Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Citrus Fruit Season Is Now Officially Over (Part 2 of Navel Gazing)

Last time I went all “GIANT POST WITH MUCH NAVEL GAZING,” I talked a bit about how I felt my humor and its unleashing on the world had to be tamed or mutated in some way. Not because there is anything inherently wrong with being funny, of course, but just that for me, I needed to get a handle on where it comes from.

Sadly, this post you are reading now might not make that much sense unless you read the other extravaganza. Shut up! I know! I desperately need an editor.

I’ve been thinking about this humor stuff for a while and here is the best I have come up with as to my motivations behind why I am the person I am. (The “how I got there” is only really interesting to me (and my therapist, I suppose, but only because I’m paying her and keep showing up at appointments, notwithstanding my wholehearted loathing about going)).

I wanted to be funny because that was the only way I knew how to get the love and acceptance I craved from people. It’s also quite handy in keeping all the feelings and issues I don’t want to address at bay. For me, humor is both a way to get people to like me, while at the same time keeping them at a distance. Trust me, it’s hard to be close to someone who doesn’t even accept the premise that “it’s time to be serious now.”

I shudder to make this a universal construct or anything, but I can only come up with three reasons why people are “funny” (in a “global” sense, where it pretty much consumes your personality, not just in the “have a good sense of humor” meaning of the word):


  1. To get people to like you

  2. To avoid confrontation and/or resist intimacy

  3. To be vengeful or exert power

In the realm of my personal neurotic solar system, only the first two really apply. I’m desperately afraid of letting the third come out and play (see reason #1). Though occasionally it does, but I’ve learned pretty well how to curb going into the neighborhood of #3. And when, in the event I do veer into that orbit, I always end up feeling pretty rotten afterward.

One thing I’ve gleaned from writing a blog for a while or posting on twitter (which is even worse in a way), is that blogging was and is a perfect medium for getting a decent amount of #1 and enough of #2 that I still felt comfortable. It feels a bit like “killing” during a stand up performance. I’ve done a teeny amount of stand up and the buzz from making people laugh is extraordinary. Comments, hitting the front page of favrd (it’s a twitter thing), traffic analysis through delving into apache log files, PageRank, landing on people’s blogrolls and complimentary emails are like crack hits to a psyche that craves acceptance, affection and admiration. People like me! They really like me! It feels amazing. How can I stop? Why on earth would I ever dream of stopping? How can I keep doing it? How can I get more? How can I turn everything in my life into a channel for the gaping maw of surface-bobbing love that is the scattershot of people who read this site or follow me on twitter?

To wit:

Wife: “Sometimes I feel like all our familial interactions are just fodder for your blog or twitter.” Me: “Don’t be ridiculous.” Me on August 18, 2008.

So what’s the big deal about that? Where is the harm in living your life on the surface and keeping everything light and airy and funny?

That’s the catch for me. After drifting my whole life on the superficial surface of intimacy, all forty-one years of it so far, my standard modus operandi has left me essentially empty inside. Not because the affection and attention isn’t real, deserved or appreciated, but because of the decades of strongly resisted intimacy that came along for the ride. Surfing on the veneer of life has left me seemingly vacant and in some ways unable to have “real” relationships with people. Yeah, I’m working on fixing that, I can assure you. Let me tell you, it’s quite the thing to “enjoy” the dawning realization and irony that you’ve lived your life in a such a way as to achieve the exact opposite of what you’ve been striving for all those years. Where is the “Cmd + Z/Undo” function for my life, please?

Though additionally I have to admit that the desire for positive feedback and notice (i.e., have my “stuff” read and be popular) and having that specific thing be so important; that ultimately also feels pretty needy and unattractive to me. “Here I am! Love me!” Plus, it’s never enough. I simply can not fill all my psychic holes with the affection of strangers I’ll likely never meet in person. That can only happen in the relationships in my immediate physical line of sight, I’m sure.

Anyway and again, I know this comes across as a classic case of a “First World Problem,” “take-it-to-LiveJournal, Emo Boy,” pity party-a-thon, but it’s hugely important to me (and my family by extension). I’m not going anywhere really; I’m not taking the site down with a huge emo flourish. My “voice” here on Ransom Note Typography isn’t changing, but I’m finding the “why” behind it is morphing a lot behind the scenes and hopefully the quality around here may improve (though I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you. *rim shot*). The net result will probably fewer posts each week, but I hope they will be better/funnier/less filled with inexplicable typos as my zeal to gain the contact high of immediate feedback abates. That’s now the goal, anyway.

Thanks for being a reader and letting me take a moment there and analyze and spill my guts about what the hell I’m doing.

Jon scribbled this mess on 10/28/08 at 03:35 PM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Fall Fashion Guide

Fall is here!

Yes, I know Fall “officially” started a little while ago, but I’ve been swamped, so back off, man.

First off, it was an exciting summer in Fashion here at Ransom Note Typography HQ. I bought two pairs of shorts. I wore them out in public. No one died after basking in the glow of my pasty white calves. It was glorious.

Second, I subscribe to a personalized “Fashion Do’s and Don’ts” newsletter. Every season I get an update on what I should and shouldn’t be wearing. Some tips are specific to me, but there’s a lot of good info in there! The least I could do is share with you.


See you in December when we talk about whether powder blue snow suits are IN or not!

Jon scribbled this mess on 10/21/08 at 03:42 PM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Thursday, October 02, 2008

I Don’t Even Know What to Say Here


Watch CBS Videos Online

Actually, what I would say is this.

In all her interviews thus far, Sarah Palin reminds me an unprepared High School student taking an essay exam, trying to fill a blank page with B.S. in the hope that will fly.

The contrast between the two V.P. candidates is striking.

Also, as I’m sure most of the Internet has pointed out already, she essentially reverses herself on Roe v. Wade by stating that she believes there is an inherent right to privacy in the Constitution. (There’s not.) (The privacy issue is the central tenet of Roe as I understand it. (I’m only married to a lawyer)).

That sound you just heard was Antonin Scalia falling over with a thud.

Yes, I will be watching the debate tonight. Though I’ll be cringing the whole time.

Jon scribbled this mess on 10/02/08 at 01:20 PM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

So Much Navel Gazing, I May Be A Citrus Fruit

Back in late July I twittered this little gem:

Therapist says I’m funny because of some deep and lingering psychological damage and a rapacious need to be loved. “Yay! I’m funny!”

I followed that up a week or so ago with:

@cleversimon then there are those of us who tell jokes to get people to like us while also keeping them emotionally distant. #therapy_baby!

So guess what I’ve been doing for a while?

Yeah, I started therapy about a year ago.

I’m not going to write about exactly why, but I will say this, I have hated almost every second I’ve gone. (Standing appointment every week, thanks very much; I take that unending, unswerving frequency to mean that I’m chuck full of screwy, though I’ve missed a few appointments here and there.)

Seriously. Hated. It.

I hate going. I hate the reasons why I have to go. I hate how long it takes to get to her office. I hate her stupid People and Fish & Stream magazines in the waiting room. I hate cracking open my brain every single time. I hate how I feel while I’m there in a session, pouring out all my emotional blather and letting it spill onto her ugly industrial carpeted floor. I hate writing the check out at the end of the hour and handing it over. I hate replaying back everything I said on the drive back to work. I hate thinking about all stuff I dashed out in the time between appointments.

Which is not to say that it hasn’t been enormously helpful to me.

Seriously.

I just might have figured out a whole lot about why I am the way I am and all kinds of other stuff. If therapy were an Ebay auction, I’d give it feedback of “A+++++++ Highly recommended! Would divulge deepest emotional drivel again!” I’m a big fan of therapy, though frankly, I’d rather be telling other people to go, rather than being there myself. Every. Blesséd. Week.

Again, I’m not going to delve into the depths about why I decided to start going to therapy or any of the reasons for my emotional blather, but I do want to tell a story and then ramble on for a while longer about what it all means.

Last week we left the kids with my Mom who recently moved here to Salt Lake and we went to Colorado Springs, CO. Reha had a week long conference that kept her busy during the days, but we got to play at night. And by play, I mean that we got treated to enormously expensive (and tasty) dinners in the company of her office colleagues, bosses and other important people.

At the end of one of those dinners, after an evening of pleasant conversation and very good food, and me generally on my best behavior, the server began taking dessert orders. He started at the opposite end from me. Everyone, the bosses and the bosses’ spouses said they were stuffed. People hemmed and hawed and ordered “a small scoop of ice cream,” a dessert with “two spoons please, we’ll share” or no dessert at all, “I’m so full, thanks!” The waiter came to me, and by this time the full table of twelve had gotten inexplicably quiet and essentially everyone was staring at me.

I looked the server straight in the eye, cleared my throat and ostensibly loud enough to be heard all the way at the other end of the table full of somewhat stuffy and stilted lawyer types said, “I’ll have the largest creme brulée in the restaurant, please. I’d like an entire vat of creme brulée brought here to me as soon as humanly possible. You can just bring it out in a trough, I don’t even need a spoon. Thanks.”

Did everyone at the table laugh?

Yeah. It killed.

But.

Here is the thing that bothers me.

I had almost no control over whether I popped off like that. To call it a compulsion wouldn’t be going too far. Though I didn’t look around the table, I somehow divined that all attention at the table was on me. I also realized in the instant the server came to me that no one had really ordered a “real” dessert. My brain just put it all together and blew out with a relatively funny quip. I’m not sure I could have just ordered dessert like a “normal” person.

Really.

I had to make my dessert order funny in some way.

On the one hand, “yay, me! I’m somewhat quick witted” and made everyone laugh. But on the other hand, sweet cracked caramelized sugar over custard, do I find the whole thing fundamentally disturbing.

I’ve always known that I use humor as both a disarming tactic to get people to like/love me and as a wall to protect and shield myself. A part of therapy for me has been realizing how just how high those bulwarks have grown over time and coming to grips with the fact that my entire being is built on this defensive shell, fashioned primarily out of humor shaped bricks and mortared with an urgent longing. I don’t even know exactly what I’m protecting myself from, though I’m pretty sure it has to do with (pardon me while I whip out my “therapy-speak” translation manual), “being emotionally connected with other people.” My inner core of emotions is so barricaded that I only know how to protect them, never long trot them out to peek at the rest of the world. I rarely allow myself to feel emotions, even ostensibly good emotions.

I talked to Reha about it later in the hotel room and how mortified I was.

“Well, I’m not sure I would have ever said that in front of my bosses and co-workers and their wives, but it wasn’t that bad. Everyone laughed. I might have preferred that you not do stand up comedy in front of those specific people, but it wasn’t too awkward or horrible.” [ed. note: like my public “performances” can be sometimes. (OK, oftentimes.)]

“Right, of course not. You are normal. That’s a part of my point. It wouldn’t have occurred to you to start riffing, but I’m freaking out over this realization that I don’t think I could stop myself.”

Though this is a way over the top metaphor, right now I feel a bit like I’m Abraham strapping his only and much loved son Isaac on the altar. In my somewhat sacrilegious parable, my humor has to be sacrificed in order to show lasting fidelity to emotional health. A giggling Isaac gets sliced open.

Oy vey! Drama much, Jon? Is this not the very definition of a “First World,” self-absorbed blogger type kerfluffle?

Well, yeah. Except that this is a big giant deal to me. Seriously, that’s how it feels to me. I’ve spent my entire life building this “funny” persona (for some decent reasons, I might add, though again, not dipping into those reasons now), but in order to be, I don’t know, a real person, I have to stab that humorous persona dead on the altar. This thing that happens where I only know really how to be funny and quippy has been a wonderful and warm and comfortable cloak to wear out in the world, such that I don’t even know how to put on different clothes or even if I own other jackets stored away deep in a box, hidden away and buried under layers of fortifications, but that cloak has ceased to make me happy.

Plus, the cloak is pure wool and it’s incredibly itchy.

See what I mean? This may be impossible for me.

I’m breaking this fit of highly personal emotional histrionics into two (or three, heaven help me) posts. More later. Though if I keep this up, I’ll have to re-direct Ransom Note Typography over to an emo-friendly LiveJournal account. *rim shot*

Anyway. Conclusion coming.

Jon scribbled this mess on 10/01/08 at 01:14 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

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