Ambiguity Part 1: Home for Someone Else's Holiday

One of the more difficult lessons about growing into adulthood has got to be that nothing is ever straightforward when one is an adult. The layers of ambiguity that sometimes seem to smother the world were beyond my ken when I was a child.

This is a subject that I’ll be addressing in several BarkingShaman essays over the next while. Right now, foremost on my mind regarding this topic are the events of this evening.

Tonight was the first night of the Jewish holiday of Passover and my mother asked us to come over for her seder. There was never any doubt that I’d be going. I try to go see my parents for holidays that are important family times. As a rule Fire and Summer come along whenever one or both of them can. After several years of awkwardness, my mother no longer asks me to attend religious services at her synagogue, but I go to her home at least for diner for most major holidays.

So it was with a minimum of hassle that Fire and Summer took early days from work and the three of us plus the dog bundled into the car for the two hour ride to my folks’ house.

Anyone who has attended at Passover seder however, can tell you that it isn’t just a meal. Rather, the seder meal is a ritual in itself. For a number of reasons, I have avoided Jewish worship services and rituals as thoroughly as I possibly can since leaving Judaism to serve my Lady. First off, a Jew by birth leaving the religion is a really big no-no, and not just from a community perspective. Judaic law is rather clear on the allotted punishment for idolatry, which for a Jew consists of worshiping any god but the god. I prefer to stay below the radar of the god of the Jews to whatever extent I can, and not just because I believe it to be the polite and ethical thing to do.

Additionally, my Jewish faith and identity was an important part of my life and upbringing. I do not regret my choice (such as it was) to dedicate myself to the Lady or to become a pagan. However, I would be lying if I told you that being forever cut off from such a pivotal part of my childhood and family life does not hurt, it does. I know that Judaism was not the right religion for me, and far more importantly, the god of the Jews was the wrong god for me for many reasons. On the balance, I would far prefer a devout life as a pagan than a secular life as a Jew, which was what would have happened given the disconnect between myself and the Jewish god.

Unfortunately (or perhaps inevitably, given its nature) Passover was always my favorite holiday in the Jewish calendar. It is also the only holiday whose ritual is traditionally done in the home rather than the synagogue.

The fact that my parents accept who I am so far as to invite both my partners (plus our dog) to their home for a family holiday is invaluable to me. Especially given my health situation of late, our lives would be infinitely more difficult without my parents’ support. At times like these though, it can be a challenge not to shove the complete reality of my life in their faces. I know that my religious path is a source of pain for them (especially my mother) and I try as best I can to minimize its impact on them. However, I do this to the best of my ability without diminishing who I am and what I do in my religious life.

For instance, I have two tiny “token” tanto knives that represent the two knives I carry in my shaman work. One token is polished and one blackened with cold-bluing to stand in for my full-sized polished and rusted knives that represent life and death. I usually wear the tokens on strings hanging from my belt loops. I am bound to tell anyone who asks what they mean, and I do not choose to leave them at home when I go to see my mother. Part of being Her shaman-magician is that I am forbidden to lie when asked about aspects of my spooky job. This means that I have explained to my mother the meanings of my shamanic tattoos, tools, and hair cut (for those who don’t know, I shaved my waist length hair off during my death ordeal cycle and have kept it shaved for over a year since).

As much as I value the fact that my folks have us all home for the holidays, it is hard not to resent it when they appear to be pushing me back into the broom closet, so to speak. It brings my mother joy, or at least peace, to pretend for the duration of the seder that I am still Jewish. Striking the balance between pleasing the mother who raised me and being true to my other Mother is an especial challenge during this particular ritual. The cautious dance of watching what words I don’t say during prayers to avoid swearing falsely to the god of the Jews doesn’t do any great wonders for my mental state either. An amazing number of Judaic prayers are some form of swearing of fealty: “you are our god” etc.

I imagine that the careful dance of balancing the reality of who an adult child is with how their parents might want to perceive them is hardly one that is unique to people who have departed as radically from their parents expectations as I have. I am also well aware that my parents are rather unique in how completely they have been able to accept those radical deviations in the course of my life. My parents and I have an understanding which applies most times: I don’t ask them to be happy with the path that my life has taken and they don’t try to change that path. The logical continuation of that agreement is that they generally don’t push their unhappiness with my path on me and I don’t shove the evidence of that path in their faces.

Just as adulthood is not nearly as straightforward as I expected when I was a child (imagine my shock to find that so far no one has given me a manual!), compromises feature far more prominently than the child I was could have imagined. When my mother asked me to read the four questions in Hebrew tonight (and with no transliteration no less) I could have refused on the grounds that it was not a terribly comfortable thing for me to do. However, that discomfort has led to me staying up late thinking and writing. Come the dawn it will be all but forgotten. The unhappiness that refusal would have caused my mother would have lasted far beyond the next rise of the sun.

I like to think that this decision is the sort of thing that distinguishes me today as my parents’ adult child rather than just their child.

Audacity Is An Hold System Trying to Make Me Feel Guilty

How does one define audacity? Dictionary.com has this to say:

1.	boldness or daring, esp. with confident or arrogant disregard for personal safety, conventional thought, or other restrictions.

2.	effrontery or insolence; shameless boldness: His questioner's audacity shocked the lecturer.

Me, I prefer:

1. Telemarketers that call you up with an “all our representatives are currently busy, please stay on the line” message

2. Telemarketers that do it over and over again.

Now I know what you are thinking. Actually I have no clue, but I hope at least one of you is thinking the following “Wintersong, why the hell don’t you guys put your name on the Do Not Call List? Of course, I would hope that if you thought that, you would immediately say to yourself “this Wintersong fellow sounds like a sensible if perhaps overly eccentric sort, I imagine he has thought of this (apparently between thoughts you moved to England).”

Of course we thought of that. Our number is on the Do Not Call List. However, there is an exemption made for charitable organizations. Or more importantly, paid telemarketing companies working on the behalf of charitable organizations. We get a lot of these. We’ve been getting a lot of these for some time, but I will admit I may have exacerbated the situation.

You may or may not have deducted from previous posts on BarkingShaman that I struggle with depression. Or more accurately I live with depression since for some reason the term “I struggle with” always evokes images of high school wrestling in my mind. Which is weird since I’ve never wrestled, my high school did not have wrestling, I’ve never attended a high school (or any other kind) wrestling match. Despite the stereotypes, I never even masturbated to the idea of high school wrestling.

Strange brain associations aside, anyone who lives with depression, like many other neurological issues, will tell you that the medication that works great one week may not do crap the next. During one of these “medication not doing crap” periods, I answered a charity telemarketing call. We’d been getting a huge number of them at the time and saying “no” to disabled vets, retired police associations, active police associations, and such was not doing anything positive for my sense of self-worth. Hanging up on poor bastards that probably get called worst things in a day than some serial killers get called in a lifetime didn’t help either. Interestingly, I have since determined that most or all these calls may have been coming from the same call center.

When the fourteenth caller called (ok, couldn’t have been more than fifth but you get the point) I relented. Actually I tried to get him off the phone but he kept saying things like “Surely you can free up just fifteen dollars for our returning wounded heroes” although as depressed as I was, my brain chose to interpret it more like “If you just give us fifteen dollars I won’t have to kill this kitten I have here.” In the interest of saving kittens or war veterans or my own sanity I did so.

To say that the rate of calls has not slowed would be both obvious and completely predictable.

However, we have gotten quite good at dodging them. For financial reasons we do not have caller ID, but after a while we reacquired the pre-caller ID skill of recognizing the several seconds of empty line that often is what greets you when a telemarketing firm’s auto-dialer is moving more quickly than its agents. If you know this sound, or lack thereof, you can put down the receiver or hit the “off” button before a voice filled with the “I know I’m not fooling you, and you know that I know that I’m not fooling you, but my manager might be listening” kind of artificial cheer comes on in order to ask you for money. If you can get off the phone before this happens, you can do so with no guilt. The computer doesn’t give a fuck if you answer or not, it just auto-dials the next person having diner, a shower, or sex. Hanging up on the computer has a null effect on your daily “how big a shit have I been today?” meter.

In response to either a much higher rate of outgoing calls than staff, or to people getting better at the sound of silence trick, one of the companies that calls our house has now added the hold message I mentioned at the beginning of the post. As my problems with insomnia have yet to be resolved, and perhaps as a result (or perhaps for some other whacked out reason) my thought processes have mostly not been up to much deep thinking, I have spent a decent amount of time wondering what the reasoning behind this message is.

I simply cannot conceive of an remotely healthy individual who patiently waits on hold when a telemarketer calls. It is obvious that the call is from a charity telemarketer because it says so right in the message. “Company A is a paid solicitor calling on behalf of the Pay Us Not To Kill Kittens Foundation. All our agents are currently with other callers. Please stay on the line and a representative will be with you shortly.”

After much (way too much) thought on this question I’ve decided that there are very few groups of people who this particular method could work with: the very stoned, the very drunk, the very senile, and the very mentally challenged. All groups of people that have members who, when hearing that message might conceivably get confused into thinking that they were the ones who had made the call and wait for a representative to assist them. Even taken together these groups cannot account for much in the way of revenue.

Perhaps they are hopping that, baffled and weirdly compelled, people will stay on the line just to see how long it takes before they are transfered to an agent. In this case, it is a method that is likely to only work once.

Combined with the fact that there is a movie coming out about rouge man-eating killer sheep, this has to be a bigger sign of some sort of end of times than gays getting married or the availability of a vaccine to protect against cervical cancer. The right wing needs to reevaluate their priorities and get a handle on this automated telemarketing thing. It would be a shame for them to spend all this time looking for Satan in internet pornography only to find that he’d been in the telephone system all along.

You can expect that plot to hit the theaters in a few years, once the killer-sheep people decide to do a new project.

Playing Pretend (yet having nothing to do with sex)

We all have secrets that we think are shameful, it’s part of being human. I’m going to share with you what I consider one of my darkest secrets, and amazingly it has nothing to do with sex:

Despite being in my mid to late twenties, I still like to play pretend games. As an adult I suppose that wouldn’t be a problem if I kept said games to the bedroom but that isn’t what I mean. For a long time I justified my mental games by the fact that I also like to write, but I would be doing exactly the same thing even if I wasn’t writing.

What sort of thing do I mean by “play pretend games?” Well, I mean pretty much the same thing I did when I was ten, only I like to think that the scenarios have become more sophisticated. For example, I have a sci-fi world in my head that is incredibly complex. In the context of this world, I can explain in great detail what kind of spaceship any automobile on the road would be. I do this while requiring that I simultaneously stay true to the design intend and function of said automobile’s unique design features and the requirements and restrictions of the imaginarily world. It’s both impressive and pathetic at the same time.

I have a “plot line” in this world that includes a character that I play in my head. I suppose it isn’t that different that role playing, except that I have never role played. As strange as it may seem, as a kid I was told by multiple friends who role played that I was not the “kind” of person they were looking to game with. Never quite been sure why that was, but as a consequence I haven’t actually gamed before. Fireheart has said on more than one occasion that she wants me to try to write this world up as a role playing game but I am not overburdened with time and I continue to insist that as a non-gamer I shouldn’t try writing a game. I certainly can’t be a game master for one, which is the next stage of what she would want me to do with it.

The reason all of this comes up now is that my company is failing horribly. We haven’t had any good paying work in a year. Moving to New Hampshire caused me to loose all the contacts I had cultivated in Vermont and with my worsened health; I haven’t been able to pursue new work actively enough. Also, we don’t have the money for me to have an out of home office. Without a public space it is much harder to go after clients or build relationships with the local chamber of commerce. Our office in Vermont only cost about two-fifty a month but I can’t afford that right now.

As a result, we have been looking into the possibility of getting me work doing CAD rather than design work to bring in some money. Temp agencies often have CAD work listings and are just as happy to contract a company as an individual. Without client work though, my SolidWorks (an industry standard CAD program that we pay a ridiculous amount of money to have and update) skills have become rusty. I needed an intricate project to work on that would push my abilities with the program farther than they had been pushed before. The project I came up with was designing in the computer, the small space ship that my Subaru Forester is in my mind.

I have now sunk just about 43 hours into the design and I can safely say I’ll need at least half again that, if not double, to finish and render the design. I have approached the project as if I was making a model. I have made the parts of the ship and then put them in a very complex assembly file. The rendering process is remarkably like painting a model.

It has been incredibly fulfilling to actually see the ship taking form in the computer in a form I can manipulate in three dimensions and has a lot of moving parts (I was thrilled to be learn limit-mates in order to make the wings open and close together). Of course, it is fulfilling to CAD-draft any design idea that one has only previously seen in one’s head, but it is somehow different when it is the spaceship. Part of that is the exciting challenge of designing around a set of rules defined by the technology of the world in my head rather than the real world. After all let’s be honest, I am never going to get to design a real space vessel, which was once a childhood dream, as well as the subject of more than one science fair project.

The process has gotten me asking an interesting (at least to me, but then it is my blog) question. When did I start to feel that this kind of imaginary game was not appropriate for someone my age? At what age did it stop being ok to play pretend? I can’t remember a specific moment or even year that I started feeling embarrassed by my mental games. I suppose I feel about my pretend games the way many people feel about masturbating. It’s one of those things that you feel you shouldn’t do, although you don’t quite know why and can’t seem to stop. Of course weirdly enough, I don’t feel that way about masturbating at all and totally fail to understand why some people do. Summerwind says he is equally puzzled by my embarrassment over my pretend world.

So what do I get out of this imaginary world? Being able to have many of the ordinary things I do in life have an element of excitement or fun makes the activities of daily life more interesting, which given the amount of effort these sorts of activities can take when my health is really troublesome, means it can make those activities possible. For instance having a complex story when I dislocated my shoulder several years ago made physical therapy more bearable. After all, I slipped in the kitchen and was trying to catch my fall is way less fun than a story about the optical-thermal ablative coating (long story, involves car washes and sparkly paint) of my spaceship failing and an energy bolt penetrating the cabin and my right shoulder, necessitating repair work and physical therapy to be re-certified as combat-ready (the TENS unit the therapist used was nerve stimulation to try to get the artificial replacement nerve fibers to synch with the remaining natural nerves).

Maybe this all sounds awfully stupid to you. Maybe it doesn’t. I am certain I’ll spend the next few days worrying about what people think, but right now I have a CAD spaceship with a retractable rocket assembly that I have to go figure the geometry for.