Neko Case recorded a great one called "Make Your Bed" best not quoted 'round here.

GC

At least you could have some fun with it. Start asking what the id number is on the junk mail. Click the keyboard into the phone, say "OK" and hang up.

You mentioned Big D - do you still hang out around there? I moved from there, to the far southwest corner of the continent. It did not snow here.

Pops says it is cold back Big D way, though.

Maybe you should just start hanging up on em. That would be the least amount of stress and effort, all things considered.

Thanks for the vote of humanity.






DANG IT. I have a crush on another woman. She sings (very well), seems to like me, has a good reputation. But I am just not quite ready. Still sorting life.
DANG IT.

far

Mmmmmm, crush.

Nice, Homer.


We had a beer opener that would fizz like an open bottle, and Homer's voice would say.....

Well, obviously you know.

Have a great weekend, all!


far

Hey FAR. I know a boy who had a crush on a girl when it was too early for him to be doing that stuff. They had a rough time for a couple years while they were both staving off doing anything about it. It made them much more solid in the end, though. You know how to do the right stuff. Keep it to stuff you're willing to tell us about and you'll be jes' peachy.

And yes, weaver, I've read Stranger in a Strange Land. 'Bout a hunnert times, give or take. That and all Heinlein's other stuff (Time Enough for Love, Moon is a Harsh Mistress) led me to believe polyamory was ok. What did I know? I was 12 or 13 when I was reading it. Seemed plausible to me. *sigh*

Anywho, yeah, I getcha about the ideas. It's good to know where someone stands, if they're straight with you. Out in the rest of the world, it seems hard to find. There's a lot of back stabbing out there.

Recently, I have had to "justify" my "other job" at work. Yes, folks, someone came across my bio at SYMC and decided that I must be taking work time to do all the stuff I do for them. And further assumed that I must be getting paid to do it. The person then went to the president and VP of our company to complain.

Luckily, I told the boss about my involvement with SYMC the week I started doing it -- 4 years ago. He asked me for a formal memo for the record giving him the information he's had verbally for all this time, and will hang onto it in case there's further complaining.


It's very odd, the stuff people gossip about. I suspect they wouldn't have done it if I were listed as a pastoral counselor with my church, or something like that.

JustJ,

“It's very odd, the stuff people gossip about. I suspect they wouldn't have done it if I were listed as a pastoral counselor with my church, or something like that.”

I wouldn’t count on the second sentence. The first though, you can take it to the bank.

I’ve read all Heinlein's stuff too. Starting right in the middle of SIASL his writing changed into just that of a dirty old man. It went from what could be called good hard SF (Science Fiction) to just soft porn.

The transition between part 1 and part 2 of SIASL is obvious. I read later he had a stroke right at that point in writing SIASL. It took about a year for him to start writing again. But he was changed into that dirty old man.

Appy:

I'm pretty sure it was Glory Road that was his 2rning point 2 dirty-old-manness.

I love his older stuff. I also read Glory Road and SIASL, both when i was a teenager, and thought I liked soft porn
Skiffy novels. But I can honestly say I've never read anything newer.

By far my favorite: Time for the Stars.

I read that to my wife the summer before we got married. In one 4-hour period. On a beautiful summer day up Indian Creek east of Manderfield, Utah. Sitting on a rock in the middle of the creek. My MIL and BIL came with us, but they were way "up the creek" fly fishing.


I don't think I identified with Heinlein's characters in GR and SIASL at all. I was always monogamous. All my crushes and the one or 2 GFs i had before I met my W ripped my heart out when we broke up. Then my W did, but that was later.

I sometimes wonder if I'd learned the lesson I learned this time, but 35 years ago instead, what would my recovery have looked like this time?

Oh well. That's not where I went, and this is where I am.

Had a great Buffalo chicken sandwich in Old Town 2day... ...and my W and I bought a 900 dollar chaise and ordered some sectionals 2 go with it.

-ol' 2long

Do you have to remove the horns before cooking a buffalo chicken?

No, it ac2ally enhances the state of feeling chicken if you don't remove the horns first!

<img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

-ol' 2long

Hi J,
It does hurt when people try to sabotage you behind your back. Or even to your front.

I can imagine your feelings, I think most of us have been in your shoes. Sorry - hope you find a band aid that works for this as well as the ones your mom used when you were small.
Doesn't HoFS have some of the new kind that work over the telephone for most things?

After Heinlien changed his writing style, I gravitated to Asimov. He was pretty safe.

Gray, you give some good advice. Keep it up.

SS

Thanks SS. I don't know if my advice is helpful. Some people are obtuse enough that you don't know whether or not it's worth it to even try... but now and then I get motivated. It makes me sick to see good men treated badly, and it makes me crazy when they suck it up or neglect to fight back for fear of alienating their rotten WWs.

In popular culture men are commonly thought of as the cheaters.

There is something to that, but there's something else: in the U.S. at least, the following is documented: divorced men who did not initiate their divorces suffer from depression more often and for a longer time than their female counterparts. It is not unusual for men whose wives divorce them to continue experiencing depression as long as five years after their divorces [citation missing but I have it somewhere].

I reckon in the case of male BS, that depression often arises because losing your wife to another man gives you an instinctive feeling of having lost your status in the community, and for a man, even a passive, non-alpha type, that status is important and losing it is very serious. One of your core values, the need to feel you have social status, dictated in large part by your success with women and hard-coded into your DNA, has been broken. Even if you feel in an abstract way that you have done nothing wrong and that you are the bigger person and even though everyone who knows you has said they admire you and believe you handled the whole thing like a champ, you walk around with this eradicating feeling of having been defeated by an inferior rival and rejected by a woman who has previously sworn to never reject you.

Sorry to go all Gorillas in the Mist about this but it's true.

For women, another man will always come along. That's normal. From that perspective they're wired to bounce back quickly. For men, another woman will not come along. On the contrary. Historically at least (and you realize this instinctively) you're likely to be ostracized by your community if another man steals your mate. The isolation that naturally occurs for a man after a divorce does an efficient job of simulating this feeling of having been thrown out of the community. No matter how many friends you win in the divorce, it's likely that there will be Saturday nights when nobody calls and when everyone is busy, and that is something that never happened when you were married because your mate was always around.

Seems like there's a book in here somewhere. Or at least a lengthy article.

I was visiting a friend the other day. She was friends with my ex (they went to H.S. together) and has seen her once or twice since everything happened, but I'm much closer with her now than my ex is. I don't remember how it came up but my friend started comparing the way my ex and the OM interacted with the children they had with them during a visit some time in the past. I felt that ole familiar sensation, that salt-on-the-wound feeling. It hurt a lot. I wanted to lie down. After my friend's son left the room I told her that it was difficult, impossible really, for me to converse casually about those people. She said, "Really? But you're so much better off without her. You seem like you have a really good life." All I could say was "It still hurts a lot." This friendship is the one situation in life where my past regularly comes back to bite me in the a$$. I'm keeping it though. This woman is an excellent person, even if she doesn't entirely get it.

GC

YOU are an excellent person Gray.

Even if you don't entirely recognize it.

The world is a better place 'cause YOU'RE in it.

Why not visit www.minneapoliscast.com today, hear some songs?
gc

I listened yesterday.

B4, right?

Had trouble hearing everything though. The bass kept fading in and out and it all sounded muted, as if far from the mics, no matter what I tried. I don't think it was connection problems. It sounded like it was in the recording itself, actually.

But I liked it.

I like it too GC....even tho my speakers hoover.

I mixed the bass low and computer speakers definitely do not help it any. Nothing fades in and out though. On my stereo at home there is nothing peculiar about the recording.

Short little austere song, no big whoop.

Interesting. There were numerous patches several seconds long that faded to the point I could barely hear. I guess I need to check my speakers/audio driver.

But like I said, I liked it. In fact, I thought it ended too soon. I wanted more.

There you go, practicing intermittent reinforcement on us.

It's a tease of a song, no doubt.

I may make it longer one day. We'll see.

GC

Hey guys!

FF, JJ, Weave -- how goes it, girlies? Where's everybody been lately? Am I behind the times because I rarely leave Gray's thread? =(

GC, I loved the song. I even went to the MS link to have a listen to some other ones y'all had put out. Already have some faves -- good stuff. If you talk to the Powers That Be that add friends to the group's MS page, put in a good word for this neighbor. I'd love to endorse what I heard on my own page.

Appy -- "intermittent reinforcement" -- thought of you and laughed out loud when I heard that first song. You've got a way with words, my friend.

SS, you've been awful quiet lately, for you, anyway. =) How have you been, man?

Hi SLH. I wondered where this thread got off to. Too lazy to actually look for it though, I guess.

I can't listen on my computer. I don't know what's wrong.

Gray, I agree with what you wrote. It seems like guys have such a harder, longer recovery period than women do. Probably for the reasons you mentioned. At least the ones who don't use band-aids to cope.

The guy I dated who had so many problems (Dave) still wasn't over his XW who had an affair and left eight years or something earlier and I think it was because he used alcohol and denial to cope. Doesn't work, only prolongs and complicates things even more.