the point of being suicidal, although several more years went by before it was properly diagnosed and six more months after that before I found the right combination of medications to get it under control. I'll be on some kind of medication the rest of my life, but I'm OK with that. Two of my sibs have type 1 diabetes and will be on insulin the rest of their lives, and this is much easier to deal with.
Besides computers and blogging, my interests and hobbies include tennis, volleyball, dirt bikes, water-skiing and photography. Not that I get to do all those things, you understand -- at least, not since the kids came along. Again, I'm not complaining, and as the kids get older and a bit more autonomous I expect I'll get more time for the other stuff ... and will probably miss the time when I was the center of my kids' worlds.
Anyway, I guess that's enough to start. Questions? Comments? Leave a comment or send an e-mail.
