I ought to read my old email more often. I knew there were five supervisors-only key fields on the 1930 forms. I don’t know why I only put four in.
Added the fifth with great trepidation, as adding fields is what got the darn thing crashing irretrievably before—but not this time. Field is added, shows up in the right place, is (mostly) working right. Go me!
Oh, and I hate Visual Basic. Just for future reference.
There’s a bit in the Torah (somewhere or other in Numbers) that goes something like… the Israelites have left Egypt, and they’re wandering around in the desert lost and confused, and suddenly a large detachment confronts Moses and says, “Look, why can’t we go back to Egypt? Sure, we were slaves, but at least we knew the ropes. What are we supposed to do out here? Where are we going, and when will we get there? Who are all these people in our way? And this manna stuff—it’s nice and all, but it’s also weird. Can we trust it? Let’s just turn around and go back.”
(I remember this bit because it was part of my Torah portion for my Bat Mitzvah. Really. I was supposed to do a little sermonette based on it, but I didn’t. Maybe now I can repair the omission.)
Now, Moses trusts the promises he’s been given, because who wouldn’t, seeing what he’s seen and doing what he’s done? His belief isn’t the problem. The problem is communicating that belief to people who haven’t seen and haven’t done.
Neither Moses nor his master is especially good at this, as it happens. Moses tries to jolly them along, narrowly escapes a stoning, and goes back for a conference, at which his master goes utterly ballistic and swears he’ll wipe those lame-o disbelievers off the face of the earth. Moses convinces him not to do this (think of the precedent! won’t the Egyptians just laugh!), but all he can talk him down to is that the disbelievers won’t ever get the benefits promised.
One can sympathize with Moses’s master’s ire. A number of strings have already been pulled just to get the Israelites this far. It isn’t enough? Even so, though, I think the response is excessive—but I’ve always valued praxis over faith, so who am I to say?
There’s some pretty sharp psychology in this bit, I must say. Its relevance to the current spat between myself, IA, Rana, and Kevin Walzer ought to be fairly clear. Kevin wants to be Moses, and he’s annoyed that his reward is a stoning.
Eh, I dunno. Moses might have wanted to go talk to Miriam instead. She seems to have been pretty sharp.
She might have reminded him, for instance, that his master isn’t a mindreader. As long as the Israelites keep going and nobody gets stoned, who cares what they’re thinking? It’s safe to assume their state of mind will improve once they actually get there. So improving their state of mind now is kinda putting cart in front of horse. The problem isn’t getting them to think right, it’s getting them to keep going. Jollies about the Promised Land clearly aren’t sufficient motivation, so why not try something else?
One thing Moses didn’t try was acknowledging and respecting the Israelites’ very valid and understandable fears. Sometimes you don’t want to be jollied; you want to be heard. Sometimes you can’t even hear the jollies, no matter how real they are, until your fears have been heard.
Another thing he didn’t try was praising them for how far they’d already come despite their terror. I mean, really, split seas are scary places. Sure, eyes on the prize—but honor the history, too.
Nor did he approach the Israelites on their level, establish a commonality with them. Hey, I’m scared too (he was!), and I don’t have all the answers (he didn’t!). I’m still walking. I still believe. Walk with me, whether you believe or not.
Nor did he remind them that Egypt was toast; there was no going back. Harsh, yeah, but no harsher than condemning people to a lifetime in the desert, to my mind.
I guess my point here is that faith is good, but forcing it is counterproductive, and it isn’t always necessary to begin with. If someone’s feet are going in the right direction, insisting on Right Thinking won’t make those feet move any faster. If the feet are going the wrong way, it’s easier to change the direction of feet than of head—and feet have this funny habit of carrying a head along with them.
Or such is my experience. Can’t speak for Moses.
Turns out the other comforter was a wee bit too heavy for the dryer; the drum has stopped rotating. I’m guessing we broke a belt. Oops.
I would have guessed getting a repair would require calling an 800 number, sitting around on hold for ten minutes, giving my info v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y to someone in a call center, altogether a half-hour of wasted time—but on a lark, I decided to see if the repair folks had a website.
Sure enough. Less than ten minutes later, I have a repair visit scheduled. No muss, no fuss, no annoying automated phone systems.
This Internet thing. Might catch on.
If you noticed a CavLec outage yesterday, it’s because the sysadmin was patching the server CavLec lives on owing to a hack attempt.
Don’t think I lost any mail, but could have.
Children’s wooden blocks do a fine job of fluffing just-laundered down comforters in the dryer. They make a heck of a lot of noise, of course, but they work.
One comforter washed, one to go.
Both Rana and Invisible Adjunct are intrigued but repelled by a Kevin Walzer post on positive thinking overcoming anger. Frankly—sorry, Kevin—I had exactly the same reaction they did.
I always have had that reaction to the cognitive-behavioral model of therapy. I accept that it works for a great many people. That doesn’t stop it from really ticking me off. I shouldn’t, however, go running it down without examining why it has the effect on me it does, and suggesting an alternative. Off I go, then.
One aspect of cognitive-behavioral approaches that bugs me is being forced to ill-wish my native state of mind. “These thoughts are wrong; these thoughts are unproductive; these thoughts should be replaced.” Yes, well, these thoughts are also genuine, and calling them names is tantamount to calling myself names. Not helpful. Just not.
Another is denial-based cognitive dissonance. I just don’t have much luck pretending something I don’t believe. I get angry at the old belief for not going away, and at the new one for not being compelling, and at myself for not succeeding the way Dr. Beck says I ought… and in the end I don’t feel any better; I feel worse.
(Especially given my habit of rumination. I turn the nasty stuff over in my head quite thoroughly, quite logically, and quite rationally. It’s really rather insulting to ask me to throw that logic, that understanding, away.)
At its worst, the positive-thinking idea leads me straight to that old Egyptian river. It’s not so bad. Keep on going. You’ll get through. It’ll get better. Until I end up catatonic in an armchair wholly unable to make sense of a single sentence in a book, because things have gotten bad beyond my power to cope, and instead of walking away I’ve jollied myself with false jollies.
So the positive-thinking thing—not for me. What is, then?
Recognition. Acceptance. Functioning.
Instead of “If it feels bad, it’s all in my head! I don’t really feel bad at all!” I prefer “This feels bad.” I admit this is the weakest link in my coping chain. It still takes me a while to recognize when I’m not quite myself. Still, I’m catching it earlier and earlier. Go me.
Instead of insisting that I actively limit my own bad thoughts, I remember—because it is true—that they are self-limiting. Whether I do “the right thing,” think the right thoughts, or not, eventually I will return to equilibrium. Paradoxically, not forcing myself to hunt for palliatives makes me far more likely to do so. “This sucks, so I must fix it!” yields to “This sucks, but it can and will be fixed.”
I strongly resist the idea that depressed or angry people are completely non-functioning. For Pete’s sake, I know better! In the grip of the same paralyzing depression that left me unable to read, I taught forty-odd people Spanish, and did so pretty damned well, thank you. So I don’t believe in telling people that they can’t get anything accomplished unless and until they fix their thoughts.
Instead of “That thought is doubleplusungood, so stop everything until it’s rooted out!” I prefer “I can meet—I am meeting—my basic responsibilities in spite of whatever’s eating at me. I’ve worked through stuff and kept going before; this time isn’t any different.”
Like cognitive-behavioral therapy, this series of thoughts and behaviors won’t work for everybody. It is, however, reflected in the way I behave toward people who are working through stuff, and I haven’t yet felt the resistance from anyone that Kevin’s post is getting. So maybe I really am on to something.
For what it’s worth, then. I need to stop now, because my hand is acting up—right hand this time, and carpal rather than cubital tunnel. Later, all right?
Just got back from dinner with Sean. If you ever get an invite from him, absolutely take him up on it.
Sean is a good talker and a gifted listener. He is one of the rare people capable of making David feel comfortable enough to talk on a first meeting. (“I think I talked too much,” David said on the way home. This is truly rare. Usually I have to nudge him to say more than three words in succession.)
He also knows his way around sci-fi, fantasy, and gaming. When we get together next (he says he’ll be back in Madison sometime), I hope we get to talk more about books.
I don’t want to say something facile about how bloggers are the salt of the earth. Some of them are, some of them not so much. I will say, though, that the ones I’ve had real contact with, whether face-to-face or virtual, have been such terrific people that I do genuinely wonder why I interest them.
Until next time, Sean!
David got a letter (really! snailmail!) from his aunt last night. I vaguely knew he has some aunts and uncles, but I’ve never met them and couldn’t name them if I tried.
(He knows about some of mine, but not for good reasons. Things like explaining why I didn’t invite extended relations to our wedding. And why I refused to go to my grandmother’s funeral, much though I respected her.)
Why the sudden contact? Guess. His aunt’s husband’s cousin’s kid (or some weird concatenation like that) is 8, and loved the Lord of the Rings movies, and would just die for something written in Elvish…
Don’t get any ideas. I don’t let him answer all the emails he gets with similar requests; he’d not have time to do anything else (like, say, work toward his Ph.D). Blame me, not him. But, hell, I can’t pass up a chance to encourage a young proto-linguist in the family and neither can David, so he spent yesterday evening calligraphing a message for the kid. I got him to photocopy it before he sent it off; he doesn’t realize how cool these things are.
David and I are going out to dinner tonight with Sean Meade, who happens to be in town. If you pass by Chautara this evening, wave.
An unbelievable encyclopedia of characters from Victorian pulp. This is just awesome. Must link!
Someday I’ve got to get the Malory Knight Index that David and I did—oh, heavens, a decade ago—on the web.