Tag Archives: coping mechanisms

Survival Tips for Deadly Boring Meetings

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Deadly boring meetings are one of the hazards of office life. They don’t actually take your life (most of the time), but they can make you wish they would. (There have been stories about office workers who died in their cubicles and went undiscovered for days, but these are largely untrue. No matter how rancid the office refrigerator smells, a decomposing body surely out-ranks it. Though too-energetic air conditioning can delay the process. But I digress.)

One meeting that I was in was so memorably boring that I became fascinated with the ear hair of the man sitting next to me. I couldn’t imagine how the individual fibers got so long while escaping his notice as well as his ears. They weren’t just protruding from inside his ears; they had migrated to his earlobes and whatever the technical term is for those folds and channels of the ear. I thought that he might be turning into a werewolf and that, being within chomping range, I would be his first victim. Needless to say, I didn’t pay much attention to the agenda.

Aside from werewolf-watching, though, there are plenty of activities to keep you alert – or, more importantly – looking alert during those agenda-setting meetings, pre-meeting meetings, meetings, and post-mortem meetings (especially appropriate if someone actually has died of boredom), not to mention stand-up meetings, which will be mercifully short if there is a quorum of women wearing high heels. (I mistakenly typed “high hells” there, which is a slip you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to figure out.)

So what can I recommend to keep you breathing in and out while that guy from IT rattles on about bandwidth and the CEO decides bandwidth actually means how much work she can get out of each of you? Take up a new career. Here are some suggestions.

Take up poetry. This has the added advantage that you look like you are actually taking notes. Of course, you can always draw boxes and weapons on your legal pad or play Candy Crush with the sound off on your tablet, but your arm and hand motions will give you away. No, you should be writing down actual words. Pay attention to the office smarty-pants and write down words he uses like “deleterious” (and other words of three or more syllables). By the end of the meeting, you’ll have some serious free verse. Maybe you can even get it published!

Take up sculpture. There are usually paper clips and coffee stirrers available at every meeting. If not, BYO. Then twist and sculpt away. This has the advantage of keeping your hands busy so you don’t strangle anyone. After a bit of practice, one man I know was able to make a recognizable figure of Don Quixote and a windmill. (OK, we were in a bar and they were margarita stirrers, but the idea is the important thing.) As the meeting ends, subtly slide your sculpture in front of someone else’s chair. If you’re caught, claim that you have a more appalling nervous habit (I recommend rhinotillexomania) and your therapist suggested you try this instead.

Take up musical theater. This is one of my favorites, and can also be made to look like you’re taking notes. Take any musical you’re particularly fond of (I like The Mikado), and recast it using only the people sitting at the table. Would the CFO make a good Pooh-Bah? Would the comptroller do well as Katisha? Then imagine them playing the roles. Afterward, you can recast it with the worst possible employee playing each role. (A variant of this is to recast an old musical with current actors – Kevin Kline and Catherine Zeta-Jones in Man of La Mancha, for example.)

Take up psy ops. This is just plain fun, although it doesn’t result in any notes on your pad or tablet, so perhaps you might combine it with one of the other techniques. Stare attentively at whoever’s speaking, but focus your gaze not on her eyes, but slightly above her left ear (aim for the tip). Or at the knot on the marketing manager’s tie. This can cause distraction – even actual twitching – and no one can tell that you are doing anything. (I understand this is an actual interrogation technique meant to throw the subject off balance.)

You could, I guess, go back to Office Bingo and mark off squares when anyone says “synergistic” or “incentivized” or “skate to where the puck will be,” but when you all yell “Bingo!,” at the same time, the game is over.

Team Eating

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I’ve never been any good at team eating. And I’m not referring to those idiotic competitions to see who can eat the most hot dogs in under a minute (which I believe are individual events anyway). Not that I think I would be any good at those, either. I belch too often to get any kind of rhythm going.

A group of friends eating at a restaurantNo, where I fail is at business dining. Oh, I can make it through an isolated lunch or even an occasional dinner. It’s the day-to-day eating events that leave me stymied.

The company lunchroom is as terrifying to me as a high school cafeteria. I never get to sit at the table with the cool kids or even the audiovisual club. And since a tuna sandwich takes approximately three minutes to eat – maybe five, if you have carrot sticks or yogurt, there’s no good way to stretch it out.

You’d think that my usual strategy – bringing along a book – would allow for some first-class work-related eavesdropping. But no. People get suspicious if you don’t turn the pages, and any book worth its tiny paper package of salt will prove distracting right before the team eaters get to the really juicy stuff – and I don’t mean ripe peaches.

If the lunch culture at the office (and here I’m not referring to yogurt) involves dining at local establishments, the problem is even worse. Even if you want to be a team eater, only the truly pathetic will attempt the “Can I come too?” ploy. It works, in the sense that hardly anyone has the meatballs to say no, but it only leads to groups of employees hustling out a fire door that’s not near your desk the next time.

If you’re a brave soul and decide to eat out alone, trusty book in hand, you may encounter the horror of sauntering into a restaurant where a tableful of your co-workers have already gathered. At that point the only thing to do is nod politely while the other diners pretend their mouths are full and wave a cordial fork in your direction. If you’re a grump, you can hope they flick salad dressing in someone’s eye.

But by far the worst team eating events are picnics, cookouts, pizza parties, and other mandatory frivolities put on by the company. These may be billed as voluntary events, but believe me, they aren’t. If you do decide to forego the games of water balloon volleyball or bingo (with prizes “donated” by your suppliers) in favor of retreating to a cool, dim nearby watering hole, you leave yourself open to being the object of whispered, eye-darting conversations in the lunchroom for at least the next month. Plus, you’ll have to avoid making eye contact with everyone else who slunk off to the same watering hole.

What’s the solution? Is there a solution? A number of people I know just read their books and ignore coworkers back. Some eat at their desks, though honestly, you’ve got to get out of that hell-cube sometime or you’ll grow corners.

Maybe the best solution is to take a large batch of brownies – they don’t even have to be home-made – and offer them around. Brownies are a kind of currency that buys you a place at the lunch table. Especially if they’re “special” brownies (depending on where you work, of course). Oh, and mix it up. Cupcakes, cookies, doughnuts – anything suitably sweet says, “Invite me!”

Then feel free to dish about someone else who isn’t there. You’ll be a team eater in no time.

I Want My Blankie!

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Linus’s security blanket. Radar O’Reilly’s teddy bear. That kid in Mr. Mom‘s woobie (which seems to be where the term “woobie” was invented). (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSVCQ-NmTac.)

What do all these things have in common?

They’re what psychologists call “comfort objects,” or as Wikipedia defines it, “an item used to provide psychological comfort, especially in unusual or unique situations.”Morgenmuffel

But look again at that list. What’s different about one of the names? Radar O’Reilly is an adult, or at least grown-up enough to be a corporal in the U.S. Army. Some of the characters on the show and in the audience poked fun at him, but most understood – Radar was in a strange and dangerous place and needed a comfort object to remind him of his childhood home in Ottumwah, IA.

And Radar isn’t the only adult who needs a woobie of some sort. Alabama journalist Anna Claire Vollers wrote:

Last year, the hotel chain Travelodge polled about 6,000 people in Great Britain and found 35 percent said they sleep with teddy bears. A surprising 25 percent of men admitted to bringing their teddy bears with them on business trips.

So now I have a confession to make: I own an array of comfort objects and sometimes take them with me on trips. Once I even took a stuffed bunny with me to a sleep study. (Let me be clear: It was not a taxidermied bunny, but what I believe are now called plushies. For taxidermied animals as comfort objects, you should check out The Bloggess.)

My habit started in childhood, when I preferred plushies to Barbies. Every year our Easter baskets contained, in addition to candy and fake grass, a plush bunny. One year I won a plush bunny three-and-a-half feet tall in a raffle. It was wearing a blue and yellow checked dress. My mom found the same fabric and made me a matching one.

Now my collection includes, in addition to bunnies and bears, crocheted armadillos, assorted Beanie Babies (including a crab and a spider), a giraffe, Thing One and Thing Two from The Cat in the Hat, and a Raggedy John Denver doll that a friend made me (the little heart on his chest says “Far Out”).

Nor am I the only one among my circle of friends who treasures assorted comfort objects. Two of my friends have plush animals that could be either husky dogs or gray teddy bears (which they call “huskie bears”). Our friend John had a toy bunny (“Lovie”) to sleep with at home and borrowed a bear my mother had made when he napped at our house after Thanksgiving dinner. My sister had a 12-inch square piece of cloth from her childhood that she named “Tag.” She kept it under her pillow at college. Her roommates teased her unmercifully about it, though really it was a miracle Tag had lasted that long.

One friend even received as a gift a plushie called “My First Bacon.” As I recall, it talked, though I’m not quite sure what talking bacon could say that I would find soothing, except possibly “Eat me.” (Like the cake in Alice in Wonderland. Get your mind out of the gutter.)

But now someone has gotten serious about the therapeutic effects of comfort objects. Wikipedia notes:

Inventor Richard Kopelle created My Therapy Buddy (MTB) in 2002 as a self-described transitional object to benefit “one’s emotional well-being”. The blue creature speaks to you when you squeeze it and says any of a number of phrases that include “everything is going to be alright.”

Here’s a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6kSqSzWr0w. It shows a pale blue, bald, pregnant Smurf-like object being cuddled by various people to a background on New Age-type lullabies. One clip even shows it in the mouth of a giant, leering shark, which does not comfort me and does not appear to comfort the shark.

I will stick with my Pirate Winnie-the-Pooh, thanks. Or my plush Puss in Boots that makes a sound like a cat coughing up a hairball and says, “I thought we were done doing things the stupid way.” In the voice of Antonio Banderas, no less.

I guess we all find comfort in our own way, even if some of them seem stupid to others.

 

Is the “Friend Zone” Hell?

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Men fear and hate it. They see it as a torture device invented by women.

It’s the “Friend Zone.” You know, when a guy expresses romantic (read: sexual) interest and the woman doesn’t feel the same way – the male is relegated to the Friend Zone. (I always picture it as a kind of corral, with men inside milling around, meeping piteously.)

But let’s take a closer look. When a man is, let’s say, encouraged to dwell in the Friend Zone, there are four typical reactions he may experience.

The “It’s Nice to Have a Friend” Response

This is the rational, mature response, and one you almost never hear. It says, “I believe men and women can be friends and I’m delighted to be your friend.” Perhaps this is the least-common response because more women than men believe in the possibility of male-female friendships – and not just between women and gay men. And perhaps the resistance to it among men is a sign of homophobia – the thought that people will automatically assume that a woman’s male friend is a woman’s gay friend. Not that friendship between a straight woman and a gay man is a bad thing, but some people look askance.

The “If I Stick Around She’ll Come Around” Response

This reaction says, “I’ll hang out in the Friend Zone, but all the while I’ll be doing my best to get out of it.” It is sneaky and manipulative, because it assumes that any woman will “give in” (read: put out) if only the man is persistent. Unfortunately, this pattern has been reinforced by endless rom-com movies in which the originally spurned suitor turns out to be the love of the woman’s life all along, once he persists and she comes around.

In real life, that can lead to stalking.

But, admittedly, a woman’s feelings can change, and a friend can morph into a lover. A patient man will mill and meep in hopes of this happening eventually. If he’s any kind of mensch, he will get on with his life while doing friendship-type things with the woman – like going to the movies with her, only without all the heavy breathing.

The “Me! Me! Me!” Response

This can be translated as “Oh, no! Now I’ll never get laid!” It is usually followed by the woman never seeing the guy again, except at parties with a smug look on his face and a trophy date on his arm. “You had your chance,” it says. “I’ve moved on and done better.” Do I have to say that this response is repulsive and insulting? It implies that sex was the only reason for the man’s interest in the first place and if he can’t have that, he’s on the first bus out of there.

Suzannah Weiss expressed this well in her article in Everyday Feminism (http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/10/nice-guy-lies-shouldnt-believe/):

If someone harbors any hostility toward you for “only” wanting to be his friend, he’s probably not the best friend or boyfriend. Your friendship is not a consolation prize – and the idea of being relegated to friend status hinges on the notion that he was expecting more in the first place.

The Toxic Response

Sadly, there is an even worse response than “sex or nothing.” This is what’s known as the “beta male” movement. According to the Urban Dictionary, a beta male is “an unremarkable, careful man who avoids risk and confrontation. Beta males lack the physical presence, charisma and confidence of the Alpha male.” Beta males see themselves as the “nice guys” that women are never attracted to sexually because they are all pursuing “bad boys” who are obviously wrong for them, if only they could see it.
This reaction turns toxic when it leads to anger at the women doing the overlooking of the betas. The “beta uprising” is a (we hope) theoretical rebellion of the supposedly second-class males in order to – I’m not sure what. Eliminate the alpha males so there’ll be less competition? Punish the women who’ve not had sex with the betas?
Some people claim that the threats of violence that can ensue are fantasies, pranks, or posturing. But Reddit, 4chan, and other anonymous groups and sites perpetuate the concept and provide places for the betas to egg each other on. The Colorado theater shooting and the Umpqua College incident have been claimed as part of the uprising. Even if these claims are untrue, I’ve read the threads on 4chan. They’re truly terrifying and appalling.
 So what’s the solution? Remove the term “Friend Zone” from our collective vocabulary? Socialize women so that they become the willing sex partner of anyone who asks? Or how about socializing men so that they understand that sex is a mutual choice, not a male entitlement? Socializing everyone to realize that friendship – between partners of any gender or gender identity – is a good thing?
I’m dubious, but it’s worth a try.

Color My World

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Pencils Abstract Background

I don’t know anyone who admits to coloring within the lines when they were kids. Coloring outside the lines was a sign that you refused to accept the rigid dictates of uptight coloring book manufacturers and compulsive kindergarten teachers. It was a badge of freedom and creativity and, for some, poor fine motor skills. It was how the more inhibited of us let our freak flags fly.

Now coloring books are back again, only this time for adults. Or at least adults who color within the lines. Elaborate rose windows and fantasy castles await, ready to be embellished with wee flower petals or swirled ribbons of psychedelic hues.

These grown-up coloring books are touted as the next best thing to meditation, so I thought I’d give it a try. My brain could use the time off from my mundane-but-still-complicated life. However, meditation (and yoga) are pretty much out for me, as my lotus-sitting days are long past and I need help to get up off the floor. Coloring seemed a reasonable, less physically challenging alternative.

I took up the hobby despite the fact that I gave up needlepoint years ago when my eyes refused to cooperate with close work and my hands began to tremble at the touch of nearly blunt needles. At least, I figured, I couldn’t draw much blood stabbing myself with a pencil.

I began coloring around the Christmas holidays – a mistake because of its sudden popularity. The store where my husband works sells coloring supplies, but he had to fight for the very last box of 72 colors. (I haven’t told him that blueberry, aruba, denim, mediterranean, and tidal wave are all the same shade of blue. Berri, wildfire, rose petal, and terracotta are all pink.)

At last, with 72 pencils and coloring book in hand, I’ve joined the coloristas. My book offers Spirograph-type geometric designs, assorted animals, and a few Rorschach-style shapes. I color them all with stunning inaccuracy and near-random color choices, producing mediterranean owls, rose petal turtles, and pages that look less like a cathedral window and more like the Grateful Dead’s laundry basket.

But I don’t care. It is soothing and sort of creative, plus I don’t have to frame the completed pages or clutter up the refrigerator door with them. They can stay in the book where only I can see my freak flag flying.

I’m certainly not going to show them to any kindergarten teachers.

Finding Balance – Literally

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We always hear about finding balance – between work and home, family and career, mind and body, heart and head.

My struggle for balance is more literal. My struggle for balance is about not finding myself on the floor with new bruises on my tush.

A number of factors influence my struggle for balance. Various parts of my body are in quiet or open rebellion.

I often joke that I have rocks in my head, but really they are in my ears. Otoliths (literally, “ear rocks”) are tiny calcium crystals that live in the inner ear and bump up against the little hair cells that send information to the brain about gravity and balance – which way the head and body are moving.

Unfortunately, if the little bits of calcium start rattling around loose in the “vestibular organs” (balance centers) of the ear, the brain senses movement when there isn’t any. The result: dizziness, vertigo, loss of balance. Technically, this is called Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (BPPV).

Practically, what it means is that moving my head in certain directions – such as tilting my head backward, especially with my eyes closed – makes me wobbly and prone to falling. This makes showering and shampooing tricky, even without the slippery surfaces, water, and suds.

(An extreme version of this, particularly when there is a sinus or ear infection, is called “labyrinthitis,” which I have also experienced. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk. The room spins. Then you crawl to the toilet and throw up. Repeatedly. The usual treatment is antihistamines such as Antivert or Benadryl.)

Then there are my back and my toes. The two are not as far apart as you might think. What connects them are nerves. And my nerves are frayed.

That’s not just figurative. I have bulging disks between the vertebrae in my back. A number of years ago, some of the bone in my lower back deteriorated and the combination caused a pinched nerve. I had pain in my back, of course, but also in various areas of my legs that were served by that particular nerve. An operation relieved the pain, but there was some residual damage to the nerve.

Now I have no feeling in the three smallest toes on my left foot. You’d be surprised at how much those baby toes have to do with balance. I was. The nerves have healed all they’re going to, so this is it.

How do I achieve balance?

Sometimes I walk with a cane. I try to avoid uneven ground, which pretty much means anything that isn’t paved or as flat as a golf green. I stand with my feet farther apart than most people. I don’t stand on my toes, largely because I can’t, or stand on one foot or with my eyes closed. I would absolutely fail any drunk-driving test that involves those skills.

Indoors, I do something that I’ve learned is called “wall-walking” (which is different than climbing the walls, something I do quite well figuratively). In my own home, where I don’t usually use my cane, I try to keep a light, finger-tip touch on the wall, a door, a bookshelf, or anything else handy. I don’t lean my weight on it. It simply gives me a solid, unmoving point of reference. It’s sort of like when tightrope walkers use a long pole to help keep their balance, or when a gentleman extends a hand to help a lady step down from her carriage. (Depending on whether you’re at the circus or in a romance novel.)

So. I know what you’re thinking. You think I am a decrepit old lady and should just get over it.

But what if I told you I am only 25?

In truth, I am not 25. I am at the age when one begins to worry about aging.

But I was 25 when I started getting labyrinthitis. And even younger the first time I damaged my lower back.

The point is, mobility and balance issues are not limited to the elderly. Back operations and pinched nerves can happen at any age – for example, after a car accident. Some neurological conditions strike young adults.

Finding balance can be hard at any age.

 

The Ups and Downs of Positivity

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The only thing making you unhappy are your own thoughts. Change them. 

When it rains, it pours…but soon, the sun shines again. Stay positive.

I see lots of posts and pass-alongs like these on Facebook: memes claiming that all our problems are in our heads and that we have the ability to change our circumstances by changing our thoughts.

With apologies to Norman Vincent Peale and Joel Osteen, I have trouble with the whole positive thinking movement. My back pain makes me unhappy. My brain chemistry won’t let me control my thoughts (I’m bipolar). Thinking about being rich does not attract money to me. Ordinarily I view positive thinking as wishful thinking.

But I know many people believe in positive thinking and its ability to change their lives. So I set up a little hypothetical dialogue. On one side is Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America. I have selected quotations from her book, particularly those dealing with health, and juxtaposed them with comments from Leslie Larkins, who embraces positive thinking.

Larkins, a former scientist, has always been extremely rational, so it surprised me that her outlook is informed by positive thinking. And she has plenty that she could be negative about. Larkins has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), and had a bout with breast cancer and a surgical mistake that (if not caught) would have subjected her to a completely unnecessary mastectomy. At various times in her life, she has also been treated for depression.

Larkins says that her embrace of positivity came with her MS diagnosis: “When I realized that the problems I had been having at work – trouble with focus, forgetting things – had an actual cause and I accepted that I couldn’t continue to do my job, it was actually a little bit of a relief because I had been feeling out of control for a year or so and couldn’t understand why….I did a lot of research on MS and realized that I could end up in a wheelchair any time, so if I wanted to do something in my life, I shouldn’t put it off. That thought was actually quite empowering to me.”

Ehrenreich, in the first part of Bright-Sided, focuses on the breast cancer movement, particularly the pink-ribbon side of things: “Positive thinking seems to be mandatory in the breast cancer world, to the point that unhappiness requires a kind of apology….The cheerfulness of breast cancer culture goes beyond mere absence of anger to what looks, all too often, like a positive embrace of the disease….[I]t requires the denial of understandable feelings of anger and fear, all of which must be buried under a cosmetic layer of cheer.”

She quotes Cindy Cherry, who stated in The Washington Post: “If I had to do it over, would I want breast cancer? Absolutely. I’m not the same person I was, and I’m glad I’m not. Money doesn’t matter anymore. I’ve met the most phenomenal people in my life through this. Your friends and family are what matter now.”

Larkins responds: “Thankfully I did not have to have the ‘full cancer experience’ because I didn’t have chemo and therefore didn’t lose my hair, so I was kind of a stealth cancer patient and could only tell people who I wanted to know. I wasn’t forced into ‘breast cancer culture.’ I also was in a place where I could handle the emotional issues myself, so I didn’t encounter the support groups and such. I think the ‘Cheer up, it’s good for you’ comes from people who don’t know what to do or say, trying to help when they have no idea what’s going on.”

She adds, “I definitely would not want cancer and I would not want MS, but I do really understand this one. I sometimes joke that being diagnosed with MS was the best thing that ever happened to me. It forced/allowed me to focus on the present, not the sins of the past and not the possible mistakes or failed plans of the future. Once I started doing that and it became a habit, it became much less likely that I would fall into the despair of those worries. It was definitely a paradigm shift for my outlook.”

Larkins’s scientific rationality may have helped her as much as or more than the positive thinking movement. At least it gave her a logical base for embracing positivity. “I think having the medical background and a good handle on statistics and human psychological reactions to probability helped me think clearly about all of it, rather than letting it bury me in despair,” she says. “I think it mostly allowed me to stand back and see what I was doing in my head from an objective view.”

Larkins and Ehrenreich also disagree on the benefits of psychology and support groups. According to Ehrenreich, “Psychotherapy and support groups might improve one’s mood, but they did nothing to overcome [my] cancer.” Indeed, a claim that a psychological uplift can cause a remission in cancer seems (to me, at least) both unwarranted and unprovable.

Larkins, however, swears by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, not for its cancer-killing results (if any), but for its influence on her ability to deal with her various diagnoses. She does see a distinction between “positive thinking” and CBT (don’t Google the acronym, she warns).

“Positive thinking can be a result of CBT,” she says, “but if you just say ‘I’m going to think positive thoughts’ you will end up frustrated. CBT is the method for changing how your brain functions, and it does, indeed, change your brain physically.”

She explains the process: “The more you think about something – an event or a problem – the stronger the neural connections that make up that memory become. My analogy is that it’s like carving a groove or rut in a path by going over and over it again and again …. As the groove gets deeper, it’s easier to fall into it any time you get close to it. By consciously stopping yourself from treading that same neural path, and actively carving another one that has more positive, pleasurable feelings associated with it, you allow that groove to smooth out and the new, positive one to take its place ….

“It’s not that I never fall into a repeating loop of self-recrimination, but if I catch myself there, I consciously tell myself to go down another path, one that I’ve predetermined so as to have it ready and at hand when I need it. It has gotten much easier with practice….”

Back over to Ehrenreich: “Breast cancer… gave me, if you want to call this a ‘gift,’ …  a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before – one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.”

“[I]f you’re denying feelings, you’re doing psychotherapy wrong,” Larkins insists. “You’re also doing meditation and CBT wrong. It’s not about denying, it’s about experiencing them, evaluating them and deciding consciously if they are doing you good or harm.”

Nor is positive thinking the only method Larkins used for alleviating her depression. “Medication definitely helped!” she says. “When I’ve gone off the SSRIs [antidepressants] entirely, I found myself getting weepy and feeling out of control, even though I could see, objectively, that I was OK and even reasonably happy. The meds allow me to control my brain enough to take control of my brain, if that makes sense.”

What about other areas of life? Positive thinking has been touted as an answer for everything from poverty to relationship issues. Ehrenreich explains, “People who had been laid off from their jobs and were spiraling down toward poverty were told to see their condition as an ‘opportunity’ to be embraced, just as breast cancer is often depicted as a ‘gift.’…In fact, there is no kind of problem or obstacle for which positive thinking or a positive attitude has not been proposed as a cure.”

“This,” says Larkins, “I see as a struggle to make sense of and control an uncontrollable world. The same way that religious people call everything ‘God’s will’ or less religious folks say ‘[E]verything happens for a reason’ as a way to feel better about bad things….I think a lot of the ‘positive thinking’ rhetoric is more [a way] of actively distracting yourself from dwelling on the bad things. If you’re not predisposed to depression, that may be a workable method. If you already have malfunctioning brain chemistry, it’s not likely to help, but concentrated cognitive therapy can.”

As for me, I try to notice positive things in the world (which means not watching very much news); I try to add positivity to the world by thanking servers, clerks, cashiers, my husband – anyone who helps me in the course of a day; I appreciate things that make me laugh; I try to find some little thing I can agree with, even if I disagree with most of what a person says. I give myself permission to feel rotten when I feel rotten, but know that it won’t last forever. I do the best I can.

 

The Noble Armadillo

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A new friend asked me the other day if there’s anything I collect. Not many of my collections have been very successful. Back when I was able to travel overseas, I was working on a Beers of the World t-shirt collection. Now I can’t fit into any of them or acquire more. (Yes, you can get anything on the Internet, but I had to be where they actually sold the beer for it to count.)

Another failed collection started when a boyfriend decided that I would start collecting heart-shaped boxes, made from various materials. I know it was just so he would automatically have a go-to present whenever a gift-giving occasion came up. That collection lasted about as long as the boyfriend.

What I collect now are armadillos. I started this back in the 70s and now have armadillos made from a variety of materials: wood, stone, aventurine, concrete. Plush armadillo toys. Crocheted armadillos. Armadillo pins and earrings.

The prize of my collection is an armadillo purse. Her name is Erma. She makes me easy to identify (“My wife is joining me here. She’ll be the one with the armadillo purse.”) and is a great conversation starter (“Is that real?” “Where did you get that?” “Where I come from we call that “possum on the half-shell.'”).

(Brief digression: My mother found her in a catalog. I don’t know which one.)

At this point, you may be asking, “Why armadillos? They aren’t native to Ohio. People don’t keep them as pets. As a cat owner, why don’t you collect cat items?” (I do.)

Armadillos are fascinating creatures. You may not know this, but armadillos are one of the few animals besides humans that can catch leprosy because their body temperature is so low, so they are used in leprosy research. I can thank an armadillo that my childhood leprosy now hardly bothers me at all.

(Bazinga! I made that part up – the part about having had leprosy. The research part is true.)

But I digress. Again.

There are two main reasons that the armadillo is my SA (significant animal). The first is musical.

Back in the 70s, there was a subgenre of country music variously called progressive country, outlaw country, or redneck rock. Artists such as Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, David Allen Coe, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Waylon Jennings, and others broke from the Nashville music scene and started making records that featured their own bands instead of studio musicians, rock and folk influences, gritty or provocative lyrics, and so on. I was a big fan of this music and still am. (Now it goes by some other name – Americana, maybe, though I think of it as retro-alt-country.)

So where do the armadillos come in? The place that attracted and supported and freed these musicians was Texas, where armadillos abound. One of the main clubs was the Armadillo World Headquarters. That theme song for Austin City Limits is popularly known as “I Wanna Go Home With the Armadillo,” though its real name is “London Homesick Blues.” Austin and the musicians adopted the armadillo as their symbol.

And so did I.

The other reason I identify so strongly with the armadillo is that it has such unique defense mechanisms. The first is to roll up in its protective armored shell, like a pillbug. The other is to jump straight up in the air about two and a half feet.

The pillbug thing works pretty well and they probably ought to stick to that. But the jumping strategy has one major flaw.

The main menace the armadillo faces is the automobile. Their leap puts them right at car bumper height. Splat. Roadkill.

And I identify with that.

Over the years I have tried or developed various coping and defense mechanism that resembled the armadillos’, and worked about as well. Using the pillbug technique, I would retreat into a shell and let the world pass me by. Which it did, but I never got to see much of it.

When I decided to abandon that strategy, to engage with the world, I encountered lots of scary things. And how I dealt with them always seemed to end with a big, messy splat.

And that’s why I keep Erma and the armadillo collection around – to remind me of the music that still sustains me, and to remind me that what I think are ways to dodge anxiety and fear and danger just might turn out to be counterproductive.