Christmas

Well, it's almost 1 pm, it's 80 degrees outside and I've already eaten multiple servings of a salmon avocado pasta which served to keep the leftover salmon and aging avocados from going to waste. I figure the tamales I brought home from a work potluck will last until tomorrow so I don't need to try and finish those today. I can't freeze them because the freezer is full of meats, frozen dim sum, pierogis, what have you all purchased in bulk on sale. And the overall carb load would likely induce a sugar rush food coma. Such is the state of my Christmas holiday.

At least I didn't have to work today. Juggling various part time jobs with one that has me on a 6 day work week on the swing shift during the holiday peak season has really disrupted my sleep schedule. As it was, I only slept through an entire night on my two days off each week and on the other days I've slept in staggered 2-4 hour naps throughout the day and I've managed to be functional. But I've made an effort to go to sleep earlier during the holidays and get more rest and I've actually been averaging more than nine hours a day. I imagine that going for decades on an average of only six (6) hours a night took its toll without my realizing it. 

I suppose that's as good a segue as any to describing my overall mood which is much the same as it was during the fall: contemplating changing seasons in my life going from autumn to winter with things being a little more poignant as we observed the winter solstice earlier this week. Recognizing that my body is continuing to... age (I vacillated between using the terms change and decay) prompts me to ponder what goals and expectations I've had that require reevaluating. But that can be postponed for a day. Today is the day we traditionally celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, even though the Bibilical account suggests that he was actually born in early spring, and due to a monk's error in tabulating the length of a certain Roman governor's time in office, it's actually 2028 instead of 2022 as Jesus was actually born in 6 B.C. I like to think so, because then the "star" that the wise men followed would have been the alignment of the moon, sun, Jupiter & Saturn within the constellation Aries. But I digress. From Luke chapter 2:

8 And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. 9 And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. 10 And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. 11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. 12 And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” 13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,

14 “Glory to God in the highest,
    and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”[d]

That last verse is worth contemplating. There's not a whole of peace going on. That would suggest that God's not particularly pleased with what's going on right now. 

Reacher

     Reacher is the name of a fictional character created by author Lee Child. Tom Cruise made a couple of movies portraying the character, but many fans of the novels objected that Cruise was not physically an appropriate match for the character's depicted size, etc. and Child, who has become successful by catering specifically to the tastes of his readership responded by selling the rights to make a video series to Amazon featuring this character. Season one of the series was released earlier this year. The main character Reacher is supposed to be about 6'5" & about 250 lbs. They cast well when they chose Alan Ritchson, but he had to gain 30 lbs in muscle for the part. But I digress. 

I've developed a habit of bookmarking specific scenes from movies, TV shows, etc, and rewatching these scenes from time to time. I've come to recognize that I'm motivated to do so because there's some sort of emotional harmonic resonance with something I'm carrying around but have yet to name and/or identify. 

There's such a scene I bookmarked in episode seven of season one. The scene is a flashback to when Reacher is still an adolescent living in Okinawa. His father is in the military and has been transferred to Germany under unusual circumstances and while packing, his mother says something to Reacher and his older brother:

"You look so confused right now. You see good people being punished and bad people getting what they want and don't understand why. I'm going to tell you something that won't make sense right now. Hopefully it will one day, when you're older."

"Joe, you don't need to solve all the world's problems. Solving some is more than enough."

"And Reacher, you have the strength of three boys your age. What are you going to do with that strength, hmm?"

"You're going to do what's right."

On her deathbed, their mother reveals that in that moment she recognized and was affirming the goodness that she saw in their natures.

As I continue to process through my mother's passing away, I can start to define a basic shape to a piece of baggage I still carry around in terms of how... unknown I felt in relation to my mother.  And I suspect that this is the kernel of my belief that who I was and what I was capable of accomplishing would always be obscured to my detriment, so this is going to be really not so fun to come to grips with. 

Autumn

 C.S. Lewis once said about autumn:

"Autumn is really the best of the seasons; and I'm not sure that old age isn't the best part of life. But of course, like autumn, it doesn't last."

It's autumn now. It's simply been a part of a repeating cycle of the changing season in the past, but it's different this year. I'm much more aware of the impending winter. The pandemic has been a factor, but I'd have to say that the passing of my mother a few weeks ago has been the catalyst for the season I'm currently experiencing. 

The relationship I had with my mother was complex, enough so that I elected to not to make any effort towards attending her funeral which was held a couple of time zones away. My previous blog post was an attempt to create some sort of statement I could use as my attempt towards a eulogy without touching on any of the issues that came out of the relationship I had (or didn't have) with my mother. I'm not going to get into any details of that here, except to say that I did grieve the loss of any chance to achieve whatever closure might have been possible had there been a chance for meaningful communication. But that grieving process began a long time ago when my mother began to display symptoms of Parkinson's as well as dementia. But there was still an infinitely small chance for that closure as long as my mother was alive and now it's gone. 

Other than my monthly session with my mentor, I really haven't done any in-depth digging/analysis of what the actual loss is that I'm still grieving. I guess some of it will happen as I compose this. But it's not necessarily going to expressed within this post. 

My birthday was yesterday. In years past I've scheduled a number of meal/dance outings that took up the better part of a week. This year, I had one meal with a friend with whom I'd only recently renewed our friendship that had otherwise been dormant for several decades and he'd gotten married and moved to Taiwan. The pandemic was a factor, but I also seem to be fighting a sinus infection that wants to become full-blown so I've slept a lot more than I normally do, and rather than go out, I've read a lot as many of my favorite authors have all had new novels come out in the last four weeks or so.

Two of those authors are crime fiction novelists Ian Rankin & Michael Connelly, who both have written a detective series featuring the career of a detective over decades and whose main characters have reached retirement age but have still found ways to be involved in police investigations. It turns out that these last novels end in ways that suggest that the next novel will be the last for each character. Even literary characters are dying. And it's not just these two literary characters. I also was a big fan of Jack Higgins, who penned a series of novels featuring a former IRA hitman turned government operative named Sean Dillon. The last Sean Dillon novel was written in 2017, and I've patiently waited for the next novel. That novel isn't coming; I discovered Higgins died earlier this year. And I find myself mourning the passing of these imaginary literary characters much more deeply than I did the passing of my mother. And it's their passing that makes me more aware of my own impending mortality.

Mom

My mother passed away a number of days ago. It was a long time coming. She'd been diagnosed with Parkinson's and dementia a bit of time ago, and those conditions had taken their toll; my mother was placed in hospice care months ago when her weight dropped to seventy-eight lbs and she was under regular sedation during this time. In many ways it was a relief to see her get her wish to be reunited with my father.

My mother was a lot braver and a lot more resilient than she ever gave herself credit for.  

Born February 10th, 1932, she grew up during WWII. I know little about her childhood except that her father was the village schoolteacher and that he suddenly died of some unknown ailment when my mother was around the age of ten. I presume her schooling stopped at that time. The only other thing I learned about my mother's childhood was that she learned to carry her food within her clothing and bring it out one bite sized piece at a time. If she tried to take a bite of whatever she was eating, that risked having someone bigger than her grab the food out of her hand and eat it themselves. 

She had an arranged marriage into a relatively well-to-do family in her village and she married my father and moved in with her in-laws. As far as I can tell, the entire family fled China after the communist revolution and moved to Hong Kong, where my sister was born. In the late 1950's my father left Hong Kong and went to the U.S. where he worked in a restaurant owned by relatives while my mother and sister remained in Hong Kong. My father had been adopted, and from the little I've been able to learn, they were emotionally abusive, and that behavior was extended to my mother while she stayed with her in-laws in Hong Kong. 

Eventually my father came back to Hong Kong and brought my mother and sister to the U.S. on a tourist visa - and they never returned to Hong Kong. Instead, they settled in Cleveland, Ohio; it may appear to be a seemingly odd choice, but at the time, Cleveland was still the sixth largest city in the U.S. and my father's adoptive family had opened a Chinese restaurant there and my father returned to work for them.

A few years later, shortly after I was born, my mother enrolled in an English as a Second language course for three months. As an adult I learned that my mother had been terrified at the prospect of leaving me in someone else's care, and every time during the class she heard a passing siren she would become frantic that something had happened to me. 

Taking that class allowed my mother to find work as a seamstress for a company that made parochial school uniforms. She did piecework; each worker was assigned a different piece of the clothing pattern and they were paid for each piece completed. Each piece was assigned a different rate, and over time the company assigned the more lucrative pieces to other workers in order to prompt them to be more productive. My mother never complained, and she responded by working harder doing more piecework so that she still got paid the same amount. Years later, a bookkeeper in the company showed the owners the records of how my mother had never complained each time they assigned her less lucrative piecework and instead had increased her productivity to earn the same amount, and the company rewarded her by eliminating her share of the medical insurance payment so that she got free medical insurance. I did the math on that and calculated that she'd earned about a 40% raise as a consequence including the non-taxable benefit. 

While my father had completed school and had received training as a car mechanic, my mother handled the family finances. Despite the equivalent of what I estimate to have been about a fourth grade education, she dutifully educated herself about banks and saving accounts and carefully compared interest rates to try and maximize the growth on the family savings to grow a down payment allowing the family to buy the home they lived in for 48 years before relocating to Milwaukee in 2018.

In the mid 1960's, our family had begun attending a Chinese Christian fellowship meeting started by some American missionaries who'd spent time in China. The fellowship, comprised of Cantonese/Toisan speaking Chinese, eventually become a church, merging with a Chinese church whose congregation was comprised of Mandarin speaking Chinese who'd emigrated from Taiwan. While the Cantonese immigrants were all blue collar workers, the Mandarin congregation was almost exclusively white collar, either with graduate degrees or in Cleveland studying for a graduate degree at Case Western Reserve University. My mother was very aware of these differences and she once confided to me that initially she was too intimidated to even speak with the Mandarin speakers in the church. She eventually overcame that fear.

My mother liked music, and she encouraged my passion for music; at one time I was taking three different music lessons a week and she bought a piano (for which there really wasn't enough room in the living room for it) for me to practice on. I suppose in some ways she was living vicariously through me, but I can hardly fault her for that.

My mother and father had problems in their marriage like all couples do, but when all was said and done, in their final days together, my mother was devoted to taking care of my father. Unfortunately, she developed stenosis and that limited her mobility and that resulted in her having a bad fall resulting in a broken tailbone. But instead of seeking medical care, she lay in bed in pain for weeks, knowing that if she went to the hospital, there would be no one to take care of my father. Eventually she was taken to the hospital, and when her condition was diagnosed, the state stepped in and mandated that my mother go directly into assisted living. So my mother never saw the home she'd lived in for 48 years ever again. 

It became clear that my father was not capable of looking after himself living alone, and both he and my mother were relocated from Cleveland to Milwaukee where my sister administrated their assisted living care until they both passed. 

Dance Dance Dance

Those who know a bit about me will be surprised to discover that the title has absolutely nothing to do with my passion for partner dancing. The title is actually the title of a book by Haruki Murakami, who happens to be one of my favorite authors and I'm now a couple of books closer to my goal of reading all of his works. In the past week I was trying to decide which book to read next, and the title Dance Dance Dance naturally appealed to me. I decided to read a few reviews first to get an idea of what the work was about, and it came out that Dance Dance Dance was described as being a sequel to the book A Wild Sheep Chase. So I read that one first earlier in the week before just having finished Dance Dance Dance (hereafter referred to as DDD to save myself some typing) earlier today.

I've read a lot throughout my life. It started the summer when I was about 6 or so when my older sister got a summer job working at the library, and I spent every day in the library because I couldn't be left home alone. All I had to do was read, and I've been reading a lot ever since. The reality of it is that I starting doing it primarily just to occupy myself. I'd read the sides of the cereal box at breakfast or the side of a Lysol can while doing my business in the bathroom. I read a lot of science fiction into my 20's: Piers Anthony, Alan Dean Foster (I've kept up with his Flinx series), Asimov, Pournelle, Niven, Harrison a lot of Star Trek novels, among others. I tried Clarke, but just couldn't get into his stuff despite the popularity of 2001 as a movie. Heinlein also didn't do much for me. I tried Bradbury, but he mainly wrote about the human condition and happened to set the surroundings in space. Surprisingly, I found Douglas Adams boring. I wasn't so crazy about McCaffrey Dragon series, but I really got into Damia series. Not surprisingly I also got into the psi aspects of Marion Zimmer Bradley Darkover series. Looking back now, I could see that I was drawn more into possibility of different realities, and this interest is now evinced by my evolution into more of a surrealistic approach by authors like Murakami. It's ironic that Murakami is one of the most celebrated Japanese authors of his time yet his work is often criticized for being "too western" because I can now see that it's the clash between Japanese & western culture that drives a lot of Murakami's plots that has drawn me to his work.  

On the flip side of a coin in this literary currency is another author I greatly admire, Kazuo Ishiguro, who is obviously genetically Japanese, but identifies as British, having emigrated from Japan during his childhood/ Still, he clearly acknowledges that his experience growing up in a Japanese family in Britain has been crucial in his writing, allowing him to see things from a perspective different from that of many of his peers. Rather than attempt to reinvent the wheel, I will borrow the following phrase used when Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature: he 

"has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world" 

though I might then continue by suggesting that he's explored how we lie/deny things about how and what we feel and believe. 

And now we've reached the crux of the matter. I've maintained that Asian & Western cultures/world views have qualities/characteristics/values that are mutually exclusive, so that it's not possible to fuse the cultures. The reality is that at any given moment one value has to dominate any other mutually exclusive value. So fusion is not possible. But now I am coming to a point of believing that the attempt must be made - and the process of choosing which mutually exclusive value will dominate is necessary, because the process forces one to deal with any sort of lies/denial of truths that the other culture allows. And here I come full circle: the title DDD refers to how the protagonist has described his life of just repeating the same dance steps to the same beat over and over again. I could describe most of my existence the same way. But now I have to come to grips that I need to continue my process of self examination and face up to truths, emotional or otherwise, that I've been denying up to this point. It's scary as anything, but it's exciting to consider the idea that the process might lead to something as influential as Ishiguro & Murakami have accomplished in their explorations.  

South Of The Border

West of the Sun is the title of a novel by Haruki Murakami. Many consider this novel to be his finest work. I can't say that I enjoyed it as much as I would say that the novel definitely tapped into emotional wells of pus of mine that needed draining. I'm not sure they've been drained entirely, but at least I now know that they're there. 

The novel covers the life of the protagonist from adolescence to middle age. The protagonist is an only child and has a childhood sweetheart (also an only child) with whom he loses contact when his family moves during junior high and the loss of that connection has a profound impact on him. The protagonist goes on to have a high school sweetheart and his behavior has a profound impact on her - in a bad way, and the damage appears to have been irreparable. The knowledge of this fills the protagonist with an extreme amount of guilt when he discovers this. At this point he is married - to someone who is carrying her own burden of pain and hurt which resulted in her attempting suicide and was just beginning to recover when she meets the protagonist and eventually marries him. While he struggles with learning about his high school sweetheart, he reunites with his childhood sweetheart who has become an exceptionally beautiful woman and clearly has secrets of her own that we never learn - other than that she lost a child, though it can be inferred that she is a woman kept by a very powerful man. The two take a road trip to allow the sweetheart to dispose of the child's ashes - and they finally consummate their relationship physically - and in the morning, she's gone, and the protagonist never sees her again. This throws the protagonist into emotional despair and the wife is now distraught that she is going to lose him.  At the end of the novel, the husband and wife move towards embracing the idea that they are capable of hurting as well as being hurt, but the only choice is to change as best they can and move forward.

Murakami has never communicated the idea that his novels have any sort of underlying messages or morals/agendas so I'm not going to ascribe any, but a running motif seems to be that relationships fail and that that can't be recreated as much as rebuilt, from the ashes as it were. Also, the women: the childhood sweetheart, the high school sweetheart and the wife have carried emotional hurt from prior relationships, and they all responded in different ways.

Personally, I was able to look back and see that I still carry some negative emotion about failed relationships, as well as relationships that never came to be. In the cases of failed relationships due in large part to my behavior resulting in hurting my partner, I found myself wishing I could get some reassurance that the other person was doing OK, especially for the ones who never got married. And there seem to have been quite a few. Intellectually, I know that I am not responsible for another person's emotional healing, but the negative emotion I still carry has hampered me from moving forward with other opportunities that have presented themselves. I need to embrace the truth that all I can do is change myself as best I can, and to move forward from where I stand now. 

Wallender

I have this thing for detective novels. I think it started with Michael Connelly's "Bosch" series. What set these novels apart from many American detective series is that Bosch was damaged by emotional trauma, including the murder of his mother, but that damage was what made him a successful detective. But the struggle achieve closure is a vital part of the plots.  I've discovered that I prefer detective series written by non-Americans, as these authors also tend to create damaged heroes but also (intentionally or otherwise)  provide insights into their country's society. And so I read Ian Rankin's "Rebus" series set in Scotland, along with other series such as Qiu Xiaolong's Inspector Chen series set in Shanghai (and it didn't hurt that Chen was a gourmand and there were a lot of descriptions of his meals). I had high hopes for Camerilli's Inspector Montalbano series, as Montalbano is also a gourmand, but since his novels were written in Italian for an Italian audience, the dishes are mainly just listed as it was expected that Italians would know what these dishes were, and unfortunately the character hasn't changed much over the series. And then there's Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallender. 

The Wallender series is a bit different, because it was Henning Mankell's intent to depict how Swedish society was changing - and not for the better - and the topic of Mankell's first novel Faceless Killers was immigration/racism in Swedish society. Mankell died about seven years ago, and the Wallender series had ended in 2009, but I recently discovered that a novella An Evening in Autumn had been written and so I acquired a copy and read it today. There's an epilogue in which Mankell described the thought process that led to the creation of the Kurt Wallender character. It began with the idea that the natural path would be to write a crime novel, as "racist acts are criminal outrages. A logical consequence of this was that I would need an investigator, a crime expert, a police officer.". He went on:

"It seemed to me that the police officer I shall describe must realize how difficult it is to be a good police officer. Crime changes in the same way that a society changes. If he is going to be able to do his work properly, he must understand what is going on in the society he lives in."

Crime changes in the same way that a society changes.

While I disagree vehemently with Mankell's politics (he was an ardent Communist) his observation on this was dead on. And it behooves us to look at the crimes that seem to outrage us the most nowadays. For many it's an increase in gun violence. But instead of looking at how the changes in society have prompted this, many have been led to believe that this will be curtailed by the banning of guns. 

It's always amused me that certain people have embraced the idea that the country of Sweden is some sort of utopia to be emulated. Some of these same people have enjoyed the Wallender series oblivious to the fact that each novel addressed different negative aspects of the result of trying to incorporate a welfare state into a democracy.  The results have also been depicted in Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy. Perhaps people might have paid more attention if they'd used Larsson's original title: "Men Who Hate Women". Now it fills me with dismay that a lot of what was depicted in these novels describes a lot of what I see in American society today.

Condor

 "...you were born with an intellect that makes you unique. You process things faster than other people, and that's good, but it can also create an illusion in your mind that you understand things that you don't understand, and you have to learn how to feel things. And it doesn't matter how smart you really are, you'll never really understand what it means to be human..."

This quote is taken from the dialogue of a TV series called "Condor".  It may not be prescriptive, but I wish someone had said this to me a long time ago. My mind works a bit more quickly at most, and people seem to notice this even though I subscribe to the idea that certain things about themselves should be observed rather than announced.  I was labeled as 'gifted' in kindergarten after one of the teachers put a college textbook in front of me and made me read it out loud to all the other teachers. 

The thing is, my 'gift' has been as much a burden for most of my life. The following quote comes from Psychology Today:

"According to the Davidson Institute, PG people exhibit the following tendencies: rapid comprehension, intuitive understanding of the basics, a tendency toward complexity, the need for precision, high expectations, divergent interests—and a quirky sense of humor." 

The quirky sense of humor is a given - and yeah, some folks just don't get it. But for me, the inherent need for precision has been a major factor in not connecting with people; my proclivity for precision shows up in everyday conversation when my choice of vocabulary expresses a level of nuance that most people don't seem to get. Or someone else will use a word in a context that to me is inaccurate or even inappropriate. And that's been a major source of frustration in my life. I still look for and treasure moments and people with whom I can just sit around with in what I describe as my "mental underwear" and speak my mind with the confidence that what I say can be understood without my having to resort to a 'dumbing down' process I've learned to employ 24/7.

This leads me back to the original quote. As bright as I might be based on conventional measurements like an IQ score, I'm much more gratified by the level of emotional awareness I believe I've reached. And it's not just my own emotions; it's an understanding that our most significant life choices are driven by emotion, not by intellect. Moreover, there seems to be a stigma attached to that, so people are motivated to rationalize their choices. Because of this, people have attempted rational discourse to resolve conflicts, and these attempts are generally unsuccessful to a significant degree. 

If I were to say something prescriptive about this, I'd probably put it this way:

1) Most every important choice we make is based on emotion, not intellect/facts. This especially applies to things like ideology, because ideology represents the world the way we'd *like* it to be;

2) Whenever a choice is driven by fear, the use of reason to effect a change is ineffectual. The first thing that should be attempted is to identify the source/cause of that fear, and then attempt to help the other person feel safe enough so that rational discourse can ensue. Unfortunately, many attempts will be driven by a reliance on rationale, and these attempts will prove to be ineffectual as well. Any suggestions I might offer would not be prescriptive, because every individual is unique. But I will suggest that it starts with trust, which is something that is built over time;

3) You can't need to be right if you hope to resolve conflicts.

Contempt

is the topic of this particular post. I imagine everyone has a general idea of what it means. I'll summarize it how I see it displayed most often nowadays, and I expect that most people will agree: it is the feeling that some individual or group is somehow inferior to themselves in some horrific way. The unwritten part of that definition is this inferiority makes it morally viable to impose on the personal rights of that inferior individual/group. 

The Wikipedia entry for the concept suggests that contempt can serve a useful purpose in a moral society. This might be true, but the problem is that we no longer live in a moral society. The rise of secular humanism has resulted in morality becoming the result of an ideology. And ideologies are driven by opinions, not facts. While contempt has always been a part of this culture, it has never been displayed as openly as it is currently in how some are imposing of the rights of others based solely on ideology. This does not bode well for the future.

Cleveland: A State of Mind, But Mainly, A State of Shame

Cleveland, Ohio is where I was born and raised. It's not a place that attracted a lot of Chinese immigrants, but most people are unaware of the fact that Cleveland was the sixth largest city in the US at the turn of the 20th century. The term "Sixth City" refers to that - Cleveland adopted the term in the same way Chicago adopted the term "Second City" (which is reflected in names like "Second City TV", etc.). Cleveland was actually briefly the fifth largest city but the term "Sixth City" is the one that stuck. Cleveland became a major industrial manufacturing center, and that attracted a lot of immigrants from central Europe as well as Ireland. In the 1920's the collection of department stores including Higbee's, The May Company,  Taylors', Baileys' etc. comprised one of the most fashionable shopping districts in the U.S. compared favorably to Fifth Avenue in NYC. By 1950, Cleveland reached its peak population of over 900,000 people, and it had become one of the most well regarded cities in the US. And it was in the 1950's when my family settled in Cleveland. Unfortunately by the end of the 1960's Cleveland had become a national punch line, the city where the Cuyahoga river had caught fire due to the amount of pollution in the river, and as a consequence, Cleveland was now routinely referred to nationally as: "The Mistake by the Lake (Erie)".

Most of the manufacturing industries took big hits and left the area. The "Steel Belt" became known as the "Rust Belt". Any chances Cleveland had of converting to service industries were decimated when Dennis Kucinich aka "The Boy Mayor" took office, and his populist tactics including major taxes hikes on the remaining businesses prompted those businesses to move out of the state. As a result, the median income was about $15k for decades and even in 2022, the median income is now only about $26k (US average: $53.4k). The point is that a city that was once extremely affluent and had a proud heritage has been reduced to a relatively pathetic condition.

This will seem like an abrupt change of topic, but there's a term in Korean culture known as han. The concept has proved difficult to grasp by those who grew up in a "western" culture. Wikipedia explains it thusly:

"The contemporary concept of han, that it is a national characteristic of the Korean people, is a modern phenomenon that originated during the Japanese occupation of Korea from Japanese colonial stereotypes and the characterization of Korean art and culture as "sorrowful" in Yanagi Sōetsu's theory of the "beauty of sorrow". The idea that han is a specifically Korean characteristic was adopted and popularized by Koreans in the 20th century."

I will define it as the symptoms that result from a community sense of shame, in some ways due to how Koreans were conditioned to believe that Korean culture was somehow inferior to Japanese culture while Korea was occupied by the Japanese. Having said that, any individual Korean's thoughts about han will not necessarily be prescriptive because everyone responds uniquely to their circumstances. 

The point I'm getting to is that it's my take that a lot of people living in NE Ohio suffer from their own version of han. Those who've lived in NE Ohio all their lives will probably scoff at the idea, but I lived almost half my life in NE Ohio, and when I first moved to California, it took a few years for a lot of the behaviors that I associate from growing up in NE Ohio to stop manifesting themselves, and I've had encountered a number of native NE Ohioans who felt something similar happen when they left NE Ohio. One person told me that he felt like the city had been cursed somehow, and that affected how Clevelanders acted. Despite having lived in southern California for over thirty years, I've remained loyal to the Cleveland baseball team, and I've followed them closely, which includes reading the Cleveland dot com website daily and participating actively in the comment section of many articles until the website disabled that feature for financial reasons. The point is that because now I was looking at it from the outside, I could see the patterns of thinking which I consider indicative of a basic sense of shame / inferiority. 

Sadly, I see no good way of broaching the topic with those who still live there, but I hope that others  who've left and no longer identify with the associations are now somehow happier, even if they can't make the connection as to why.  

One Day One Room

 is the title of an episode of the TV show House M.D. The main character is an intellectually brilliant yet emotionally damaged doctor who in this particular episode has a patient who has been raped and for some reason wants House to be her physician while House is acutely aware that he's ill equipped to help her deal with her trauma and tries to get her to see the hospital psychiatrist. The patient responds by taking an entire bottle of sedatives and House relents, but beyond the goal of getting her to talk about what happened to her, he's mainly curious about why the patient/victim insists on him. The patient/victim can't explain why she wants House and insists that they just talk, though eventually she tells House that she'll talk about what happened to her if he first shares about a bad event in his life. House can't understand why and continues to try and figure out why but he eventually reaches a place where he actually wants to know what she's feeling, at which point the patient lets House know that the reason she chose him was because it was apparent to her that he'd been hurt as well. After House then shares a truthful account of how he was treated by his father, the patient then tells House the details of what happened.

Ultimately, I found it remarkable that the episode essentially communicated the same premise as Henri Nouwen's book The Wounded Healer though Nouwen's book is geared towards those in spiritual counseling, it applies to all counseling; we all share a fundamental woundedness - and that commonality can make those who seek to heal others more effective by using their own woundedness as a source of strength & healing. It's Nouwen's contention that all who seek to heal/help should first recognize their own woundedness. 

I myself had thoughts about getting a PhD in marriage & family therapy about 20 years ago. A lot of therapists who also do a lot of social dancing were pretty excited when I proposed that my thesis which would involve the concepts of partner dancing to be used for diagnostic as well as therapeutic/educational purposes. Looking back, I can now see how ill equipped I would have been; the concepts will work, but I had not yet begun to come to a fuller and deeper understanding of my own woundedness. I find it ironic that my coming to grips with a lot of it only began after I lost my financial independence where I could have funded my education completely from my own resources. 

Narcissism

I approach this topic somewhat gingerly because narcissistic behavior is a part of my own personal history.  

As I understand it, the term derives from the myth of Narcissus, someone who fell in love with their own reflection, and narcissism has a modern day definition of describing some who exhibits an excessive degree of self-esteem or self involvement. The DSM5 defines the characteristics of narcissistic personality disorder as follows:

“a pervasive pattern of grandiosity . . . , need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts” (American Psychiatric Association, 2013, para. 301.81)

The DSM5 goes on to list diagnostic criteria as follows:, grandiosity; preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance or beauty; belief that he or she is special; a requirement for excessive admiration; a sense of entitlement; a tendency to exploit others; an absence of empathy; a preoccupation with envy; and an attitude of arrogance. The point is that all these traits are pejorative; they are a list of unpleasant traits.

This created a sense of emotional dissonance when I began to explore and identify what had an influence on my behavior and I reached an intellectual conclusion that my mother exhibited a number of behaviors (but not all) that fit the diagnostic criteria listed above. At one level, it made complete sense; two of my favorite TV sitcoms are Everybody Loves Raymond and Two and a Half Men and a primary reason is that there's a mother character who displays narcissistic behaviors, and the impact of that behavior on the sons is apparent - even though each son responded to that behavior with different coping mechanisms. But because of the pejoratives associated with the term narcissism I felt like I was somehow judging my mother to be evil. And I can't imagine anyone wanting to feel that way. Another factor that contributed to the emotional dissonance is that I knew how insecure my mother was about a lot of things; she once confided to me that it took her years to talk to certain members of our church because of how well educated they were.

An article came to my attention where the author had done research with various patients exhibiting the diagnostic criteria of narcissism and concluded that there was a link between shame and narcissism. Shame deserves its own post (and I'm pretty sure I've touched on the concept already in a few posts), but for those of you unfamiliar with the concept, shame is a sense that there is something inherently wrong with one's self. This is different from guilt where one may feel that they have done something wrong. Guilt is from doing, shame is from simply being. The overall point was to consider the idea that narcissistic behavior is a symptom of shame.

Asian cultures typically rely on shaming messages as a means of prompting desired behavior, and as a result, the vast majority of those raised in an asian culture experience shame at a fairly deep level. It's not limited to parenting - it's common to use shame to motivate subordinates at work. A common result is that a shamed person often overachieves, motivated by the idea that one of their achievements might result in pleasing the authority figure in question. 

It makes a lot of sense to me that many who experience a deep sense of shame/inadequacy would resort to narcissistic behavior as a coping mechanism. This understanding should prove beneficial at at least two levels:

1) Those who exhibit narcissistic traits - understanding that there are not character flaws but rather a coping mechanism to deal with their pain might avoid a defensive response when identifying their behaviors;

2) Those who encounter people exhibiting these traits can perhaps sympathize or even empathize with the sense of shame/inadequacy instead of being angered by it;

It's been observed that narcissistic parents produce narcissistic children. This led to more emotional dissonance for me; if I had to accept that my mom was in some way narcissistic, then I also had to accept the idea that I was in some ways narcissistic as well - potentially adding to my sense of shame.

It's also been observed that you can't get a narcissist to accept any potential criticism - which makes it difficult to get people to recognize their behaviors for what they are. But once someone recognizes their shame, they can then more easily embrace the identification of coping behaviors. 

Hence, this understanding helps me on at least two levels. 

I confess that I'm somewhat surprised this never occurred to me before despite having read M. Scott Peck's People of the Lie decades ago. In this work, he has posited that it's an inability to recognize or accept displeasing things about themselves that result in people routinely lying about things. But the lies are not designed to fool others as much as they are designed to fool themselves. There's an irony in that the self-deceit associated with narcissistic behavior is a result of believing a LIE about one's own inadequacy.

This takes me back to a quote by C.S. Lewis:

“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”

This describes perfectly the plight of those seeking comfort by using narcissistic behavior as a coping mechanism for their shame, which a lie about their self-worth.

Connecting

I started this post in another blog five years ago with the next two paragraphs.

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I've come to expect/accept that I seem to operate at some different fundamental frequency than most folks. A lot of the stuff that seems to be what typical folks want to talk about are completely trivial to me.

Perhaps it's more accurate to say that the things that typically excite me don't have the same effect of most of the people I seem to encounter. I'm sure that how my brain works has a lot to do with it. But it's not just that. I just don't seem to care to do what I consider superficial, even though I acknowledge that there's value to that, and in some cases, necessary.

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And over the past five years, I've come to understand that indulging with others in what seems to be mundane details is a large part of how community is built. So it occurs to me that my sense of isolation is in many situations self-imposed when it comes to socializing. 

On the flip side, almost every student I've tutored at the center where I've worked for the past five years seem to acknowledge my presence by greeting me or at least making eye contact when they show up even if I'm not assigned to tutor them that day. I see that as a consequence of allowing them to share about things not necessarily associated with their homework, things that I imagine a typical adult might find to be trivial. And I follow up by asking them about these things the next time I see them. 

It occurs to me that the building of relationship is not about knowing the (mundane) details of another person's life, but rather more about the other person knowing that someone else knows what those details are. I elect to be interested in my students because it helps me build rapport to allow me to be more effective as a tutor. As a result my students listen to me because they know I am listening to them. And of course, my overgoal (hidden agenda) in feeding the homeless is building community. But I know that I can't possibly hear everyone else's stories, so I've striven to create the family dinner environment so that people living outside can form community amongst themselves.

Clearly the dynamics are different in typical social settings. As a tutor I'm being compensated financially (though to be honest, I derive no small level of satisfaction in knowing that I have connected in a way that seems meaningful for my students) whereas in social settings, people appreciate when I listen, but they seem to have little desire in reciprocating that interest, and I quickly got tired of it being a one way street.  I find this ironic as most of my interests involve activities that require a fair amount of collaboration to achieve best results: ensemble music groups, volleyball, social dancing, etc. But then everyone has their own set of reasons for pursuing any particular interest - and collaboration may not be included in any one person's set of reasons, but rather narcissism.  

The Good Doctor

 I don't watch much TV, but the quarantine resulting from the pandemic prompted me to start binging series that had received reviews that intrigued me. Most of the series have been developed by cable TV, but there are a couple of network series that I will continue to follow even when all requirements for quarantine have been lifted. 

One of the shows is the series "Blue Bloods" starring Tom Selleck, whose character is the patriarch (despite having a father he lives with) of a family clan who are active in various areas of law enforcement. One series review described how the show is distinguished by the interaction that goes on at the weekly family dinners. For most part, no subject is taboo, and all family members are required to answer honestly when a controversial question is posed. Despite the verbal skirmishes that occur, they're all still family first. This appeals to me as I now realize this is a goal of the weekly dinners I've been doing for over a decade; to get people to come, break bread together and experience the equivalent of a (relatively functional) family meal together. I now realize that this subtopic deserves its own post, and I need to move back to the originally intended topic of this post.

The other network show I've now adopted into my list of TV series that I follow is "The Good Doctor" which is actually an adaption of a South Korean TV show with the same name about a doctor who is a high functioning autistic with savant syndrome as well. Even though the main character's mix of autism and savant syndrome does not necessarily represent the range of behaviors and symptoms of high functioning autists, the depiction of the character has influenced how I interact with my autistic students and has helped me connect with them effectively; last month the center director told me relayed to me comments from the mother of one of my autistic students about he apparently talks about me all the time at home. That same student gave me Chick-Fil-A gift card for Xmas. In the interests of full disclosure, that same student began to initiate physical contact by reaching out and poking me and touching my arm, etc. and I had to set some boundaries about what constituted appropriate behavior and it seems like he's interpreted that as a rebuff of sorts, so I'm still learning and negotiating connecting appropriately and I clearly have a ways to go.

I'm also enjoying how the main character has explored his emotional side and his struggles putting rational expectations on emotional responses only to discover that those expectations turn out to be unrealistic, and despite his intellect, his major decisions are driven by emotional responses. I suspect that the mixed reviews of the series are a response from who rationalize their emotions, particularly those who want to impose their emotionally driven world views onto others (which seems to be a primary motivation for those in that media). Interestingly, I find myself in agreement with some reviews which suggest that the show is advancing the idea that autists have value only when they are savants which would be an injustice, even though these same reviewers would see no cognitive disconnect in using quality/value of life arguments to justify abortion. But I would be derelict if I didn't acknowledge how observing some of his struggles have helped me look back at some of my own struggles with a more appropriate perspective. 

I would also be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that some of the attraction for the show involves the number of asian characters that have been on the show (though many have been written out), and a asian male character who begins a 'friends with benefits' relationship with a caucasian co-worker. That ends when the male's desire for a romantic relationship is not reciprocated. In time, it's the caucasian female who realizes that she's also drawn to him romantically as well and the relationship resumes but at a romantic level. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised about the inclusion of this story line since Daniel Dae Kim is an executive producer who actually purchased the rights to the show.

There are more thoughts on this, but I've save those for another post. 

Empathy vs. Sympathy vs. Compassion

I've chosen to make working with the homeless an essential part of my life, and I imagine that people who know this make basic assumptions about me and my motivations, and people might use terms such as compassion, sympathy or empathy. And those terms would be apt, but those terms should not be used interchangeably. I will summarize/plagiarize the differences as they've been explained to me as follows:

Sympathy are the feelings one has in response to someone else's situation. And you see it commonly expressed as follows: "I'm sorry for your loss." The thing is that it's about one's own response and otherwise does little to alleviate another person's suffering..

Empathy is feeling what another person is feeling. And some people who are suffering can benefit more from empathy than sympathy, but it's been suggested that empathy can be taken too far such that it can lead to tribalism among those with shared experiences, which can involve "good" feelings such as joy. I confess that I might have reacted this way in how I appreciate certain interests. 

Compassion drives a desire to help people who are suffering in some way. Some would claim that compassion take sympathy/empathy up a notch, but I'm not yet convinced that this is so, perhaps because I've observed some who've perhaps only wanted to appear compassionate. But to be fair, compassion does seem to play a factor in avoiding the development of tribalism out of empathy. 

The overall point is that it's my take that anyone who seeks to help other people should be influenced by a combination of all three of these motives, and my life experiences have enabled me to do that when it comes to wanting to help the homeless..

Comfort III: Tutoring

At this point in my life I am, among other things, a tutor, and I find this extremely rewarding in ways I hadn't anticipated. Truth be told, I pursued this mainly because I had the expectation of leveraging my intelligence and ability to do well on standardized tests into a vocation where I could make good money tutoring aspiring college students from the comfort of my home and continue the type of lifestyle I sought when I pseudo-retired almost twenty years ago. 

Even though I was hired by a local tutoring firm for the purpose of doing ACT/SAT test prep, I wasn't assigned any students and it wasn't discovered until after some turnover in the office staff a few years later that someone in the office had marked my file as not being eligible to do test prep and as a consequence I had been assigned to work with younger students. Apparently, I did some good, recently a student I worked with four years ago (who I did not remember) requested me specifically when he returned for the purpose of test preparation, and again, truth be told, that was during my first year there and I was just going through the motions, thinking I was just putting in time until I could claim at least three years experience doing test prep and start making double to triple what I was making then. 

My perspective began to change when I was assigned to work with a ten year old who was mainly interested in playing Fortnite all day and believed he could eventually make a living monetizing videos he posted on Youtube because that was what his eighteen year old brother was doing (and still living at home) and he wouldn't even have to move out of the house. His approach to the center assignments was lackadaisical until I was able to determine that his goal was to complete assignments as quickly as possible to have tangible proof that he was making progress to appease his mother, who, according to the child, was subjecting him to f-bomb laced tirades about improving his studies. Once I learned this, I sat him down privately and told him that it was a hard way to live doing something just to please someone else, and that he needed to figure out a reason for himself to do good work. The next time he showed up at the learning center, he walked all around the center and told anyone who would listen to him about how wise I was. Apparently his schoolwork improved immediately, and he stopped coming to the center shortly after that. It was at that point I began to embrace the idea that I could be as much a mentor as a tutor.   

I confess that there have been sessions with students that seemed to drag on forever, though this happens only infrequently nowadays. This is due in large part to a change of perspective on my part, which came about as a consequence of being assigned to work with a number of high functioning autistic students. I'd found this to be rather tedious, even as I began to understand how to make my students feel comfortable and to help them be productive.  Then late last year the owner of the firm told me he'd just had a conversion with the mother of a particular autistic student who apparently talks about me all the time at home. This student also gave me a $20 gift card for Christmas. Until then, I had no clue I'd made that kind of connection. Ultimately, I've begun to understand that it's not just about abandoning the idea of minimizing conflict/inconvenience but it's also about instilling comfort into others - so they can go forward with strength. 

Ozark

is a cable series currently in its fourth and final season.. I discovered the series during the pandemic; I'd seen initial reviews for the series before the inception of the pandemic, and the premise of a financial planner in Chicago being prompted to move his family to the Ozarks to launder money for a Mexican drug cartel just didn't really appeal to me, but the reviews after a couple of seasons prompted me to give it a try, and I ended up binge watching seasons 1-3 and waiting for season four to come out.

There are few, if any, good guys in this series, although one might start out rooting for Justin Bateman's character as he's drawn in mainly because he had a corrupt partner and he's been trying to protect his family. And now that I've watched the first half of season four, which has gone at a breakneck pace, what I've found fascinating is the depiction of family dynamics and how each major character views the concept of familial love. And regardless of warped that view may be, the common motif is that family is important, yet being mistreated/betrayed by family violates the contract and empowers one to exercise their own individual agendas. I haven't assimilated fully my take on this, but I found it provocative enough to put this out there before I get sidetracked.

Maybe this has resonance as I've had to deal with abandonment issues. Then there's community world view that's part of my Chinese heritage where the family is everything.