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Daily Prompt: First Instincts Versus Second Opinions

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 10 asks, “What are some (or one) of the things about which you usually don’t trust your own judgment, and need someone’s else’s confirmation?”
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My first instinct, which is that my first instinct can not be trusted, is usually wrong. This often puts me in any number of conundra.

The paragraph immediately above gives a clear example: My typing fingers wanted to write “conundrum,” then wanted the plural form. But what is the plural of conundrum? My all-too clever brain thought: “conundra. That’s funny. It’ll get a smile from someone.” The someone who smiled was me, which was enough to make it so, and I typed “conundra” for “conundrums.” But I go look it up and learn—thanks, World of Information!—that since conundrum does not come from a Latin root, but sounds like it might have, the proper plural is “conundrums.” Further, the word “conundra” has existed for a long, long while as a humorous, mock-educated plural form for plural problems. “Mock-educated.” That’s me, so it remains “conundra.”

But if that agonized convolution of almost-thought is a real tracing of how I decide most things, and it is, it is a wonder that I find enough food each day to survive.

Thus I need help deciding things more often than not, but have made a life’s habit of refusing help or of going in the opposite direction.

The one best example of going against my first instinct of ignoring my first instinct came when I first met my girlfriend, my partner, my love. (All one person.) The very moment I saw her, a thought crossed my mind (always a dangerous thing) just on other side of being articulate; words were not there, but the thought, if it can be captured, was: “She is going to be important to me.” Not possessing foresight, I did not know what that might mean (the joy is that I am still learning)—I needed five bucks that night, and maybe she was going to lend it to me. Or maybe she was going to join me for this ride we have been on for these last couple-plus years.

Knowing myself all-too not very well, I knew that I should not reach out to her, not try to get to know her, ask her out on a date or 300. My pre-instinct said, “You want to know her.” My first instinct replied (of course, my first instinct feels like a reply already): “No you don’t. Fear rejection. Fear acceptance. We don’t have any food in the fridge.”

I did something I have no history doing and asked friends. “I think I like our new friend.” (My questions end with periods instead of question marks.)

“Yeah?”

“I think I’m going to ask her out.” (Now, this was the challenge: One of the first sentences we had heard from her was that she was beginning a year-long moratorium on dating, starting that week. Easy excuse for me to throw in a towel that I did not even know the color of.)

“You haven’t yet? I thought you had.” That semi-clinched it: My friends knew me less well than I thought they did. That was enough second opinion for me.

My first instinct, to always doubt my first instinct, led me to do the opposite of what I was telling myself to do and ask her on a date. I ignored my instinct to ignore my instinct and trust that someone special was in front of me. At the time: I was unemployed; had not yet had necessary eye surgery, so my glasses were unbelievably thick and unattractive; had not yet been diagnosed, so I was not collecting my Social Security. Thus my life situation was that special kind which does not include income. So my asking her out on a date at all was audacious, and I am not an audacious human.

For once I was, and it made all the difference. I am grateful for her inspiring this audacious behavior from me, and happy she was just as audacious in return.

Daily Prompt: Born at the Right Time

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 9 asks, “When life gives you lemons … make something else. Tell us about a time you used an object or resolved a tricky situation in an unorthodox way.”
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“Life has taken you down a different road, and your GPS is broken.”

One of my myths I believed about myself, deep into grown-up-hood, was that I had incredibly good timing. When it was time to make a life decision, even if that decision was to not make a decision at all, I made it (or did not make it), decisively and without looking back. As said above, this is actually a myth.

The reality was that when in one of life’s corners, I took what was available, crumbs or cake, and kept it moving. “Consequences” was a four-syllable word for “things I will probably ignore.” For the most part, my life was spent chasing employment, trying to find something akin to permanence, only to flub it after three or four years.

I am starting to understand a sentence: “Shall not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.” Perhaps I made a lot of errors, but no mistakes. I am not certain about that, but I continue making my amends. If I am here (check) and all is fundamentally well (check), then the road that I followed that brought me here brought me to a good place. There is nothing wrong with this road. I am a signpost on it for others.

I do not have many specific “MacGyver”-type incidents of situational brilliance in my life, not yet anyway. More often than not, my mouth has talked me into increased trouble instead of save me, like that time when I talked a New York State Trooper into giving me a ticket. (He did not, because paperwork. And to annoy me. I am grateful—now.) And I am not a physically resourceful person. My relationship with the natural word of objects and things is that of a reluctant participant, one who breaks unbreakable things and walks into street signs.

When my body started to change in my late 30s, when the symptoms of adult spinal muscular atrophy first showed, it came with a jolt. Only recently have I learned that this is a common experience among people with neuromuscular diseases. When walking becomes difficult—in my case because the nerves that had been sending (ever dimmer) signals to my legs (which had started to atrophy from receiving ever dimmer signals)—the end of normal walking comes as if everything had been just fine one day and the next day as if one’s shoes had been nailed to the ground or one’s co-workers had painted the floor with superglue. It is sudden and scary when the progression of deterioration is undetected and undetectable until the day it is not.

The strange thing is my behavior regarding this: I attempted to MacGyver my response. Rather, I attempted to manufacture a cliche of a MacGyver response. Very little was done consciously on my part other than to buy a cane and start to use the local cab service for any journey longer than my front door to my room, some of whose drivers actually carried me from their car to my front door—stone sober (I emphasize this because my history could imply otherwise)—because my legs had had enough for that day. I developed a mode of walking, a stiff waddle that I hoped would not attract attention. It did.

I attempted to “strong and silent” my way through it as if I was confident that there was a something better on another side of a tunnel that saw me traveling through it in secret terror.

What would MacGyver really do? Probably what I ultimately did: visit a damn doctor. See a neurologist. I have learned to ask for help and even to (and this is a tricky thing) accept it. I still walk with a waddle but I am no longer counting down the minutes to a lesser and lesser able self, which is what I was doing before I knew what the heck was changing in my body. Accepting reality and using all the tools at my disposal, changing into the person who tries to do those things, that is making lemonade, I guess. That’s how I get to play MacGyver in my life. My GPS is finished re-calculating a route.

Daily Prompt: Vote for Not-Him

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 7 asks, “Tell us about a time you made a false assumption about a person or a place—how did they prove you wrong?”
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If you are interested in the horse race nature of American politics, the drop-everything-every-four-years-so-we-can-fill-all-the-jobs-in-Washington portion of our public life, you could do no worse than live in either New Hampshire or Iowa for the year before Election Day. This is because, for reasons I could bore you with but will not, Iowa is the first state in the country to hold a vote for President, in January of election year, and New Hampshire is the second state, usually a week later. (Through the spring and summer of election year, the major political parties conduct state-by-state votes, and the winner of the most votes is sometimes, often, usually that party’s candidate for the national election in November.)

These two states fight very hard every four years to hold their place as first, fight so hard that both states always claim to be first every time, even a week apart, because Iowa uses one type of voting system and New Hampshire a completely different one. So they are both always first. It comes down to money: because they are first, both states receive a quadrennial economic boost unlike any other, with political candidates and their support teams and journalists and their support teams needing food, shelter, television time for months before January. Some nationally famous politicians have rented houses in Iowa to live in and signed year-long leases for the year of door-to-door campaigning they will do. Other states would love to be first in the nation, to attract those millions of dollars, but these two small-population states put up a winning fight with both the Democratic and the Republican parties every four years and get to be first in the nation to cast ballots.

From 2000 to 2004, I lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a city of about 125,000 in a state of three million. A state that is larger than New York State but with one-sixth of the population. So that means that in 2003, I was in the second-largest city in the first of the two “First in the Nation” vote-casting states for Election 2004: Bush v. Kerry. With George W. Bush running for re-election unopposed, it meant that almost every Democrat elected to any office anywhere in the country was campaigning in Iowa.

Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In the foreground is a Quaker Oats factory. My apartment building is the red brick building smack in the middle of the photo, across the highway from Quaker Oats.

Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In the foreground is a Quaker Oats factory. My apartment building is the red brick building smack in the middle of the photo, across the highway from Quaker Oats.

I am a progressive voter, to the left of most Democrats but tending to vote for them. But I also fall head over ballot for every candidate who claims to be the representative from the Land of New Ideas. Rarely do we hear what those New Ideas might be or how much he or she may think they will cost, but I love the idea of New Ideas. Selling New Ideas is an Old Idea, but it gets me every time. And so my life’s list of candidates I have rooted to run for the next office higher than the one they already possessed includes several people named Kennedy, Gary Hart, the late Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, and, in 2003, a North Carolina senator named John Edwards. There are others, but I am blushing while typing this.

I should retire my political instincts. Then-Senator Edwards was one of the few politicians I have ever heard speak about rural as well as urban poverty as a blight, a blight because it is a problem that can be tackled. I was inspired. From 2004-’08, it could be said that he pushed the bigger-name candidates to the left (some might think that a good thing), but from 2004-’08 it could also be said that he was doing some other (scandalous) things.

And I met him! And my immediate in-person sense of the man was: “I do not like him.” In January 2004, days before us Democratic Iowans were to cast our first in the nation votes, our so very first votes that New Hampshire was going to be the second first, so stuff it, New England!, just days before that, I saw him speak. Great speech. People are poor. Terrific. Speech over. In the crowded room, we all discovered that that single door entrance over there was now the single door exit for everyone, including the candidate and his handlers, who must hate situations like this in Iowa and New Hampshire. I was next to him for the five minutes it took to leave. He shook my hand—he shook everyone’s hand within reach. I have met a few politicians and I have met quite a few people who ought to run for office, but I have never been rendered invisible quite as quickly as I was by that man. It may qualify as the single most bizarre social encounter I have ever had: I have been dismissed mid-conversation plenty of times, even made to feel that I offended someone, but never looked at like I did not exist.

Perhaps it was the overwhelming crowd and the fact that I did not immediately produce a way out and he was looking for one, or perhaps it was the woman behind me. Or perhaps it was because, a bright man, a good reader of juries in his lawyer life, he felt my instinct to not like him. Or perhaps it was the woman behind me who wanted and received his autograph. I have no idea.

What did I do with this instinct to not like John Edwards? I convinced myself to ignore it and campaigned for him at my caucus site on election night and swung our district over to him. My instinct to ignore my instincts can not be trusted.