Big Ed's Place

This past weekend, the neighbors who inspired Babe in the Night threw another party. It wasn’t loud by objective standards, but I could hear just enough of the stereo and the laughing to keep me awake and cranky. I finally retreated to the guest bedroom where other ambient noises drowned out the distant revelers.

Of course, what was really annoying wasn’t their party, but my reaction. I’ll turn 43 in a month, but once again I was reduced emotionally to 13. It’s annoying that this happens and keeps happening. I’m damn familiar with the scars from that age and how they’ve affected me through the years. I’ve certainly done the counseling, inner work, and life rearrangement to move on. But every now and then… bam, there they are.

Like I said, it’s annoying. Why does it take so little to make 30 years of maturity disappear from my psyche?

I won’t rehash the scars and stories from that era of my life here–they sneak out enough into my stories as it is. Nor will I engage in the justifications and rationalizations and amateur psychology on what’s going on and why I do it. Been through all that. Have a few more t-shirts than most. Suffice it to say, sometimes the “popular kids” get under my skin and I feel excluded, regardless of reality.

But I do wonder how unique I am. Is part of the popularity of coming of age stories due to the fact that so many of us have similar early life triggers? Are stories about outsiders, like the TV series Glee, popular in part because so many of us recall not being popular and want to watch others where it’s okay? And are we picking at the scabs or actually doing some good when we revisit those periods?

I suspect that such issues spill over into far more than fiction. I once heard that if you wanted to understand Washington DC, the best degree to have was in Developmental Psychology. The implication was that too much of our country and our world was being jerked around to satisfy personal issues rather than anything that might be construed as for the greater good.

But I do hope that since I at least recognize when the shifts in mental age occur, I can avoid such jerking reality around. The night of the party, it was like, “oh, hell, here we go again” and by morning it was pretty much gone. After all 43, is a lot more fun an age to live.

With the turn of the calendar, we’re in the season of retrospectives and resolutions for the future. My daily life is still oriented with very short term deadlines, which makes resolutions a bit tricky. It’s hard to say, “this is what I want to do for the year” when I can barely see past the end of the week. Similarly, it’s hard to look back at the past year with any objectivity when near term events have been rather stressful. I’m happy to say, “Good Riddance” to 2010, except it’d be more accurate to say, “Good Riddance to December 2010” because, when I have a chance to really relax, I may discover the other months weren’t that bad.

This is in part because I realize how malleable memory really is. False memories are surprisingly easy to imprint, as is the tendency for the mind to fill in details inaccurately. We remember things that have strong emotional content and I’ve realized that sometimes the memories change when the emotions do.

For example, I can remember fights with my college girlfriend, despite it being nearly 20 years since the fight in question. However, the distance of time has mellowed the import of those fights and so the details of them have changed. They’re memories I’ve revisited several times, but over time I’ve remembered less and less what she said, and more what I said. Am I remembering correctly? I like to think so, because those memories of my younger self aren’t flattering, and why alter them to make me look bad? But of course, I have no way of knowing. After all, if I asked her, there’s no way to tell if it’s her memory or my memory that’s at fault.

Similarly, and more on-topic for this site, I remember sexual encounters that I thought were the most-incredible-thing-ever at the time, and even for some time after. But years later, they’ve lost their thrill for one reason or another. It’s usually not so much me having more experience or being jaded, as having a different perspective. For example, now when I recall the face of one past partner, I see different emotions in her expression. I don’t think she was as crazy about the sex that time as I had thought.

So… what do I remember about writing in 2010? Not a lot, I admit. I remember spending most of the year on Deep Dish, getting started on Unmasked, and also TMI, but those are all relatively ‘fresh’ in that they’re still in my queue in one form or another. Fortunately, I don’t have to actually remember what I did–because I have notes in the form of musing posts over the past year.

I released Babe in the Night, though it had been written in 2009. I also wrote and released In the Style of Rodin, and Love’s Labor Found in 2010. I wrote and sold Irie No Kaubutsu. Throw in the Deep Dish script and TMI, and that’s five stories completed, for about 50,000 words total. That’s a lot more than I remembered or thought. I just kept plugging away…

So maybe the memories aren’t all that important. Not when I have my words here to provide a reality check of my brain.

I submitted Deep Dish to my first publisher. As expected, it was harder to hit ‘send’ than I expected. I intellectually knew that it wasn’t a big deal to do so, and I knew intellectually that if I got rejected, it wasn’t a big deal. That didn’t stop the nerves.

And the thing is, of course, that I’ve been rejected plenty of times in my life in a wide variety of venues before now. When I first started applying for jobs out of school, I mailed 101 resume’s and had 19 interviews before I got an offer. I probably went on dates with close to a hundred women before I met my wife. And that’s not counting the women who I tried to reach through online dating sites that never bothered to even acknowledge my email.

That hasn’t prevented it from being nervous and sweat inducing each time I step into a new arena.

For the pattern in each case was the same. I’m on edge about the first time. I get rejected and it stings more than I anticipated. But I pick myself up and try again. I get a second rejection which stings again. After a few more rejections, the sting gets less and less, as if I’m building up an immunity or a tolerance. And then at some point, it becomes almost a game and I find I don’t care.

This was literally true in the year before I met my wife. I was online dating and I reached the point where I said, before going on a first date, “either I’ll have a good time or I’ll have a story to tell.” The fear of rejection was long gone.

So I know I’ll eventually stop being nervous and submitting to publishers will feel like old hate. But damn, going through this again and again is getting old. My brain knows better but the gut continues to churn…

Recently, I attended a technical conference that I first attended 15 years ago. A lot of ghosts came flowing back, and not all of them were pleasant.

The first time I attended this conference, I happened to call the up-until-then-love-of-my-life, who I will call “Alicia” for simplicity. We’d broken up 2 years earlier, she’d move to Europe to pursue another romantic relationship, but that had ended badly and she was back at her parents’ house. That was about a 3 hour drive from the conference.

We had a very pleasant phone conversation and tried to figure out how we could meet in person. Unfortunately, we couldn’t figure out the logistics. It was clear then that we were both entertaining ideas of getting back together. Six months later when we did meet, though, the window for reconciliation had closed. Would we have gotten back together if we’d been able to meet that night? I sometimes think we would have, but of course there’s no way to know. It’s just my memory of the conversation and what life was like for both of us at the time.

So… why didn’t we get together if we both wanted to? Because the technology didn’t exist. We knew we’d have to meet in the middle in order for both of us to make our next-day obligations and we couldn’t figure out the logistics. Sure, there was a map that showed a town halfway between us, but we knew nothing about what was in that town that might be suitable, and we had no idea how we’d get in touch when we arrived.

Two problems that are completely irrelevant in the age of the internet and cell phones.

Today it’s yelp followed by mapquest and we’d have a place. Then cell phones to ensure we connected. No problem, no missed connection.

Now my life has turned out pretty well and I don’t begrudge the lost connection. I wouldn’t have met my wife, after all, and she’s a much better match for me than “Alicia” was. So I don’t have a lot of regrets about the lack of technology then, but it does make me wonder…

…and while there are obvious analogs in writing (certain stories could only exist in certain times or the available technology would render much of the plot moot), I’ve also started wondering how the technology changes affect our memories.

Ya see, memory is often more emotional than rational. We often have clearer memories about things that triggered strong emotions than those that were just intellectual. So what created those states?

I clearly remember the frustration of not knowing how to connect with “Alicia”. I remember how overwhelming it was when we finally quit trying. And I remember the angst when I realized later that the window for getting together had closed.

Similarly, I remember times in my youth of giddy nervousness, waiting for the phone to ring. I didn’t dare go out because I didn’t want to miss a specific call. I got cranky when my dad got on the line. Of course, answering machines and call waiting made those issues moot long before cell phones. Do kids have that anxiety today? And how does it color their romances?

Which calls into question some of my own memories. I remember all the drama of teen romance. How would the drama have been different if I’d had better technology? I don’t know. But I do suspect I’d remember those times quite differently.

I don’t have answers, of course. It’s just one more reminder of the fungibility of the human memory.

I’ve always been skeptical about personality profiles. It doesn’t matter if it’s Myers-Briggs or any of the variety of typing that gets done in business seminars, or something simple like horoscopes. My skepticism largely stems from three things.

First, I am aware of how personality profiles can be created so that people easily say “this is me!” There’s a famous psychology experiment where the entire undergraduate lecture class took a personality typing test and then had to say how well it matched their personalities. They all agreed that the resulting descriptions fit their personalities pretty accurately. Except they’d all been given the identical result and it was taken from a horoscope. Phrases like “You’re outgoing but occasionally shy” get lauded even though they’re meaningless.

Second, I believe people have a tendency to live up to their self labels. If I think of myself as outgoing, I’m more likely to act outgoing. Again, this has been backed up by experiment–tell people they are stupid before taking a test, and they do worse. So how does a personality profile help, other than reinforce behavior that one may not want reinforced? Am I really an introvert, or am I just making myself an introvert because of my self-label?

True story–my father is incapable of knowing when he’s hungry. If a meal is late, he gets irritable and grouchy and snappish and lacks the self-awareness to understand why. His solution is to maintain a rigid schedule for meal times. Well, I had the same behavior until I was in college. Then I discovered that it was learned behavior. I’d spent years telling myself I was ‘just like dad’ when I could easily say, “okay, I’m hungry, but let’s not let that affect my mood.”

Third and finally, I don’t think people are static. Sure, someone might be an introvert today, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be an introvert in five years. Yes, it might be hard for them to make that change, but personality typing assumes they won’t change. Strength changes (with weight training). IQ can change (seriously–the tests are normalized for age). Why not other aspects of who we are?

But where personality profiles come in handy, in my opinion, is actually in fiction. An author can make a character fit a profile and, if they do it realistically, the character will feel real to most readers. My Shakespeare Professor used to point out how the Bard did it with characters such as those in Romeo and Juliet. And who am I to say that it’s not good enough for me if it was good enough for Shakespeare?

Which brings me to my favorite personality profile: think-feel-act. When something happens, people respond at three levels: intellectual, emotional, physical. However, most people don’t react to them at the same speed. When told of a death in the family, one person may immediately break down crying (feel first), while their sibling immediately starts making funeral plans (think first) and the third sibling may immediately jump in the car to head to the scene of the accident (act first). Action heroes tend to be “act first.” Hamlet was the archetypical “think first” (and think and think and think). There’s basically a pattern or habit that a given person or character will follow. They may be ‘think-act-feel’ or ‘feel-act-think’ and that response pattern will be at the ‘habit’ level of behavior–almost automatic.

So it’s something I consider when I’m creating a character. I can use it to help with realism and consistency, but I can also use it as a path for growth, like Joe in Friends and Benefits. And even if I don’t establish a hard pattern, it’s worth thinking through. How will this character respond to events? What mix of thinking, feeling, and action will they tend to respond with?

It’s a case where personality profiles actually do serve me well.