Incompleat Iconoclast » Life

50/50 Fall 2008, Exercise #8: Letter of Persuasion

Edward F. Gumnick — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 04:36:59 +0000

Letter to a young homosexual

Dear much younger self,

This is a warning from your future self. Ignore it at your peril.

I’m afraid you probably will ignore it, because you aren’t looking for advice. You’re looking for absolute answers, and you have some very limited ideas about where to look for them. You will not find any of the answers that I can give you in the places you’re comfortable looking.

There is so much I could tell you, but what I wish for is the chance to stand at your shoulder when the opportunities to make choices present themselves to you. I would stand there and whisper into your ear. “Desire is good. (Or at least not bad.) Trust it. (Or at least don’t fear it.)” Or maybe, “Give in to your feelings.” Or “Use the force, Luke.” Hell, I don’t know if even that would get through to you.

No, see, I’ve gone off on the wrong track already. It’s not about desire. You’ll figure out desire on your own eventually, and you’ll get to understand it before you understand the nature of truth—not big Truth, I’m talking about your truth, i.e., the truth of who and what you are. You’ll start making sense of desire before you get a handle on love or discipline or loss or sacrifice or compassion.

Let me be blunt. Come out! Come out now, or come out soon. Come out to everyone you know, starting with yourself. Don’t think about right and wrong. Focus on honesty. You were always an honest guy. You may not know a thing about hard work, but you could be trusted. It’s eating you up inside to have to lie to your parents, your siblings, your friends. Stop it! You’re killing yourself slowly with the lies. You know it’s true. I’m not telling you anything new. What are you waiting for, your next nervous breakdown? You can be that honest guy again.

I need to tell you something about yourself that you don’t know: You are fearless. I know, you don’t feel fearless. But your fear is only a byproduct of your double life. The fear of being found out, the fear of being exposed, the fear of being known for what you are—the fear is a lie. It won’t survive the light of day when you finally do what you need to do.

Note: The prompt for today is to “Write a letter to someone specific in which you attempt to convince or persuade him or her of something.” This is the beginning of a letter to myself that could serve as a template to someone else who needs to hear it as badly as I once did. There’s an awful lot more to say.

Boot Camp Day 8: What to Do, What to Do?

Edward F. Gumnick — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 05:13:36 +0000

I love to-do lists. It’s great to gather the details of your life into concise bullet points, to organize the universe of tasks by priority or category or color-coding. It’s great to check things off a list.

I have a lot of problems with to-do lists.

I don’t like being told what to do—even by me. I never know how to deal with recurring tasks. Do I really need to remind myself to make my bed? Once upon a time, I did. If I take it off the list, will a day come when I forget to do it? On the other hand, it’s an easy job to check off early in the day to get some to-do list momentum going.

But then, there are tasks that happen with predictable frequency that still come as a surprise to me. I have to deposit payroll taxes? Again? There’s a quarterly report due?

And then there are those tasks that are pressing and urgent and critically important, and if I don’t write them down on a list, I forget them the very second I stop paying careful attention. That ticket for the red light I didn’t run fit into that category. I put it on a list weeks ago, but then I stopped looking at the list on a regular basis because it was a tragically flawed list. Too many routine tasks, too many dreary to-dos, mixed with just a few pie-in-the-sky dreams that were so ambitious, I should never have put them on a list in the first place. “Create documentation for paperless business processes.” Yeah, right, like that’s ever going to happen.

I have to confess: A month ago, I was a listmaniac. I was putting every blessed thing on my to-do list, which I managed via a simple, free online Wiki interface. I’d start each day’s list by copying the previous day’s list, removing any items that had been completed, and turning off any recurring items that had been highlighted to indicate that they’d been done. Then, as the day progressed, I’d obsessively add new tasks to the list as fast as I could think of them, creating categories (“Starfall work,” “Writing objectives,” “Personal development,” “Promoting world peace,” and so on), sorting, contemplating, prioritizing, long-term planning, occasionally actually getting something done and highlighting it to signal its completion, and dreaming of someday never having to do this any more, because frankly, to-do lists are NOT what I want to be spending my time on.

I’ll tell you more about my system if you want to know…and if you’re the kind of person who knows what to do with a to-do list.

I used to have a system that worked, a long time ago, when I was still working at the University of Houston Printing Department. I had one main list of things to do, and also a list of things that had been done. I kept them in the Stickies utility on the desktop of my Macintosh. As I generated tasks needing to be done, I’d stick them on the to-do list, making some kind of judgment call about where they belonged in priority in relation to everything that was already on the list. I’d generally keep myself focused on the top of the list. When I completed a task, I’d cut it from that list and paste it at the top of the other one, which was only broken up by subheads to indicate the date I’d accomplished things. The second list was just something to look at to convince myself I was getting something done.

That system worked okay at that job, where a lot of my work was reacting to other people’s needs—my boss, our office manager, our clients, my staff. There weren’t a lot of big projects, mostly lots of small tasks, so it was fairly easy to sort priorities, and the system didn’t need a lot of complexity. I tried to carry it over into self-employment, but managing a business was a whole new ballgame. The projects got bigger, the scope of responsibilities got wider and deeper, and I had to set my own priorities. The Stickies system fell by the wayside.

Through all the years of managing the graphic-design business, I’ve experimented with lots of time-management systems. I’ve taken some workshops, read a few books, and tested various schemes. I should mention that I’m missing the gene that enables most human beings to operate a calendar. I’m serious. I’ve owned calendars, I understand the underlying principles of how they represent time, but I’m completely clueless when it comes to using one to run my own life. Mostly, I come back to some form of list or another. Sometimes a system works for a while. Sometimes it breaks down.

As I said, I was a listmaniac a month or so ago. I thought, for a moment, that I was on the verge of designing a new system that was going to be great—interactive, portable, fun to use, satisfying. But I ran into the stumbling block of too darned much stuff that I don’t especially want to do. I also found that I was loading up my list with easy stuff—things that were easy, but not urgent, or things that I could readily delegate to someone else, or things that maybe didn’t even need to be done at all. I became frustrated, and I quit my list cold turkey for a week or so.

When I went back, I was surprised to find that I’d accomplished a few of the things on the list. I copied the list to a new file, removed the completed items, fixed the highlighting again, and dedicated myself to a new effort. Then I let another week go by. When I returned to the list again, I could hardly stand to look at it. I started to realize that there was something fundamentally wrong with the design—and I don’t just mean the graphical elements of the design, but the conceptual design.

The next day, I didn’t even try to work from the list. I handled the first few important tasks that popped into my head. Late in the evening, I wondered what I’d do the next day. Go back to the list? Give up on it entirely? I started thinking about designing a completely different way to decide how to spend my days.

(To be continued….)

Note: The prompt was “To-do lists.” This is a rougher draft than a lot of the class work I’ve posted. There’s a lot more to say, and my ideas aren’t in much of a logical order yet. I promise to put “Finish to-do list article” on my to-do list.

Boot Camp Day 6: Things That Stood in the Way of My Writing 1,000 Words Today

Edward F. Gumnick — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 05:30:21 +0000

The first thing I had to do this morning—after brewing a pot of coffee, of course—was to soak in the bathtub for a while. See, I overdid it yesterday in a couple of different departments. I walked 6-1/2 miles in the stifling heat and humidity of mid-day because I had received an invitation to a party that would conflict with the usual timing of my walk. Then I went to the party in question and drank four beers, which is about four more beers than my normal daily consumption of late. So when I rolled out of bed at the crack of 10:15 this morning, my first rudimentary (dehydrated, hungover) thought after “must have coffee” was “must soak in tub long time.”

Coffee mug in hand, I crawled into the tub with the latest issue of Granta, my favorite “literary magazine.” I had read most of the issue, so this morning’s soak was focused on finding every scrap of text that I hadn’t already read.

When I finally got out of the tub, I had to make my bed, which didn’t really contribute much to keeping me from writing 1,000 words. But then I rewarded myself with another hot, steaming cup of java and took a look at my e-mail inbox. There wasn’t much there that needed my attention, but I was ambushed by an e-mail update from Pharyngula, the blog of biologist and atheist agitator PZ Myers. PZ posts items of interest to evolutionists and all manner of freethinkers on his blog several times a day, and I get a daily e-mail with the most recent updates. He’s an enjoyable writer with a razor-sharp mind. His posts draw attention to stories he’s found in the news or on the blogosphere. Which of the new items that I found there sucked up the rest of my morning? There was an interesting piece about Jefferson’s version of the bible, which he compiled by “chopping out all the miracles and unbelievable stuff.”

I also got sidetracked for quite a while by a scathing critique of Barack Obama’s recent speech about keeping alive—even expanding, God help us!—President Bush’s ill-conceived and relentlessly partisan Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. I’m very disappointed in Obama’s blatant pandering to religious fundamentalists. Does he really think that he’s going to get their votes, and doesn’t he care that if he moves much farther to the center, he’s going to be losing mine? The most disappointing thing about him is that he doesn’t seem to see that progressives have been a big part of getting him where he is today. [Sigh.]

Next thing I knew, Jorge was calling to ask if I wanted to take a quick road trip with him to check out the logistics on the new job he’s starting tomorrow in Texas City, an industrial town about 40 miles south of Houston. He said he’d be over in about an hour to pick me up. I hadn’t eaten anything substantial yet, so I went to the freezer and dug out some pasta putanesca that we made a few weeks ago. Tossed it in the microwave and came back to Pharyngula for a while longer.

I can’t honestly say that spilling pasta sauce on my laptop for the second time in a week was a major factor in my not writing 1,000 words today, but I thought I ought to mention it in passing.

It was easy to see by 2:00 p.m. that the day was racing by, so I took my laptop with me on our journey. As we headed into downtown, I started a free-writing exercise. I wrote 349 words on the topic of trying to write in a moving pickup truck on a dazzlingly sunny day on a laptop with a dusty screen. Truly inspired stuff. Even though I was immersed in my topic, I couldn’t help but notice that Jorge had passed the exit to head south on I-45. It turned out that he wanted to stop at a refresqueria (a purveyor of cold drinks) on our way. And it had to be a particular refresqueria in the middle of a Hispanic neighborhood that was not even slightly on the way to Texas City.

About an hour later, we were headed in the right direction, aguas frescas in hand. An agua fresca is more or less a fruit smoothie. Mine was mango; Jorge’s was papaya. He also didn’t have to work too hard to talk me into a serving of elote, a snack of boiled sweet corn, a touch of mayonnaise, crumbled white Mexican cheese, and a splash of hot salsa. He assures me that after eating this snack, I am now at least as Mexican as he is.

There was nothing remarkable about the rest of the drive to Texas City, but somehow it still kept me distracted from doing any more writing. But I had a phone conversation with Gayle (The Cheerleader) on the topic of why it’s not always easy to write, no matter how much one might want to do so.

Once we arrived in Texas City, we spent about half an hour looking for the contractor parking lot where he’ll have to leave his truck at 6:00 tomorrow morning. It turned out that he’d been given a very poorly drawn map, and we were driving up and down the wrong road for most of that half hour.

Then we took the long way home, via Kemah, Seabrook, and Pasadena. I wrote 343 words about Gayle’s suggestion that I need to work on finding ways to turn writing into a game I can win. This idea needs further exploration.

On the way home, we stopped at Kim Son for an early dinner. Since tomorrow is the first day that Jorge has to be up early after a few months out of work, he’s planning to go to bed very early tonight.

Oh look! I’ve written 1,000 words after all—without even counting the earlier efforts I mentioned. It turns out that for today at least, life wasn’t as much of an obstacle to writing as I thought it was.

Note: When my siblings and I were kids, my father used to tell us “Don’t make noise just to make noise.” I fear that today’s post is making noise just to make noise—pure writing-workshop-word-count-quota babbling. Sorry!

50/50 Exercise #13: Address Book

Edward F. Gumnick — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 06:27:59 +0000

Dear Grandma,

I’ll bet you thought you were never going to hear from your youngest grandson again. I wasn’t too regular about writing to you for the last decade or two of your life, so you certainly shouldn’t be surprised that you haven’t heard from me since you left us.

From your vantage point, I would think it’s easy for you to see why I didn’t stay in closer contact. Not long after the last time I saw you, when we got together with Laura and Yvonne, Karl and Edith, little Karl, Linda and her kids, Jane, Dad, and all those others at your place in Middle River, my life started heading in a direction that I wasn’t ready to share with you. I hate the way that time and circumstances isolated me from you. It wasn’t that I thought you couldn’t handle the secret I was carrying around. It was just that I couldn’t handle it, and I didn’t have the first clue how to talk to anyone else about it. Looking back, I can only imagine that if I’d told you, you would have behaved true to the sweet, patient, loving, saintly Grandma you always were.

I hope you can see how much of you I carry inside me. I can’t scrape uneaten food into the garbage disposer without hearing your voice say, “It’s a sin to waste food.” I don’t hear it as a taunt, just a gentle reminder that abundance is a gift for which we should be profoundly grateful in this world of endless need. I’m glad you’re there reminding me. I’ve never known real hunger, so it’s easy to take what I have for granted.

And there’s a lot more than that. I would like to think that I took into my heart something of the lessons you taught us—about how a life with more than its share of pain, loneliness, grief, and deprivation could be lived with optimism, humor, generosity, and piety.

I wonder sometimes what you would think when I see pious people on TV spewing messages of intolerance. Your constant faith was never a weapon to use against people less faithful than you were. You sat by your radio praying the rosary hour after hour, you surrounded yourself with holy pictures, with prayer cards, with rosaries and statues—the Infant of Prague scared me a little—, with Crown-of-Thorns plants and crucifixes and every other sort of devotional object. But I never once heard you accuse anyone else of being un-Christian, or less Christian, or less worthy in any way of God’s love.

You were a model of faith and humility more real to me than any of your saints (dead or living). I hope you’re not disappointed that I haven’t held on to your kind of faith. I hope you know I try as hard as I can to cultivate your kind of humility.

I remember a story you told me once about Dad. It still fills me with pride for what it said about both of you. You told me of a day when some members of the local draft board came asking about him, wondering whether he planned to volunteer to serve in Korea. He was in college at the time, or maybe already in graduate school. You told the board members that your first three sons had all served in the military, and that you wanted your youngest son to stay in school.

One of the recruiters said, “You know, if he volunteers, he can become an officer. But if he gets drafted, he’ll be digging ditches.”

And you said, “And they’ll be the best danged ditches anyone ever dug!”

My memory might be a little shaky; I don’t think you ever used a word as strong as “danged” (unless you said it in Polish). But I’m sure of the sparkle in your clouded eyes when you delivered that punch line. “Danged” seems about right.

If you’re reading this letter somewhere out there, then I guess you already know I don’t believe in heaven any more. But I never lost my faith in your love.

Author’s note: The assignment was to write a letter to someone with whom you have not been in regular correspondence, but to whom you still have something to say. I don’t think this piece needs any further explanation.

50/50 Exercise #8: Three Wishes

Edward F. Gumnick — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 21:02:28 +0000

To be honest with you, I don’t make a lot of wishes. Somewhere near the age of seven centuries, I realized that I already had the power to bring into existence anything I desired. Don’t get me wrong…I’m not saying I can defy the physical laws of the universe to make the impossible possible. But around that time, I began to realize that I could mold my own desires to conform near-perfectly to everything that could be. And remember: the limits on what’s possible aren’t what they used to be.

But you asked me to make three wishes, so here goes.

Number one, I wish I could forget the wrongs that I never had an opportunity to make right. There aren’t many of them. When you live as long as I have, you develop a sense of when to remain silent; you spend a lot of time in silence. And you get a lot of chances to apologize, to offer repayment, to make things right. A funny thing—even though you have a lot more time to hold a grudge, you feel less and less inclined to do so. But there is an apology I never had a chance to offer, one forgiveness for which I never had the opportunity to ask, and I wish it weren’t so often on my mind.

Would I call this emotion regret? Not exactly. The sensation is more like the hunger you sometimes feel early in the morning, when it’s still too early to get out of bed. You ignore it, you go back to sleep, and it’s gone when you awaken again.

Two: I wish that I could share my contentment more generously with people who haven’t learned to be deeply happy yet. I understand the operation of happiness, the biochemical reactions, the hormonal responses, and the subtle connections from mind to mind and body to body. I know that joy can be shared, that it can be taught, but only to the extent that the student is prepared to receive the lesson. Each of us is a vessel for happiness, but a small vessel cannot be made large overnight, and I cannot pour my abundance into a heart that already bears as much as it can hold. I have learned a lot of things, but never to accept this cruel limitation on our existence.

When I was young—really young: 30, 35, 40 years old—I used to say, “I wish I had known when I was 18 what I know now.” And then came the quantum leaps of progress that are responsible for my longevity, and suddenly, it was possible to have the strength and vitality of youth along with what we used to call the wisdom of age. And those of us who took the treatment could experience “knowing then what we know now.” We could savor our second youth, taking the chances we’d passed up the first time, making sure that youth wasn’t wasted on the young yet again.

My second young adulthood was a lot of fun, and it went on for a couple of hundred years. It was followed by my second coming of age, which was more satisfying than the first, more real in every way. I have never questioned that knowledge and understanding are always and everywhere to be sought, savored, cherished, and retained. There are new dimensions that we cannot explore until we are fully present in the one that comes before.

And yet, I wonder sometimes if life might somehow be circular in shape, and if there might come a time when I approach the ignorance, the innocence of youth as a new frontier to be crossed, a dimension beyond some final, absolute presence. So my third wish is that some day, if I live long enough, I might come to not know then what I know now.

Author’s note: This assignment sounded simple: write about three wishes, your own, or those of a real or fictional character. I think I bit off more than I could chew by trying to imagine what a thousand-year-old man might wish for, and starting off from the premise that he’s transcended the ability to wish for anything. It was a challenging exercise, and I’m not sure that I haven’t stretched this character completely out of shape in trying to work out his three wishes.

50/50 Exercise #3: An Eternal Flame

Edward F. Gumnick — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 07:05:27 +0000

Not a day goes by that I don’t think about the ones who didn’t make it to “escape velocity.” About my parents, who were already past their seventies when the longevity therapies were introduced. About my brother, one of the last victims of cancer, before we understood how it could be turned off and on at will. I think most often about my baby sister. She couldn’t overcome her moral objections to life prolongation, and so I watched her age catch up with mine, and then I saw her overtake me, grow old, and finally die of a disease that had been all but eradicated in our generation. We were of the generation that came to be called “The Millennials,” both because of the timing of our births and because we were the first humans to live a thousand years.

The vast perspective, what I would once have called “wisdom”—the hindsight accumulated in 950 years, is a gift and a punishment. If I could have imagined how much I would come to know, how much I would come to understand, I don’t know whether I would have made the choice to enter the treatment trial. I didn’t share my sister’s objections, not because I had any faith in the ability of human beings to find solutions to the new problems of a swelling population of virtual immortals, but because at the immature age of 45, I couldn’t see beyond my narrow self-interest. What I didn’t bargain on was that the same therapies that made it possible to live in a vigorous thousand-year-old body would also prevent the dimming of memory in the eternally youthful mind. I never imagined that forgetting would be something I would come to miss.

And so she is always here with me in my thoughts—as a baby, a child, an awkward teenager, a young mother (of three boys who help maintain my memory of her not merely alive, but fresh and raw), but also as a middle-aged woman, skeptical of what another 50 or 100 years would mean for her, and then as I saw her the last time, bedridden, half-paralyzed, attended by a roomful of perpetual 30-somethings.

Editor’s note: The assignment was to “write about a flame…that has been burning for a long time…from a character’s perspective or from your own.” I’ve chosen to place the flame inside a fictional character in a story that I’m working on about the first people who live to be 1,000 years old.

The Art of Living

Edward F. Gumnick — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 14:23:35 +0000

I ran across the following quotation in May, and it’s been on my mind ever since. How much work (or play) will it take to live up to this standard?

“The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he’s always doing both.”

—James Michener