Real Joe

A few guys have written back in response to my “Message boards rationale” email. One offered a criticism that I’ve wondered about myself, i.e., Why would anyone find it helpful to be reading excerpts from what essentially is my journal? He wrote:

One thing that I might mention is that the emails are very interesting but are more focused on what you are up to rather than specific advice/comments that might benefit the general population of men. I do occasionally get something out of them that I can apply to my life but I feel like I am reading your journal. This gives me an odd feeling from time to time.

I didn’t reply to him, preferring to think about it for a while, and then I got an email from another guy that seemed to answer the question, at least for him:

I’ve been reflecting on how your reflections (hall of mirrors!) effect me. Not that it’s necessarily all about me, in an egocentric way, but there is an incremental effect that is emerging. I don’t have another similar experience to use as comparison. The daily eavesdropping on work conversations creates distraction and confusion; the Joe to Gos give me a small pool for reflection that as a cumulative effect of enlarging the pool. It has helped to be reading Kent Nerburn’s “Letters to my son”. This is an elemental part of my life that requires nurturing. The Joe to Gos are nurturing. They are yours, and I’m not vicarious about this, your touch points transfer to corresponding touch points in my own life that trigger a personal reflection.

I see this as one guy’s discovery providing a much better answer than I could muster to another guy’s wondering. I took it as a confirmation of my plan to create a message board where stuff like this could happen waaaay more often than if all communications goes through me.

I got the CD of my audio recording session from my friend Paul on Sunday. It has three pieces on it: a condensed version of Scoring points. Cashing in. A Joe to Go from Feb 13 about the two guys from town who died recently. And a Joe to Go from Feb 9, the travel lesson from my son.

I bought some Avery CD labels today, slapped a crude label on a copy of the CD, and then FedExed it to the person from the unnamed media company who heads up the radio show seed money committee. I also tried to encode the pieces so I could easily email them or put them on my website but I gave up after an hour. I’ll try again this weekend.

I’m allowing myself to be excited a little… enjoying the process, trying not to get too focused on the results.

I sent this note out to the Joe to Go list today:

Subject: Message boards rationale - Real Joe

Greetings fellow Joes,

I’d like some feedback on the Joe to Gos you’ve been receiving the past few weeks. It’s also time for me to relaunch the Real Joe Message Boards. So I thought I’d combine the two, but before I send you directions, let me yak a bit about the rationale.

It’s been my plan from the start to have a Real Joe online gathering place that serves a unique purpose or need in my life and in yours. I’m not exactly sure what that could be but I’ll take a stab at it and then we can figure it out together, if you’re willing.

I’ve learned long ago that there’s a real benefit to reflecting in solitude. But since I began writing essays last fall and Joe to Gos this winter, there also seems much to be gained from letting selected others in on some of those reflections. I’ve heard from many of you guys via email and phone and F2F. And it makes a difference.

The benefit might be because it’s easy for me to deceive myself, so having a BS detector is handy. Or maybe it’s that I get a different perspective that I’d never get on my own. Or maybe it’s just good to know I’m not the only one out there struggling with goofball thinking.

So it seems like the Real Joe message boards, an online community of Real Joes, could serve the purpose of extending these benefits to anyone who chooses to participate.

Would we try to be a men’s group? No, since it’s not therapy with a small group of committed participants. But we would often be talking about the hard stuff in our lives, as well as the good stuff.

Would we try to be a discussion salon? No, since I don’t think the Net needs another place for the intellectual discussion of men’s issues.

I don’t know what phrase would best characterize what I have in mind. Maybe you’ve got some ideas.

So that’s it. Let me know what you think. And then watch for the directions on how to join the message boards.

Griff

Only in quiet waters things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world. - Hans Margolius

For the past week, I’ve taken 10 minutes or so to sit quietly in a rocking chair after waking up, doing a type of eyes-open meditation that I recently read about. I’m a morning person — my mind is zooming about tons of stuff as soon as I wake up — so this is proving to be a very difficult thing to do.

I just try to quiet my mind, focus on a point on the wall, and deliberately slow down my breathing. I can’t seem to get past 20 seconds without some thought intruding. When I realize that I’ve been off into the future (”I gotta remember to add that to my to-do list…”) or back into the past (”What the hell’s wrong with that guy anyway?”) I’m supposed to say to myself, “Oh wait. That isn’t important. I just want to sit here with a quiet and empty mind.”

I don’t know if and when I’ll begin to really experience the benefits from doing this. It helps to know that practicing quieting my noisy brain could eventually help my racquetball game. But I’m assuming there’ll be other benefits, too. More on that later.

Today, I added one element to my ten minutes. I read the “Make Me An Instrument of Your Peace” prayer of St. Francis. I’m not sure why, or if I’ll continue. But I figure a little more ritual can’t hurt.

It’s simply not true to say carte blanche that marriage is good for children and divorce is bad. - Robert Milardo

The current issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family has an interesting research study out. An article in today’s Mpls Star Tribune about it is titled, Divorce bad for the children? It depends.

It started me thinking about my own parents’ marriage, basically a high-conflict marriage for 55+ years. The study’s author says that children of “high-conflict” parents were in trouble if the marriage stayed together, because “long conflict is just not good for kids at all, and part of the reason is they’re often drawn into the disagreements.”

It was primarily my sister drawn into my parents disagreements, as she was “the bad” child. I was too, but to a lesser extent as “the good” child. I’m not sure about my brother. I think they just neglected him. At any rate, my sister’s had the roughest time and reading about this report makes me more sympathetic towards her struggle.

What’s most interesting about the study is that children of “low-conflict” parents were also in trouble if the couple divorced. It makes me shudder a bit to think that this would’ve been true for our kids if Robbie and I had gotten into serious marital troubles and divorced.

The primary thing that has to be given up is knowing what is good for us. - Polly Berrien Berends

A guy I know recently told me that he’s tired of just providing the basics for his family, that he wants to be able do anything he wants without worrying about how much it costs. He’s determined to make a lot of money this year, and he’s asked God to help him.

This is a good example of false prayer. He’s completely ignoring the good in his life right now. Or another way of saying this: he’s ignoring God in his life right now. It makes me wonder whether he’d be better off not doing this kind of praying at all.

I have this image of fugitive billionaire Marc Rich praying for his pardon. He pretty much had all the material possessions a person could want, plus a few other things like massive amounts of power and influence. But he didn’t have freedom — he missed both his father’s and daughter’s funerals while living in Switzerland — so he used his money to influence those in a position to plead for a presidential pardon and he finally succeeded. If he prayed for a pardon, though, it was a false prayer. It could all turn out to be fine for a while, but there are indications that the notoriety from his pardon has the world turning against him. His empire could soon crumble. He probably won’t see that as his prayers being answered.

It occurs to me, though, that I probably have lots of false prayers going on in my head much of the time, just below the level of awareness. I don’t invoke God generally, but they’re really not all that much different than someone who does. I might think to myself, “I hope I play relaxed during my next racquetball match.” My real reason for wanting this might be because I want to win and impress somebody. That’s not all that different from someone who says, “Please Jesus, help me win today” which I’ve always looked down upon as immature. There’s that judgmental me again.

I wonder what other false prayers I’m praying without realizing it?

To keep your resolve, surround yourself with those who want you to succeed. - Robert Ornstein

As soon as I read this quote today, a very interesting thing about writing these Joe to Gos occurred to me. I get a sense from others that they want me to succeed at figuring out how to make Real Joe into a successful venture. Of course, this helps to keep my resolve, as the quote says. A lot.

It’s odd that it hasn’t occurred to me before, though. For some reason, I’ve thought primarily of the guys on this list in terms of whether they’d find what I’m doing as helpful or enjoyable or interesting.

It’s a shift in my thinking. Maybe not a small one. It may trigger a further shift, too, now that I think about it — that maybe it’s not whether or not “I succeed” with this, but rather “we.”

Study without thinking and you are blind; think without studying and you are in danger. - Confucius

One of my sons told me last week he’s thinking of going to college. He quit high school before graduating and has done very well financially as a web designer. But he’s realizing that it’s not something he’s going to want to do forever and thinks some college experience might be good for him.

Another son told me two weeks ago that when he tells his college friends about his K-12 schooling (alternative private school, homeschooling, public charter school) and all the experiences he had, they’re envious. But he’s been realizing lately how much he’s missed out by not attending traditional schools.

It didn’t occur to me till my kids were school-aged that my formal schooling left something to be desired. I approached it like everything else in life–who could I impress? I had no passion for learning anything until graduate school. I just went through the motions. My wife’s experience was somewhat similar. And so we were determined to provide our kids with a different kind of educational experience than we had.

We succeeded, to some extent, but now I think we erred too far the other way. I got pretty cocky about my views on what was the right kind of education and this cockiness prevented me from seeing that there’s a wisdom to a more balanced approach.

“School, if it is good, imparts knowledge and a context for understanding the world around us. It opens us to ideas that we could never discover on our own, and make us one with the life of the mind as it has been shaped by people and cultures we could never meet in our own experience. It makes us part of a community of learners, and helps give us form and direction to the endless flow of experience that passes before us.” - Kent Nerburn

I know my sons have benefited from their non-traditional education. But I think they’ve also missed out, primarily because of me and my ego. My wife saw the problem way sooner than me, and thanks to her persistence, we’ve come back towards the middle with our daughter. It’s not too late for them, of course. But I do feel oddly bad about this — maybe even guilty, an emotion that I rarely experience.

Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place. - Billy Crystal

My wife bought one of those inflatable fitness balls recently and last night asked me to pump more air into it, as it was pretty soft. I pumped it up after dinner and then started leafing through the March issue of Men’s Health magazine which had just arrived in the mail. The article titled “The Best Places to Have Sex” caught my eye and as I flipped through the article, I noticed that the third item on the list (after Hammock and Airplane) was Fitness Equipment, featuring the fitness ball.

She was on the computer at the time, working on the bills, so I nonchalantly placed the magazine in front of her and said, “Now I know why you wanted me to pump up the fitness ball” and I walked away to do the dishes. A couple minutes later, I peeked in the office and she was still reading. “Whadya think?” I said, flatly. She peered out from behind her reading glasses and with a sly gleam in her eye, said, “Pretty interesting” followed by a “Don’t leave this magazine laying around the house, ok?”

I chuckled and went back to the dishes. A few years ago I would have been euphoric about this. A few years before that, we would’ve gotten into an argument about it. These days, I’m just really pleased. Happy. Tickled. Grateful. We’re in a kind of comfort zone that’s reliable and still exciting. Our love life has been good-and-getting-better for so long now that I no longer obsess about sex. The feelings of compulsion and anxiety are mostly gone.

This didn’t just happen. It took a LOT of work. But we’re now reaping what we sowed, it’s great to be in love, and yeah, I now need more than a place to have sex, which is a fine problem to have.

After I wrote Tuesday’s Joe to Go about being judgmental, I drove to the airport to pick up Robbie. I arrived a bit early and got in line at a fast food place to get a piece of pizza. A young black kid was at the cash register and was having trouble with it. A well-dressed middle aged white woman in line ahead of me was in a hurry, and I watched her growing increasingly impatient while she waited for the kid to clear the transaction from the previous customer. He should’ve looked up at her, apologized for the delay, maybe explained the problem. But he didn’t (probably hadn’t been trained properly), and he kept his head down, kept punching buttons, saying nothing to her.

She got exasperated and tried to get the attention of one of the other workers, saying loudly twice, “Excuse me, can you help over here with the cash register?” Finally, a supervisor showed up and fixed the problem, the woman paid, and as she gathered up her luggage and pizza, glanced directly at me and gave me one of those smiles that said “Can you believe the incompetence?” And I automatically acknowledged her smile with a smile of my own that essentially said, “I know, unbelievable, isn’t it?”

As I sat down to eat, it occurred to me how insulting it must have been for this kid to have someone pointing out his incompetence to others right in front of him. Yes, he should have acknowledged her, but she should have spoken directly to him, “Hey, looks like you’re having trouble with that thing” and eventually “Is there someone here you could ask for help?”

I wondered whether it was because he was a kid, because he was black, or what it was that was the factor for her. I couldn’t imagine her doing that to a middle-aged white woman struggling with the register. But I don’t really know.

And then I realized that I’d reinforced her seemingly judgmental attitude with my own return glance. I’d chosen to publicly join with her, instead of publicly join with the kid. I could have ignored her glance and made small talk with him when I paid for my pizza. But I didn’t. I was on automatic pilot, acting superior along with her, and not even aware of what I was doing. It occurs to me now that she probably was on auto-pilot, too. Am I judging her now?