Triwrite (pronounced "treewrite"?)

Actually this isn't even going to be what it claims to be because I'll just start by talking about my current physical situation first. Last night I went to bed, and men would understand why (considering what I said two posts ago about what kind of surgery this was) when I went to sleep I suddenly woke up with awful pain. I knew this would happen and I know that tonight it might happen again, except with worse pain because the local anesthetic might wear off. Ick. Also, my sense of smell has been especially powerful for the past month (I don't know why) and I seem to be smelling blood. Well, now that I've completely grossed you out I hope you bother to read the rest of this, assuming I'm not talking to an empty-set audience. Well, I'm not; I'm potentially talking to myself as well. You think I don't go back and read what I write? Well usually I don't, but as of late it's been easier to shrug off the usual artist's embarrassment at his own work and I'm looking back more easily now. Reminds me of when my host father in Paris was drunk at dinner and explained his first time going to a peep show. One time the embarrassment leaves, it's gone forever. (Actually, this isn't true in a general case, and I'll get to that in the part 2 of this triwrite that isn't really a triwrite.) And so yeah, he could explain that without hesitation to us at the dinner table (well, when drunk).


Only-child syndrome
I suppose that just as alcohol changes the way you act the same is true for painkillers, no matter how weak or strong. And I've been taking painkillers as recommended by the doctor to follow my surgery (and for further justification go down two posts and see what the surgery is, if you haven't already), and it does change the way you perceive things and act. Slightly, if not completely. But I feel like it just adds on to other stresses. One stress is being tired. I didn't sleep very well last night because of the awfulness of waking up with, well, yeah, and so that certainly added to how the painkiller worked today. Secondly, the other side effects of the painkiller add to the slight changes in perception and action, two of these being constipation and nausea. Anyway all these things add and overall make you act in a way that you only act when you're stressed. And when you're stressed, that's when the heart comes out and speaks its mind. If not through your voice and out into the open world, at least to your brain. And today it spoke something to me.

I guess this was just a minor feeling. But when I was talking to my dad about a topic I don't even remember, ah, I think it was about the cooking I was in the process of doing, my sister interrupted in her usual energetic voice and part of me got really annoyed. But I was like, hey, by logic (which I'm about to state), that isn't unusual. It feels unusual though. And that's because 1) it's rather minor and I honestly am not in that much of a rush right now and have no need to be stressed and 2) Lately I haven't been around my sister and my dad that much, since I've been in other countries. So I forgot that this kind of a thing could rub me the wrong way a bit.

When I was a kid, though, we adopted my sister when I was 7 years old, I believe. No, probably 6. And apparently when we first met we fought a ridiculous amount. Now a reason occurs to me why that might be. It may not be solely because I always wanted to be the only child. (Everybody wants to have 100% attention at the times that he or she wants attention.) It might also be because I didn't get to know her starting from the day she was born.

I feel like that's an important building process in relationships in general: there has to be a toned-down or soft (or gradual?) start to things, a sort of introduction phase. That sort of seeing a younger sibling grow up from day one is what was lacking in this context, that sort of introductory process. And believe me, when you're age 7 and the person you're being introduced to is age 4, it's hard to introduce the concept of "you're going to be sharing this world with this person from now on" with a soft, toned-down introduction. And so we fought. And up until I went to high school we always had been like that.

So in some situations with relationships like this (or it might just have something to do with the kind of person I am), you need time. I need time is what I want to say as well. Sometimes the reality is that you can fit really good together, but there are certain things you need to get over to reach that. But it's like skiing a trail with moguls that has a dip in the middle and starting from that dip in the middle. You can't do that and expect it to be easy.

Maybe I'm just slow. If there's one legend I believe, though, it's that there was once a tortoise who beat a hare in a race...


Daschund
Our dog Samantha is a daschund. Daschunds are hunters, or at least I'm sure that's true about the males. My dad and sister say that female daschunds are hunters too. I told them that was hard to believe.

You see, our dog Samantha is not a hunter, at least not right now. She hears a dog barking outside, she runs away and scrambles up the front steps to be let back into the house. She sometimes runs away from what's not apparently anything. A fox barks at her (my dad and I didn't know they could bark prior to this), she runs back inside. As for motionless objects, you throw a ball near her, she doesn't have the instinct to chase after it. (Or she's been trained to control this instinct. I don't know. We're at least her 3rd owner.) Danielle threw a treat near her, she didn't go after it until some more urging from my sister.

But she's been looking braver recently. She seems to be less afraid of people in the house, including most importantly me, and she doesn't whine all the time in desperation like she used to. But she did in December, and I felt so bad, but at the same time I didn't go out and pet her continuously for 5-20 minutes like I could've, at least most of the time I didn't. And even now I don't pet her that much. But anyway, she seems to be able to stand the foxes off and look them in the eyes now and communicate if not to them, to herself, that this is her home, and she's staying there, and she doesn't have to run back into it to assure herself that it's her home.

You see, Samantha reminds me of... me.

Bravery is something that is much easier to show when you know where you stand, and I don't think it's necessarily true that this is less of a bravery than in a situation where you don't know where you stand. Perhaps I'm mincing my words or delving into semantics, but I think that a lot of the time, when you go off on your own and you do something brave, you can add the adjective "ballsy" as well.

This digression is leading nowhere. Ugh. In any case, I think not knowing where you are is similar to not knowing where your balls are (sorry female readers, I guess substitute "boobs"?): it can throw bravery out of the question, out of the realm of acceptable behaviors. (And hey, that makes the action "ballsy"! whatever, read on, I'll stop trying to say every single thing I'm thinking of...) In any case, it would not have been Samantha to have been brave in that situation. It would have been acting like some other dog. And for dogs that would probably be hard to do, for them to think of some prime example of some brave dog and then act like that dog did in that situation.

But we humans do that.

And in doing that, it can lead us away from acting like we truly act. And if it does lead us to pursue some example of someone else... that's really dangerous. It's one of my fears. It's a trap I've led myself into several times, especially recently, where I've exemplified one person for his bravery and wished I could act like him. In my case it was a mistake; I overdid it. There's always a part of me (and I think this is true for anyone else) that is vulnerable to overdoing respect for one person into wanting to be that person and do everything that they do. Foolish thing; the best thing is to do better and to do differently. If you can't be them, beat them. At a different game. Then you'll be yourself again, because you've led yourself into limbo. That's what I've got to do now, after my Paris experience.

And I've led myself away from my original point... but sometimes digressions get at what you're truly thinking. And for sure all of those thoughts as listed above have been in the back of my mind constantly these past months.

And this kind of digression of thought is sometimes what you need on your own, a sort of meditation that takes you around, whirrs around in your head until you discover what you really need to do, who you really are, what you really need to do to get back to who you are. And that takes me back to Samantha. There was one point where I looked at her today, and I said to myself "you're brave now." Haha, when I write "I said to myself" I meant "I said in my head" those words, in reference to Samantha. But the funny thing is that I think I've been getting back to saying that about myself.

That's what we all need to say. Because we're all brave, but in our own individual ways. Hobbes would tell you, if I've got him right, that nobody's special, that everyone has the same faults to work over. But don't tell me that everybody has the same bravery, the same good points, because they don't. And don't tell me that bravery can't be conditional, because it can. And for true bravery, it's up to you to find what it is for yourself... and of course, in order to find it, you need to take the path that gets you there, whatever that path may be, however many or few paths you have to your use... it's your bravery, Samantha. It's your bravery.


Taking time (before hearing news)
As many of you were probably informed about by somebody who was in a hurry to tell it to you or who said it in an (obviously not happily) excited manner, somebody killed two people at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC today. That's all I know right now, and I will check after I write this to make sure the number's right, but I will write knowing this for now. First I will go to the bathroom; this is a long freewrite, whoo!

But no, this is no "whoo" about what happened. I honestly can't believe somebody would go in and do that. Well, I can, and that's the hard part: two questions come to mind. The first one is, what stops us from being insane (except for this situation where nothing stopped this guy) and doing things like this when we're emotionally distressed? I know it's unusual that that's my first question, read on. The second one, and it's the second one because I've already considered it times and times before, is what makes us go insane and do these things? Also, don't eat me out here; I'm not claiming implicitly that the person was legally insane when he did this. I'm just using a loose definition of "insane," because honestly it is a loose definition to the best of my lack of knowledge. And let's add a third question: why am I using the word "us"?

Well, none of these questions have an answer. It's hard enough to answer the questions, and I guess they don't 100% need to be asked, because with more knowledge about the story there are probably solutions out there that you could easily refer to depending on what your opinion is (wow, my sentences are long nowadays; am I getting more mathematical or just more grown-up? I think the latter, and in an academic sense. ok i need to stop writing vague shit that can be interpreted in several different ways). But I don't know; I'm getting tired and I'm not sure I really can address those questions and tie it back to what I originally wanted to write about. So I won't. They will be left as open as the door that let the cold, harsh reality the winter air makes you feel into our summer, which should be full of warm, fuzzy, peaceable and harmonious meanings. God, I didn't mean for that last sentence to feel cheesy in such an inappropriate place as this topic. But I'll move on.

And it's getting late so I'll just throw in a few other notes before moving on with my main topic instead of trying to address these things later. First of all (I think there's a "second of all"; I don't know yet...), I might know somebody who died there. There's a really small chance, because all of a sudden I know tons of people in that area... wow, I almost googled the link. I just remembered what I said at the top of the freewrite; I'll try to hold true to that promise in a minute. Wait, did I even promise that? Well, I want to check... see, this is how good I am with promises that I don't make wholeheartedly. But yeah. There's a small chance that somebody I know died there. And they were talking about the fact that Holten-Richmond Middle School had some kids there (none of whom were hurt), and that middle school is in the town next to me, Danvers, where I went to elementary, middle, and high school! But does that make anything more or less likely? No. Sit down, Alex, and continue writing. So yeah, there is a small chance that someone I know died there. I didn't realize it. And it is an important story anyway, and ordinarily I would probably have looked into it by now, since I heard about it at about noon today, maybe the news broke later? So yeah. It's pretty crazy, so ordinarily I'd have known more details by now.

But tonight, my family and I had a relaxed dinner; I whipped up a pretty damn good spaghetti sauce (which is a testament to my luck on trying things for the first time, at least for the first time in a long time), yeah I don't really cook, and ate that with the spaghetti and some salad and watched the Red Sox beat the Yankees afterwards. And it was fun, we had a good conversation or two and yeah.

What is the point I'm trying to make? It's that we really rush to hear things and see things if we think they're necessary. It doesn't occur to us enough that we can take some time before we hear these things and the outcome will still be the same. This idea from the news that you have to know, you have to know this now, is similar to the mentality we've picked up naturally from the existence of Wikipedia and the fast advancement of, oh now I'm sounding like a geezer. Jeez, what was I trying to say?

I'm tired. I'm sorry. But sometimes it's just good to enjoy a family dinner and hold off on getting concerned about these situations where you can't change anything and where you don't really need to take in all this information all at once and make quick assumptions about everything and isn't the news kind of like a run-on sentence like there where it just goes on and on we report you decide and they want you to decide now right away tout de suite and it just goes on, and on, and on? Sometimes you need to slow down. Commas help. A comma that splices isn't a real comma, though. But anyway... I'm sorry for all this poor writing form. But right now I'm really not going for that. I'm going for the hits, the on-base percentage, the contact. The mixed metaphors that don't completely go together, especially in the last sentence, whoo that was bad. The feeling. Even if I have to go back and change things. I can't go back to the past now, my past writing style, where I didn't have to go back and change things. Now I have to go back. It leads to things that are difficult to read and comprehend, but I sure as hell have fun writing them for you, the theoretical reader, to perhaps enjoy and/or maybe make a face at. But it's fun. Haha, that last mix-up was really cool.

But sometimes we need time. Just to let go before something else is piled up onto our train of thought. And now I'll check the news. Who died? Why (well, the news always claims to try to get at that even when it's not fully possible)?

Wow, I was wrong, or high on my painkiller when I was watching the news or something. I guess the two that I thought were killed were wounded...? A security guard died. In all probability, I didn't know him. In any case, now I maybe don't feel as good about the world having read a few articles about the shooting.

Maybe. Freewrites, treewrites, triwrites, whatever, they're at least here to be here to talk for me when I can't talk out everything I want to talk to people about. So I guess yeah, I feel pretty good.

And if I didn't, that would be weird. But still I think we should be bombarded with violent imagery from Pakistan and Iraq and Afghanistan (and you notice that at the beginning of this year or whenever it was, journalists weren't really allowed to enter Gaza). It's only fair, that's what happened in the Vietnam days.

Anyway, I will end this 'write by saying that the latter third of this is mostly tired writing, and I do not take complete responsibility for what I have said in that part. Also, I am recovering from a pretty life-changing surgery, and that includes accompanying painkiller. I don't know what effect that has. So don't get offended and lose respect.

But hopefully, if you read all of this, you were moved, or enjoyed reading it. Or parts of it at least.

Give me some sugar. "I am your neighbor!"