The Internal Dialog

We’re already nine days into the new year and I realize I haven’t posted anything yet.  True, things have been busy.  Crazy busy.  But that’s no excuse.  After all, my mind is constantly churning out thoughts I seem to have no control over.

Spewing and spewing more words, phrases, ideas, and concepts than I can wrap my head around.  Nonstop.  Mass internal confusion.  The collision of thoughts like sub-atomic particles ricocheting around in a super collider.

Condensation trails in a cloud chamber.

It’s no wonder it’s tough to think and write cohesively.

What is that voice in our heads constantly telling us how the world is?  And I don’t mean that voice from the subconscious that warns us when we need it most – that’s our gut talking.  That’s intuition.  That’s something entirely different.

The Darkness and the Light

Fear, desire.  Lightness and dark.  The polar opposites are said to be interrelated.

But that doesn’t seem to match our perceptions of reality.  I mean, do people fearing some awful event actually have a secret or subconscious desire for that event to happen?  Self-flagellation??

I’m not really sure.

There is a growing body of literature talking about our power to manifest the things we want in life.  And I’m not sure how much credence to put in that line of thought.  This mystical power if activated improperly, by a negative focus, would rain terror down upon us.  And that seems to negate the concept of free will, or our ability to say “no thanks.”  “I don’t wish to be struck by lightning.”

So Many Buzz Words, So Little Time

From some of my prior writings, you know how I love buzz words.  Especially in the employee-employer context that I see so often in the management literature.

I’m not really sure what motivates people to “rebrand” and try to stake original claim to concepts that have been around forever, more or less.  And I’m also not seeing any of this “elevated thought” being put into actual practice by all of the “influencers” and so-called “thought leaders.”  In fact, I see the old traditional, industrial-age, top-down, hierarchical, my-way-or-the-highway management structure still thriving.

And regardless of all the hype about worker retention, the words of my past managers still ring in my head that “attrition is our friend.”  In other words, if you were one of the creative ones, the ones that offered innovative thoughts and solutions, that in anyway questioned authority and the old “we’ve always done it that way” mentality, well then, you needed to be driven out of the organization, not retained.  You were a threat to management.

In fact, if you were innovative, you were considered a direct and lethal threat to the management team that was busy (barely) trying to justify their own existence.  They didn’t want any smart folks replacing their glacial-moving, accomplish-as-little-as-is-necessary, paper-pushing to retain their Herman Miller “Cosm chair” complete with “auto-harmonic tilt, intercept suspension, and flexible frame” working “together to give them the feeling of weightlessness.” 🙂 

So, with that slightly cynical and sarcastic, yet realistic, intro, here are today’s buzzwords.  And there was a cluster of them today.  “Unbossing,” “servant leaders,” “knowledge workers,” and “compassionate directness.”

And now that the laughter has subsided . . .

Time for Review ?

Time is slipping away, and as we approach the end of another year it’s time for people to engage in reflection, projection, and resolution.

Some are already referring to this as being the end of a decade.  And they’re glad for it, calling it one big dumpster fire.

To others, it’s the end of another year of tumultuous political machinations.  Or perhaps, a role call of all those who died, famous and infamous, loved and unloved.

Others find victimization, trauma, sadness, and are truly heartbroken.

And to others still, it has been just another amalgamation of meaningless seconds ticking away on the clock of the Universe.

Lazy or Brilliant ?

My last post was a bit short.  And it really only listed out some research findings.  Although it was interesting research about the power of positive relationships.  And it did include some fun terms like “micro-aggressions,” “micro-experiences,” and “positive alacrity.”

I had to look up that last word “alacrity,” and it means “promptness in response, cheerful readiness.”

One could say that I didn’t put a lot creative effort into that post, or mockingly, and fairly, say that “I phoned it in.”

But sometimes shorter and simpler is better.  The acronym I used for this was “KISS.”  I used it as “keep it short and simple.”  In law school, it stood for “keep it simple stupid.” That’s kind of interesting because one might think that highly educated folks, like lawyers, might not mind long and detailed analyses.  It goes with the territory.

But people are pressed for time.  And maybe that time is not well spent on “legal briefs” or social media?

Fulfilling Relationships = Life

I really do like studies.  Even the ones where we think there are obvious conclusions, as if we didn’t need any documentation.

“Everybody knows that!”

But us humans do like to research.  To authenticate, substantiate, certify, justify, confirm, establish, corroborate, prove, support, validate.  Whatever word you want to use.

We like confirmation and quantification.

So, while I’m not overly surprised, I do find it intriguing that the research bears out that modern medicine has very little to do with our overall health – only about ten to twenty percent at best.  A full eighty percent or more is determined by our relationships.  At least that is what a seventy-five-year study conducted by the Harvard Medical School concluded.

To Have and to Hold – Part 8 – Dodge the Bullets

Four years after my first divorce, in a courtroom on the other side of the state, the parties were gathering to complete their divorce case.  Apparently, things were going really bad for the husband.  He knew he was going to lose it all, so it lost it all in a different way.

Mentally.

There was limited security in the courthouse.  No metal detectors.  The court relied mainly on its bailiffs to keep order.

The husband, seemingly an ordinary guy of even temperament, an aerospace technician, had stashed two pistols in his briefcase.  It wasn’t long before the gunfire began.

He shot and killed his wife.  Shot both his attorney and her attorney.  Shot a bailiff and a sheriff’s deputy.  Shot at, but missed the judge.  All before the police responded and took him down.

He sustained nine gunshot wounds – two to his head.

Before the paramedics arrived, and while he was still conscious, the story is that he exclaimed:

“Did I kill the bitch?!!  Did I kill the bitch?!!!”

Now that is some powerful hatred.  From a man who presumably, at least at one time, loved the woman he just killed.

To Have and to Hold – Part 7 – Bedtime Stories

They say time heals all wounds.  But that’s just a cliché.  Sometimes our minds gift us with the ability to forget, maybe selective dementia, erase the slate, ease the pain.  But other times, not-so-much.  And while writing about this stuff is therapeutic, it also raises those dead memories from the past.  Tears the scab off the old wounds and brings the pain right back to the surface again . . .

Oh, and I still have the paperwork. . . I’m afraid to throw it away.

***

To Have and to Hold – Part 6 – Oh Where, Oh Where Did My Property Go?

I was the charge nurse for a general surgical floor and you might say that things were a bit hazardous.  That’s actually putting it mildly.  You might have less risk of harm bungee jumping off the Kawarau Bridge in New Zealand with rubber bands wrapped around your ankles than receiving patient care under these circumstances.

Between sundown to sunup, just what would the body count be?

Working on the night shift meant that in addition to myself and a LPN, my staff was composed of a rotating group of five or six graduate nurses still waiting to see if they passed State Boards.  They weren’t licensed, but the hospital let them practice as though they were.   This small band of ragtag, inexperienced, semi-educated, youngsters and I had to take care of forty-nine very, very sick, post-op surgical patients.

We had twenty-four patients on cardiac monitors, and I was the only RN on duty and the only nurse certified in the reading and interpretation of EKGs.  I was the only nurse on that shift for that ward with any length of experience.  In addition to supervising my grads and ensuring their patients’ safety, I had to take a full load of my own patients.  And based on the hospital’s patient acuity system, each nurse would routinely be assigned 14 to 16 hours of patient care to deliver in an 8-hour shift.

Nice.

I worked those shifts at a full gallop.  And once the graduate nurses got their licenses, they would move on to other units and other shifts and be replaced by another group of graduates.  Thus, the five to six-month cycle of rotating bodies.  This always left me with a staff of inexperienced nurses who needed constant supervision and on-the-job training.

Crazy and dangerous as this was, we also had conflicting and distracting interpersonal situations to deal with during work hours because of the many doctor-nurse relationships.  It was quite a simmering stew of young women mixed with older, rich, prestigious men.

Soap opera and reality combined to form some pretty insane chemistry experiments.  Anything you can imagine, from nurses having “quickies” in the treatment room, to giving doctors blow-jobs in the bath room.  It was safe to say that there were more than just the patients’ body secretions floating about on the ward.

How long would a patient have to wait to get their call-light answered . . .

To Have and to Hold – Part 5 – The Alpha and Omega

* Ok folks, my apologies.  This chapter is a bit long at over 2500 words.  I had no idea where I’d go when I started writing this morning, but I thought it was important to provide some more personal history before getting to the technicalities of marital asset division.  To provide a better understanding.  Yeah, I was stupid.  Love is blind.  So at the risk of my own personal embarrassment here goes:

It’s said that every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  Of course, it’s a little more interesting to jump around a bit, so if you’re looking for chronological order in the tales of my marriages and divorces, well, you might have to string some of my posts together in a completely different way.

For instance, today, I’ll jump towards the end.  And then towards the beginning of my first marriage.  The Alpha and the Omega – in reverse order, of course.  Time to set the stage for the grand dissolution.  The first one.  Then wash, rinse, and repeat, maybe.  😊

To Have and to Hold – Part 4 – A Zigging and A Zagging

When my daughter was a teenager, I told her to avoid two things during her teenage years that could leave her struggling for financial gain and independence for the rest of her life.  Two Albatrosses, that could strangle and weigh her down and prevent her from ever getting ahead.

Smoking cigarettes and having babies.

These two things are incredible financial weights that can decimate monthly earnings, prevent you from going to college or learning a trade, and have the potential to actually impoverish you if take these on early in life.  Especially in your teens, before you’ve even start building a career.

But there are other weights we can acquire later in life just as devastating, and some might put marriage in that category.   Why, because they dissolve and turn into everlasting debt.  Or at least very long-standing debt.  The debt from a divorce can bankrupt you.

***

To Have and to Hold – Part 3 – Where the Rubber Meets the Road

I remember in my first semester of law school being in property class.  One of my fellow students was answering the professor’s question.  They grilled us pretty hard.  The Socratic Method.  My classmate made an error.  They had said,

“Well, that’s not fair!”

My instructor paused for a moment.  Chuckled.  And then replied.  “I was wondering how long it would be before someone used the ‘F’ word.  If you’re going to argue that something is not ‘fair,’ then you have to tell me why it is not ‘legally fair’.”

***

To Have and to Hold – Part 2 – Contract, What Contract?

So, what’s all this talk about a contract?

And forgive me, but this post is going to get a little technical.  But not too technical. 😊

If you haven’t, you might want to read part one first to understand this post’s jumping off point.  Also, nothing I’m going to talk about will cover all of the intricacies of the law, or the evolution of marriage law, nor will it constitute legal advice.  If you want true legal advice, please go hire an attorney.

Here we go . . .