Real Joe

The World According To Chuck: a riveting story about his autistic son:

The rages started when he was about 4, and they were ugly. His rage, my rage. One day he punched his mother, just hauled off and decked her. I grabbed him and dragged him to his bedroom, tossing him on the bed. I’ve never had the stomach for corporal punishment, so I just yelled at him, and he yelled back. He was out of control, writhing and screaming in anger, and in my frustration, I slammed his closet door, shattering the mirror. He screamed louder, now horror mixed with rage, and he pointed his finger at me. “YOU did it! YOU did it!” So I picked up a nearly full water bottle, emptied it over his head, and stormed out…

But he lost his laugh, and I think sometimes it’s my fault. I think I should have known, should have recognized signs, should have understood and should have done something earlier. Thousands of dollars have been spent on counseling, psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, medications and tests. We’ve done the best we could, but I still wonder, still think I could have intervened at the beginning, helped him more. This is stupid, I know. Still. I have nightmares.

Chuck’s still suffering. I wonder what his mistaken idea is?

We would often be ashamed of our finest actions if the world understood all the motives which produced them. – Duc de La Rochefoucauld

This article about philanthropist Zell Kravinsky, Kidney donor pushes his altruism to the extreme, appeared in the NY Times in August. Brainwash (the online magazine of America’s Future Foundation) has a posting about it on its weblog including one comment from Kravinsky.

I’m guessing he’s neither the devil nor saint that people are making him out to be. His wife is evidently threatening to divorce him over it but to me, that’s just an indication that their marriage was troubled already. Sneaking behind your wife’s back to donate a kidney isn’t all that different from sneaking to have an affair. Or in my dad’s case, buying a motorcycle without my mom knowing about it and hiding it at his brother’s house. Or in my case, sneaking off on day-long motorcycle rides when my wife thought I was at work. All were signs of troubled marriages.

True, these behaviors were not altruistic like Kravinsky’s but when he says (in his blog comment) “It’s cool when you can save a life without depriving anyone of your company. Some of you “nutjob” and “jerk-off” spotters should try it–for sheer satisfaction, it beats a raised eyebrow and a sneer” it seems to be he was doing it as much for the pure self-pleasure as he was for trying to make the world a better place… as well as taking a poke at his wife, for whatever reason.

One helpful outcome of our attempt at an at-home vacation (we bailed on our camping trip because of my bad back) was stumbling upon a NadaChair booth at the Minnesota State Fair. The chairs “effectively prevent slouching while relieving back pain related to prolonged sitting. Nadachair lumbar support cushions improve posture by using the knees to keep the pelvis stabilized in an upright position.” The thing really helped with my lower back pain whenever I needed to sit someplace — the car, movie theater, dinner table, etc. It looks a little weird to carry around. One guy mistook it for a rock climbing harness. I was hoping someone would ask me if it was a trapeze-type device for facilitating interesting sexual positions.

Last week I was finally got to the point where I was pain free most of the time, as long as I didn’t sit for long. I kept adding gentle back exercises each day from my new back bible, Backache: What Exercises Work and by week’s end, I was doing fast-walking at the Carleton College running track and climbing up and down the stadium stairs. I also started swinging my racquetball racquet at home, much to my wife’s dismay. But I wasn’t even tempted to ride our trials club’s two-day motorcycle event at Spirit Mountain.

Tomorrow I go see my orthopede about my knee with the torn ACL. I’m trying to decide whether to have it fixed now, later, or not at all and just figure out how to strengthen the knee and stabilize it with a knee-brace. My joint bible is Wear and Tear: Stop the Pain and Put the Spring Back in your Body and between the two books, I can see me continuing to be active with these joint-unfriendly sports for another 25 years or more. Hah!

Kent Nerburn wrote in his weblog last week about seeing the sudden spiritual transformation of a woman who survived a severe auto accident. “I can’t explain it. It would be simple to say that she has gained a newfound wisdom or appreciation of life. But that is too simple. This is something deeper, something that she herself is not even able to comprehend. In the twinkling of an eye, she has been changed.”

This reminds me of a book I picked up a couple months ago when the author visited our local bookstore for a reading and book signing. Ann Jauregui is a therapist and the author of Epiphanies: A Psychotherapist’s Tales of Spontaneous Emotional Healing (available via Booksense or Amazon.)

It’s a book that focuses more on the possible scientific underpinnings for these sudden spiritual transformations and less on any psychotherapeutic intervention. “There is something deep, something elusive still missing in our understanding of how the world works. What is certain is that a person can slip into an alignment with these workings. Often while walking out under the sky. Indoors or out. On legs or in wheelchairs. There, on a lucky day, we see something.”

Herbert Benson’s new book, The Break-out Principle, also may give a clue about what’s happened to the woman Nerburn cites. “… a powerful mind-body impulse that severs prior mental patterns and–even in times of great stress or emotional trauma–opens an inner door to a host of personal benefits… Breakouts open the door to different kinds of peak experiences–self-awareness, creativity, productivity, athleticism, rejuvenation, and transcendence–and lead to lasting changes.”

Benson cites the interesting developments surrounding nitric oxide in the body and its possible connection to what we call the mind. “Puffs of insight” — break-outs — can occur when this natural gas gets triggered in the body. While his book is all about learning to deploy a variety of techniques and habits that trigger break-outs, Benson also says: “It seems quite possible to me that some part of the mind — perhaps what theologians refer to as the “spirit” of human beings — may be linked to a dimension beyond the physical matter, DNA codes, cell structure, and other limitations of our brains and bodies.”

And maybe that’s what God is.

The Sept. issue of the American Enterprise magazine has nine articles on men, part of its cover story, Real Men: They’re Back.

Only three of the nine articles are online so I ordered a single copy of the print issue. The editorial overview by Christina Hoff Sommers is titled Men — It’s in Their Nature and it encapsulates their overall perspective that the nature of men can’t be changed, it’s back in fashion, and that that’s good.

“The gender activists who fill our schools and government agencies will continue with their efforts to make boys more docile and emotional. But fewer and fewer Americans will support them. Maleness is back in fashion. And one reason is that Americans are increasingly aware that traditional male traits such as aggression, competitiveness, risk-taking and stoicism—constrained by virtues of valor, honor and self-sacrifice—are essential to the well-being and safety of our society.”

I like most of what she and the other article authors have to say. Vive la difference as I’ve blogged here before.

But as I wrote in my blog a month after Sep. 11 in reaction to Peggy Noonan’s piece: Welcome Back, Duke: From the ashes of Sept. 11 arise the manly virtues, this characterization of what makes a man manly seems just a little too thin.

Male traits constrained by the above-named virtues? Yep, good point. But it’s often not enough to prevent damage to ourselves and those around us, as evidenced by the epidemic of male depression in the general population, and the psychological impact to FDNY rescue workers after 9/11: “During the 11 months after the attacks, 1,277 stress-related incidents were observed among FDNY rescue workers, a 17-fold increase compared with the 75 stress-related incidents reported during the 11 months preceding the attacks. As of August 28, 2002, a total of 250 FDNY rescue workers remain on leave with service-connected, stress-related problems. “

I generally agree with the article authors’ who lambast various feminists, academics, and others who campaign to get boys and men to share their feelings. But that has nothing to do with being psychologically smart about yourself and others, a trait that’s very likely to make you more effective and happier in all your pursuits, manly or otherwise.

Some feedback from Stuart Greene, author of the Rake piece Should Married Men Go to Strip Clubs?.

I loved your comments with regard to my column in The Rake– I think you provide the subtlety that my column lacked. Like you, I feel like I’m a better, more complex person as I get older, and I especially liked what you said about putting that extra energy into finding new ways to get jollies with the old lady.

I’d only take exception, I think, to the widespread urban myth you touch on, basically that all strippers are victims, which I tend to think is condescending in a backhanded kind of way. Here’s where I cue the stereotypical rebuttal, “Well, I have a good friend who’s a stripper, and she does it because she likes it, feels blessed with a beautiful body, and makes heaps of money.” So you can see where I’m going with that– though surely there ARE plenty of hard-luck cases, to be sure. (On the other hand, think of all the really essentially unhappy men in positions of white-collar power who are there because of horrible mistreatment as children. For some reason we always assume the incidence of victimization is much higher in the so-called sex industry, when there doesn’t seem to be much hard evidence of same, but plenty of speculation based on political prejudices– i.e. that vice is essentially caused by abuse.)

I can’t back up my comment with facts or research studies, so Stuart might be right. I think my perception is based on articles contending that prostitutes have a higher incidence of childhood sexual abuse in their backgrounds. Here’s one site: “… survivors of child sexual abuse are vastly over-represented among the ranks of prostitutes and other sex workers…” Where’s the research to back this claim up? I don’t know. Are strippers considered sex workers? I don’t know either.

But it’s not far-fetched to imagine that the environment for women who work in strip/gentlemen’s clubs is ripe for on-the-job abuse, as reported in this study: Stripclubs According to Strippers: Exposing Workplace Sexual Violence. The details cited make for grim reading. Even if vice is not caused by abuse, it’s easy to see how a “vice environment” leads to abuse.

So even if I’m a patron who doesn’t personally abuse the strippers, I’m still supporting the whole enterprise. Most of us can understand why buying stolen goods from a fence is wrong, or even buying clothes that were made in a children’s sweatshop. Patronizing a strip club seems similar to me… as much as I’d like to go occasionally. I don’t see that as condescending, upfront or backhanded, but since I do have a tendency to be more than a little arrogant [cue a knowing smile at my wife here] I could be missing something.

And what about all the “… unhappy men in positions of white-collar power who are there because of horrible mistreatment as children”? I’m not sure how serious Stuart was with that remark, but I’ll assume he was. It’s just hard to feel sorry for guys who are political, economic, or cultural kings-of-the-hill (Bill Clinton? Jack Welch? John Gotti?), miserable though they may be. And it would seem to be a real stretch to imply that childhood mistreatment tends to create powerful but unhappy men.

In yesterday’s NY Time Magazine: The Futile Pursuit of Happiness. (Read/grab it before it disappears in 7 days.)

Some really interesting research on something termed affective forecasting is being done by four academics who’ve “… begun to question the decision-making process that shapes our sense of well-being: how do we predict what will make us happy or unhappy — and then how do we feel after the actual experience? … almost all actions — the decision to buy jewelry, have kids, buy the big house or work exhaustively for a fatter paycheck — are based on our predictions of the emotional consequences of these events… and when it comes to predicting exactly how you will feel in the future, you are most likely wrong…

And whether Gilbert’s subjects were trying to predict how they would feel in the future about a plate of spaghetti with meat sauce, the defeat of a preferred political candidate or romantic rejection seemed not to matter. On average, bad events proved less intense and more transient than test participants predicted. Good events proved less intense and briefer as well.

Put another way: our tendency to be wrong about what will make us happy or unhappy is due to mistaken ideas. And the unspoken corrollary is that our innate desire for MORE tends to make it difficult to appreciate the good things in life that we already have.

Two of the researchers cite examples from their own lives where their decisions proved problematic: buying a big house in the boonies; ignoring turn-back times when mountain climbing.

Lately, I’ve been telling myself that I’ll be soooo freaking happy when my backache is gone and that I’ll never give up my back exercises or overdo it with sports again. Heh. My wife seems to know better.

All of this brings to mind two of my favorite sayings:

It is said an eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him with the words, ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’ How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction! — Abraham Lincoln

Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity. — Socrates

Role reversal: Unconventional wisdom in the personals

“A new study suggests some guys may be losing their single-minded preoccupation with women’s bodies and are instead going weak in the knees over financially well-endowed femmes.”

People underrate their attractiveness, study finds

No matter how buff they might be, men rate themselves as being less muscular than women do. Women perceive themselves as heavier than men see them… “We tend to think the opposite sex wants a much more desirable figure than they actually want,” Pride said.

Good news for us skinny guys, assuming we believe it.

If you were a teenaged malicious hacker, what better result could you hope for than this?

Hopkins Internet suspect: Government exaggerating: “Meanwhile, Parson was the buzz among his classmates at Hopkins High on Tuesday, the first day of school. As Parson, 18, roamed the halls, he drew his shares of ‘Whoa,’ ‘Wow’ and ‘Oh, geez’ among students surprised to see the Internet worm suspect return. ‘We couldn’t stop talking about him,’ said Tricia Livingston, 17, a senior. ‘Who knew he could do that? He definitely put Hopkins on the map.’”