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Just Imagine

Dusty Leave a comment

I want you to do something for me.

Imagine you were born with only one arm.

Doesn’t matter which one, left or right; for simplicity’s sake, imagine you have your dominant arm, whichever hand you write with. That one is still there, exactly as it is right now, and has always been there. But the other one — in my case, my left arm — was never there. You didn’t lose it in an accident, or to cancer or anything like that; you were just born without it. No stump, just a perfectly smooth shoulder.

Imagine that for a second.

Now, if you were born that way, with only one arm, it wouldn’t be that big a deal. Really: there are some things that would be difficult to do, because they require two hands working simultaneously; it would be a bit harder to drive, for instance (though you certainly could do it), and there are a lot of musical instruments you just couldn’t play, like guitar and piano (But if Rick Allen of Def Leppard is any example, you can play drums with one arm all the way to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame); and sports would be challenging, especially baseball and basketball and hockey. You could play football, if that were your preference, though not all the positions; and soccer, of course, it wouldn’t even be a disadvantage, really. Other than that? You couldn’t play pattycake, and jumprope would be tough (unless you jumped double-dutch), but you could play tag, or hide-and-seek; and you could play with dolls and Legos. Some video games would be impossible or close to it: but you could play Wii, and handle most driving games; and of course with any strategy or puzzle based games, your one-armedness would mean nothing at all. Most parts of life, in fact, having one arm would mean nothing at all: you could still read and write and do math and science, you could use a computer or a smartphone, you could ride a bike, you could dance in the rain. You could date and fall in love (There might be some people who would reject you for only having one arm, but come on, how ridiculous and messed up is that?), you could marry and have children. You could be a lawyer, a doctor, a car salesperson, a carpenter, a sculptor, a farmer, an engineer, a rocket scientist, a dogwalker. You could live a full and healthy and rich life.

It would be difficult to find clothes that fit you well. People would probably stare. Little kids would make jokes, and tease you. For a lot of people, it would be the first thing they would ask you: it would be a thing that defined your identity, even though to you, it would mean next to nothing. You never had the arm. You don’t miss it. You may sometimes wish you had two arms so you could throw a flowerpot on a pottery wheel, or shoot a longbow; but it would be more comfortable for you to sleep on that side, because you’d never have to figure out where the hell to put your arm so your hand didn’t fall asleep. Mostly, it just wouldn’t matter.

Can you picture that? Try going through your day, in your mind, with only one arm. Some things might be a little tougher — mostly it would just take more time — but really, not that big a deal.

Okay: now imagine, having lived your life with only one arm, you came home today, took a lil nap because it’s Monday and we all deserve a lil nap on Monday; and when you woke up — you had two arms.

Picture that. Not how wonderful it would be to suddenly be able to juggle three chainsaws: but how incredibly brain-meltingly shocking and horrifying it would be to suddenly have a whole other limb where one hadn’t been before. Step out of this whole thought experiment for a second and imagine how it would feel to wake up from your lil nap to find you have three arms, one new one growing out of the middle of your chest. Would you think “Hell yeah, now I can juggle FOUR chainsaws!” or would you think “AAAAAAAAHHHH WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT THING GROWING OUT OF MY CHEST JESUS CHRIST GET IT OFF GET IT OFF!!!!”

I know what I would think. And so I know, for the person who had one arm their whole life, suddenly getting that second arm would be absolutely appalling. Your body would suddenly be different. Your balance would be off. All of your clothes, bought and maybe adjusted or even tailored to fit your one-armed self, would suddenly be different. Everyone who ever knew you would talk about nothing else, pretty much forever, especially if you didn’t have an easy explanation for what happened. If you have any fundamentalist Christian friends, they might decide it was a miracle, a gift of God, and they might try to make an example out of you; conversely, they might think it was the work of the Devil, and shun you, or try to exorcise the demon in your new arm.

Your whole idea of yourself would change. You wouldn’t recognize your body in the mirror. Imagine how weird it would be to keep seeing a hand, fingers moving and gesturing, in the wrong place, attached to the wrong side of your body. Everything you had ever thought, ever said, ever come to a difficult recognition of, about what it is like to be a one-armed person in a generally two-armed world — all of that would go out the window. You’d have to be — normal. But at the same time, not at all yourself. Everybody would think you were normal now, and they would probably congratulate you, and be super happy for you: but the whole time, you would, most likely, feel wrong. Just wrong. Not yourself. Not at home and not comfortable in your own body. You wouldn’t know how to sleep, because you’d have spent your whole life sleeping on the side where there was no arm, and being perfectly, totally comfortable that way: now there’s a fucking arm there, and the whole thing is different. Is wrong.

So here’s the question. If you felt that way, if you felt uncomfortable and strange and weird, all the time, would you grow to hate your new arm? You might. I might. I might not: I might adapt, might adjust; but I might not adapt, either. I might resent my new arm. I might miss being one-armed. And if there were people around me, if I had joined a group of one-armed people, say, and I had to see them sleeping comfortably with their single arms, I might really hate what had happened to me: and I might even grow to hate myself.

If that happened — and I know we’re getting pretty out there, but hold on, we’re close to the end — what if I came to a decision, and went to a doctor, and told that doctor to remove my left arm? To give me back my self-image the way I thought it should be, to make me into the person I knew I really was, no matter how I might look to others who thought I should be happy to have two arms like they do?

Would that be wrong of me to do? Would it be insane, to remove a healthy limb? Would it be butchery, for the doctor to agree?

What if I had really descended into depression and self-loathing? What if I were suicidal, because I had too many limbs, and I couldn’t stand it any more? Then would it be wrong of me to ask, and would it be wrong of the doctor to remove my unwanted body part?

I think it would not. I think it would be my choice, and I think there is nothing at all wrong with being one-armed. I think if someone chooses to be one-armed, then they have every right to make that decision, and to be that person if that’s what they want — particularly if being that person would help them to live a happy life, to have a good self-image and self-esteem, and to keep from harming themselves.

And that’s why I support trans rights.

Now: this may seem offensive. And if this were the actual analogy I were making, it would be; because there actually is a disadvantage in only having one arm, and there is literally no disadvantage, at all, in being transgender, other than how people treat transgender people. There is nothing “wrong” or “missing” in a transgender person, at all. But this is not the analogy I’m making: this is just the warm-up, just the practice round. (Okay, I’m kind of making this analogy: because there are a number of parallels. But it is an imperfect analogy. And it is not the main one I want to make.) Now it’s time to move to the actual topic of conversation here.

You see, there’s a trend I’ve seen in arguing with conservatives (And with assholes, let me point out, because I do my arguing these days on Twitter, which is now like the black hole of assholes [WON’T… MAKE… THAT… JOKE… WORSE… THAN… IT… ALREADY… IS!], pulling them all in until they have more mass than anything else in the solar system), and it has to do with the issue of transgender people getting gender-affirming health care, in two specific areas: one, young trans people getting puberty blockers and then hormone therapy during their adolescence, before they complete puberty; and two, trans people of any age getting surgery.

The trend is this: these folks, both the “compassionate” conservatives (And some of them probably are genuinely compassionate, but not a one of them tries to understand or empathize with what trans people experience, so their compassion is more performative than genuine) and the transphobic assholes, say that they don’t mind people being trans or living how they want: but they don’t agree with people changing their bodies to match their gender identity. They do what conservatives, and compassionate people, and assholes the world over have always done, which is claim to have the right to decide what other people should do, in this case because they are arguing only for young trans people: for children, they will tell you, children who are not mature enough to make decisions about themselves or their lives or their identities.

“What about a young person making decisions in collaboration with their parents, and with loving and competent medical care providers?” I ask these people, over and over again. I get either a simple refusal to accept anyone making a decision these people disagree with — or silence. It speaks volumes, either way. It shows that they are lying when they claim only to be watching out for children, only protecting those too young to protect themselves.

And at some point, I realized why.

They object to surgery, most specifically and frequently, because, they say, nobody should “cut off healthy body parts.” That’s crazy, they say. And for them, maybe it would be — though I would disagree with calling it “crazy,” because our bodies do not define us, we define our bodies: starting with tattoos and piercings and circumcision (Not that I’m getting into THAT conversation, because while I will fight all day with transphobes, intactivists scare the bejeebers out of me) and all kinds of voluntary surgery like cosmetic surgery and permanent birth control like vasectomies and tubal ligations; so honestly, if somebody decided their life would be better with only one foot, then I say mazel tov: go for it. Save all that money on shoes; now every sale is BOGO (though you’d need a friend who only had the other foot, in the same size. [Business idea: ShoeMates, for people who only need one shoe, to share with another person who only needs the other shoe. Call the Tinder people. Whole new meaning for swiping “left” or “right.”]). Make all kinds of jokes about “The shoe’s on the other foot now!” or waiting forever for the other shoe to drop. Joke — or lament — about how you will never again have to do the Hokey Pokey. But okay, let’s say that to someone who likes having two feet, removing a healthy foot would be crazy. Or to stop stigmatizing mental health, let’s just say it would be something they would never, ever do. To them, it would make no sense, and they’d never, ever do it. Just like most of us would never voluntarily choose to remove an arm, particularly not one that we’ve had our whole lives, particularly not a healthy one.

But what they are not considering is how one’s body feels if one is trans.

DISCLAIMER: I am not trans. I have never been trans, and I do not for one second think that I can speak for trans people or try to explain how they feel or how they experience the world or their bodies. I, unlike the conservatives and assholes I’ve been arguing with, would much rather leave ALL people, trans, cis, and everyone else, to make up their own damn minds about who they are and how they feel, and what their bodies should look like, with absolutely no unsolicited input from me at all, ever. But what I want to do, what I think I can do, is try to get some of the people who actually can be compassionate to understand what is wrong with this argument that I’ve been facing. This argument that it is wrong for someone to remove a “healthy” body part just because of how it makes them feel, particularly when they are young (though again, conservatives are not actually protecting young people, as can clearly be shown BECAUSE TRANS PEOPLE ARE AT PARTICULAR RISK OF SUICIDE AND SELF-HARM AND GENDER-AFFIRMING CARE IS PROVEN TO HELP WITH BOTH ISSUES AND IS THEREFORE THE BEST WAY TO PROTECT CHILDREN BUT I GUESS I FUCKING DIGRESS), and therefore, gender-affirming health care should be banned for those under 18 (or under 21, when the mask starts to slip and they reveal that it isn’t about children, it’s about control), particularly hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and surgery.

“Butchery.” They keep fucking calling it “butchery.” They insist on it. As if we weren’t talking about medical procedures carried out by fully trained and licensed physicians in a modern hospital with all the proper precautions and care and science around it.

It’s because they’re not trying to understand how the trans person feels, what made them decide to pursue hormone therapy or puberty blockers or surgery.

The people arguing against GAHC (Gender Affirming Health Care, and yes I hate the acronym, but it’s a pain to type out over and over and I don’t want to change the name from what it actually is because words matter and my opponents intentionally use the wrong terms) are thinking about what it would be like if they went to the doctor and removed their body parts. Their healthy body parts. Their wanted body parts.

That’s not it.

Here’s the real thought experiment. Ready?

So instead of picturing yourself with one arm, and then suddenly waking up with two, picture yourself as you are now: and then you take your lil Monday nap — and you wake up with the wrong genitalia.

If you are a woman, imagine waking up with no breasts. Not that they have been removed, which would be traumatic enough: they’re just not there. Flat chest, completely. And imagine in between your legs, you suddenly have a penis and testicles. If you are a man, imagine waking up without your penis and testicles. And you have breasts. And — forgive me for this, but it helps make the point — they’re big. That penis and testicles, those breasts, they’re HUGE. Just slapping around, there. Every time you move — and when you move, it’s awkward, because you never had them before so you do it wrong, and it hurts more than a little — they shift, they flop, they smack into something else, into your legs or arms, into your belly, into everything. They are there, and they are unavoidable.

And they are WRONG.

Joking aside: can you picture that? Can you imagine how awful it would be to wake up with the wrong body parts in the wrong places?

Now imagine you go running out and go to your loved ones, and say “WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING TO ME!?!?”

And imagine if they acted like it was normal. And like you were strange for thinking those body parts were wrong. Maybe they would even be offended.

If I woke up with different body parts, with large lumps where before there had been no large lumps, I would immediately think it was cancer. Or like some kind of horrible infestation or infection, like the aliens had laid eggs in me. It would terrify me. It would be awful.

But to everybody else who wasn’t me, those lumps would be — healthy. Normal. Not only normal, but positive, important, defining.

Think back to when you went through puberty. When your body started changing. Did you have someone — a loved one, or maybe, like me, one of those terrible cheesy sex ed movies from the 70s — tell you that you were perfectly normal? That your body was supposed to change, that it was supposed to look like that? That you were becoming a man, or a woman?

What if you were becoming the wrong one?

Can you imagine how that would feel?

If I had woken up as a young woman, with breasts, with feminine hips (And imagine if I burst into tears, and immediately thought that I was crying like a little girl), my mother would have been ecstatic. I said before, she always wanted a daughter: it would be affirming for her if I had been her little girl. She could have taught me everything she knows about being a woman, as she understands it — and my mom knows a lot. She cooks. She knits. She sews. She is a nurse. She worked for decades with post-partum mothers and children with complications, so she can handle ANYTHING to do with babies. And my mom is a very feminine woman, in the classic stereotypical sense: she sings, she dances, she wears bright colors and pretty dresses. She would have LOVED to take me under her wing and show me how to dress and how to act with my feminine body. How to sing with my high feminine voice. How to live with my menstruation, and what it all meant for my future as a mother.

But if I was me — and in my mind I have always been male — all of that would be horrifying. Particularly because I would know that refusing to be the girl my mom wanted me to be would break her heart. But I’ll tell you right now: even apart from the horror of finding my body was not the body I wanted or expected it to be, the very thought of pregnancy and childbirth is the most horrifying thing I can imagine. It has always given me the heebie-jeebies in a way and to an extent that I can’t explain. I’m terrified of all of it.

And if I were, in my mother’s eyes, a girl, and she started talking about how lucky I was that I would get to look pretty in dresses, and eventually get married to a man (Ew) and have babies?

Aw, HELL no.

This is not how it feels to be trans. Puberty does not happen overnight, and doesn’t change a familiar, known, comfortable body into an entirely different body. But puberty does feel sudden, because you don’t notice the changes until you do: and then suddenly it feels like everything has changed. And for someone who is trans, that change might feel — wrong. And every day it continues unchecked, it gets worse: it gets wronger. But if you go to someone for comfort, for understanding, they will most likely not sympathize with your feeling: they will most likely tell you that your feelings are wrong, that your understanding of yourself is wrong, that your body is right, and you should just try to accept it. They might even get offended: and insist that the body, and the identity that they associate with it, is a good thing, a thing you should be happy about and proud of.

Picture that: you, as a man, wake up with breasts, and your loved ones say “But you’re such a pretty girl!” You, as a woman, wake up with a penis and testicles, and your loved ones say, “Come on, stop crying, BE A MAN! Show some BALLS!” But you are not a man. You do not want balls.

That’s the point. Don’t imagine GAHC as removing your body parts, healthy, wanted body parts: imagine if you had body parts you DID NOT want. Body parts that DID NOT belong on your body. They might look healthy to everyone else, but to you, they are more like tumors. More like infections, or infestations. They are wrong. They do not belong there. And worst of all, those body parts redefine you, in everyone else’s eyes, as something you are not. As something you do not want to be.

Wouldn’t you want them removed?

Wouldn’t you want to have the right body, the body you know, the body that you belong in?

What wouldn’t you do to get that body back?

That’s how we should think of GAHC. It’s not changing someone from what they should be into what they should not be: it is AFFIRMING a person’s body, making it look like what that person knows it should look like, what it should feel like. Making it into the right body. And, not least important, changing the way everyone else responds to that person and their body, so that they can live the way they know they should live.

I know that I have done this badly. I apologize for that. I know I’ve said this in a terrible cringey way, and I’ve probably been insulting. I do not mean to be. I just want people who think that GAHC, particularly gender affirming surgery, is removing “healthy” body parts, to understand that it is not what conservatives and assholes say it is. It isn’t about taking your body, that you belong in, and making it different; it is about taking a body that is already wrong — and making it right.

That’s the point. I hope, if I have said everything here crudely and stupidly, that I have at least helped make it more clear that most cis people think of GAHC in entirely the wrong way: we think about it like ourselves. But we never think about it as it is for trans people.

We should stop that.

Hey, you know what we should do?

Listen to the people in question tell us, themselves, what they need, what they want, what is right for them. And then we should support them so they can have that, the same way of life that most of us enjoy without ever recognizing how easy it is for us to live as ourselves.

Imagine that.

New Rule: Right To Bitch

Dusty Leave a comment

I’m seeing positive feedback on my post from Wednesday: that’s good. I was worried about it. Worried that I might be accused of whining.

Is that ridiculous? The piece was intended to show the flaws in the teaching profession, by comparing it (It was also intended as an example of a compare/contrast essay, which my AP students recently wrote) to a profession that most people would rank far below teaching in terms of, say, desirability, or prestige; but I genuinely liked being a custodian, and if I didn’t need the money I make now, I would go back to being a custodian in a heartbeat. I’ve always harbored a secret wish that the custodians at the schools where I’ve worked would quit or retire while I was there, and I could slip into that position permanently. Maybe teach one class, or be available as an emergency substitutes; I want to think that my repertoire of teaching skills would make up for my lack of knowledge about things like plumbing and electrical.

Of course it wouldn’t.

But in criticizing the job I have now, I run a risk, a real risk, of being called a whiner. I know that doesn’t matter much, if other people sling that particular glob of mud at me; but I don’t want to get spattered with that. I was called a whiner a few days ago after I posted a Facebook status Sunday morning that said, “Can’t tell you how much I don’t want to grade essays.” Now, most of my friends — a large proportion of whom are English teachers, unsurprisingly — agreed with me, and sympathized. But one of my friends (A math teacher — so, y’know: evil. And heartless.) called me a whiner and sympathized with my wife for having to put up with my bitching all the time.

He was kidding. Of course he was. I don’t actually complain that much, at least not on Facebook — and he complains all the damn time, frequently to me; and I do complain back. I knew he was kidding. But it still hurt. Genuinely, though not that intensely.

See? There I go again. Complaining about a slight emotional pain, like it’s anything that matters when there are people out there in the world, people no less important than I am, starving while they die of ebola. This is the point where a conservative would call me a special snowflake and ask if I need a safe place to hide from the trigger warnings. (Or if not a conservative, then an asshole.) He might tell me to suck it up, to man up, to be the strong, silent type. To grow a pair and stop being a pussy. At which point one of the several feminists whom I am friends with — most likely my wife — would chew him out; and this asshole (And yes, I am friends with assholes, too, though not very many) might ask what is wrong with feminists, because what do women have to complain about? They have it easier than men! If anyone has a right to bitch, it’s got to be men.

This is why I wanted to write about this: because this seems to have become a trend these days, and a pervasive and pernicious one. We seem to have the idea — and maybe we always have, and I’m only now noticing it for some reason — that people generally shouldn’t complain, shouldn’t bitch, shouldn’t speak up when something bothers them: either because you have to earn a right to complain, usually by being worse off than anyone else who could hear you complain; or because speaking up about being perturbed is seen as weakness: either it’s showing fear, which will make the wolves attack you (Or the sharks, or the Guinea pigs, or what have you), or it’s letting them see you sweat, which just encourages the bastards, because they know they can get to you.

We’re supposed to take  it in silence, preferably with call0us indifference; my students say all the time that mean things or bad things don’t bother them because they just don’t care — “I don’t care what those girls over there say about me, because I don’t care what they think, it doesn’t bother me at all.” And somewhere in there is the idea that you should never tell those mean girls that what they’re saying is hurtful, or else they’ll say it more (Though really, if you aren’t bothered by it, it shouldn’t matter if they keep saying mean things, because those mean things don’t bother you. Right?).

But see, I don’t think that. I think you should tell someone that something they said is hurtful. I think that you are encouraging them with silence: because if you don’t complain, that’s when they believe they can get away with anything. Complainers get left alone, it seems to me; because nobody wants the hassle.

There is more, however. This isn’t just an issue of calling obnoxious people on their nonsense. It’s also about whether one has to earn the right to bitch.

My wife gets caught in this trap. She complains to me about teaching, about the many, many problems she has as a first-year teacher — and not only a first-year teacher, but an art teacher at a STEM school. But whenever she complains to me, when she really gets going, then once she finishes and pauses for breath she — apologizes. Every time. And not because I’ve started complaining about her complaining, not because I’m sitting there rolling my eyes and saying, ‘Oh my GOD, will you PLEASE stop that?!?” No: she apologizes for the same reason that I didn’t like being called a whiner on Facebook: because we know whiners, and we don’t like them. We don’t want to be seen as that kind of querulous, egocentric person. She also, I think, apologizes when she complains because I’ve been a teacher longer, and there are problems that are unique to my job that she doesn’t have to deal with — the essays, mainly. Those damn essays and all their need for grading. So much grading. Of course, she has problems that I don’t have, mainly being a department of one, and having been screwed by her predecessor who didn’t leave anything useful behind — no teaching materials, no lesson plans, none of the good quality art supplies — so she has to create everything she does from scratch, and stay on top of inventory and all, in addition to being overworked like every new teacher is, and undervalued as the one art teacher in a STEM school.

But see, that’s just it: why must she have it harder than me before she feels like she has a right to complain to me? (This is all mitigated, of course, by the fact that I am her husband, and so she has every right to complain to me about anything that is bothering her, no matter how small, no matter how large, forever and always.) Why do I feel like she has more right to complain to me because I think she has it harder?

Why is it that the only person who gets to complain without guilt is the most miserable person on the planet, and all the other 7 billion-plus of us have to say, “Well, this bugs me, but — other people have it worse. At least I’m not a leper in a Turkish prison or something.” And the leper in the Turkish prison is saying, “Well, they knock some of my toes off every time they beat the soles of my feet with the bastinado, but at least I’m not living in a country run by Donald Trump.”

So I’d like to propose a new rule. The new rule is this: everyone has the right to complain, any time, to anybody, depending on what their goal is for that complaint.

If your goal is to vent, to simply let off steam; if your audience needs do nothing more than nod every once in a while and make sympathetic noises somewhere between, “Mmmmhm” and “I hear you, man, totally,” then you have the absolute right to complain. I suppose somebody who isn’t in the mood to listen could ignore you or walk away, but generally speaking, we should listen to each other. Venting is healthy. It is valuable, because talking through your problems can often help you come to a solution. And the listener needs to be nothing more than a slightly more human version of a brick wall.

Okay? You don’t have to earn your complaining time, you don’t have to be the most miserable one in the room. You are a person; you have the right to feel, and to express how you feel; and it is reasonable to ask someone to listen to you, particularly your friend or your family. And I will stop feeling bad about describing my trials and tribulations on this blog; because if you don’t want to read what I write, if you feel I am too whiny, then you don’t have to read it. Feel free to walk away, and no hard feelings.

If your goal in complaining is to call attention to a problem, to let a jerk know that you recognize his jerkishness, then you have the same unlimited right to speak up. If you choose to be silent instead, okay — but I think it valuable for jerks to be called on their jerkery. No, it probably won’t stop them from continuing to jerkify all over the place, especially if all you do is call them out and point out the jerkage, without also punishing them in some way; but it does at least let them know that they have lost, or risk losing, whatever trust and faith and goodwill you harbor for them. Letting a jerk know you don’t trust him may not stop him from being a jerk — but he’ll know that he can’t count on your trust to pull him out of any truly deep hole he digs with his jerkosity.

And the same goes for political complaining: I don’t give a fuck if conservatives didn’t march in protest of Obama’s political stances or actions (Even though they did), if people — say, millions and millions of American women, and women all around the world — want to bring attention to a danger they see, actual or potential, they have every right to stand up and speak out about that danger, about that problem, about that issue. It isn’t weakness if all you’re seeking is to call attention to it. Standing up to say something is rotten in the state of Denmark? That would be strength, thank you very much. That would be determination, and courage.

If your goal is to gain sympathy for your troubles, well — that is different. That requires you to have some awareness and sensitivity about the relationship you have with the person whose sympathy you seek. Which means you probably shouldn’t seek sympathy, overt protestations of sympathy, from random strangers. That might be a genuine imposition. Because sympathy takes work: it puts an emotional strain, even if not a terribly large one, on the sympathizer, which is why it’s generally so nice for the sympathizee. So there, I can see a need for consideration — and someone getting pissed off when asked to sympathize one too many times, or when they themselves are in greater need of sympathy than the person doing the complaining.

If your goal is to gain something even more valuable, and even more onerous for your listener to give you — like money, or help moving into your new house, or a bite of their ice cream sandwich — then you may need to shut up. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be callous nor to contradict myself: but I’m talking about the right to vent, not the right to pout while staring at my Klondike bar. Nobody has the right to do that. Okay, my wife does, but none of the rest — right, and my dog. But that’s it!

Stay the hell away from my ice cream. I need it. Wait’ll I tell you about my day…

Me Mates are all Jemmy Coves! Wot wot!

Dusty Leave a comment

So I’m wondering: how far should I be willing to go for my friends?

Now, it so happens that the meme world has quite a bit to say about friendship — but unfortunately, as always with the meme world, the information is not very helpful.

 

 

So my  friends are people I like and do stuff with. Okay, I knew that; those are the people I call my friends anyway. But what does “do stuff with” mean? Do I have to do stuff with them in person? Because then a number of my friends probably don’t count any more, since I literally haven’t seen them, face to face, in more than twenty years. And what does “like” mean? I mean, I like cupcakes, and I like my students. But those are two different feelings. Do I have to like my friends all the time? Do I have to like everything about them? 51/49, like/dislike?

 

I like the sentiment, but I don’t know quite what it means. One of my friends had a lot of trouble finding an au pair that would actually remain reliable for more than a few months. He lives 2,500 miles away from me. How do I make that my problem? I suppose I could look through online listings of au pairs, but is that really helpful? I don’t have children, don’t know anything about au pairs, let alone good ones. Do I fly to Massachusetts to help him interview? Do I become his new au pair? And what if while he is looking for an au pair, another friend is dealing with a sick parent, out in California? And another friend, living in Louisiana, needs to find a cheap apartment?

Maybe I just tell them that I’m sympathetic and will help in any way that I can. But when I know there’s no way I can help, it feels terribly hollow to say that. I don’t feel like a friend when I can’t help. But I can’t always help. Does that make me not a friend?

Maybe it matters that this says “BEST friend?” Do we really still make that distinction? I mean, the Sims do, and 4th graders; but do we all think that way?

 

So I have to know things about someone that nobody else knows. Well, that simplifies things pretty well, because there is exactly one person in the world that I am that close to. I suppose my wife is my only friend.

So what do I tell all those losers who think I’m their friend?

(N.B.: You can’t get mad if I just called you a loser. Because:)

Now, if I don’t think it is particularly offensive to shout “F*CKNUGGETS!” when I stub my toe, should I be willing to say it in front of friends who prefer not to hear cussing? Or wait — they’re not my friends. My friends are only the ones who yell back “YEAH, HOT BUTTERED DI*K-BISCUITS!”  (Side note: I love those asterisks. I hate that they’re necessary, but I love them. So much. “Profanity? No, I meant ‘Focknuggets.’ It’s a German bar food. And ‘disk-biscuits’ is Cockney for pancakes. Why? What did you think it was?”) But what if I’m around their kids, or their aged grandparents who have taken holy orders to become Catholic nuns? (Yes, including their grandfathers. Don’t try to determine another person’s gender identity, you social fascist.) And maybe it’s that I should be the good friend, and not cuss around friends that I know don’t like cussing? Should I be considerate of my friends’ delicate sensibilities, or should they accept me for the foul-mouthed hooligan I am? In a friendship, who bends to whose standards? If others have to bend to mine, can I mess with that? I mean, can I get someone to agree to be my friend, and then punch them in the face and steal their sandwich, and then just say “Hey, that’s how real friends act. You can punch me and take my sandwich, sometime, too.”

Maybe I should just forget all of this, and when I stub my toe, yell, “Oh, dash it all, what deuced rotten luck, eh wot wot?!” Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we lived like moderns but talked like Victorians?

 

This one kind of cracks me up, because really, it makes no sense. It combines this idea of insincerity with an idea of priorities. Because it recognizes that people have busy schedules, but, it says, YOU should be THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THAT PERSON’S WORLD. Nothing else will do. Anyone who claims to be your friend, but for whom you are not THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD is a faker, a liar, a superficial person who doesn’t care about you, really care about you, deep down, where the real feelings are, underneath all the bulls*it. They just want something from you. Which apparently you, who want them to literally drop anything else in their lives in order to pay attention to you — what, you don’t want anything from them? Okay, sure.

And you represent that with Minions. The definitive image of depth and genuine human sympathy.

But again, that makes it pretty simple for me. I have one friend. My wife. All of the rest of you shouldn’t waste your time on me. Because I just want something from you.

 

But here is the meme I agree with.

 

You damn right, CM. Damn right.

 

 

The answer to all this, of course, is that it depends on the friend. With some friends, I am willing to drop most stuff, give up most stuff, if they needed me. With others, I’m willing to give up little stuff — like maybe some of my free time. Sure, I’ll do that. Other friends, I’d give up sleep, I’d give up food, money, comfort. One friend, I’d give up anything I have in this world, other than her. And I call them all my friends. On some level, that’s a problem, because a language as large and varied as English should be able to make distinctions between those types of friends; and we sort of do, because of course I don’t call her my friend, I call her my wife. That shows the differences in commitment quite handily: I would not die for most of my friends; I would die for my wife. Sure. Makes sense.

The issue is that we have grown overfond of the specific word “friend.” So fond we now use it as a bloody verb, like “text” and “impact.” Bah. According to the internet, I have over 350 friends, but if you asked me to name my actual friends, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t run out of toes. If you named some criterion like “Friends are only those people you see regularly, say, every three years,” then I wouldn’t even run out of fingers.

But we want to call lots of people our friends; that’s why Facebook uses the term. (Not that Twitter or Instagram or the various blogging/content-sharing sites are any better: the term “follower” is almost weirder and more fraught than “friend.” But one strangely warped internet term at a time, eh wot wot? Else it’ll be a fifteen puzzle! Don’t want to get the morbs. [Victorian slang here. It’s some pumpkins.]) It’s not enough for me to call her my wife — that could imply all sorts of different relationships. I have to include the description, “And she’s my friend.” In fact, I generally call her my “best friend.” Not that it isn’t appropriate, but the point is, we’re trying to bring in the term “friend” to relationships where it wouldn’t normally belong. It is now a more inclusive term, rather than exclusive — applying, in some way, to everything from acquaintances to co-workers to the love of my life.

Which means, when it comes to determining my relationship with my friends, deciding just how far I am willing to go for them, it isn’t enough to just say to myself, “He/she is a friend. Therefore I will _________ but I will not _____________.” (Sample answers: share the last cookie/die.) Where, then, do I draw those lines? If I call someone a friend, how much — let’s call it “tolerance,” since that’s generally the measure of my relationship to other humans — does that entitle them to?

I feel as though there is a simple answer to all of this, and it is, “You have to decide, on an individual basis, how much tolerance each friend gets. Put up with a friend for as long as you want that person as a friend, and then stop.” And I feel that my audience is probably thinking this, and getting bored with my philosophicality here. (Hence the Victorian slang, dash my wig! I’ll be poked up if I shoot into the brown here!) And that’s fine in theory, and I’ve probably been putting that into practice, really, for the last few years.

But I’m tired. Having to decide whether or not to stick with friends who are on the margin; trying to decide if I should encourage and support them, or joke around with them, or neither, is becoming exhausting. Even worse is pretending to be friends with people I don’t really like very much, but have some reason to pretend to be friends with, reasons like working together, or for. I used to be in the staff band with one of my administrators, and I really didn’t like the guy, though I wasn’t going to tell him that. And of course, some of the time, he was great — like when we were actually playing together. If I have a friend that is great some of the time, and crappy some of the time, how much of the time does he have to be great to make up for the crappy? Should I just get rid of any friends who are at all crappy? But what if my good friends, who get a whole lot of tolerance, have an opinion I happen to disagree with? An opinion I disagree strongly with? How crappy does that have to feel for me before they cross the line and get dumped?

I try to be forgiving with my friends. I don’t actually mind disagreements. I ended two “friendships” this past weekend, both times because the person shared a meme joking — joking — about the atomic holocausts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was an easy call. But I have other friends who consistently mock Bernie Sanders followers, which generally includes me and several of my other friends. So now the question becomes, do I speak up when they say or post something that annoys me? Or do I ignore it, for the sake of the friendship? What about those who mock everyone who ISN’T a Bernie Sanders fan? Do I really have to decide on an individual basis, every time they say something? In an election year?

This is further complicated for me because I generally have to be careful about what I say on the internet; my past statements and profanity very nearly lost me my license to teach. And I’m friends online with many — hundreds, probably — of my ex-students. I’m pretty open to becoming friends with them, but to be honest, I don’t have a whole lot in common with a lot of them. I remember them fondly from class because they’re bright, or they worked hard, or they had interesting things to say in discussion; but now that I interact with them casually and socially, I find out things like, they only care about cars. Or they’re devoutly religious. Or they’re prickly and combative. Or they believe astrology. Or they want to vote for Trump.

So now what? Do I dump them? Or do I ignore the annoying foibles? For how long?

Do I have to keep a balance sheet for each of my friends? And if I do — where are the cut scores?

I also worry about myself. How much can — should — I interact with them? I am, after all, a lot older than them; if I joke along with their jokes, like a friend, does that make me seem like a creepy old guy desperate for friendly interaction? Do they think that of me? Are they just putting up with me despite my annoying habits out of some sense of obligation because I was their teacher? Of course some of them are — but which ones? If I call them on their bull*hit, does that make me their straight-up honest friend, or some hypercritical *sshole? Of course the difference is in our relationship: but what if they’re of that group of people that prefer straight-up brutal honesty? Do I assume that? Do I use my own standards, and expect them to cleave to what I think is right? Am I more friendly or less friendly if I pick fights with people? What if I say something harsh, but I add “lololololololol” at the end of the comment? Is that something a friend would do? How about an acquaintance? How about a former teacher who gave you an A? How about a former teacher who gave you an F?

I really don’t know. But I’m thinking I may stay off Facebook more, or thin out my friends list a bit, to save myself some effort. And maybe that makes me a bad friend. Maybe I should be willing to put the effort into the friendship, whatever kind of friendship it is. I really don’t know.

 

I don’t think I have a final insight for this other than: I think we should start using terms other than “friend.” I would like to suggest, as one alternative, “chuckaboo.” Wot wot? Dash my wig, I’m off to bitch the pot. I’m going to get half-rats.