The day the earth stood still

My world, as I knew it, ended on Monday.

I have been married 21 years. Some of that time was difficult, filled with stress, conflict. Not much fun. Well, ok. A lot of that time was like that. There were also great times, intimate, close, wonderful times. Vacations in Florida, house-building, adopting children, starting careers, adopting pets, holding them in your arms as they died. Great and terrible stuff.

I had this memory, detailed in some of my posts, of the first 10 years of my marriage as incredibly tough, harrowing years that we survived as a couple because we stuck together and were totally committed to each other. I recalled occasional passion and intimacy in the midst of what was often a living hell. I missed that time in a way, at least the good parts.

On Monday, I decided, after months of waffling and soul-searching that I needed a change, some way for me to obtain the intimacy and passion which had left our marriage and which I now craved. We seemed unable to get it back, and I could not live without it anymore. We were distant and dispassionate roommates. I wrote my wife a letter telling her that I needed to take her up on an earlier offer to have an affair to get those needs met. I told her I was absolutely committing to our marriage, that I would no longer consider the possibility of divorce, that I would seek to improve our marriage through whatever means necessary, but that I need to feel free to look outside it for that missing spark.

I was proud of myself. I had finally made a bold, if imprudent decision for my own happiness while following the rules I want to follow for myself. I want to be an open, honest, truthful person. An honorable individual. Someone I can be happy to see in the mirror. I am not always that person. I am not always brave enough to do what I need to do either.

My wife requested a lunch appointment with me. We met and she started telling me stories. Stories about herself. Stories about those hard but good first years of our marriage. It turns out she had engaged in a series of sexual affairs during that period. The first was 17 years ago, after about 5 years of marriage. Most were short, but one lasted two years. That one cost me the most: it took away time, energy and passion that should have been going to me over an extended and very critical time of our lives. Most were 13-17 years ago. There was one more affair 5 years ago, while she was overseas adopting our second child. That affair briefly resumed last summer and again in fall. She will be going on vacation to reconnect and stay with an old flame for a few days next week. The number and scope of her sexual adventures was a shock in rather the same sense that a thermonuclear detonation is loud.

This confession of hers was her acceptance of my offer for an open marriage, and her first act of openness. To her great credit, it was an act of unparalleled bravery. It could have led to the end of our marriage, something I know she values more than almost anything else.

There simply are not words that can express what I felt. I could say shock, anger, surprise, bafflement, resentment, hurt. Those words are not inaccurate, but they utterly fail to capture the depth of the emotions they portend to describe. I felt like the biggest idiot on the block, the wide-eyed country bumpkin in the big city, the only person in the room not getting the joke. This is a woman I knew for 25 years, with whom I entered adulthood and now middle-age, a person I *knew* that I knew, to her core, as I know my right arm and as I think she knows me. I now feel like I know nothing of her. She is a stranger posing as my wife. Think of "Invasion of the body snatchers", in real life.

My life and universe kind of sucked before Monday. I was not happy, but I thought I understood my world, my life. I thought I knew the fabric and foundation of my life and that of my wife, the nature and challenges of our relationship. I thought I knew our shared history. The foundation that was my understanding of the world vanished. I now feel completely lost. I feel like everything before Monday was an illusion, a dream based on some story I read somewhere. I know intellectually that this is not the case, but this is what it feels like. My wife was the core of my world. As unhappy as we were, she was the center of this universe I thought I knew. I feel adrift, directionless. I know that all of this is just shock, I also know that reality is different than it feels now. But this is what it feels like right now. Some day I hope to gain perspective on what happened, who I am, who my wife is. That day is not today.

Do you recall me writing "I am not jealous. At all". No, really, I wrote that. I meant it too. The difference between theory and practice in this case should be noted as huge. I actually felt myself begin to lose contact with reality that first night. I think they call it a nervous breakdown.

I know that she is mostly the person I know. She just has a part of her which led this parallel life hidden from me all these years. A part of her that I had no clue of, completely opposite of the person I thought I knew. She loves me, she really does, I know this. She is still the good person I have described in previous posts, she just had this secret, this very big secret.

Having been so open about my wife's transgressions, I will say that I also had an affair last summer. While the core of that affair was the intimacy and romance, it did culminate in a sexual encounter. My affair was wonderful, beautiful, it transformed me and re-awoke the part of me that understood beauty and love. It was also wrong. I guess it is a good thing that I did, because I understand first-hand how two people meet, fall in love, connect and meet each other's needs. I should also say that had it not been for my lover's inerrant moral compass, I don't think I would have terminated the affair so quickly, if at all. In my more reflective moments I have a hard time being too judgmental. But I try anyway ;-).

My wife's affairs seem to be an escape hatch from bad periods in our relationship, when there was stress, conflict, or perhaps to get needs met that weren't being met by our marriage. Mine was driven more by the realization that life was passing me by and I had missed out on a lot of stuff (a.k.a. mid-life crisis). But I think for both of us the mechanism was that age old one: we met someone and fell in love.

The end of the story is still being written. We have decided to try this very, very strange thing called an "open" marriage. I have no idea if it will work.

The early indications are encouraging. Since she and I came clean with each other, the barrier that had existed between us has lifted. We are able to discuss, really discuss, our feelings, frustrations and hopes for ourselves, our marriage. We have been intimate and connected in all the ways that I yearned for in the past few months. The barrier and distance that this Big Secret had placed between us had limited our intimacy. That impediment is now gone. The irony of the situation is not lost on me.

I am certain I will never be able to trust my wife in matters of sexual fidelity again, and for that reason, the very notion of monogamy is absurd: I would never know if statements of fidelity were real or just another cover-up for another series of affairs the next time we hit a rough patch.

I am happy, excited, nervous, scared. This is giving me the chance to live that youth I always felt cheated of, but also putting me on a precarious path. The humor of this happening after all my previous posts is too precious for words. You cannot make this stuff up. Really. "I wish my wife would have an affair" I think I recall writing.

Life is full of surprises isn't it?

Take a good look at your spouse, friends, co-workers. They may not be who you think they are.

Do you know who you are? I'm about to find that out about myself.

I think I feel the planet begin to rotate again. Let's see what tomorrow brings.

Happiness

I had an epiphany last night.

I was speaking to my wife about happiness, or the lack of it in my life. I pointed out her amazing ability to come to a decision point, evaluate reality exactly as it is, make a decision, and NEVER look back. She never second-guesses herself, wastes little time on worrying about the consequences or moral implications. She embraces and enjoys her choices. She pursues her choices without holding anything back: fully, completely, and with abandon. She is unreservedly immoderate in her commitment to being happy. Of my statement, she said "that is so completely true". This is a wonderful gift. It allows her the freedom to make choices in the pursuit of happiness, even questionable ones, and live in the present. It allows her the freedom to live. It has enabled her to not only pursue personal happiness, but also accomplish amazing feats: start a non-profit, switch careers (twice), go on hiking and biking adventures. Sometimes there are bad consequences to her boldness, but usually not. I told her I envied her ability to do that. Her response was that maybe that could be one of the things I tried to change about myself. She is right. Absolutely.

If I wanted to flatter myself, I would say that I have a strong sense of morality or at least responsibility. That is probably partially true. Another view, probably more accurate, is that I allow myself to be ruled by fear. I fear the possibly negative consequences of a bad decision, and allow that fear to "force" me into a very constrained and rigid life. As this blog shows, I agonize endlessly over decisions, afraid to pursue my happiness, because Bad Things could happen. Not only does this prevent me from making choices that would result in my happiness, but even when I do, I find it difficult to own them and enjoy them. How utterly stupid.

I have lived my life so prudently and cautiously that I now have a lot of regrets over lost opportunities to love, to travel, to have adventures, to live "dangerously", to be free and happy. I see life through the lenses of a 30-year outlook. I rarely live entirely in the present, the now, and have hard time enjoying it. What a tragedy, what a real loss and what a waste of a life.

My epiphany was that I need to be more like my wife. I need to be happy. In this lifetime. I need to live more in the present, not in a 30-year future. I need to occasionally make choices that make me happy, right here, right now. I need to own them, embrace them, enjoy them. I need to at least occasionally forget my responsibilities, duties, what I "should" do, stop imagining evertything bad that *could* perhaps happen. Make a choice and go with it. Immoderately and imprudently.

This is hard for me. It involves the risk of failure, rejection, and loss.

I don't want to live with any more regrets over things I was afraid to do and thus didn't try. If I fail, having tried, good. I just don't want to not try out of fear anymore.

No more fear.

Depression

Depression's a bitch.

There are as many reasons for depression as there are people I think. My own experience with depression has taught me a few things about myself. The first is that I think I am naturally a rather happy, social, gregarious person. Secondly, I need people and social interaction to be happy. I don't do well all by myself. Thirdly, I have a well-developed stress response, much too well developed.

The upshot of the above is that when I am relatively stress-free (job, money, marriage) and have active friendships, I am happy. When life turns to crap, and my social life dries up, I get depressed.

Regrettably, that happens to be where I am now. I am finding it difficult to focus, to work (thus making my work-stress worse, funny thing that), to enjoy or even put up with my kids, to relate to others. I find it difficult to talk or enjoy the company of other people. I can't sleep. I can't get myself to exercise, which also doesn't help. I seem to be suffering from anhedonia, one good side-effect of which is that I don't really want to drink... much, but I can't seem to enjoy much of anything either. My mood could best be described as "flat". I'm not so much sad as I feel nothing. I also recall this being a response I've had in the past to stress: just shutting down to be able to deal with it and get through the day, do what I must do and carry on.

I am buoyed by the recollection of happy times, even rather recently, and the firm belief that my depression is entirely situational. The most useful statement ever made to me was by a counselor I was seeing years ago. He said something to the effect that there are times when it is completely normal to be depressed. I think this is one of those times. I'm normal, my life just happens to really suck right now. I will get through it, this isn't my brain, this is my brain on crap.

Being a person of plans, here is mine: I am in the process of selling a house, that will be a huge stress relief as well as a financial one. That should happen by mid-March. Around that time, perhaps in May, I need to resolve, one way or another, my marriage issue. Fix it, really fix it, or get the hell out. I simply cannot continue as it is now. I want to start running again. That is hard no matter what, doubly so when it is cold and double that again when I am down. This will give me a chance to "live on purpose". I am great at making plans, follow-through... not so much.

A friend recently posted this quote on her blog, the single best quote I have ever read, bar none:
You took my joy, I want it back.
--Lucinda Williams

That is my statement to the universe: I want my joy back, I want my happiness back, I want my life back.

I'm coming to take them.

Crossroads

I seem to have a knack for finding myself at crossroads in time. Mere coincidence no doubt, mostly due to when I was born, but rather intriguing nonetheless when taken as a whole.

I spent my childhood in France, my family having moved there when I was 5, in 1969. This was only one year after the tumult of the 1968 student revolution, which led to sweeping changes in the French educational system. These changes were not yet really in place and I went to a school in an older area, so was one of the last entering classes to experience the old system. I wore a blouse of sorts ("tablier") over my clothes in school, to keep them clean. This was necessary of course because we wrote with a quill, the steel kind that you dip in an inkwell every line or so. The teacher would come by with a big jug-o-ink and fill you up when you ran out. Corporal punishment was standard as was public berating and humiliation by the teacher. Pink Floyd's "We don't need no education" resonates with me in a most profound way. Of course we never spoke in class without first raising our hands. My male classmates wore shorts year-round. While the Paris area isn't exactly Fargo, North Dakota in winter, it isn't exactly Miami either. We had months of low-40s rain and some freezing temperatures too. No matter, the little blue-legged boys would run around me in my big, warm, American clothes. I'll blog about how always being a weirdo freak scarred me some other time.

France was coming out of the old post-war era, but still was very old-world in many ways. For example, indoor plumbing was not universal out in the country where I lived. Some people would still wash their clothes in the public outdoor wash-buildings "lavoires" and you could see them haul water in Jerry cans. Water in the cities was in fact not always safe, which was the original reason for bottled water, which later became a fad in the the U.S. and is still with us today. Most houses didn't have showers and little old ladies in black would would be seen walking around town doing their groceries and going to church.

I grew up near a woods in which there was still a rusting German rail-gun and lots and lots of bomb-crater ponds. I grew up in the shadow of The War (WWII, although older people used that term to refer to WWI). Many of my friends' parents had fought in the war or in the post-war wars of independence in Indochina and Algeria. I grew up on a diet of war stories from my best friend's Dad who was a real war hero, having served as a scout in a French unit attached to a British division. They would go into northern France and scout out German positions. He was strafed once by a British "Mosquito" fighter plane who mistook his squad for a German one. Wearing the British summer uniform of shorts, they dove into a nettle patch to escape.

I really feel now that I grew up between worlds: the old post-war France one sees in the movies and the new France that is fully developed and modern.

My childhood took place in the 70s. As a result, I came of age right at the end of the counter-cultural movement of the 60s and 70s. I grew up listening to the music of that era, and hearing the stories of sex, drugs and rock and roll, only to come of age (back in the U.S.) to Reagan, the preppy movement, Young Republicans and a lot of bad music. I never saw all the drugs and sex I had grown up hearing about, I felt downright cheated.

I already mentioned in a previous blog that when I discovered the world of computers, it was right exactly at the crossroads between the old heroic days of the mainframe and the beginning of the modern era of computing, ushered in by the PC. I was a freshman in 1982 when the PC was invented. So I never actually read a core dump in hex, but I still took COBOL and assembly-language classes.

I pursued a career in science, Physics specifically. When I graduated in 1994 with my PhD, I discovered that the end of the Cold War had resulted in a very sharp decrease in the perceived need for basic research. No one was hiring Physicists. I graduated just in time to witness the end of a certain kind of heroic era of Big Science (think Apollo project). Oh well.

Right when I was graduating, the old Soviet empire was falling apart. In our lab we got a bunch of really great Russian equipment (and scientists) for cents on the dollar. It also felt like I was coming of age at the transition betwen the old Cold War-dominated world and the global political reality in which we now live with the U.S. as the only global superpower (for now... did someone say China?).

Right out of school (1997, I went back for another degree), I hired into IBM, at a time when it was changing from the old mainframe and hardware-dominated company it had become huge with, into the new software and services behemoth it is now. This transition meant a decreased emphasis on R&D and internal development, ultimately resulting in me losing my job there. It also very much felt like the passing of the era of Big Blue when that meant something heroically uncompromising. Many companies went through that transition which is at least somewhat sad.

So here I am now in Austin, Texas. Although I am told that Austin has been changing rapidly for a long time, it now also feels to me like it is on the cusp of really becoming a new Silicon Valley, of entering a new phase of even faster development. We'll see, it is usually hard to tell these things until after the fact.

I guess all eras are crossroads of some sort or another, few things remain unchanged in our world for very long. It's likely that someone 10 or 20 years younger or older could present a similar story with different events, but this is mine.

Sex vs. Romantic Love: Love wins

This won't be very eloquent, thus matching most of my other entries, but I can across this study showing that sex and romantic love affect mostly different parts of the brain. Moreover, love has a much stronger effect on the brain than sex.

http://www.livescience.com/health/050531_love_sex.html

That makes so much freaking sense to me, I can't even begin to tell you.

Living on purpose

I want to live on purpose. What I mean is that I don't want to live just doing whatever happens my way, "accidentally" if you will. I want to decide what I want to do and do it.

Living deliberately has always been something I wanted to do, but had a really hard time doing, either because I can't decide what I want or having decided what I want, I fail to follow through on it. I think most people have at least somewhat of a hard time with this, so I am not unusual, but this is no less of a problem for being common.

This recently came up as an issue in my life for a couple reasons. The first will be familiar to anyone who has read my blogs. I am trying to decide if I want to remain married. There are a lot of considerations, but I have enough information that I should be able to decide. That isn't really the hard part. The hard part is being willing to get a divorce if the answer is "no" and really accepting reality exactly as it is today if the answer is "yes".

The second reason that living "on purpose" is important now, is that, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the turmoil in my marriage, I began drinking excessively and smoking, even though neither had been much of an issue at all in the first 43 years of my life. I don't want to smoke. I don't want to drink excessively either. Both make me feel bad physically as well as mentally. I don't want to be a drunk or a smoker. I want to be a runner.

I have tried cutting back several times, but moderation doesn't seem to work. So I decided to stop altogether. It just so happens that all three of my friends have also decided to stop drinking and the two who smoked (somewhat casually) decided to stop smoking too. They inspired me, particularly my closest friend who has really struggled with this, and is now starting week 3 of total abstinence.

I want to be able to decide that I will not smoke or drink, and do so. At some later stage, I think I want to decide I want to drink moderately (2 drinks/day) and do that. But for now, at least for a while, I want to go completely without.

I want to be able to decide that I will start running everyday and do that.

So here's to being who I want to be... cheers.

Motorcycles = Sex-on-wheels

This will either make sense to you or not, depending on whether you dig motorcycles or not.

When I was young I owned a 1978 Yamaha 650 Special II, it was a beautiful thing. Every time I got on it I felt virile, adventurous, happy. One of the concessions I made when I got married was to get rid of it after we had kids. That was 12 years ago.

Last summer, fully embracing my mid-life crisis, I bought a 2003 Triumph Bonneville T-100 . A finer machine was never made. I was amazed that after all these years I could hop on that thing and feel 20 again. I LOVE THAT BIKE. I don't even know if I can explain what I feel when I am on it. But I'll try.

When I am riding, I feel inexplicably sexy and adventurous. I feel raw exhilaration, the adrenaline rushing through me. I feel alive and happy, strong and slightly dangerous (well that part might be easy to explain). The thumping vibration of this beastly machine is an almost sexual sensation, as cliche'ed and idiotic as it sounds. The instant speed and ability to outrun any car on the road is a guilty and juvenile pleasure that never seems to get old. Particularly satisfying is the ability to race some hot sports car driven by a testosterone-laden youth (up to the speed limit), leaving him in the dust. I love putting on my vintage leather jacket and having my daughter tell me I look "beautiful". The truth is, I feel beautiful, glorious even. When I put my helmet on, I am a knight in armor, fully prepared to perform some heroic act. On my motorcycle I am Evel Knievel, the Fonz, Marlon Brando in "The Wild One" (he rode a Triumph too btw), or Steve McQueen in "The Great Escape".

How stupid is that? Pretty stupid I'd say.


The fact is I don't understand why I feel this way. It's just a machine, a mode of transportation. There are millions of motorcycles, all driven by ordinary, boring people. Like me. I know this. And yet, when I am on my bike, I am this beautiful, confident, glamorous person, at least in my own mind, which is what counts.

And the fact is that I don't care how stupid this is, how juvenile and pointless, how dangerous and crazy it might be. I love who I am when I am riding. I want to enjoy and savor every precious moment I have on that thing. I want to accept and appreciate those feelings at face value without scrutinizing them too closely for as long as they last. I want to embrace everything that life has to offer me and squeeze the last drop of joy and excitement from everything I can.

Life is short. Prudence is overrated.