By uglyelf, on May 8th, 2012% It’s awkward when you’re having a conversation with someone and they reach into their pants and start messing with their junk.
Wait. Here, have some background story.
Some years ago I moved in with a good friend of mine. He was under lease and his roommate bailed on him. I was on a month-to-month, so me and my then-girlfriend, the EVIL-EX, moved in with him. We’re still good friends, despite the adage that one should: “make your roommate your friend, but never make your friend your roommate”. But thankfully, we’re no longer roommates.
One thing that irked us was having to repeatedly ask him not to stick his hands down his pants.
I mean, he’d dig down deep with one or both hands and really go to work. He didn’t have an STD or anything, he just really liked to scratch. He didn’t do this in public, but, as he explained, he figured it was OK to do around people he trusted. Let me reemphasize that: He put the energy into behaving better some times, but not others.
Fallacy one: It’s OK to behave the same way with your closest friends / family /loved ones as you would when you’re alone.
Related story. Bear with me, this really is related.
Back when I was a young man in college I was in a relationship with another winner (as bad as the EVIL-EX). This was the girl who later, two boyfriends later, liked to brag that she’d cheated on every boyfriend she ever had. This was a point of pride for her. Actually that has nothing to do with this story I just wanted to bitch for a second.
Speaking of bitch — while she was always sweet to her casual acquaintances and everyone around her loved her, she was far less good to her close friends, her family, and you guessed it, her boyfriend. She was short tempered, rude, inconsiderate, and selfish. She would snap and insult. She was this way with: Her parents. Her sister. Her me. It didn’t matter. (And yet she doesn’t make the cut as “the evil ex”. I’ll just let you imagine other details.)
What boggled me for the longest time was how she could behave so badly and then the phone would ring or a less-close friend would show up and suddenly she was all glitter and rainbows. The instant she was off the phone / friend was gone, the fangs came out.
I tried to talk to her about this. She said she had to work to be nice around other people. With her loved ones, she could really relax and be her true self.
I might have then asked her if her true self was a raving bitchcake. Cut me a break; I was twenty-two — still very young — and still had a lot to learn. Of course in hindsight what I should have said was “I’m breaking up with you” and never looked back. But no. Of course I tried to make it work and … well that’s another, crappier story.
Anyhoo, she was essentially willing to put her hands down the pants of her id and mess around with her figurative junk in front of us.
See what I did there? I related both stories.
Fallacy two: It’s OK to be your worst around those you love the best.
In both cases these people were mistaking “being yourself” with trust.
OK, you get it, but you still don’t really get it. Let me try again.
Role play this with me. You’re coming to visit me. I’m your best friend or your boyfriend or your brother or your priest or your shrink or your father, mother, concubine, pet dachshund, … shit I don’t care. I’m something really close to you is-the-point and you’re equally close to me.
You’re really excited to see me. I’m really excited to see you. One thing though, I’ve had a terrible, fucked up day and I’m going to let you know that, because we’re besties, or bros, or wtf evar. (Yes. I used both “wtf” and “evar” in a sentence. I’m hip! This is the blogosphere! Who are you to judge me?!)
There are two ways I can do this:
One, I can “be my true self”. I can stick my hands down my pants and scratch, literally or figuratively. I can snap about you getting in my way in the kitchen right after I asked you to get something for me in the fucking kitchen. I can forget to tell you how important you are to me because you should already effing know that and this is about me.
To describe this method: I can fail in a bad way.
Second option: I can talk about my true feelings while behaving as your favorite person. I can tell you how important you are to me. I can get things for myself in the kitchen, or ask you to do it and then thank you. I can tell you the things that bothered me that day, without putting you down.
Let’s go all meta again. If I choose option one, how do you think you’re going to react? I mean it. Even as my forgiving, loving, non-judgmental, best gal, you’re going to put up a wall between us. Maybe you just won’t put up with that shit. Or maybe, this one time because we’re such good friends / relatives / etc.s, you will put up with it. But you’re not going to be particularly sympathetic and I’m going to feel your lack of sympathy. Your closing off will fuel my rage.
Cycle repeats.
On the other hand, if I choose option two, you will open yourself up to me. If when I first see you I tell you, verbally, how excited I am to see you because your wonderful and I’ve had a shitty day, you will make yourself emotionally available to me. All the way. Now I can talk about everything that’s bothering me. You’ll put up with it because you like me and care about me and I’m not mistreating you, and you’ll work to make me feel better. Your compassion will fuel my healing.
Obviously, there’s a limit to this, I can’t do it all the time, it takes too much energy from you. But if I were the kind of person who did this all the time, I wouldn’t be your bestie, now would I?
Anyway, about that option two, it’s the only option to choose. Ever. You’re going to compartmentalize your feelings away from your behavior. You can absolutely trust the people you love to accept anything you need to talk about, but not to accept any shit-ass way you want to behave.
Does this balance sound familiar? It should. Pretend you’ve started dating someone. Things are going really well, you’re out on your third date. The third date is significant. You know you’re in good, but you can still fuck everything up. Oh, and because the universe has a sense of humor, you’ve had a really shitty day. You can’t not talk about your day because it’s so obviously affecting you, but you can’t be an asshole or you’ll lose the person. So you talk. Your talking will actually bring them closer to you, but you’ll guard and not offend. That’s why I call option two the “Third-Date Rule”. Because that’s how you’re going to behave with the people you love.
Never ever relax beyond the Third-Date Rule. Not with your lover. Not with your best friend. Not with your brother or mom… OK, “Third Date” is kind of a stupid name for a rule you’re going to follow with your family — unless you’re from West Virginia in which case it’s a perfect name. If you think of a better name for it, you can put it in the comments.
At first the energy required for the Third-Date Rule is daunting. It takes work. You don’t want to work, you’ve had a bad day. You want to stick your hands down your pants or tell your mother she was a lousy cook. Or whatever you want to do because… well I don’t really care what your “because” is. What you’re failing to consider is that there are two “fuel tanks” that are low here. There is your energy required to behave deliberately, and there is your emotional-well-being energy. You have a choice, if you don’t work to control your behavior, it will cost you in emotional-well-being. But if you do work to behave better, your emotional well being will be filled by the people closest to you.
Ultimately, this becomes freeing. When you start treating your happiness as a marathon instead of a series of sprints, you really start to get there. This is how to make your long term relationships solid. You’ll find that when you keep this little part reined in and not let it poison your actions, the person you need close will get closer. It will make you feel more connected, not less.
Confession, I don’t really know how to make your long term relationships work, so I shouldn’t say that I do. But I do know many ways to make a relationship to fail. Breaking the Third-Date Rule is one of them.
That might be why I have cats.
Look, point being. Always try to enrich the lives of the people around you, even when you need to ask them to enrich yours.
That’s all for now,
-UE
By teaelf, on February 1st, 2011% My apologies, this is likely incredibly dull reading. I’m narrating personal conflicts which involves a lot of back story for minimal introspection.
[The Jump!]
By teaelf, on February 1st, 2011% 31-01-2011, mid-afternoon in London
Stopping over in Heathrow at the moment. I overestimated the time it would take to go through immigration / customs and get back in through security. Luckily LHR is a fairly mellow place to wait.
I had never flown Virgin before, and it was slightly surreal. I’ve grown so accustomed to American flights. We huddle around the gate in tense hordes, mobbing the gate agents in the mad rush to get on board and sit down as quickly as possible.
In contrast, Virgin loaded slowly, with people trickling on for close to forty minutes. The plane was enormous – and quite empty. In my row of eight seats, there were only three people. I failed to take full advantage of the room, which I have begun to regret. There also appeared to be a bar area on the plane which I wasn’t really expecting. I should probably have explored it, but instead I slept.
I’m realizing how sedentary I am. In Colorado, rather than explore I stayed at the airport. Yes, I made an airport friend, but I’ve heard lovely things of Denver and I didn’t bother to visit it at all. I have too much stuff, I convinced myself, I’m not particularly mobile. And anyway, I wouldn’t want to sleep in and miss my flight tomorrow.
While I gave myself several excuses for remaining sedentary, the luggage one was the most persuasive. I think I need to work on packing lighter, in order to not feel trapped by my own belongings. This trip I packed relatively light (one 20 kg bag, one smaller 16 kg bag, and an overstuffed “purse” filled with odds and ends).
Property really does have a transformative effect. I feel weighed down by goods, both while traveling and at home. I have boxes in three states. Ok, I have boxes in two states an assortment of objects in a third state, including my favorite pillow and an awkward-to-pack basket.
There are things I own that actually matter, but so much of what I own is of fairly little importance. In NY I have five boxes of book and school supplies. I should have just given the pens to goodwill and recycled the half-full notebooks. Instead I carefully ripped out the used sections, ready to fill the rest of the notebooks next year.
There is any number of reasons I have such a hard time getting rid of things. While I’m sure some of it is modeling, I think a great deal of it is that fear founded in early childhood. My God, if I get rid of this one, what if I can never find a replacement? What if I need to bye a new one and can’t afford it? This is a perfectly good thingy, and it would be shamefully wasteful to get rid of it.
I packed most of my stuff at home into big plastic bins. I left a few things out, but relatively little: books, some clothes, a single drawer in my desk.
[The Jump!]
By uglyelf, on December 31st, 2010% Hello from Seattle! It’s like Portland but less ironic. Everything is twice as expensive though, so I guess they pay for it.
I’ve written a lot of posts lately and then not posted them. They’ve often tasted bitter and that’s not the way I feel, so I haven’t let you sample them. But here I am, last chance to write before New Years, and the last chance I’ll have to send a note to future gregory from past gregory of 2010.
I’ve never put much measure in the practice of setting New Years Resolutions — I’m uncomfortable with the idea of making a promise I don’t intend to keep — so no resolutions.
What always impresses me about New Years Resolutions is the sheer tenacity of the thing — the ability for one to make a resolution to fix something they refuse to admit is broken. Most common, of course, is to lose-weight / eat-better / do-more-exercise when the resolver will not admit any flaw of constitution or mass in the first place. Thus, doomed to fail.
And that made me think about what would really make a better year. The obvious answer was not having the worst thing about 2010 in 2011. Just don’t make that one mistake again. In other words, instead of making a resolution to eat-better, admit that you’re overweight and accept everything that comes with it.
Then I realized that mistake might not be the most fair word. If I were overweight than looking honestly at myself and accepting that my decisions were the cause of my body shape, would be admitting to a mistake. But what if the worst thing was something completely different?
I still think the best thing for the next year is to spend a little time thinking about my own worst thing of 2010, and hope it doesn’t happen again next year. Sort of say ‘goodbye’ to the bad time and hunt for better times ahead.
In my case the worst of 2010 was losing important friends.
 Taken the day of the incident (and probably to blame).
By uglyelf, on November 6th, 2010% I’m feeling bad—really guilty—for something I did today. I said something that “crossed the line” and was “rude.” So I’m feeling awful. But honestly, I shouldn’t. And It’s taken me way too long to realize why I shouldn’t.
I was in a class earlier, a nearly empty class, and the teacher said she might just cancel the class since no one was showing up. I said it was probably because of the price, and if she lowered it a little a lot more people might show up and she would make more money.”
She got pissed.
I apologized. She had a right to be angry, and she explained it to me. She has an unusual relationship with her students: she’s a friend and a teacher, and it’s really hard for her when one of us, like me, tried to “nickel and dime her to death.” That we needed to understand that “just because we were friends didn’t mean we could try to take advantage of her.” Those were the words she used. She also said that so many friends were “rude” like this, and she couldn’t be friends any more because of it. I didn’t, and still don’t know if she was talking about our friendship.
I’ve had female friends give me the silent treatment and stop being friends with me for less. For Tapas even (the fucking tapas).
Anyway, she said she’d been running her own studio for more than two years and people should know that she knew how to run it and she didn’t want to talk about money with them.
Needless to say, I apologized profusely. She was right. I had been rude. She’d asked me to drop it, so I did. I tried to make small talk. I forced cheeriness. But ten minutes later, half an hour before the class was supposed to end, she dismissed me and ended the class abruptly.
I sat in my car feeling horrible and brutish for ten minutes before I could drive. How could I have been so rude? How could I have shoved my foot so far in my mouth, again?! Why was I unable to see it coming?
And slowly I started to realize why: because All Laws are Local.
Bear with me.
Now I’ve had friends that I’ve bought cars from. I’ve sold cars to friends. I’ve sold and bought furniture. At its base, I’ve had a commodity and I’ve sold it to friends. Or my friend has had a commodity and I’ve bought it from them. Did we talk about money? Hell yes. Did we negotiate prices? You bet your sweet bippy.
And finally I started thinking about my friendship with this and other teachers I’ve had. I realized this was not a special or unusual relationship at all for this sort of thing. Across most of my circus, music, dance, climbing, and body-weight conditioning classes I’ve formed friendships with teachers. In many cases even close friendships that have lasted much longer than my interest in the subject they taught.
Have we talked about the price of classes? Yes. Has it ever been a problem. No. I had to think long and hard about that one, but no. I’ve never had an issue talking about money with any of these teachers & friends. No one has ever taken it as me trying to nickel-and-dime them before.
So based on my previous experiences, hundreds of them, I couldn’t have foreseen her reaction.
But then we come back to it. Was she wrong to think what I had done was rude?
No.
No really, she wasn’t wrong. Why? Because all laws are local. Because the mores of a group or the sensibilities of an individual are always local, and in this case, really local. Most of my friends who are teachers compartmentalize. They deal friendship in one area of their brains, and business in another. They don’t have any trouble separating the two. This teacher couldn’t do that. There was no compartmentalizing. I was a friend, friends have your back, her back is her business, by mentioning a money thing I had stabbed her in the back.
So she wasn’t wrong to think of this thing as rude. But honestly, she was wrong to get mad at me. She was wrong in assuming I would know what would offend her. She was wrong to believe that her mores were more right than mine.
 all laws are local Stay with me on this one. It comes up all the time. When I was in France this summer, I discovered (the hard way) that the French think it’s very rude for you to ask them something in English without first asking in french if they speak any english. A friend who was with me, and was a French-American, said of course it was rude. Didn’t I know anything? Even in America it’s rude to ask somebody for directions in a foreign language. And I had to think about it. Was she right?
By and large, for the specific cases of America and France, she was. We both have a majority population that believes you shouldn’t come to this country unless you speak the language. This is less true for America than for France.
Many of you are probably revolting at my saying it’s largely true; you yourselves having given directions, aid, or at least a comforting smile to strangers speaking spanish or german and not even trying for english with you. I have too. But we’re the exception here, not the rule. Think about how many people have cried for, or voted against ESL support in public schools. Think about the “anti-brown” laws that have plagued the central U.S. If you’re reading this, chances are you’re flattered when someone assumes you speak their foreign language, here on U.S. streets. But you’re the exception. Most people are offended.
So if my own country is offended by this behavior, why didn’t I anticipate the French reaction? Because I’d already traveled too much. From Central America, to the Polynesian islands, to Indonesia, I’d spoken english first and never offended anyone. The reaction I would later experience in Iceland was the typical one, if they didn’t speak my language, they would still, happily, make comforting “poor-lost-tourist” noises while I pointed at the place on the map I was trying to get to, and with a mixture of pantomime and language that was lost on me, tell me how to get where I was going. It’s the more common reaction in the world. But the French, and the Americans have forgotten that all laws are local.
The author Cory Doctorow recently did a much better job of explaining this than I’m doing. In his Locus Article, A Cosmopolitan Literature for the Cosmopolitan Web Doctorow essentially defines being cosmopolitan as being aware that all laws are local.
You should hop over there and read the whole article, but I want you to especially consider these two paragraphs:
Behind every torturer’s mask, behind every terrible crusade, behind every book-burning and war-drum is someone who has forgotten (or never learned) that all laws are local. Forgetting that all laws are local is the ultimate in hubris, and it is the province of yokels and bumpkins who assume that just because they do something in a particular way, all right-thinking people always have and always will. For a mild contemporary example, consider the TV executive who blithely asserts that her industry is safe, because no matter what happens in the future, the majority of us will want to come home, flop down on the sofa, and turn on the goggle-box – despite the fact that TV has existed for less than a century, a flashing eyeblink in the long history of hominids, most of whom have gotten by just fine without anesthetizing themselves with a sitcom at the end of a long day.
Which is not to say that cosmopolitans don’t believe in anything. To be cosmopolitan is to know that all laws are local, and to use that intellectual liberty to decide for yourself what moral code you’ll subscribe to. It is the freedom to invent your own ethics from the ground up, knowing that the larger social code you’re rejecting is no more or less right than your own – at least from the point of view of a Martian peering through a notional telescope at us piddling Earthlings.
Read that second paragraph again. I agree with it one-hundred percent. It was perfectly right for my teacher to invent her own ethics, her own code of what was rude and what was in the friend’s domain. But then she went exactly wrong, and for a moment there, so did I. She shouldn’t have forgotten that all laws are local. That she invented her law, and I may not know the local custom.
It would have been fine for her to tell me that she didn’t want to talk about it, but she shouldn’t have gotten angry with me the very first time I unknowing blundered across her invisible line. Believe me, I won’t talk about it again. And wouldn’t have even if she’d been nice when she explained it. I guess I just hope I haven’t lost yet another friend this year just because they don’t understand that all laws are local, and I’m a freaking alien.
And if you’re one of my many, many friends or erstwhile friends who I’ve offended. I’m sorry. I really didn’t know. And believe me: I still feel guilty anyway. I always will. I’m sorry that I hurt your feelings.
But as for what I did?
Je ne regrette rien.
-Ugly Elf
By uglyelf, on October 12th, 2010% I’m annoyed so I’m going to rant now. This might be a good time to remind you that you don’t have to read this. I hear there are other things to look at on the internets.
Why am I annoyed? Because most people don’t seem to think “sorry” means what I think it means.
Too many people use “I’m sorry” to mean “you can’t hold it against me.” “I’m Sorry” is their magic get-out-of-jail-free card.
Bullshit.
“I’m sorry” means two things:
1) I will never do this again.
2) I will do everything in my power to make this right.
It’s true that number 2 may not be achievable. But it’s the effort that makes you forgivable. If you say you’re sorry and then do nothing to repair the situation and then do the same censurable behavior, you’re not sorry. You never were sorry. And on top of it, for saying you’re sorry when you didn’t mean it, you’ve violated Wheaton’s Law: Don’t be a Dick.
By uglyelf, on October 4th, 2010% I’m so busy I don’t know how to handle it. And thus the next exciting installment of Euroland hasn’t been started yet.
Brief and uninteresting life news that no one will care about but me. The weekend was spent in Eugene, where Stephanie’s birthday was lovely. Poor Andrew and Stephanie, the day after the party they had to put their wonderful cat Grimple down. We’ll miss you Grimple.
I continue to train, but without any real progress. My elbow has been living hell, so I took last Thursday off, which turned out to be a good choice: yesterday for the first time in three years, I got a V7 at the Circuit. So awesome!
OK, that’s enough. Shouldn’t bore too much and should let you know I’m not stopping the blog.
-UE-
By uglyelf, on September 21st, 2010%  Caution: God
So THEY contacted me, and asked me to remove them from my posts. Which seems reasonable, except that it’s a lot of work and nobody is actually reading this stuff anyway.
No, I’m serious! I have the power of Google Analytics behind me, and he tells me that I am talking to myself in a closed room. (Except for one old friend in Ashland. Hi Kate! Do you realize we’ve been friends since 1998??!! How fucking old are we!!).
While I’m talking to myself in an empty room I’d rather not do “real work” on this site, so I’m going to lock the door. I still don’t care if you read about my life, but now you have to register. I’ve turned on the register button. Anyone can do it, it only takes a second. It’s annoying, but it will email you a temp password. You log in, set a password you can remember at the bottom of the page, and then you can read good stuffs.
When I get more time I’ll either strip them out of the posts, or use a better plugin to manage users. I don’t like that you are sent to manage yourself by default. You should be routed back to the page you were logging in from. Annoying! I’ll fix as soon as I can.
This will prevent any of the eurland stuff from showing up on a google search and render SEO null and void, but even with those things, no one was reading it anyway.
I’ll try to post more useless little posts to the site, while I write out the whole euroland adventure. Stuff that will be publicly accessible without registration. Euroland is taking me way longer to write than I thought. It’s a time thing. I can write about 1k words a day. Each post is 6 to 8 k words. Then there is research. Then there is photo organization. Then there is editing. And I only get about a day per week to work on it.
So please, register! Walk into my lonely room and listen to me talk to myself. The only difference is you have to knock first before you enter.
By uglyelf, on September 12th, 2010%
By uglyelf, on August 3rd, 2010%
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Contributors
- Ugly Elf - Gregory Randolph
- Tango Elf - Andrew McCollough
- Tea Elf - Cameron McClure
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“Somehow, Narnia failed to prepare me for the rigors of adult life” — @leverus
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