Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

still philosophising endlessly, don’t mind me

Today’s subject is still anger. Anger provides temporary relief. Somebody hurting you? Don’t get sad, get mad! If you’re angry, you’re energetic and you can go do something like hate them or get revenge. It’s really easy to get mad. Just look only at somebody’s flaws, turn off empathy and assign them the worst possible motives. The more you love somebody, the easier this is, because you’ve got a lot of experience with the flaws of people you love. It’s rewarding and easy to turn love into hate. Everything is the other person’s fault. And you can burn with a justified and bitter rage.

This, however, is akin to visitting a loan shark. Lots of funds now, lots of debt later. Hate almost always hurts the hater more than the hatee (excluding acts of violence. silent hate is more self-destructive). Hate burns a hole in you. And hate doesn’t hurt the other person, usually. I mean, you can do things to hurt them, but they might fail to work and then, either way, you feel guilty or enraged or some other taxing emotion.
anger causes explosions. Get mad! Get wound up tighter than a spring! freak out at small provocations or for no reasons at all! yell at your cat! Mad! Mad! Mad! BOOM!!
Of course, maybe you do succeed in hurting the other person. then s/he gets mad too and extracts revenge in return! and then you extract revenge! and the s/he does! and then you! ohhh all this righteous rage is enough to burn down a house, or a temple . . . some people think their body is a temple. somepeople would gladly burn their bodies to the ground. Anger could be addictive, you need more and more to keep hurt at bay. And when you’re wound up so tight, how do you stop?
Man, I dunno. Take a deep breath. As Jean says, if you’re not breathing, you’re not doing your best thinking. Then think of something good about your nemesis. Everyone has something good about them. If this person was all bad, they wouldn’t have been able to attract your attention long enough to get you mad. This strategy may not work for elected officials, but it’s got to work for people you love. Yeah s/he’s got more flaws and misdeeds than you can shake a stick at. And her/his nose was always just a little bit pointy in an unasthetic way. And s/he did yell at you and say something maybe s/he regretted later. But abstractly, without hurt, there would be no hope. Concretely, there is something that made you love this person. And that something is still there. S/he still has a contagious laugh. there was that time s/he bought you ice cream when you were having a bad day. there’s all the love you shared and that still counts for something. Breathe. find love. find a stable platform. then figure out what to do. imho.

facing facts

well, christi has gone back to Paris, and we’re still seperated or broken up or whatever you call divorcing queers. thus meaning that i’m still single. thus meaning that there’s still time for a very short tumultuous affair. it would be an affair on a budget, as i have not done any school work and really need to spend time on that. i’m not sure that me just being here till (very very very early) sunday morning is even long enough to qualify for a tumultuous affair. maybe just a tumlutuous couple of evenings? no committment, lots of fun…..

i am not special

many young people are angry. many are militant. this is a cliche. the world is full of angry young women in their late teens and early to mid 20’s. then, in their late 20’s to early 30’s or so, most angry young women chill out a bit. people are like honey mead or some wines. they mellow with age. stuff happens to them. they learn to talk. they learn to have boundaries. they learn mostly by making mistakes. sometimes from a teacher-type figure or a book, but mostly through trial and error.
This stuff that’s going on in my life is a story told over and over. i was young and angry. now i’m less young and less angry. i was in a relationship. now i’m not. If I wrote something dramatic, like my heart felt like shards of broken glass cutting into me with every beat, you would all know what i meant. almost everyone gets their heart broken. almost everyone outlives their parents. almost everyone has a life filled with emotional ups and downs. almost everyone my age gets shaken up and re-examines things. we all live this story over and over. we all tell this story over and over. This is what the novel Generation X is all about. It’s what many many novels are about. it’s a story we never get tired of because it is universal. it is what happened to all of us, over and over again, but with different details, different faces, different names. what makes my story special to me is that i’m in it. what makes it special to you is that it reminds you of your own story.
We’re all in this together. We’re all looking for love, feeling pain, facing challenges, changing according to somewhat predictable patterns. because we’re all human. and we all hurt each other or goof up or fail to communicate or act our age. nobody in this world is perfect. what makes us human is our errors, our hurts, our foibles, our personal drama, which is really our shared experiences of life.
We can look at people around us and see that they’re all highly flawed. We’re all born with Original Sin, according to Catholic dogma, meaning we’re all doomed to fail sometimes. this makes us human. it is a cause for making connections instead of driving folks apart. how often is it that people appear more human and more likable because they’re not perfect? we all share flaws, we all feel pain, we all bleed and this teaches all of us compassion. this can teach us forgiveness. we hurt each other and otherwise fail all the time. most times, people don’t do this on purpose. all of us have done it. all of us have purposefully hurt each other. all of us have accidentally hurt each other. hopefully, more often the latter.
keeping a list of misdeeds of ourselves or anyone else would be exhausting. every person you’ll ever meet will have a million things wrong with them. they probably have more wrong than right. if you know them long enough, they’ll hurt you more than once and long enough again, they’ll hurt you on purpose. we’re all fucked up people and we’re all fucking up all the time. you. me. everybody.
diogenes walked around with a lantern, looking for an honest man and never found anyone. anyone now looking for someone perfect or someone that won’t hurt them is going to meet a similar fate. you can search yourself with a lantern and be similarly disappointed. but perfection is not actually desirable. what would you have in common with someone who had never hurt anyone or been hurt? no shared humanity. and perfectionism is even more undesirable. holding anyone, including yourself to overly high standards is just going to lead to more hurt and more heartbreak and a terrible feeling of aloneness.
this is why we must forgive. because our shared pain is an essential part of our existence. it binds us together while it pushes us apart. forgiveness is the final glue that holds us together. she who forgives is happier. the happiest people keep trying and trying again. they see faults and flaws and mistakes in themselves and everyone around them, but they look for the good. they look for what is beautiful and lovely. they look for what flaws have taught us, like compassion, forgiveness and hope. (perfection defies hope. it is a hopeless state, since it leaves nothing to aspiration.) the happiest people know that love and growth and mistakes and hurt and forgiveness and patience and compassion and compromise are not incompatible. they are essential. they exist in all relationships. if everyone of us is wrong and everyone of us is wronged, then we all desperately need values of compassion, forgiveness and compromise.
love is too important to be perfect. it is too human to never err. love is as fucked up as the rest of the emotional lives of people. love is the most important thing in our lives. to feel love is to look for the good amidst everything else. love is hope. love is forgiveness. love is compassion. in short, love is a product of hurt and errors. love is a second chance.

Asshat

today’s word is “asshat,” pronounced ass-hat. this is an insult. it can be used with great satisfaction

when i was a senior in highschool, i told the vice principal that if he didn’t let me take my gf to prom, that queer nation would have a sit-in in front of the school and that the front page editor of the santa cruz sentinel was anxious to cover it. I said, “and the ACLU told me I should sue you, but I don’t want to do that…” in a voice that suggested that all this activism was spinning out of my control and i could end up with a lawsuit in my name against my will. suddenly, it was decided that people could take “friends” to proms instead of merely dates, the compromise I had been suggesting all along. muahahahaha. He had said earlier that some of the students would later marry their dates and since gay marriage isn’t allowed…. blah blah blah and that’s falling down now too. (my response: um, what if we promise not to get married at prom?)
We live in happy times and the asshats are losing.

Origins of weird ideas

Self-esteem

When I was in 6th or 7th grade, my class had to sing that song that starts “I believe the children are our future” as part of some school production. I still know almost all the words to that song and will sing it to you if provoked. My mom, a devout Catholic who was somehwat uncomfortable with Vatican II, was also somewhat uncomfortable with that song. I was at a Catholic school. My mom thought we should not be singing that song, which has a line near the end, “learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all.” What sort of stuff were they teaching us? God’s love is the greatest love of all, she told me.

Some years later, I had gotten a free glossy magazine, prolly at gay pride, which had a page that said in large, colorful block letters, “love your body.” Being a teenager who pasted all sorts of stuff to the walls of my room, I cut that out and stuck it in the next available space. My mom scowled at it. Self-love was definitely suspect. Any corporal self-love was doubly suspect. It was always worse to be egotistical than to have low self-esteem. And really, my mom’s self-esteem was not high. She was terrified of going to hell her entire life. this is a cultural thing for Irish Catholics and maybe most catholics in the US. It’s how they’re taught to behave. And it’s incompatible with high self-esteem and it’s how I was raised.

I am not blaming my mom for my own low self-esteem. I’m grown up now. I can fix this. I just wanted to know where it came from.

Anger versus Hurt and Not Asking for Help

I told my parents that I thought I was queer when I was 14 years old. This was in 1990. They were the first people that I told. I wasn’t even totally sure at the time. this was a huge mistake. 1990 was before Ellen, it was before gay-straight alliances. Most adults weren’t even out then, at work or to their families. I mean, in big cities, yeah, but in the south bay, no. People thought that they didn’t know any gay people then. so much has changed in the last 14 years, it’s incredible.
But there I was, 14, a freshman at a catholic high school with no gay friends, role models or anything except for some books like One Teenage in Ten that I found in the Cupertino library. I was profoundly alone and confused and my parents said they would help me with whatever my problems were and they would understand and so I told them and it blew up.
My mom would call my friends parents and they would swap their litanies of complaints about their children. “Paul isn’t doing well in math.” “Sandy got detention for chewing gum in class.” “Celeste thinks she’s a lesbian.” My mom never told me what other parents said about their kids, because it wasn’t my buisiness. However, some other parents did not subscribe to the same philosophy. It got around my freshman class in high school four seperate times that I was queer. Kinds in my PE class were screaming at me in the locker room. they would sneak up behind me and hit the top of my head and then dissolve into a giggling group. This was not good. finally, I beat up one of them and that stopped, but the rest didn’t. there was nobody to complain to. My religion teacher told us that god blew up Soddom and Gommorah to get the fairies. I was really into the Catholic thing at the time. I played trumpet in mass every week. I thought that God hated me. I knew my peers hated me. And meanwhile, my mom had started a reform program to discourage me from being gay by giving me a hard time about it. she and my brother would sit around making homophobic comments whenever I was there. My brother was delighted. I had always done better in school than him and had been the “good” kid. finally, it was his turn to be the favored child.
I know now that my brother just wanted approval from mom and was finally getting it. And I know mom really loved me and thought that being queer would be a disaster for me and was tryign to stop it any way she could. But at the time, I felt outcast by peers, by religion and by my family. I contemplated suicide, as did most gay kids at that time. About a third of them would actually try. Chapters of PFLAG were starting to be formed to address this problem, but my folks didn’t want to join.
It was really really important to me that nobody could know they were hurting me. I didn’t want my parents or mean kids to know they were getting to me. I eventualy started reading Hothead Paisan:homicidal Lesbian Terrorist comics. The motto: “it’s better to be homicidal than sucidal.” I cultivated anger to protect myself. If I could just get really mad, I could do something. And I did. I was the first out person at my highschool. I actively came out, it wasn’t just rumors. I took my girlfriend to senior prom, after more than year of clashing with the administration in an argument that started a few months before junior prom. I think queer kids that went to that hischool after me had an easier time because of the battles I fought, mostly alone (although I had great band friends who kept talking to me despite major social stigma. They weren’t necessarily supportive, but they were there and that was a lot. and some were accepting). Four years or so after I graduated, a stranger approached me at dyke march and explained that she had been a freshman at that school while I was a senior.
And my mom finally came to terms with me being queer and really loved Christi. So it all worked out in the end. I had a much easier time than a lot of other queer kids. I never got gay bahsed. I had friends. A few people yelled “dyke” at me, but I ignored tham and they stopped and prolly feared detention anyway. African American kids had a much harder time at that school than I did. I found a strategy for dealing with stress that was the best I could do under the circumstances. And it was getting angry instead of sad. Hiding my feelings. And not asking for help.
I should have jettisonned this long before now, but really, my life wasn’t very stressful for the next several years. This strategy wasn’t working as well as other strategies would have, but it wasn’t really ever tested. Until my mom died. and now I’m getting rid of it.

For Marek

Bush Radio – uses the weekly Bush radio address from right before the State of the Union, which is when this was written. Due to peaking or something random, the recorded version of this sounds almost nothing like the “real” live version. There’s a lot more data-bendy static, basically, I think digital peaking, which you don’t hear when this is played live, but has screwed up the recording quite a bit. Although, I kind of like it this way.

Untitled thingee. Sounds like the real-life version. Written January 28th

taking an assesment of what’s important

I have a sound file of dubya speech where he says, twice, “in fact what the terrorists have done is caused us to take an assesment of what’s important.” I’m taking an assesment too.

I think I must have thought that the slogan “think gloaball, act locally” had an extra clause of “and indoctorinate your friends and family.” I tend to get involved in cult-y movements to improve the world, like veganism or Esperanto. things that would work if a critical mass of people started doing it. So I’d try to convinve other people around me of what a good idea it was, to help reach this critical mass.

Christi makes the most awesome Quiches and Dutch Baby pancakes. We used to have a dutch baby every weekend. She would get up and start making one. I would slice strawberries and roast coffee. Often our neighbors came over and shared with us. But I read Fast Food Nation and became more militant about my diet and quit eating eggs and milk. I was making a sacrifice for the good of the planet. But I was also sacrificing Christi’s amazing cooking skills. Does that really help the planet, or does that just alienate loved ones? How is the world in any shape a better place because I haven’t had one of christi’s great dutch babies in years?
I was getting more and more inflexible and more militant. Christi likes/d to make cookies. Her favorite cookie recipie calls for brown sugar. Brown sugar is the most processed food on earth. Some processes use animal products. I told her that she had to use the raw sugar stuff I was buying from the hippie grocery store. We had poor boundaries. We didn’t know how to talk things through. We argued. I won. How fucking important could brown sugar possibly be? Why on earth would I argue with her abut her great cookies? What was I thinking??
Then my mom got sick and died and I wanted to compartmentalize that. I would go see her five or six days a week and when I wasn’t seeing her, I was going to live a normal life. I was going to put the pain behind me and carry on. I was going to supress all negativity and look at other things and I was not going to ask for help or talk to anybody about it. this combination is somehwat explosive. All this stuff about moral purity in consumption seemed really important. but what good is moral purity if it chases off people you love?
In short, I’ve recently been shaken to the core. All the stuff that I thought mattered didn’t. All my “radical” ideas are for naught. They’re stupid. I bought brown sugar the other day to make cookies for Christi.
I know that Christi doesn’t want me back. The last few years have been hard. I might hurt her again. And maybe she thinks if she took me back, she’s have to throw away her brown sugar. but I think having boundaries means that (as long as it’s not hurting me), she can do whatever she wants.
We were poorly individuated. We got together when we were 18. We had virtually no boundaries. We grew together like two trees that have been planted too close. this is not healthy for the trees. It wasn’t healthy for us.
I look at these ideas that I had and wonder how I could have been so stupid. I know that I need to learn from them and go on. and part of learning from them means forgiving myself. why did i do it? youth. foolishness. a misguided desire to avoid pain. because i didn’t like myself. according to feeling good, dichotomous thinking (aka: binary oppositions) is a thought pattern that depressed people fall into. i wanted all-or-nothing moral purity because i was somewhat depressed and because i was mourning in a destructive way. and this is why i need to forgive myself, so i can like myself and stop acting like an angry, bitter, untreated depressed person.
So I’m telling myself that I like myself. I’m smart and funny and creative and cute and kind of charming. I’ve made terrible mistakes, but so have most people at some time in their lives. I’m doing my best.

My dad came over yesterday and i spent several hours crying on his shoulder. for some reason, it’s easier to cry with somebody else there than it is by myself. splitting with christi is the hardest thing that’s ever happened

Two weeks ago

I woke up to a grimly pleasant morning and got up thinking that despite major turmoil, I was still on an even keel, and thus was now, finally an adult. My shrink disabused me of this notion. I thought that to be grown up meant to supress despair and to never ask for help. I also thought that criticism was an acceptable part of normal discourse. Not to be overly dichotomously binary about things, but these ideas were wrong wrong wrong.

And the two weeks since have been a lot like being caught up in a tornado and getting wacked repeatedly with flying debris. Not a happy event at all, but an opportunity for growth, as my shrink might say. I’m going to be a happier, more stable person at the end of this, but getting there really sucks. I would really like just to drop down in Oz right now.

not standing alone

I wrote something a few days ago about standing alone against pain. what complete bullshit. nobody can do that. that’s why people have friends and shrinks and religion. i am not standing alone, thank god. i tried that once. it was a disaster. i don’t see the need to repeat that experience. stading alone is sort of masculinist. supporting communities is a “feminine” ideal. there’s a reason that women live longer than men.
if i can’t undo the past, at least i can learn from it.