Real Joe

Here’s a couple of recent pieces from Salon. With Valentine’s Day coming up, timely.

1. Thong or bikini, sir? How to go lingerie shopping for your woman without feeling as though you’re 16 and sneaking a peek at Playboy with your Sunday-school teacher standing next to you

“Now comes perhaps the most important piece of advice you’ll ever hear about lingerie shopping, and it’s one that American men need to take to heart: Avoid Victoria’s Secret like the devil himself will swallow your soul if you so much as set foot in the place.”

2. Sex toys on review: From the Fukuoku 9000 to a Hello Kitty vibrator, gals test-drive the newest bedroom playthings and report the results

“So I asked some fearless females to be masturbatory guinea pigs and report back. Now that the holidays are over and women have lavished gifts and attention on everyone else, I figure it’s time to encourage a little sensual self-indulgence.”

An article in the December issue of Wired on the death of psychiatrist Elisabeth Targ is titled, A Prayer Before Dying: the astonishing story of a doctor who subjected faith to the rigors of science – and then became a test subject herself. The author, Po Bronson, offers an alternative ending to the article on his web site.

I’m writing with a pen and paper this morning because my Palm Vx suddenly is FUBAR. It won’t hotsync, even after a soft and hard reset. And now it’s useless, with no info on it at all. I think it’s the cradle or maybe the COM port but AAARRRGGGHHH, it’s pissing me off to spend so much time trying to fix the problem. I wonder if anything good could come of this aggravation? What if I had to go completely paper-based again for my planner, using my old Franklin-Covey stuff? I might have to in the interim. Maybe it would help me in my efforts to get more organized, more disciplined. Coincidence? Maybe.

Related Aggravation #2: I had a lousy week on my getting things done plan. As I think about it now, I seemed to be thinking subconsciously that once I made the plan, announced it here, and said a few prayers of help that it would come eeeeeeasssssy. Wrong. It’s hard, and now it’s humbling to fail, temporarily anyway. I’m glad I’m not trying to do something really hard, like quitting smoking, drinking, or some other drug. I guess I’ll just suck it up this week and take another whack at it.

Aggravation #3: I played shitty in 3 of my 4 racquetball tourney matches over the weekend. I thought I’d be able to control the small amount of anxiety that I know prevents me from playing loose. But I only did that in one match and that was primarily because my opponent was more tight than me. The more he started choking, the more relaxed and confident I became. Same lesson, I guess. It’s not easy for me to learn to play relaxed under pressure, even in something so insignificant as a local racquetball tourney. I keep thinking that a few days of sports psyching exercises right before a tourney will be enough. It might be for some, but not for me.

Aggravation #4: I ruined our date night on Saturday by making a remark to my wife after seeing a movie. She’d seen Chicago earlier in the week with a friend of hers and was absolutely enthralled with it, wanted to see it again, really wanted me to see it, and was sure I’d love it. On the way out of the theater, I teased her with something like “Well, it wasn’t a great movie.” We have a history of conflict over movies — our preferences, how frequent to watch one — so it reopened those old wounds. What to learn? Not sure. She asked me to refrain from any pointed or sarcastic or teasing remarks about movies from now on. Just consider them as a form of entertainment and escape and a way to have something fun to talk about afterwards. Guess we’re due for a walk and a talk about this.

Four aggravations, four lessons.

It’s not quite enough for me to take a Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff approach, as much as I liked that series of books. For me, when I find myself sweating the small stuff, it’s better to take the time to figure out what life’s trying to teach me, that if I’m sweating, I must be entertaining mistaken ideas.

Another “get organized” strategy occurred to me today: no racquetball unless I’m keeping up with my daily targets towards a more disciplined life. Gulp.

We are what we repeatedly do. – Aristotle

I found that quote in an article in the Dec. issue of Fast Company magazine titled Vote of Confidence in the How to Coach Confidence section. Jim Loehr of LGE Performance Systems (Corporate Athlete.com) is the performance coach profiled. Loehr adds to the Aristotle quote: “Excellence is not a singular act, but a habit.”

I came across Loehr a few months ago when Martin Belair, the US importer of Montesa trials motorcycles, loaned me a set of audio tapes by Loehr and colleage Peter McLaughlin titled Mental Toughness Training. It’s a little out-of-date but otherwise a very complete approach. Plus, Loehr and McLaughlin talk informally on the tapes intead of the usual canned reading that so many audiotape programs use. However, I still think the book Sports Psyching: Playing Your Best Game All of the Time by Thomas Tutko is better on the actual mental exercises to practice.

I’m becoming increasingly aware of how all this mental toughness stuff can apply to my everyday life, not just my recreational sports activities. I’ve made satisfactory progress on my small steps to get more disciplined this past week. I drew a little chart on my whiteboard by my desk and kept score on the two things I’d decided to work on: Daily prayer and whittling down my email inbox by 25/day so that I was at zero by Sunday. I almost got there: 25. I’m also trying to use the suggestions by David Allen in his book Getting Things Done and listed on his web site in a section titled Email: How to Organize It.

I don’t want to add too much to my “get disciplined” plan but since I have a racquetball tournament next weekend, I want to do a ten minutes/day of mental exercises this week, primarily relaxation and concentration. And I’m going to schedule one hour of writing time each day.

The Jan/Feb issue of The Atlantic Monthly has this well-written essay on books about sex in marriage: The Wifely Duty: Marriage used to provide access to sex. Now it provides access to celibacy by Caitlin Flanagan.

American adults under the age of fifty tend to know more about sex and its many delightful permutations than did streetwalkers of an earlier century… But let these inebriates of nooky enter marriage, a state in which ongoing sexuality often has as much to do with old-fashioned notions of obligation and commitment as it does with the immediate satisfaction of intense physical desire, and they grow as cool and limp as yesterday’s Cobb salad.

I mentioned in my blog last October about my seeming inability to both read and write poetry. One guy emailed me a couple of poems by Billy Collins, our current Poet Laureate. I liked them and actually bought his book “Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems” to give my 17 year-old daughter who’s been writing her own poems for a couple of years. I’ve been borrowing it from her to read it myself. I’m starting to like Collins’ stuff.

Now this via email from another reader:

“Michael Cary says more on one page than anyone I’ve ever read. His poetry is often in essay form, and it’s written from a man’s point of view. Here is a sample [from his book] “The Noise The Earth Makes” by Michael Carey (Pterodactyl Press – ISBN 0-931757-36-3). It’s probably out of print, but a used book store might have a copy.”

A Few Good Words by Michael Cary

The thing that scared him most about a wife was that he’d run out of things to talk about. The old bravado, quiet sincerity, those awkward fumblings in the dark soon would not be enough. It never occurred to him that things could go on as they had before: lonely as hell in the fields, growing darker from sunlight and hard work. It never occurred to him, until it happened, that there could also be a sweetness in the long cool evenings: the baby asleep, the skin loosening slowly over a book, and someone else, here and there, with just a few good words in the night.

I’m starting to rework an essay on prayer that I wrote over two years ago. And this morning it occurred to me that I need (want?) to pray more regularly (essay research!) mainly because I’m sort of stuck and struggling to get unstuck.

Help. That’s my starting prayer, an acknowledgement that I’m not quite managing to lead a more disciplined daily life, one that I believe would help me accomplish some goals important to me. It’s not much different than the first step of AA, I suppose… admitting I’m powerless. That’s not quite true for me in this situation, but I’ve struggled with it enough on my own that it’s time to acknowledge I need some help. I mentioned my struggle with being more disciplined about my writing schedule and tasks to my Inner Circle group last week—-and their feedback was pretty much a blunt “get off your ass and just do it.” That was last Friday and I still haven’t done anything different so I guess I need something more.

So who or what am I praying to? My belief (thesis?) is that it doesn’t seem to matter. More on that in the essay. For now, it’s just praying. So what’s my prayer? Just a simple:

Help me develop more daily discipline, help me stick to a plan, help me be aware of what gets in my way, help me learn.

So what comes to me now as I listen for an answer to my prayer? Apparent Answer #1: Start small. Today. Apparent Answer #2: pray 3 times, when I eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Just a silent “Help me be disciplined.” Apparent answer #3: Whittle down my email inbox by 25 messages/day so that it’s cleaned out by the end of the week. Current total: 140. Like an overly messy office, it’s a dark cloud looming over me every time I check my email.

I hesitated to blog this, but I figure what the hell… going public with a plan adds to the pressure/incentive to follow through. Maybe this is Apparent Answer #4.

Bill Doherty’s post to the Putting Family First weblog points to an article in the Rocky Mountain News titled Kids Just Wanna have fun with their parents. In a recent online survey, twenty-three percent want their parents to resolve to “spend more time relaxing and having fun” than to make any other resolution for 2003.

Po Bronson’s new book, “What Should I Do With My Life?” The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question is now out and is excerpted for the cover story feature in the January issue of Fast Company. NPR’s Morning Edition ran a segment on it and they now have a online interview with Bronson up with a link to the audio. And this week’s issue of Time reviews the book: Hint: It’s Not Plastics.

I’ve not read the book but I like what I’ve read thus far. Including this:

Here are four wrong presumptions, which we have wrongly accepted as true:

(1) That money is the shortest route to freedom.
(2) That we can think (or analyze) our way to an answer of where we belong.
(3) That we are autonomous from the environment that surrounds us.
(4) That our biggest obstacles are external, rather than internal.

I also like that Bronson’s struggled with this issue of vocation himself. Here’s a clip from the NPR online interview:

Three years ago, I was wondering whether to get married again and have a family, or stay single and keep working on my writing career (which requires me to travel a lot and work many odd hours). I never thought I could do both. In these three years, I have done both -– the book is nothing less than a testament to me overcoming that fear. Not only is it the most important thing I’ve ever written, but my family was actively involved. My son, who’s not yet two, went on 17 trips during the reporting of the book, as I traveled across the country and both oceans to meet people in person. I no longer feel torn between these two loves. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in how I’ve answered this question in my life — mistakes both in my career and personal life — but writing this book was one of the few right things I’ve done.

Washington Post social science columnist Richard Morin has one of his blurbs published in this StarTribune piece: Married men have less testosterone than singles. The original article on the research was published in this piece in the Harvard Gazette: Marriage lowers testosterone: Hormones range less on the homestead.

No real shocker here, but a good read on how nature tries to help us out once we’re hitched.

“It makes sense,” notes Peter Ellison, professor of anthropology. “Lower levels of testosterone may increase the likelihood that men will stay home and care for their wives and kids, while decreasing the likelihood they will go out drinking with the guys and chase other women.”

This line caught my eye, since my wife and I have had at-home offices across the hall from one another for over a year now: “…men who spent lots of time with their wives — sociologists call this “social investment” and say it indicates a commitment to the marriage — had even lower testosterone levels than other married men.”

But in case you’re tempted to go the Androgel or androstenedione (Mark McGwire) route:

Gray and Ellison take note of what they call “a silent experiment” that is taking place. Physicians wrote more than a million prescriptions for the hormone in 2001 for men who hope that it will raise their libido, slow aging, and reduce muscle and bone loss. No scientific study has conclusively shown this will actually happen, but demand is high for testosterone patches and Androgel, a salve that men rub on their skin… “What will be the result of millions of middle-aged men rubbing themselves with Androgel?” Ellison wonders aloud. “Will hormone replacement therapy reduce their motivation to care for their children or increase their infidelity? Or will it vitalize marriages? What will be the consequence for athletes of steroid use over many years?” … There is a clear association between high testosterone levels and prostate cancer, and evidence that the hormone raises the risk for heart attacks and strokes.