I knew I should have taken a pill before I left, but I always lie to myself and think the headache will go away.

It did not go away. I was sitting in an overly air conditioned room, not able to get lunch and the headache was bigger than my head. I longed for that pill I hadn’t taken. Then I realized there was a pharmacy located only a short elevator ride away.

OF COURSE! Grab my wallet and relief would soon be mine.

No line, thank heaven, so I stare through the fog of pain at the legion of pain pill choices. I finally make my selection and turn to find a line of three people.

WHY?! Three people and it’s not moving. I want to get relief. I have a geologic age to contemplate the unfairness as I stand in my same place in the line.

The helpless outrage bubbles up to realization: I don’t have to wait.

I can step outside the social contract; I can open this bottle while standing here. My civilization-trained soul rises up in alarm.

Open it? Without PAYING for it? It’s not done.

Well, I have my credit card. I will pay for it as soon as my turn comes, but the pill with start its work immediately.

What if the credit card machine is broken?

I have cash. DONE. I pierced the safety seal and swallowed my gel cap. Was it psychosomatic? I don’t know, but my pain lessened immediately.

And I Felt So Empowered. I was in control of my destiny! I didn’t have to follow these rules. I wasn’t stealing, but I made it work for me.

It made me think about the purpose of money. And how money works. What if I needed that medicine and I didn’t have money? What would I have done? I’d have to barter something…I had a chapstick in my purse. But a used chapstick is not equivalent to a bottle of Aleve. I’d have to throw in something else. A pen? My cell phone? No, that’s too much.

Money makes this so much easier. What else could I have done? Mop the floor? But then I’d probably have to mop it before they would give me the pills. And I could live with a headache, but when it came to something like water or food, that would be a very difficult situation

This “extreme” situation is on my mind for two reasons. First, I’m reading a book about the depression. During the 1930s, the Brain Trust of the feds did some magic tricks that resulted is physical money not being available. At that time, money was mostly the sort that you could touch. The fanciest it got was a bank check, pretty much. So, if the factory boss comes up to the end of the month and has no dollar bills to give his employees their pay, what is he supposed to do?

This happened.

The Second reason I am thinking about this is because we are in the middle of a banking AND international currency crisis. The Euro dollar is very close to cracking right now.

But that leads me to ponder the great benefit we are given by having a reliable system for value exchange…AkA Money.

If the money system broke down, everything would grind to a halt. I mean, we have stuff to barter, but figuring out the exchange would take forever. We would spend hours just trying to figure out how many beans are worth how many grains of rice. And by the time we struck a deal, the kids would be crying because they wanted dinner.

If money didn’t exist, even for a day, we would have to invent it again.

We built the tower of Babel with our world economy and currencies. We should keep it health and appreciate what it does for us.

Now that it’s kind of over. But history is never over, is it?

Okay, so there is the Communist Manifesto, and it’s really short.

But the Communist manifesto was not an original idea. Marx wrote down one version of what a lot of people were thinking. And even when he wrote it down, there were a lot of competing ideas.

The way those competing ideas became real to me was when I read Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell. That story is very hard to follow, but the whole communist etc. revolution is hard to follow. Orwell goes to the Spanish Civil war, and he gets to be our avatar, interested passionate and confused.

We can read it and start to see…oh…this was NOT a monolithic consensus. AND he also talks about how Moscow had appointed itself the mothership, and that has implications for later.

So, then I think a look back, a look at how things worked themselves out to the monolith of COMMUNISM that Moscow became, is in order.

Doctor Zhivago

That is an amazing love story, but look past that. Look at the power struggles, and the people in the ideas and allegiances. Lenin, Bolsheviks, anarchists, and and and and and…

there were so many ways that it could have gone. But it went one way. It went the way of tragedy and persecution and death.

not to mention the many lives and loves that were affected. Which is why Doctor Zhivago (Zhivago means “Living being” loosely) is a masterpiece of a holistic story.

But more. There is more. The powers came into being.

Milan Kundera wrote The Unbearable Lightness of Being he talked about what it was like to be under the communist thumb.  So many of the types of people who are attracted to communism–thinkers and arty types–are the very ones who suffer from the totalitarians of Communism for the very things that initially attracted them to the ideology. A lethal homeopathy…

And then. Because communism didn’t only happen in Europe.

Grass Soup

But don’t read that last one until you are well grounded in your mental health.

This is a super sloppy blogpost. I wanted to be organized and profound, but I didn’t have the mental space to do that this week. It’s been a very busy week. On the other hand, I’ve been thinking about this topic for several weeks, and I should just get it out there, warts and all.

Been thinking about emotions. Those pesky things which you are supposed to keep to yourself except for special circumstances, and with certain people. Certainly emotions are unacceptable at work.

The rule of thumb is women are supposed to be all emotional and men are all logical.

I work mostly around men. I often have to spend days, strings of consecutive days, managing teams of men to get work done.

Once, I had a job site with only one person- A WOMAN. The difference was staggering. Here’s what I mean:

This woman came in, she had the spec sheet, and she had relevant questions. We talked about the work to be done, the troubles we were having about the work, and after we reached a resting point, we talked about ourselves. We talked about how we had been doing this work for a certain number of years and compared notes.

I loved that day.

When I work with a team of men, it is very different. The talk gets way more personal. We talk a lot about how each of us feels. I have heard the most amazing stories from people. I had a whole crew discuss their family problems, who had step children, and how to re-connect with an estranged daughter.

The rule makes no sense, in my experience; men are WAY more free to talk about their emotions on the job.

And this is up and down the career ladder. I work with construction workers and Chief executives both. I can be in a room with either of those men for hours at a time, making conversation. It has amazed me for the longest time that this rule is so very very false.

There is one other factor maybe that I hadn’t considered.  It is possible that I am acting as a catalyst. The fact that I am present might be the thing that makes these dudes go all open-hearted. Maybe it’s nothing but sports talk when I’m not in the room.

One of my favorite college professors told me I am like a coffee bean in hot water; I change the room I’m in. She ought to know; she’d taught classes with me in them and with me NOT in them.

So maybe my experience of men as far more emotional than women has to do with me rather than the world in general.

The few times I’ve worked with females exclusives on a job, it’s been a very different experience. That cataclysm doesn’t happen. We just do the work.

I don’t mind the extra personal talk with the men. I am interested in them as people and it passes the time. Some days can be very long.

I am SURE that in some cases, these guys are not aware of the emotional content of their communication.  Especially when it’s hostile, they are not aware that they are acting out of emotional aversion. This cool website put some good words around this experience:

 

the average person isn’t consciously aware of the emotion; however, the sensitive person is. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean the sensitive person will know why the emotion is there, but he will feel something. On the other hand, just because the average person isn’t aware of the emotion doesn’t. It will appear as a rationale for thinking, doing or saying something and tell us much about his emotional state and personality. This holds true regardless of whether he’s aware of this.

…sensitive people often have many emotions, especially intense ones, flowing through them, it can be intimidating or, at minimum, frustrating to work with them. It’s intimidating because they are likely aware of something that we aren’t.

I have that experience all the time. I can watch how someone will be thinking they are rational when they have red emotional paint all over their face in their reaction to me.

It is so disorienting. Maybe that’s how all catalysts feel.

Yeah, I dunno. I just can’t quite get it going for my every day. I HAD all kinda of get up and go…but it didn’t come to anythng and now..

well. Now even the things under my control seem not worth the effort. I’m not flatlined…been there…been where I am so wiped out that i have to drag myself by my lips to keep moving.

Now…i’m moving. i’m doing this and that. But I am not feeling like I mean much of it.

I could tell myself that I’m resting on the confidence that I can handle what comes.

that sounds good. And that’s partly true.

But I *like* getting things done. And I’m mostly not getting things done right now.

My projects (other than this awesome long term BOOK project) are stagnant. Or a very slow trickle. and I just can’t seem to care right now.

I wonder.

My motor shifted sometime last year.

I used to always be revving, gotta go do THAT gotta do the NEXT THING

Oh no! Gotta go do it!

But I sorta realized, hey, I could still get it done without the freak-out. Yeah, I need to go get that part. I’m getting that part. How about I relax? Maybe that part isn’t the right part. Well, I have to trust myself that I’ll recognize that and then go find the right answer.

It is a different way of being…the Calm-the-hell-down way of being.

I’m not entirely comfortable with it.

But it has a lot of advantages

had a tiring day. But not a bad one. Now we are doing the parenting dance.

“Let me talk to her…”

sure, fine. You shall succeed where I could not.

eh.

So today I’m thinking about scorpions. They turn on you

and they are kind of everywhere.

Jesus had a lot of scorpions. Judas was a big one, and he offed himself. So. JEsus didn’t have to forgive him.

Peter betrayed him too. THe cock crowed after he’d denied christ three times. But Jesus forgave him.

Two different levels of betrayal. One was not forgiven.

But the other guy was more than forgiven.

So. What does this tell me about how to deal with scorpions?

Not sure yet. Thinking about it

Someone has been blogging through the alphabet.

It’s a new blog. Should I be condescending?

I mean, okay, my first impulse is to be condesdencing. That says a lot more that’s negative about me than anything really.

I”ve had a  blog fora  long time. But I dont’ post every day. I do post every week.

But, not every day. Maybe a prompt to get me to post daily would be warranted.

the alphabet…I dont’ know.

My problem right now is that my blogpost ideas are longer than I have time to complete.

I have to MAKE myself make time.

Seems that the world is dissapointing me again. Why aren’t we all better than we are?

I am not making the progress that I wish I were on pretty much any front. And it looks, from a survey of what’s around me, that the tower of babel never ended, and we are still all bumping into one another getting nothing done.

but…wait…if every body is having trouble..and if it is so freaking impossible to make any progress at any time…well, maybe the little scratches I’ve made are noteworthy after all.

hmm…I shall have to try thinking of it that way