I’m Going to Buy YOU!

I celebrated Easter by seeing both Basic Instinct and Basic Instinct 2 (plus Batman Begins, which I enjoyed). Basic Instinct 2 is way better than its predecessor. Sharon Stone looks really fantastic in it.

I tend to talk to myself out loud at home (as they say, it depends on whether you’re saying, “Hmm, where did I put my keys?” or “Kill! Kill! Kill!) but I decided to try not to do it anymore after I heard a woman at Rainbow saying to an apple, “I’m going to buy you!”

My mother has begged to differ with my account of her executing her mother’s will without legal assistance. She says that in fact there were three attorneys for various purposes, but she didn’t let them do any more than was absolutely necessary. I told her I hope she’s not planning to clutter up my blog with a lot of tiresome facts.

There are so many facts these days, and we have the Internet wherein to store them, so I try to reserve my own biological storage capacity exclusively for opinions. (This is why when I call tech support at work to get one of my multitudinous passwords reset and they ask me what group I work for, I have to say, “Dunno.”)

A while back I was grumbling about a coworker who made horrible eating sounds all day long. He’s gone on to bigger and better things, I hope, and I have a new coworker who is super-amiable and whose manners are way better, though it turns out he has the habit of snorting snot back into his head instead of using a Kleenex, and also sniffling, which are two different things. I finally asked him to be so good as to use a Kleenex, since he does it 100 times a day. He said, "Oh, thank you for telling me; I'll be sure to do that; I always want to improve." And then he kept doing it 100 times a day, albeit a bit more quietly.

(I don’t know why I keep saying Kleenex, besides the fact that I think someone sues you if you say kleenex. In fact, if you’re not going to use a cotton handkerchief that you then launder, the thing to use is Puffs with Lotion.)

Here’s what my mother had to say about my coworker (hmm, didn’t take me long to go from daring to mention my mother to out-and-out publishing her personal emails, did it?):

“I gave this snerfing snot problem some more thought, while sitting in my cracked green leather chair. I think the real problem is the noise it makes. If I can discreetly and quietly move snot down my esophagus, I need not fear that Officer Linda, the Snerf Patrolwoman, will humiliate me in public.

“If you think about it, you probably can not get postnasal drip back through the sinuses to the nostrils and into a Kleenex. The Kleenex is only useful if it can be formed into a long pipe cleaner to be corkscrewed into the tortuous passages. What do you think?

“You're going to telephone his mother? I love it! Mothers are to blame for everything!”

Someone else had also told me that he might not be able to blow it out the front of his nose and into a Kleenex. But I think if it's far enough into your nose to produce the snerfing noise, then it might be far enough forward to try blowing your nose. Or at least the blowing activity would keep the snot poised somewhere in the middle (neither in the Kleenex nor down in your lungs or wherever) and without the snerfing noise.

Can't we all just get along? How is it done? Is it my job to put up with the snerfing or his job not to snerf?

Where is the line between complete passiveness and militant action? In some form, this question has plagued me all my life.

Then there’s the classic relationship conundrum: There’s how you feel, how I feel about how you feel or how you expressed how you feel, how you feel about how I feel about how you feel (or how you expressed how you feel) …

I bumped into that this week, too. Someone didn’t like something I did and told me about it while I was smack in the middle of explaining how I didn’t like something someone else did (which I’ll get to in a subsequent entry). I hadn’t known she had a gripe until I was well into my gripe, so I was a bit startled. I like this person very much, but I confess there was a moment when I thought, “That bothered you? Lay off, man,” much as, perhaps, my coworker did the third time I mentioned his nasal exertions.

Thanks to Tara Brach, I was instantly and completely viscerally aware of how lousy it felt to be criticized, and I said that I had to get off the phone but that we should talk later. I went off and thought about the matter and realized that I felt OK about doing the thing that bothered my friend, and that I also cared that she felt as she did. (All right, if you must know, I mentioned the Buddha in a 12-step meeting for relatives and friends of alcoholics, otherwise, the next part of what I said wouldn’t have made sense. You’re not supposed to mention religion or your profession or other 12-step programs, but people do fairly often.)

We spoke several hours later and it was very effortless and full of good feeling and friendly expressions on both parts, so that came out fine, but it did leave me thinking about criticism and when to take offense and when not and if that kind of thing can even be decided. Probably not, so I guess it’s a matter of what to communicate and how and why.