One-In-Three

If any of you read my last blog, you’ll understand why I’m writing this one. I think I may have given the impression that I have been hitting the bottle more than the average bear, and I need to clear the air. For over a week, I’ve been editing video every night and drinking diet cherry 7-up and, though I’ve been open to a good glass of wine or a well-made Manhattan, I’ve stuck with the alcohol-free offerings as part of my promise to put imbibing on haiatus while I accepted a friend’s challenge to see “if I could actually say no to social drinking for a while”. You’ll no doubt be happy to know that I’ve determined that I don’t need alcohol – there’ s no chemical lust there -I just happen to like drinking it with amigos. I didn’t need alcohol this past week and I even drank Diet Coke on St. Patrick’s Day in New London, where it would have been just as easy to down Guinness pints with the rest of the festive party-goers. To want something and to need something is not the same thing, and I now can go forward knowing that when I do drink, it’s not out of necessity. So chalk up my tipsy moments to fun, not tragedy…. Furthermore, though drinking is “bad” to some, the state of intoxication does help you see and think in other ways in which you hadn’t. And it’s these alcohol-induced fuzzy moments that – paradoxically – allow you to see more clearly. Take, for example, the sign I saw the night that my alma mater, UConn, lost in the NCAA tournament to San Diego (ten years ago I would have been on suicide watch!). I was on my best behavior, sitting in a bar in Midtown Manhattan sipping their namesake drink (Makers Manhattan, rocks) even as my team embarassed itself against a low seed in the first round of the annual March Madness tourney.

After a horrendous loss, I decided to relieve myself in the Men’s Room in hopes that the cleansing of my physical system would cleanse my psyche as well. No dice. However, I did – for the first time in my many years – pay close attention to the sign on the wall above the sink….one that we’ve all seen more times than we can even remember: “All Employees Must Wash Their Hands”. Until that moment, the significance of this sign never hit me, and yet there it was. Being that the sign was both tragic and hilarious at the same time, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. Yes, it’s driven by public health regulations that target the limited number of employees whose behaviors can affect the health of many, many more whom they serve. But has anyone ever really thought about how ridiculous – and how utterly tragic- the need for this placard is?

What it says is that human beings left to their own devices – even almost 3,000 years after the Romans advanced the concept of sewers to drain waste from the city – may still forget the old adage that tells us to “never crap where you eat”. It says that we are not responsible enough to follow the rules of basic hygiene even when there is running hot water and antibacterial soap right there in front of our faces, everywhere we turn. Yes, that means that though we all know that “poo” is bad, and bacteria can harm us, we will still leave a bathroom (even a PUBLIC bathroom) without properly disinfecting ourselves. In fact, many people will not even give their hands a quick rinse in even the coldest of water. Believe it or not, we’ll grab a toilet seat (or worse), look proudly in the mirror, and walk out into the bar without washing and, even more tragically, without shame. I read a summary of one study that found that 33% of males in the United States don’t wash their hands after using the bathroom. Thirty-three percent! Lord help us.

What has the world come to when, in the 21st century, we have to put up signs to get our best and brightest to comply with the advancements of modern science that were so graciously gifted to us by greater generations before us? How far have we come when – in the 21st Century – the “unwashed masses” is actually an apt and – worse yet – literally-correct description??? I often think back to Martin Luther King Jr.’s dreams in these instances, and wonder to myself what he – or our other forefathers – would have said had they seen the sign “Employees Must Wash Their Hands” so many years after they gave their last so that those that came after them could live a better life. Let me tell you something: I have a dream today, too. It’s not as noble as the end of civil rights abuses or a notion of equality, nor is it an aspiration for world peace or an end to tyranny over the world’s oppressed peoples. My dream is that one day in my lifetime, when I meet someone new, I can shake his hand and simply wonder where it has been…rather than having the knowledge that there is a one-in-three chance I may as well go shake hands with the toilet seat……

The Vernal Paradox

The first day of Spring is always one of my favorite annual milestones. Mostly this is because I loathe the Winter – especially the New England variety – and though the 20th of March is almost always grey and cold, the vernal equinox symbolizes the advent of warmer weather and longer days. Ironically, it symbolizes for many of us the triumph of light over darkness when in reality it actually means “equal night” – that is, a day of the year where the length of night and the length of day are equal. So today the seasons are in a stalemate, and though it is a fact that the gains in daylight will come but incrementally as we move inexorably around our Sun, paradoxically it does always feel to me that we truly are Springing forward in a giant leap when we reach this milestone on the (solar) calendar. Never more so than this year, when Spring couldn’t come soon enough. It wasn’t the weather that brought me down this Winter, however, it was all the death….

I knew things were bad when in January I was attending my fourth wake in eight days. As if the gloom of perpetual cold, clouds, rain, and snow wasn’t enough, it seemed the world was covered by some kind of depressed fog that didn’t want to lift. I watched as people lost fathers, and grandmothers, grandfathers, and friends. But nothing hit me harder than losing my good friend Tim, who took his own life at his wife’s grave two years after she lost her battle with cancer. I won’t go into the details, but I learned that the process of dealing with suicide is unique and insanely complex. It is obviously a time of overwhelming grief and sadness, but unlike other losses, with suicide you have to deal with anger simultaneously with sorrow; you find yourself defending a friend against words from those who didn’t know him while at the same time questioning how well you really knew him yourself; you feel great empathy for your friend and sympathy for his children and family, all the while struggling with guilt and shame as you wonder if you missed any warning signs or could have been there more for him while he was here. In the end, you realize that what happened was the result of irrational thought and that the traditional reaction to suicide – that it is a selfish act – is completely bogus. Psychologists have shown time and again, from discussions with those that are unsuccessful in their attempts to kill themselves, that they thought their families and friends would be better off without them. Actually, my company had an open session yesterday talking about the facts of suicide and how to deal with it, and it was great to hear so many myths dispelled about the topic. And to see that there is hope ahead in the struggle against suicide, as evidenced by the growing coalition that participates in the Out of the Darkness Overnight Walk campaign run by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Having said all of that, what struck me most about my friend’s death – after getting past the grief as best I could – was just what a paradox the act of suicide itself is. That a living being would consciously make the choice to stop being alive is something I can’t quite reconcile in my mind, and maybe I’ll never be able to. It got me thinking about this and other examples, which I’ve shared below:

• We don’t know a lot about the rules of biology, at least not in the way we do with things like physics, mathematics, and chemistry. In my studies of biology and ecology, I have learned to boil it down to one rule above all others: The goal of an individual is to live long enough to reproduce. This survival instinct in humans is supplemented by a cognitive ability and self awareness, which has added “the fear of death” to a simple “will to survive”. Some might argue that this new phenomenon – the fear of death – is what resulted in the creation of religion and the belief in an afterlife, but that’s a topic for another day. What amazes me, then, is that any living creature can choose to end its life. It’s body will struggle to live even as its mind tells it to give up. It goes against everything I know of biology, and I guess it is a testament to just how complex the human mind is.
• Speaking of which, it strikes me the human body and its systems are very well understood…from the neck down. We get an annual physical to check up and intensive care when we are subjected to bodily trauma. Our brains, however, are what make us really human. And we don’t have any grasp on how it works! Psychologists study the symptoms and manifestations of problems, but are just scratching the surface of the mechanisms at work. However, if a person goes to a psychologist, everyone assumes something is wrong with him. Can you imagine an 80-year-old man telling you he has never been to a doctor? You’d be appalled! “What? You have to go, now!” If you heard that he had never been to a psychologist, you’d think, “that’s great, he must be well adjusted”. So we have a whole system to monitor and treat the human body that is so easy to understand, but approach the treatment of our most complex organ with stigma and embarrassment. Huh.
• US military spending – including past debt and veterans benefits – is over 50% of the annual budget. For aggression or defense, this is money spent to end lives. We spend 30% on human resources – much of that health care – which has the aim of saving lives. Most will tell you that the military is for defense, not attack. So we spend tremendous sums of money on lethal weapons in an effort to save lives?

I could go on for hours about this, but I have a day job I need to get back to. I invite comments and additional examples if you are so moved. Above all else, I wish everyone a happy Spring….may it be brighter than the season just past!

Will Power

As I left work today, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the episode of The Simpsons where Barney draws the dreaded black pickled egg at Moe’s Tavern and is forced to be the designated driver before a huge night out with the guys. Not only is he faced with staying sober during one of Moe’s busiest nights, it also happens to be the night when the Duff Mobile shows up to tell him he’s won their international contest and that Duff Man and the Duff Girls have come to party with him while he downs the “bottomless mug of Duff”. Loyal Simpsons fans, the first time they saw this episode, assumed our animated alcoholic friend was sure to fold, but no. He showed that somewhere, deep down inside, he had a store of will power that could get him through….

This flashback seemed apropos today on St Patrick’s Day, the busiest drinking day of the year. Being that I’m 1/8th Irish, and because I love to drink, I would normally be bellying up to the bar at 5:00 with the other merry, green-clad paraders (Actually, according to my National Geographic Genographic test results, there’s very little chance that I’m actually Irish…even though my father’s father’s father was said to be Irish and arrived in the U.S. through Jamaica, it turns out there’s a much greater chance I’m from the Middle East, North Africa, or the Mediterranean). However, yesterday I made a promise to quit drinking for a while, mostly to prove to myself that I could because lately I’ve taken to drinking alone in my apartment (more on that later). And I thought what better day to start than St. Patrick’s Day at Hannafin’s Pub in New London? I mean, if you can stay sober and avoid the mother’s milk that is Guinness Draught, you can avoid anything, right? What struck me as ironic was that the people at Hannafin’s all thought that I and my Diet Cokes were a symbol of will power and resolve, when the real display of those traits was that I was actually in Hannafin’s Pub in the first place! Or, more specifically, that I was in New London…in Eastern Connecticut…hell, even in New England for that matter.

Allow me to explain. I hate Eastern Connecticut. Words cannot begin to describe how much I despise this place. Not its inhabitants – my friends and most of the people I meet are great – rather the general aura of the place and what it has (or doesn’t have) to offer. There’s no nightlife to speak of. No culture. Almost no “young” people. If we think simply about the “Triangle of Misery”, as I like to call the area between Norwich, Groton, and New London, the lack of any bustling social activity makes sense. There are no big universities to speak of (sorry, Conn College and Mitchell don’t qualify) so kids have to leave if they want to pursue higher education. Most of the places they go to are a hell of a lot more fun than the Triangle of Misery, and since there are so few opportunities for employment here in Eastern CT, most anyone who has anything going for him or her doesn’t return. So the equation is a mass emigration of late teenagers and a nearly-imperceptible trickling in of college-educated twenty-somethings. You do the math.

I began my experience here in the Triangle of Misery in 2001, when I moved in with my good friend Ryan, telling him I wouldn’t put my name on the lease because “I’ll be out of here in three months”. If you were not aware, it’s well into 2008 at the time of this writing. Luckily, I’ve had stints in Manhattan and Buenos Aires that helped me keep my sanity, but I’ve honestly hated just about every minute I have been here and feel (other than making a couple of great friends) I’ve wasted seven years of my life that I’ll never get back. I like my job and the people I work with, so I’ve stayed and toughed it out as long as I could. And I’m still toughing it out, but it’s taking every bit of will power I can muster, and I honestly don’t think I can stick it out here much longer without picking up and moving lock, stock, and barrel….

How bad is it? Well, I have noticed I’m drinking a lot more lately, and when my mom asked, “You don’t drink alone, do you?”, I was forced to pull a Homer Simpson quote and say, “Does the Lord count?” It’s funny, yes, but also problematic. I should note that I’m not getting drunk alone – just having a cocktail or two – though now we’re getting into semantics….since there’s nothing much to do here, I am keeping Maker’s Mark in business while knowing that if I just lived in a better place – pick a better place, any better place – I wouldn’t have to drown out my boredom with cocktails and wine. Work is great, life sucks. Unfortunately, in equation number two, they don’t balance each other out! Let me be clear about one thing: I’m not depressed, so please don’t call the suicide hot line on me. In my case, there is light at the end of a lot of tunnels, I just need to get out of the black hole of a location I’m in right now and get on my way…

And so, though I’m kicking my exodus planning into high gear, I have to realize that it may take some time and that the great position, team, and manager I have at work are worth waiting (a bit) for. Luckily I’ve had a lot of experience with hurry-up-and-wait situations. Just takes patience and perseverance. Oh, yeah, and a hell of a lot of will power.