Coming up daisies....

I'm in love.

Or at least, I think I am.

Forced connections probably don't work but I don't have a lot of tools in my toolbox.

I’m a very private person in many ways – a fact which I regret and for which I blame mostly myself. I’ve always wanted and have only infrequently had close associations with other people, and it was only today that I think I have hit upon a possible solution to the question which has bothered me for a long time. ‘Why am I so private? Why am I alone? Why do I go out of my way to keep myself alone?’

Being close to another human being doesn’t come naturally to me. I don’t really understand how to relate to other people on the types of levels that I observe in the relationships that other individuals have with people. I’ve never understood small-talk, and feel highly uncomfortable in situations where I’m expected to be sociable, but can’t really get involved in some deep discussion over topics I find interesting.

This has always made dating hard. On a first date, you are generally expected to sit across from a table with someone in a restaurant, and mouth small pleasantries at each other, avoiding issues of politics, religion, or morality (don’t want to cause any controversy), and then see whether you can still stand each other at the end of the evening. I’m phenomenally bad at that. If I had my way, I’d sit down with a prospective girlfriend and have her tell me her life’s story, including highs and lows, character profiles, descriptive narrative and secrets that she’s never shared with other people.

I tried that once with a previous girlfriend. After a half-dozen dates, I asked her to tell me her story – the tale of who she is and how she came to be whom and where she is. I was less than impressed when she began and wrapped up her biography in a span of about 5 minutes. She told me a bit about her brother, and a bit about her sister. I found out what her father does for a living, and got a listing of the places in which she has lived. None of these things got me any closer to understanding who she was, though, which was the ultimate goal of the story. Even questioning didn’t elicit much better descriptions of the events through which she had lived or the things that she has done.

I’ve started to suspect that my reticence and awkwardness around people comes from the fact that I live in a world populated almost exclusively by myself, and into which other people scarcely intrude. Solitude breeds curious people, and when left to their own devices, they develop strange habits and unconventional ways of looking at the world around them. In a way, I think that I ought to be glad that I live in the manner in which I do, because it has freed me from the socializing influences which lead to the (erroneous, in my view) conformity of opinion on a wide range of issues in other people.

My current state of living alone can’t really be to blame for who I am today, though. Some part of me still clings to the Freudian idea that most of our personality quirks are taught to us during childhood, or are reactions to our childhoods, and I’ve begun to suspect that my solitude was taught in just such a fashion.

My family and I have never been particularly close (with one notable exception). My parents aren’t really demonstrative or close to each other. They’ve slept in separate beds for as long as I’ve been able to remember, usually at opposite ends of the house (my mother says that my father snores like an electric saw and she’s right). I can’t recall my parents ever having hugged each other, or kissed. In fact, they weren’t really lovers and sweethearts, but instead were friends who got married to erect a façade of normalcy to hide their unconventionalities from the world. Where most people have parents, I have people who could be better characterized as former roommates.

My family has never been particularly keen on verbal closeness, either. Both of my parents worked for the State government while I was growing up, and frequently went on long business trips to various parts of the state or to national conferences around the country. I don’t believe that we ever got a phone call from either my mother or my father while they were out on the road. If my father was going out on the road to monitor nursing homes, he told us where he would be and how to reach him in an emergency, and then would be gone for a couple of weeks. When he came home, life resumed as normal. My mother is slightly more demonstrative verbally, but not really much more than my father. A few years back, she went on a vacation (my parents also go on separate vacations) to Europe, where she visited the Netherlands and England. She was gone for a decent amount of time (it must have been about a month and a half), and during that time she sent me a single postcard with a half-dozen words on it.

My parents never really call me on the telephone. When I was living at the University of Kansas, they almost never called. Now, living in my apartment, they don’t call me either. They didn’t even get me a birthday card this year.

When I moved from KU back to my parents’ home north of the river, I did so because it was closer to my parents. I don’t know if I’ve ever said this to many people, but I was accepted to every law school at which I applied. Most all of them offered me scholarship money. One in New York even offered me $40,000 a year under what it called the “Presidential Scholars Program.” I turned them all down in favor of my current law school for the sole reason that it would give me a chance to try to create the kind of relationship with my parents that I had observed with my few friends at KU when their parents came to visit from far away places, and about which I had heard so much.

My parents were quick to disappoint. Instead of a son, I was a boarder. I paid a share of the bills through a monthly rent check. We even drew up a crude contract that my father said would help him if he needed to ensure payment at a later date.

When I relate these things, I keep thinking of the little baby monkeys in a famous psychological experiment. The psychologist took the baby monkeys and gave them a choice between a fake mother in the cage made out of wire and a nearly identical wire mother that was covered in fur to make it soft. The only catch was that the soft mother also emitted electric shocks that hurt the baby monkeys. The baby monkeys invariably preferred and sought comfort from the cloth mother, and when the electric shocks started coming, simply clung even tighter to their pretend guardian.

I’m not suggesting that I’m somehow a damaged baby monkey (they all turned out to be unsociable and crazy when they matured – absolutely true – and most had to be euthanized for the safety of other monkeys in their enclosures), but I think that my upbringing was marked by an absence of the warmth and intimacy that one might typically associate with childhood and family. As such, it doesn’t seem unusual to me to go without talking to my parents for months on end, and to go for days without ever speaking to something that can respond to me (you’d be surprised how many times I catch myself arguing with myself in my car or telling my oven how my day went). But some part of me instinctually knows that this is not how human relationships are supposed to function.

What brought this out is the fact that, today, a friend of mine touched me. She reached out and touched my arm, and then tried to tickle me. One sidelight of being alone so much is that you don’t have the influences of other people to help you determine whether your thoughts and actions are weird. So I don’t know whether other people really do this or not, but I keep track of times when people touch me. Hugs… handshakes… you name it. People don’t touch me, so when they do, I count it as being something special. Before today, the last time that I made actual physical contact with another human being is when I was buying some groceries about 3 weeks ago. I signed my name to the receipt and when I handed it to the cashier, his hand brushed mine.

I don’t know how often people usually touch other human beings. People in my family don’t really touch each other that much, so I don’t have much to compare it all to, but I’d bet that most people make physical contact with other human beings more often than I do. I wonder if it’s healthy to be like them and if so, does that make my way of living unhealthy by comparison?

In a way, I think that blogging is part of my response to the solitary life I lead, as is my habit of trying to have deeply intimate conversations with people, one-on-one. They are both ways of trying to force that gap between myself and other people to become narrower. On the one hand, attempting to force closeness via deeply personal revelations seems shallow and manipulative. At the same time, though, I’m not sure that I can be any different than I am right now. My driving motivation in most of the things that I do, on an interpersonal level, is a nonstop search to find connection with someone. More than anything else, I want to experience some connection with people, to see through their eyes and to know their minds from one end to another, to share a joke, or just to have someone who is willing to put their hand on my arm. My friends all, to some degree or another, provide me with small doses of these connections, if only for a short time in my life.

However quick and fleeting these connections, it brightens the otherwise bleak interpersonal landscape in which I operate and for that I am quite grateful. Thank you, one and all.

Fiat Justicia, Ruat Coelumtet [Let justice be done though the heavens fall]

(Warning: This post will likely be long, rambling, and contain gratuitous memories of cats, ruminations on the nature of American justice, and the sanitized description of the event which triggered this reflection.)

I don’t like most cats.

I said it. I’m not ashamed to have said it. That statement isn’t a justification for owning or liking dogs, since it is possible to own and like both dogs and cats simultaneously. While cats look cute and fuzzy, most cats with which I’ve come into contact are too mercurial in their temperaments for me to be comfortable around them.

Most of my experiences with cats come from my times as a child spent up at my aunt’s and grandmother’s house. They shared a small house in a small town in Kansas until my grandmother died a few years back. My aunt still lives in the house, and while the human occupants have changed, the feline occupants have mostly stayed the same.

Both my aunt and my grandmother (until her death) were ‘collectors.’ By that term, I mean that they were women of that type with which we are all familiar. They are older, single women who have few friends, keep to themselves, and have what is quite possibly too many cats in a single house. While most cat-ladies seem to have entirely feral cats living in their abodes, and have no idea how many cats are there, my aunt and grandmother were different. They knew all the cats by name, took proper medical care of all of them (had them spayed and neutered), and had regular baths, trips to the vet, etc. It was routine for their cats to live into their late teens and early twenties which is astounding, in cat-years. It’s just that they loved cats and liked to rescue them from euthanasia at the local animal shelter.

Despite being the ‘cat ladies,’ I found my times up at the house to be a good lesson in the rapid alterations of mood in cats.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved playing with the cats sometimes. I could get a brown paper bag and lay it on the floor on its side. Then I would run my fingers along the bottom end of the bag, and entice a cat to investigate. They would pounce into the bag and bat at the paper. It was quite a bit of fun. Other times, I would just lie on the couch while some of the cats would hop up and curl up next to me while I petted them. I can still remember the warm cat smell and the sound of their purring. Occasionally, they would even trap my hand under their paws and attempt to give my fingers a severe tongue-bath.

Apart from a few favorites (which all shared a common characteristic), the cats could change moods quite quickly, though. While one minute they would be purring contentedly and licking my fingers, thirty seconds later, they would spin around and bite those same fingers deeply enough to draw blood. While sometimes they would come when called and get petted, other times they would run from me as if I was the devil-incarnate, and hiss and spit at me when I finally found them.

My three favorites were named Sara, Othello, and Moses. The one characteristic that they shared was that they were only infrequently cross, if ever at all.

Sara (short for Serendipity) was a grey and black striped female cat. She was a heavy-set cat, and a little on the soft side. She was clearly overweight and spent most of her time sleeping in a sunny patch on top of a table by one of the windows. Unlike most of the cats, she almost never seemed to be in a bad mood. Part of me simply says that she was too lazy to work up the energy to bite or scratch at people, and that may be true. The only times I ever saw her moving around at top speed was when the kitty-treats bag was opened or when catnip powder was poured all over the sidewalk leading up to the front door of the house on their occasional ‘outdoors’ days. Sara lived to be about 18.

Othello was huge. He was a white male cat that weighed about 30 pounds. I’ve never known a cat to be that large since without being grossly obese. Othello, though, wasn’t a fat-cat. He was all muscle, and clearly a cat whose bloodline was replete with decent mousers, snake-killers, or bird-hunters. Only once did he ever bat at me, and when his paw connected with my hand, it actually hurt. Aside from his semi-scary appearance, he was one of the sweetest, most gentle cats I’ve ever met. If you were sitting on the couch watching television, he would jump up onto your chest and stare into your face, purring contentedly until he fell asleep. Othello died a few years back from a stroke at about 20 years old.

Moses, though, was my favorite cat of all of them. He was a medium-sized black cat that was sleek and lean. When I would arrive at my aunt’s house when I was little, I would make a quick survey of the rooms in the house until I found Moses and then I would sit and pet him. Moses clearly lived for pleasure. He was one of the first to hit the cat-nip when it was put out. He loved to be petted and would even roll over onto his back to let you rub his stomach (don’t try that with most cats – you’ll quickly find five pointy ends embedded in your hand). He had a little ‘sweet spot’ under his chin that he loved to have scratched and would purr really loudly when you found it. He carried himself with so much dignity that you might not have suspected that he was really a sweetheart underneath his stately manner. Moses’s 25th birthday is coming up soon, actually.

What brought up this little trip down memory lane is what happened to my aunt, my aunt’s house, and her cats this last week. When I went to visit my parents for their Easter lunch (I feel guilty for eating their food in celebration of their religious holidays), they told me the story.

My aunt had been having some leg pain and went on a trip to another city to get an MRI on her leg this last Thursday. Since she would be gone for part of the day, she thought it would be a great day to give the cats one of their ‘outside’ days. She opened up the lower half of her screen door, which gives the cats access to the yard. She then left for her appointment.

Not long after she left, apparently, a man down the street who owns some hunting dogs also left to go on a short day-trip. He left his hunting dogs in the care of a friend who would spend the day at the house and take the dogs out for walks during the day. Well, the friend took the dogs out on a walk and they got away from him. The friend called the police who set out on a hunt to find the missing dogs before they got hit by a car or something.

Well, these hunting dogs found my aunt’s yard, filled with cats. The cats fled from the dogs back through the screen door opening into the house. The dogs followed behind them and invaded my aunt’s home.

The police came by and saw the door open a bit and assumed that the owner (my aunt) was home and didn’t peek inside. If they had, they would have seen what my aunt saw when she came home a bit later.

The hunting dogs were still in the house when she got home. They had mauled several cats badly. A few of the cats are still in the veterinary hospital and may come out minus some eyes, ears, and limbs if they come out at all.

But the dogs apparently got old Moses. They managed to pull off one of his legs. Whether that was before or after they killed him isn’t known. They took his tail and his ears. And an eye. For an old cat, he apparently put up at least some fight because one of the dogs had one of his claws embedded in his face. They ripped out most of his chest and left his remains on the kitchen floor. The vet told my aunt that the death probably was quick, because they took out most of his lungs in the bite that did him in, but I’m not so sure that the other injuries wouldn’t have hurt before he died. They even bit off that place where the sweet spot used to be.

I’m shocked and dead-feeling at the thought of what happened to my poor old Moses and his dark black (turned charcoal with age) fur and sweet spot under his chin. But when I push all of those emotions aside and throw it down the well in my head, the cold and calculating part of me was working through the Tort consequences of this ordeal.

In American jurisprudence, we typically think that when someone suffers some harm that is traceable to another person’s actions or inactions, that other person ought to make the suffering party whole again. When I throw a baseball through my neighbor’s window, whether on accident or on purpose, I’ll be held liable to pay for the damage to the window and put a new one in.

Underlying our Tort system is the implicit understanding that everything in the world has a price. Money is a medium of exchange for value, and no matter what damage was done, some amount of money will return the equivalent level of value to the aggrieved party. In such a worldview (one I hold to be true) there is no difference between a rock, a tree, or a newborn infant in nature. The only difference between these objects is the magnitude of the price we would put on each. Indeed, even in recent legal history, we have made the realization that intangible things can suffer harms which are recompensable. If I cause you to suffer, I should be required to pay you the amount of money that it would take to restore you to the level of quality-living you enjoyed before I caused you to suffer.

Well, this dog owner, or perhaps the friend who was watching the dogs, engaged in actions or inactions which caused damage to my aunt, in the loss and damage of her property (her cats), and quite a bit of mental anguish. Theoretically, this man ought to be required to compensate her for her losses (at least in part). If I had my way, Moses would be appointed a guardian who could sue on his own behalf for the pain and loss he suffered, but so far, public opinion is not on my side yet.

What’s more to the point is the policy behind modern Tort law, though. While it is true that law is (with much greater nuance than I’ve attributed to it here) as I’ve described it, what’s more important is that the law is this way because we think it is right that the law be this way. As codified morality, we – as a society – have deemed this compensation principle to be something that justice requires of us. It isn’t an optional issue, but something that duty ought to compel of us.

Well, my aunt has dismissed the idea that she should even consult an attorney to determine the consequences of this affair. She soon will be getting vet bills for several thousand dollars (which she cannot afford to pay on her very meager salary), whether the mauled cats come out of the vet’s hospital alive or not.

People after a crisis are usually in the worst possible place to determine whether they need help. Just look at the number of abused women who refuse to press charges after the police show up to arrest their bastard husbands. When someone has been through something awful, a lot of times, they just want it to be over - even if that means it isn’t resolved the way that morality and duty say that it ought to be resolved.

And I’m not sure what to do about that or how to fix it.