Salmon Fishing in the Yemen; Social Obligation

I can't really think of a movie title that appeals to me less than Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (Amazon, Netflix), so I was surprised when it showed up in a Netflix envelope. I read the description ("a fabulously wealthy sheik longs to bring fly-fishing to the desert"), and still had no clue why I might have ordered it. I kept it around for several weeks, watching whatever was in my second Netflix envelope.

Then last night I set up what was in my other Netflix envelope---and it was an HBO series (HBO's motto: "We're allowed to use sex and swearing---and it shows!"), which was impossible to watch with the kids around. I was going to just read a book instead, but I figured, well, Salmon Fishing is PG-13, so I'll watch it for 15 minutes while I eat my dinner, and then I can send it back and be done with it.

NO IT WAS REALLY GOOD. There was barely any salmon-fishing in it at all! It was very much the kind of movie I like, so it must be that Netflix said to me, "You know how you seem to like Ewan McGregor feel-sad/good movies and anything with accents? We have a movie we think you'll enjoy" and I clicked "add to queue" without even looking at the title or description.

There are a lot of cute earnest confident guys in it, if that's your thing. And there were a lot of funny parts. And Kristin Scott Thomas is in it, swearing at her children and IM'ing with the prime minister. I really liked it.

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I'm re-reading some of my Miss Manners books to see if she has some good ways to deal with the difficult person in a group. So far I haven't found much of use (she suggests saying "So kind of you to take an interest" in a chilly voice to someone who's being overly pushy, but I tried to imagine using that in a group of friends and couldn't picture it), but I've been having fun browsing a bunch of other stuff.

One section on a different topic that caught my eye is about social obligations: she says it's a mistake to keep inviting over people you don't like and accepting invitations back. She suggests that in many cases, the other people don't want to come over any more than you want to invite them, and are themselves acting out of social obligation. Then they have to invite YOU back over, and you go even though you don't want to, and the cycle continues---with NO ONE having a good time. If EITHER party would just DROP IT, everyone would be happier.

I think this is interesting to think about in an internet context---though again, I'm not sure it works well when I try to apply it. Like maybe sometimes we're following people only because they follow us, but actually they're following us only because we're following them, and we'd all be happier if we stopped---but it seems like more often one person wants to follow and the other one doesn't want to follow back, and THAT'S the issue.

Another Appetizer Report and Some Hand-Wringing About Socializing in Groups

I tried another of the appetizer recipes for a get-together and I am ready to make a report! This time I tried Emily's party bread, which a friend of hers posted about here. It's a loaf of Italian bread, cut into cubes that don't break through the bottom crust (so that it all still stays together), stuffed with a pound of cheese, drizzled with a stick of butter, seasoned with garlic, and decorated with poppy seeds (I also used parsley flakes for additional visual appeal). Then you bake it.

I was worried because the party was 15 minutes away; I could have done the second heat-up at her house, but I felt nervous about that and preferred not to, so I took the bread directly from the oven, put it into a bag, and ran from the house. It was just fine for the party: not piping hot, but still plenty warm. If I keep going to these get-togethers, I might buy some sort of insulated transportation bag.

Next time I'll bake it longer: the cheese in the middle hadn't melted. But the edges were great. People kept going back and picking at it more. There were about seven of us there, I think, and we ate about half the loaf---and that was with six other appetizers to choose from. It seems like it would be a nice flexible recipe that could handle a bunch of different kinds of seasonings. I've added the recipe to my recipe box.

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Okay, so what I really want to talk about is that these get-togethers are getting me all agitated, and I don't know if it's good or bad. It's really hard to tell the difference between "Getting outside your comfort zone! good for emotional stretching and growth! relationship/community-building! change of pace! social needs! wheeeee!" and "This is not a good fit for me, and is resulting in distress and agitation instead of the good things that might be experienced by a different person."

And sometimes in a situation there might be the additional issue of telling the difference between "Not everyone is going to get along with everyone, and one of the benefits of a group is that it's good for us to have experience dealing with people we wouldn't have chosen and/or people who have different views on a subject" and "Yes, and that can be true of dealing with the rest of the people in the group because they also have upsides, but this particular person is a humorless, strident, pushy, aggressive, oblivious ASS, and contact with her should be severely limited, and she ruins the entire event so maybe these alleged group benefits should be experienced with a DIFFERENT GROUP."

...Okay, just typing that out was a big help. I think I will continue to get all RILED: it's not only a matter of there being one person I find challenging, it's even MORE an issue of general overstimulation (TONS OF PEOPLE! TONS OF TOPICS!), plus all the usual party issues of "Did I talk too much/little, was I boring, did I say something I shouldn't have, did I keep killing the conversation, was I too quiet/loud?" But overall, and for now, I want to keep going anyway.

Plus there's this issue: if she's so awful, why is she still in the group? Maybe I'm the only one who finds her insufferable. Maybe everyone else finds her sufferable.

And even with the insuffering, the good outweighs the bad. Just for starters, these are the moms of kids in Rob's grade. EXCELLENT INSIDER INFO AND NOTE-COMPARING. And also I do like THEM. And perhaps I will learn some tips on how to deal with the particular sort of person I mentioned, since there seems to be no world shortage.

I also noticed two other things that lead me to wonder if a Difficult Person can actually enhance a group:

1. You know that thing about friendships being based on shared dislikes? Another guest and I made a huge leap in friendship over one single "o.O" facial expression.

2. I noticed that the one strident person's strident views seemed to make everyone else more open to the concept of assorted views. Like, a conversation might be getting a little intense and divided---but then Stridentella lets loose with her views, and suddenly everyone else is saying things like "Well, different choices make sense for different families." It's like she shows us a caricature of how our own views were shaping up, and that makes us all want to back away from that.

Down

You know what's incredibly frustrating to launder? Anything filled with down. It floats like a duck. Water rolls off it like....water...off a duck's.... I think I see the problem. But how to get our down jackets clean, then? Mine is aqua and it might as well be white for how clean it stays, and Henry's is dark blue but he has nevertheless managed with effort and ingenuity to make the dirt really represent.

I looked around online for awhile, but got frustrated by all the non-answer answers all written in the same format (paragraph about the benefits of down! paragraph asking the question about washing! paragraph failing to resolve the issue! paragraph congratulating ourselves on resolving the issue!) and gave up. How would a person go about washing a DUCK, is perhaps the question we should be asking.

Right now I have the coats floating on top of the water in the washing machine ("soaking"), and periodically I go shove them under the water in frustration, and that is going to have to be good enough.

Sharing/Splitting a Tab

It was only very, very recently (this school year) that I figured out what to do if I was in a group of people standing around (like, at preschool pick-up), and I was talking with one person in the group, and another person came and stood nearby and seemed to want to join the conversation but seemed tentative about it, like they were afraid they'd be butting in. (Answer: Turn to the new person, say, "We were just talking about [how different the bus system was when we were in school / the big storm expected Friday / the stupid parking situation]," and then start looking back and forth between the two faces while talking.)

When I figured that out, I felt like it was something a lot of people would have already known in an "I just knew; I had no idea it was something anyone needed to be taught" level. But I also didn't learn until high school that if someone says, "How are you?" you're supposed to say, "Fine! How are you?" A date taught me, after his dad asked me how I was and I stood there grinning in a friendly but mute way. My date said laughingly, "...You can TELL him!" I was mortified for years, but now look at it as an illustration of how socially comfortable my date was: that he not only didn't stand there sharing in the awkwardness but also he took swift, friendly, laid-back action to fix it. And I'm sure the date's dad didn't care, any more than I would if it were one of my kids' friends, so I've stopped feeling that sink-into-the-floor feeling over it. (It's nice to know that feeling can fade after...a couple of decades.)

Where was I? Oh, yes. So, there are a lot of social things I encounter where I wonder if this is another of those things where most people know already how to deal with it and I need to find out what it is, or if it's something most other people struggle with too. Like, I know from reading blogs that MOST people struggle with how to "ask out" a new friend candidate, so I wouldn't feel strange about struggling with that too. Today's issue is one I've seen mentioned enough to know I'm not one of a tiny minority or anything---but I also think that getting a lot of different responses would be very helpful to show me the range of what society considers normal behavior.

So here it is: If I'm going for coffee for the first time with a new friend candidate, and it's at the kind of place where a waiter comes to the table, what do we do about the bill? Does one person say "separate checks, please," or no? Do people share a single check, then glance at the bill after, round up their own share to the nearest dollar, and leave the change on top of the tip? Do people just split it down the middle, even if they ordered different things (surely not, and yet I've heard it complained about)? What about leaving the tip: do people discuss how much it should be and each put down half, or does each person just put down their own little stack without consulting the other? If one person puts down a lot more tip than the second person was planning to, doesn't that make the second person feel pressured?

This is for the FIRST TIME, at a waitered-table restaurant, with someone new, where you don't yet know how they'd prefer to handle it: how do YOU handle the situation?

Data, A Love Story; The Night Circus

I read two books. Now I will say things about them.

(photo from Amazon.com)

Data, A Love Story: How I Gamed Online Dating to Meet My Match, by Amy Webb. My sister-in-law's sister mentioned this book, and so when I saw it at our library I got it. It's about a woman who, as you can see from the title, was frustrated with online dating and figured out work-arounds to get what she wanted.

I thought it was a good story and that she had some good practical advice that would be likely to work. But I found her so off-putting I could hardly stand it. I wrote four paragraphs saying why, and then deleted them because if the book showed anything it's that we all have types we're drawn to and types we're repelled by. And also, I felt like a lot of what I didn't like wasn't really HER, it was her showing off for her book. Like, if I got to know her when she wasn't trying to impress us so hard, I might love her.

(photo from Amazon.com)

The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern. I read this because I kept hearing so many different reactions to it. I liked it, mostly. I liked fairy tales and magic a lot when I was a child, and it's fun to find something along that line for grown-ups. I thought the language kept slipping into "Look how beautifully I'm writing/describing! Look how I'm making the magic COME ALIVE for you!," and also I haaaaaate second-person singular ("You go through a door. You wonder what you're going to see," etc.) but I just skimmed those parts. (Most of it was NOT in second-person singular.)

...I feel like I'm not successfully communicating that I really liked it. I did like it.

Middle-Aged

The term "middle-aged" is a little awkward, because it's a tactful euphemism for an older group than it seems to describe. If the typical U.S. human life is, say, 78 years long, then age 39 should be solidly middle-aged---but that's not what we mean by the term. We actually mean something more like "well past the middle, but the term elderly isn't right yet."

I think of middle-aged people as being in their 50s or 60s or so---but it's a stage of life more than an exact age. It's a stage with no young kids in the house anymore (unless it's grandkids), but no need yet for walkers, or for those chairs that help a person stand up. When a middle-aged person gets sick, we don't think, "Uh oh, hope it doesn't go to the lungs." We don't worry much yet about broken hips, but there are plenty of lost bifocals. No one is talking about whether it's time to take away a driver's license or "think about a home," but there is talk about retirement. There are of course myriad exceptions (a guy in his twenties might have bifocals or have bad lungs or need to use a walker; a guy in his 60s could have little kids with his young wife), but middle-aged is a general term, so I'm speaking of the group it describes in a general way too.

I have a new proposal for terms. I was thinking about how middle-aged doesn't describe the middle stage of life: it's more like the third out of four (childhood, adult, middle-aged, elderly). Then I noticed another euphemism for age, which is the "senior" in "senior discount" and "senior citizen" and "seniors residence." And the combination of "four stages" plus "senior" made me think of how we mark high school and college grades: freshman, sophomore, junior, senior.

We're currently using senior discount to include people over 65 or even 60 or 55, so we'd have to change that. "Senior" would now be used the way we use "elderly": deep wrinkles, white hair, fear of broken hips, nursing homes, walkers. Then we could use "junior" to cover the category we now call "middle-aged": bifocals, falling necks, kids are grown, menopause, needlework about having the fun grandchildren first. Early/mid-twenties (depending on personal maturity rates) up to middle-aged would be called sophomores. And children up to their early/mid twenties would be freshmen.

If we're going to use euphemisms, it's nice to have them TIDY. And I also like the way this system automatically implies a gaining of knowledge and experience, rather than an increasing fumbling with new technology and change purses.

Pretend It's Someone Else Saying It

I have come upon a Useful Motivational Tool. It is not going to work for all personality types or for all motivational situations; in fact, for some personalities and situations it would be awful. It's similar to the "Think of how other people are worse off" perspective-resetting technique, which ONLY has a chance of working if self-applied, and is DREADFUL otherwise, and can backfire and/or be inappropriate even if self-applied---and it taps into the otherwise wasted/misspent resource of "feeling like other people's lives and emotions are eye-rollingly easy to direct/correct."

Here is what it is: Pretend it's someone else saying what you're saying. That is, when you have a reason you can't do something you want yourself to do, pretend you're listening to (or reading a blog post by) someone else saying that same reason. In some cases, you will nod your head and agree: "Yes, it sounds like that situation really is preventing you from doing that." But in many other cases, you will say: "What? Are you kidding me? That's easy to fix!"

This works particularly well for those of us who are Fixers AND Too Easily Discouraged. You know how some women will complain that they just wanted to vent but their male companions kept trying to FIX it instead of just LISTENING? I have "male" fixing inclinations of that sort, and often have to remind myself, "She just wants to vent. She is PERFECTLY CAPABLE of thinking of the same obvious thing you feel an urge to point out to her, but she feels like complaining right now." And the reason I know that's likely the case is that I myself sometimes just want to whine about something for awhile: I know I have to fix it, but I want to WHINE about it FIRST, oKAY? I slump my shoulders and think, "It's HOPELESS. To fix this window situation, I'd have to go to TWO STORES! Including one I DON'T ENJOY. AND I'd have to measure a shade before I go! AND choose a curtain color! JUST FORGET IT." And then eventually I answer myself: "Psh. Don't be ridiculous. You'd be completely done before the kids got home from school. I think you can handle an hour and a half of Not Your Favorite Tasks." The whining ends up being an important part of the solution-finding process: if there's no whining, no solution is generated.

Or I remember when I had a tiny baby and was inwardly despairing because I COULDN'T EVEN GO TO THE BATHROOM. I was getting myself all the way to TEARS of frustration and injustice and resentment and self-pity over the issue. It was IMPOSSIBLE! This situation was SO UNREASONABLE!! I was TOO BUSY to PEE!! And then I remembered how I felt when other people said the same, which caused me to say to myself, "Don't be ridiculous, of course you can pee. You just put down the baby in a safe place and go to the bathroom. Yes, he will scream while you are peeing. Are you seriously saying that's literally, actually, genuinely something you can't work with, or are you just locked into a self-defeating self-pity mode now?"

So I was already familiar with this concept---but now I've been applying it ON PURPOSE. For example, for a few weeks now I've been inwardly whining about wanting to exercise but also NOT wanting to exercise. When I imagined reading a blog post written by someone else mentioning all my same reasons, I nearly gagged on all my excellent ideas and sarcastic dismissals.

Not for ALL of the reasons, though, which is good to keep in mind: this technique can work as a SORTING tool as well as a fixing/dismissing tool. For SOME of the reasons/issues, I thought, "You're right, that's a legit problem." Sometimes I then thought "But that problem will be over soon" or "It's true, that's a problem that would take a bigger solution---so let's do the easier fixes first and see how that goes," and sometimes I thought, "Yeah, I'm not sure that's fixable." But a lot of other things I thought, "Yes? So that would take, what, 30 seconds to a minute? That seems...pretty reasonable" and "Well, that's what exercise comes with. There's no sense whining about reality as if whining will change it somehow" and "Well, could you try A or B or C to fix that aspect of things?" and "Well, then what you need to acquire is a D and an E. And you could consider acquiring an F and a G."

I think this technique is already part of the automatic whining-leads-to-solution process, but I tend to have a....LONG process. Deliberate application is helping me speed things up a little.