More memories

A memory? Or is it a story.
  I remember 3rd or 4th grade at Agus Fria Elementary school. My friends invited me to stay at their house. I agreed and th next day we hot on the bus to go to Frankie and George Montoyas.
Did I not tell my Mom? I have no memories of my brothers being around. If I was in 4th grade I would have been 10 years old. I remember suddenly realizing that Mom would be alone on her birthday and sobbing on the bus because I would not be there to comfort her.
  We have all these stories of how cruel kids are. Frankie and George comforted me and tried to figure out a plan with me.  That instinctive empathy sticks with me to this day.
 The weird thing about this memory is that it ends there. I don't know if I got off the bus or their parents gave me a ride home. Did my Mom come and get me? Maybe I cheered up and happily spent the night?
   Somehow this memory is connected to working on stomach issues?! I have the frustration that occurs when I put down a good mystery/adventure book before the and can't find it again,or when sadistic director leaves a cliffhanger for you. What happened? Did the boy save his Mom? where was everybody else? Why did this little boy think he was responsible for his mom's birthday?
   Having grown up in a dysfunctional household I am paranoid about memories. i come from a family that makes up histories(my version of what happens ,maybe not the others version) so if the memory becomes complete in my mind how will I know it it is real or memorex. This is very worrisome to me because hav have few phobias, but that is one and it is very strong.
  One sits on the edge of insanity and watches others slip down that slippery slope into nowhere (see now i am worried about that little extra w that I had to erase in nowhere because spell check warned me about him.Did he feel his death? I am certain it was a he. Well one more little life snuffed out. Anyway my point started out being that reality is slippery and my experience of growing up in an environment where reality changed to fit the story has made me leery of trusting my own memory.
  As with shyness the daily battle with that monster in the back of my mind whispering"Are you not lying?!" Or worse like George Castanza "Have you begun to believe your own lies and slip into nutsville?"
  So far at the end of the day I am reasonable confident that I am still in he mix of or social reality, although even then I wonder if we are all making up stories and are lost in unreality not even knowing. Something more than the confusion and sense of unreality is the fear that I might be hiding from the fact that I am destructive like I perceive certain others to be. They don't realize it and that scares me because maybe I am like them.
  One other thing it is very hard to fight for oneself when you don't believe in you.

  Wow all of this came out of not being able to remember the end of a story that I was in. Jeez Or is it Geez?
 spellcheck says Jeez is real and Geez is not. Okay.
   To end on a lighter note. more empathetic young people. This is a very strong memory because i was a vulnerable young person. I was a 9th grader at Santa Fe Prep. (once again a good supportive experience at that place.) on the soccer team I was defending  in our first home game f the season and Ron Ellis got by me twice and scored goals. I remember saying I was to slow and feeling horrible. The team gathered around me and (I remember for some reason especially Peter Bickley, odd because we never rally spoke before or after) told me I was okay and that I would do better next time. They were right Ron was completely frustrated the rest of the game.
   I remember a conversation with my friend Laura Lewallen last year where I was telling her I thought that at that time i was close to turning bad. She said that that would not have been possible because I had always been so sweet. I don't know , I look back on a few critical instances in my life like that one at just the right time and I think of Fernando from my elementary school who ended up in jail and is dead these many years. He was sweet too.

 Thank you Folks of SFP in the 70's and 80's. 

Busted!

Soccer potluck giving a ten minute treatise on the evils of the sugar industry and how everybody has been fooled by flavored "yogurt" which often has more sugar than dairy in it. Then reminded that I am in charge of snacks for game the next day,.
 Dang go to the evil Sam's club. for gogurt, danimals and cereal bars all high sugar . Deb catches that right away I am stuck saying oh well at least I know that I am poisoning your kids with sugar and blue dye #5
  Dang sucks to be hung by your own petard! As Dr. McCoy once said.

Shyness and memories

 I grew up in a liberal intelligentsia culture where psychology was considered a real subject in terms of how humans live and think and feel so I sort of take it semi seriously.
   Dredging up memories that supposedly affect how I react to present day situations somehow makes sense to me.
  I remember YAFL football I must have been in the 3rd grade. One of my teammates could not get to practice so I told him we wold pick him up. When I told my mom she freaked out,but went along to his house. Whatever problem I had precluded me from going up to the door and knocking. this enraged my Mom who proceeded to beat the crap out of me from the drivers seat of the car. My mom was a great screamer so there was lots of sound affects to go along with the punches as slaps.  I sat there and took it. After her rage was spent we left without picking David or resolving our conflict.
  I guess I was terrified but I honestly have no emotional connection to this memory. Apparently it would be good for me to know how I felt in those moments. A lot of me brain says that this is a crazy idea, who wants to relive moments of total helplessness and terror?
 When people ask if I was abused I always say no.... then I think of this experience and wonder... I guess somehow we think our experience is not abuse or I convinced myself that being targeted once does not make abuse. Maybe I have separated so far from that experience that I do not associate with "my" childhood. That was some other kid. I do not identify as a victim of abuse. That is a whole nother subject.
  As things go I had a similar experience with my oldest yesterday. He left something at his friends house and refused (For no good reason from my perspective) to go back up the driveway to pick it up himself. In case I am doing the usual and using one word when ten will do. (the opposite of the New Yorker which seems to use ten when one would do) Ben is 7 years old and both he and my younger son seem to have the same demon haunting them that makes them very closed off around people. We sometimes call it shyness. I started thinking that I should force him to do this difficult thing then I started to get angry at him for delaying us by his irrational seeming behavior.  Just as I opened my mouth something inside changed and I felt myself saying. "Ok let's go look for your toy. I felt a physical change i my body as the words of censure I had intended to say died and were replaced by something softer and more inclusive. He and I happily went up to the door and spent more time with the cute mom and Ben's friend. Both of us were satisfied that we had done our best and we felt like a team even though e actually did not find the toy.
  I actually had a flashback to the football story as we walked up the driveway and I felt that as a parent I had dodged a bullet on the voyage of raising and growing with a family.

  The story that we have to force kids to do things or they will grow up to be lazy and immoral runs strong in American culture. This is a thought that I think often justifies abuse of young people. (Spare the rod, spoil the child) If we are not hard enough on our kids they will not survive the rough and tumble of the "real" world.

Shyness

There is an experience that some of us call shyness or social phobia, or as my sister said Nancy Zeng told her, just a lack of willpower.
 What is shyness. An experience? A feeling? A genetic issue? Emotional scar tissue? I guess that maybe all of these describe it.
  Friends and acquaintances are often surprised when I claim shyness. I am proud of that.
  I experience what I call shyness( from speaking with others who seem to have the same types of experience in relating to other humans) as a sort of a demon who lives in the back of my mind whispering to me and trying to control me. "you are not good enough?"  he whispers "You are bad " "You are dirty, weak and so on. As well as on the other side of the coin"Those people do not like you" "They are dangerous, snobby, better than you, worse than you .....and so on. Anything that this fearful(in both senses of the word )being or demon can think of to keep me from relating with other humans.
  So it is a daily battle with the Demons of our souls for us "shy" people to go out into the world and act like we are not terrified that our fellow humans are going to humiliate, ignore, and damage us physically. We must first fight the battle within in order to just look somebody in the eye or say hello.
  When somebody says to me "You do not seem shy to me?" with a question mark I am proud to have won the field on this day and stand proud on the field of inner universe with the flag raised high.

 Maybe I have been reading too much adventure fiction lately? I enjoyed composing this though.
  

Advertising and morality

I know I know another oxymoron. This is on my mind because I got in a big email fight with my tea party uncle about Coca Cola's morality. They spend over $3,000,000,000 a year convincing people that they should drink Cola's,which are very not good for you. I also finally looked at the NYT magazine my friend Allessandra gives me and sort of read their article on the art of making fast food tasty and addictive.
  I was tossing around the idea that we could make all advertising be about healthy, kind lifestyle.
"Kale is good Kale is great let's put it in our cake!!" and so on.  Instead of young men in liquor advertisements pretending to be what young women want in order to get them drunk on Captain whatever so they can have an orgy.... well I can't really think of something cool and appropriate but maybe you get the gist.
  It seems that advertising looks for humanities "weakness" and encourages those aspects of our community in order to make MONEY and that bothers me. Of course I do not know what to do about this. 

Memories?

Working on remembering my childhood in order to heal mind and body from the traumas. It is interesting that  I do not have a continuous memory until 8th grade when ,according to family myth, I who was selectively mute (for some reason it really bugs me when people confuse a moot point with a mute point)at the time, was sent to Tucson (the four boys took turns going to visit?) to stay with my Dad and I told him that I would never go to school again. Interesting factoid, I went to school 3 days a week and got all As and Bs.
    So my Dad drove me up to Santa Fe and used his army disability pay to put me in the local prep school. That fall is when my memory becomes contiguous. I guess that Santa Fe Prep became In Pater Familias. I got my sense of community and belonging  from my five years at this small private school.
  As usual something in my mind distracted me and I got off of whatever subject was interesting me when I started typing. Oh yeah dredging up childhood memories so my stomach can heal and I can start eating junk again. Although the cute naturopath assures me that it still will not be good to eat the old way no matter how healthy my psyche is. Hmph!! well I guess it is worth it since I am no longer dependent on loperamide.
  Oh well I guess I want to be the best that I can be. (I still can't believe the army stole such a good slogan) If that includes eating Kale and forcing myself to relive my childhood so be it.
  

sexism?

I just read that there was a sexist obit in the New York Times because it talked about the woman as a parent and housekeeper first before it mentioned her professional accomplishments.
  It seemed to me that the complainers were falling into the same old paradigm that "women's" work is less valuable than "men's" work. It is something to think about. Whenever I ask somebody what they do and they say "just a housewife" or "just a Stay at home mom or dad" I am always aware that there is something oppressive about that assumption that that type of of work is "less than" ":real" work liking ruining the economy of BSing clients and competitors to make a little more money.
   Would it be weird to say "He was a great Dad?" before saying somebody was a banker? "She was a great Mom." is sexist unless one realizes how important and difficult parenting is. So how do we respond when some CEO is called a great Mom before she is applauded for her part in the banking fiasco?