So, I lied, there has to be one more posting about Christmas/Holiday cards. This one relates to the fact that I finished up my cards today (those of you receiving them will think I am a total geek, just you wait). As I was about to haul them to the blue box up the street, I got it into my brain ask where all these cards are going. So being the zip code guy that I am I counted out the following distribution:
These are the number of cards being sent to zip codes starting with
0 13 (Puerto Rico, New England and New Jersey)
1 9 (New York, Pennsylvania and Delaware)
2 3 (DC, Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas)
3 1 (The Southeast)
4 3 (Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan and Indiana)
5 1 (The Upper Midwest, the Dakotas and Montana)
6 4 (Illinois, Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska)
7 0 (Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma)
8 4 (The Rocky Mountain States, Arizona and Nevada)
9 36 (California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii and Alaska)
Intl 4 (Netherlands, Austria, South Korea, Canada)
The breakdown of 9's is as follows
Southern California (91, 92, 93) 5
Northern California (94, 95, 96) 19
Hawaii (96) 0
Oregon (97) 0
Washington (98, 99) 12
Alaska (99) 0
Doing this made me happy!
Friday, December 16, 2005
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Closure on the holiday card saga
A couple hours after Tuesday mornings feelings dump, S told me that she had crossed me off her Christmas card list and that she was incredibly incensed at the original posting, but that she wasn't going to bring it up to me until after the New Year. The course of the discussion took us all over the map, but the essence could be boiled down to 1) what exactly is the role of the holiday card and 2) how different life is between those who have children (especially newborns and toddlers) from there single friends.
The first issue is easier to address. To S, the card is simply wishes the receiver of the card well, the hope that things are well in their lives and to let the receiver know that the person is in the senders thoughts. To me, I've always expected more than that. It is my belief that because these people are an important person in the story of our lives that it's unfortunate that we can only see each other rarely and have this once a year communication. This communication to me deserves more than a cursory "throw something in the mail". I have friendships with different people from different points in my life so the type of communication I have with them is different and I try and reflect that in what I send, even if it is a couple sentences long, I feel I have given the relationship some respect. Simply stuffing the card in to the envelope to me feels like, as my colleague CD so eloquently put it, "relationship on resecitation (sp)".
This lead to the more critical discussion and that is that it is a luxury for those who have young children at home to take time to sit down and type out an email or write a letter or even make a phone call. Ok, point taken. Yes, when I come home, it's a place where I am not being pulled in 55 directions at once. So S told me that it is the job of the single person to change their strategies and instead of just relying on the other person to initiate contact, that I as the single person needed to reach out and often times more than once or twice. When it is me that is always calling or emailing it doesn't mean that the other person doesn't want to communicate, it is often they can't. Here comes the key issue and that is I always feel like it's a burden upon my friend with kid when I want to call. How many times have I called and gotten the friend/parent while they are trying to do three things at once, and I get about 50% of their attention. So, that makes me feel really good, or they say that they'll have to call back. That actaully makes me feel worse because I feel as though I'm another thing on their list of things to do.
This conversation had me in tears in the office and I don't even know why. Was it the friendship on rescicitaion realization? Was it that I was being insensitive into the demands of parenthood? Was it S's making these statements and me feeling like an insensitive prick? A combination of these or all? So, I'm still confused and baffled by lots of things here, but I know that I can try and make sure to make the effort to reach out to those friends of mind who have young kids and to be understanding about the constraints on their time and energies. As for the cards, well I can simply do what I think is right and model the behavior myself. As off today, I'm over this whole saga now. I'm putting it to bed.
The first issue is easier to address. To S, the card is simply wishes the receiver of the card well, the hope that things are well in their lives and to let the receiver know that the person is in the senders thoughts. To me, I've always expected more than that. It is my belief that because these people are an important person in the story of our lives that it's unfortunate that we can only see each other rarely and have this once a year communication. This communication to me deserves more than a cursory "throw something in the mail". I have friendships with different people from different points in my life so the type of communication I have with them is different and I try and reflect that in what I send, even if it is a couple sentences long, I feel I have given the relationship some respect. Simply stuffing the card in to the envelope to me feels like, as my colleague CD so eloquently put it, "relationship on resecitation (sp)".
This lead to the more critical discussion and that is that it is a luxury for those who have young children at home to take time to sit down and type out an email or write a letter or even make a phone call. Ok, point taken. Yes, when I come home, it's a place where I am not being pulled in 55 directions at once. So S told me that it is the job of the single person to change their strategies and instead of just relying on the other person to initiate contact, that I as the single person needed to reach out and often times more than once or twice. When it is me that is always calling or emailing it doesn't mean that the other person doesn't want to communicate, it is often they can't. Here comes the key issue and that is I always feel like it's a burden upon my friend with kid when I want to call. How many times have I called and gotten the friend/parent while they are trying to do three things at once, and I get about 50% of their attention. So, that makes me feel really good, or they say that they'll have to call back. That actaully makes me feel worse because I feel as though I'm another thing on their list of things to do.
This conversation had me in tears in the office and I don't even know why. Was it the friendship on rescicitaion realization? Was it that I was being insensitive into the demands of parenthood? Was it S's making these statements and me feeling like an insensitive prick? A combination of these or all? So, I'm still confused and baffled by lots of things here, but I know that I can try and make sure to make the effort to reach out to those friends of mind who have young kids and to be understanding about the constraints on their time and energies. As for the cards, well I can simply do what I think is right and model the behavior myself. As off today, I'm over this whole saga now. I'm putting it to bed.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Hmmm, there must be something underneath
Well, last weeks "pet peeve" posting has caused quite a stir. I dashed that piece off in a quick ten minutes, but I guess it is pretty clear that there was emotion behind it. But I didn't really believe it at first. The first comment was an email from Mom stating that she thought I must be angry at the fact that being a gay man, I wasn't going to ever have children and something must stem from that lingering bitterness. My initial reaction was, because it came from Mom, that she was way off base. By the end of this post, it will turn out that she was kind of in the ballpark, perhaps she made contact but her proverbial baseball curved off into the stands. Scott had also made a comment, actually, his lack of comment was the real comment, but I blew it off. However, when a friend of mine emailed me directly to tell me her reaction to it, I knew that something had really struck these people in my life that something was out of whack with me.
So, as I always do, I sat down and stared at the wall and sorted through what I believed to be my feelings about the "photocard as christmas card" anger. In retrospect, the storm began to brew last week when a colleague of mine (not in my department) and his wife are due to have a baby any day now. There is some uproar about the "not so progressive" policy around paternity leave. A letter was going around and I was asked by another faculty member to sign it. Granted, I believe that the rules should be changed to reflect the values of the institution, but I decided that I didn't want to be associated with an issue that clearly wasn't ever going to benefit me. I know that sounds horrifically selfish, but it is one of a couple benefits that I, as a single (gay isn't even an issue) non-parent faculty member will NEVER use. It's money that I can't even try and get because I'm single and don't have children.
Around the same time, I was asked to donate money towards a baby gift. Standard procedure. We also found out that another faculty member's wife was pregnant and I saw more cash leaving my wallet. Then we had our scheduled faculty meeting (which could be distilled into a memo of announcements) morph into a "words of wisdom" for oncoming parenthood and cake celebration. This joyous occasion as one of my colleagues who has been trying for a couple years to get pregnant had to sit and watch and wonder. It was feeling like all baby, all the time.
So that's part I. The second part of my "scrooge-ness" can be distilled as an equivalent to the time when a first child gets all pissy because all of a sudden its parents are splitting their energies between the firstborn and the newborn. I'm the firstborn in this situation. I have all these wonderful friends in my life and we all met and had these amazing experiences together when we were younger. First, life taking us across the country and world scatter us all over. So I've lost part of them first to geography. One by one, my formerly single friends found partners and began to do "couples things", a world that I can be included in but never truly feel welcome. At least, their spouses and partners are adults and always persons of intellect and quality so even though I lose part of them to their partners, I gain another friend. It's a wash. But the loss in this case is that I can't experience the world in a way that they do. I'm not privy to married/partner life and all the other couples and their orbits. And don't even ask me to try and comprehend and empathize with the issues and emotions around being a part of a pair.
Then comes the ultimate loss. The arrival of the child/children. If you thought I was at a loss to understand on an emotional level the issues of coupledom, well you can imagine how difficult it is to translate an theoretical idea of what some emotion/fear should be into really understanding and anticipating how to communicate and relate to those who do/are experiencing parenthood. Add to that the irrationality of those parenthood feelings/fears and I feel like I'm on eggshells.
I've "lost" a person who was at one time a friend of substance in my life. This person would warrant mention in my autobiography. This person would certainly be part of some hilarious story in which the joke would be on me. This person would come across in a positive light and would be amazed at how I could think of them in such high esteem. However, the course of life has removed them from my life. There is little about our lives anymore that are similar. And I don't think that our lives being different is all that bad, in fact, it's something that should be celebrated that each and every one of us has pursued a career or passion that was true for each and every one of us and is living a life of genuine happiness and contentment.
So, it hurts when the only thing that remains as a representation of our friendship arrives in the form that I complained about. And it's not the picture of the child, really. It's that it would have taken the sender a minute, maybe a maximum of three minutes to jot something down about them the person who is raising that cute kid in the picture staring at me. So really, I feel like (and I know this is completely childish and immature) I would rather not even get a card. Even though the sender is celebrating the development of their child and the picture is a snapshot of the incredibly hard work, loss of sleep due to worry and all the diaper changes, it's not something I can understand at the core level. At its most crass level, the baby/child/children 1, Ernie 0. And there isn't even a chance at a rematch/do over.
To end this post in a constructive way, I ask that those of you who send the picture cards of your children, please just take a minute to tell me about YOU. What are you doing in your life? What are the things, other than your child, that motivate you to get up each day? These are the things that brought us together as friends in the first place. These are the things that are going to keep us single people around. As for my issues with those benefits, most glaringly the missed opportunity at tuition remission at a private K-12 school, well, I'm just going to have to think creatively to see that benefit come to fruition. The inequities are as stark as me not having any benefit to another teacher who sent all four of her kids here for 13 years at 75% off. Umm, you do the math on that one.
I hope that I've explained the basis for my anger. I apologize for my bluntness. I don't apologize for the fact that I made light of what is a touchy issue for many of us who don't have children. Please remember what our lives our like because you were there once. We'll do our best to try and be sensitive to your feelings, joys and issues. However, for us it's in many ways an intellectual exercise and we might not always get it right. Thanks for making it this far. Good friends are willing to read to this point. Thanks, friend.
So, as I always do, I sat down and stared at the wall and sorted through what I believed to be my feelings about the "photocard as christmas card" anger. In retrospect, the storm began to brew last week when a colleague of mine (not in my department) and his wife are due to have a baby any day now. There is some uproar about the "not so progressive" policy around paternity leave. A letter was going around and I was asked by another faculty member to sign it. Granted, I believe that the rules should be changed to reflect the values of the institution, but I decided that I didn't want to be associated with an issue that clearly wasn't ever going to benefit me. I know that sounds horrifically selfish, but it is one of a couple benefits that I, as a single (gay isn't even an issue) non-parent faculty member will NEVER use. It's money that I can't even try and get because I'm single and don't have children.
Around the same time, I was asked to donate money towards a baby gift. Standard procedure. We also found out that another faculty member's wife was pregnant and I saw more cash leaving my wallet. Then we had our scheduled faculty meeting (which could be distilled into a memo of announcements) morph into a "words of wisdom" for oncoming parenthood and cake celebration. This joyous occasion as one of my colleagues who has been trying for a couple years to get pregnant had to sit and watch and wonder. It was feeling like all baby, all the time.
So that's part I. The second part of my "scrooge-ness" can be distilled as an equivalent to the time when a first child gets all pissy because all of a sudden its parents are splitting their energies between the firstborn and the newborn. I'm the firstborn in this situation. I have all these wonderful friends in my life and we all met and had these amazing experiences together when we were younger. First, life taking us across the country and world scatter us all over. So I've lost part of them first to geography. One by one, my formerly single friends found partners and began to do "couples things", a world that I can be included in but never truly feel welcome. At least, their spouses and partners are adults and always persons of intellect and quality so even though I lose part of them to their partners, I gain another friend. It's a wash. But the loss in this case is that I can't experience the world in a way that they do. I'm not privy to married/partner life and all the other couples and their orbits. And don't even ask me to try and comprehend and empathize with the issues and emotions around being a part of a pair.
Then comes the ultimate loss. The arrival of the child/children. If you thought I was at a loss to understand on an emotional level the issues of coupledom, well you can imagine how difficult it is to translate an theoretical idea of what some emotion/fear should be into really understanding and anticipating how to communicate and relate to those who do/are experiencing parenthood. Add to that the irrationality of those parenthood feelings/fears and I feel like I'm on eggshells.
I've "lost" a person who was at one time a friend of substance in my life. This person would warrant mention in my autobiography. This person would certainly be part of some hilarious story in which the joke would be on me. This person would come across in a positive light and would be amazed at how I could think of them in such high esteem. However, the course of life has removed them from my life. There is little about our lives anymore that are similar. And I don't think that our lives being different is all that bad, in fact, it's something that should be celebrated that each and every one of us has pursued a career or passion that was true for each and every one of us and is living a life of genuine happiness and contentment.
So, it hurts when the only thing that remains as a representation of our friendship arrives in the form that I complained about. And it's not the picture of the child, really. It's that it would have taken the sender a minute, maybe a maximum of three minutes to jot something down about them the person who is raising that cute kid in the picture staring at me. So really, I feel like (and I know this is completely childish and immature) I would rather not even get a card. Even though the sender is celebrating the development of their child and the picture is a snapshot of the incredibly hard work, loss of sleep due to worry and all the diaper changes, it's not something I can understand at the core level. At its most crass level, the baby/child/children 1, Ernie 0. And there isn't even a chance at a rematch/do over.
To end this post in a constructive way, I ask that those of you who send the picture cards of your children, please just take a minute to tell me about YOU. What are you doing in your life? What are the things, other than your child, that motivate you to get up each day? These are the things that brought us together as friends in the first place. These are the things that are going to keep us single people around. As for my issues with those benefits, most glaringly the missed opportunity at tuition remission at a private K-12 school, well, I'm just going to have to think creatively to see that benefit come to fruition. The inequities are as stark as me not having any benefit to another teacher who sent all four of her kids here for 13 years at 75% off. Umm, you do the math on that one.
I hope that I've explained the basis for my anger. I apologize for my bluntness. I don't apologize for the fact that I made light of what is a touchy issue for many of us who don't have children. Please remember what our lives our like because you were there once. We'll do our best to try and be sensitive to your feelings, joys and issues. However, for us it's in many ways an intellectual exercise and we might not always get it right. Thanks for making it this far. Good friends are willing to read to this point. Thanks, friend.
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