Ape Man

Yesterday I was called into a back room for a highly secret unofficial conversation. The subject was a friend of mine. The stated goal was to explain to me why he was in danger of getting fired and why that option was not currently being pursued. But I think the unstated reason for the conversation was a desire to keep me from getting angry over the whole deal.

The underlying subtext was “We are trying to be as nice to him as we can be. So don’t get angry with us if we have to do what we have to do.”

In a perverse way, I was vaguely flattered that my opinion matters enough that people should feel compelled to explain themselves to me. On paper, I am nobody. So there is no reason for anyone to tell me these things, much less to try an justify themselves to me. But for some reason, they feel that it is worth some effort to keep me from getting angry. Even if the stuff they are telling me is none of my business.

So I put on my best poker face, made sympathetic sounds, and expressed my distress at the whole affair. And I tried to think of what I should do.

If I thought my friend was innocent, I would be on the warpath already. But I am pretty sure he is not. From what I know of him and from what I have heard from multiple sources, I am pretty sure he has done some dumb things.

So I guess that argues for him sinking or swimming on his own.

The only problem is that I feel that he has been more sinned against than a sinner as the old saying goes. It should make people wonder when a guy gets rave reviews from all over under a couple of different supervisors only for that to change with a particular change in supervision.

Moreover, I don’t think anyone realizes this guy’s true worth. He is more talented in almost every way then myself. But he is not recognized as such because he does not have my social skills.

And I guess those things are arguments for trying to help him out.

Expect for the fact that I don’t have the foggiest idea of how to do that.

Today was the first day in a long time that I got everything done that I wanted to get done. That was not too hard since my goal today was to tie up lose ends that I meant to get done yesterday and the day before.

I have way more stuff to do at work right know then I can possibly get done. In and of itself, that does not bother me. It simply means that a lot of stuff is not going to get done. And I have made it very clear to all the responsible parties what it is that is not going to get done (otherwise known as whining).

What does bother me is that the stuff that I am doing is the stupid stuff that I don’t really want to do. And the stuff that I do want to do is the stuff that is not getting done.

In part this is unavoidable. A guy got fired and somebody needs to pick up the work that he did. And since a lot of what he did was required by various regulatory bodies, it is kind of important. And since it is important, my Boss asked me to make sure that it all got done. He also made it clear that I did not have to do it all myself.

But since he is so overloaded himself, he has not taken a hands on approach in directing people to do this or that. Instead he has left it up to me to find my own help. And since I have no real authority, that means the only person who is really helping me is my partner in crime. And he has a lot of his own work that he needs to be working on.

Today I climbed up and down so many flights of stairs I lost count. I was thinking that my life has a kind of twisted resemblance to Kafka’s novel “The Trial”. I suppose that the fact that climbing lots of stairs makes me think of “The Trial” just proves that I am irredeemably weird.

And I can not really account for why I made the association in my mind. But I can say that the way I was feeling today made me see my life as dreary and bureaucratic and repetitive. And I felt like the the fact that I knew how everything is going to turn out was not stopping everything from happening excruciatingly slowly.

But my life has a twist that makes it different from the sufferings of poor old Josef K. It sometimes seems to me that I am just sailing through life while other people around me are ones who are doing the real suffering. I just inhabit courtroom and everyone else is on trial.

Just in the last week, one guy was fired, one guy had a heart attack, one guy had his wife died on him unexpectedly (she was in her 30s and had school age children). And those are just the events that everyone notices. It does take into account all the people around me who are struggling me with depression, drugs and alcohol, stress, and various other forms of hopelessness.

I think the reason that “The Trial” has become a classic in spite of being very depressing and unfinished is that it speaks to small part of ourselves that realizes that we were found guilty from the moment we are born. We just spend are lives proving the justice of the verdict in spite of our protestations of innocence. But maybe that thought is just more proof that I am I am irredeemably weird.

At any rate, I am always looking around trying to figure out when my summons is going to come. It does not seem right that I should be exempt.

Yesterday I started reading this series of stories in the New York Times about David Rohde and his experience in captivity. The series is not finished yet, but what I have read so far just blows my mind and disgusted me at the same time.

The articles have not taught me anything new about the Taliban or about how they are operating. Instead, I have been amazed and disgusted by David Rohde’s understanding of how the world works. I can’t believe that a grown man could travel around the world and still believe the things that he believes.

I know I should find none of what David Rohde express in the articles surprising. But I just can’t help thinking that nobody really believes the PC crap that they spout off all the time. When I am faced with evidence to the contrary, it still manages to shock me. Take this quote from the story for example,

” I wept, hoping it would create sympathy, and begged them to release us. All of my efforts proved pointless.”

What grown man thinks that weeping is going to get him sympathy with other men? As a general rule, a male who weeps in fear in front of men who are intimidating him only succeeds in de-humanizing himself in their eyes.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to make fun of him because he was weeping. Who knows how I would respond to the kind of stress that he was under.

The thing that bothers me is his casual assumption that it is reasonable to think that weeping might get you sympathy from your fellow males. On what planet did he grow up?

Now when I first read that I tried to be charitable. I tried to think that he was just trying to cover for the fact that stress got to him and he started crying. But latter on he goes on to say….

Tahir stared back, unmoved. Pashtunwali — an ancient code of honor practiced by ethnic Pashtuns in Afghanistan and Pakistan — prevented each man from showing fear and losing face.

Pashtunwali has nothing to do with the human male’s general attempt not to show fear in face of danger when that danger comes from another man. You could read about young men in America’s inner cities doing the same thing. Heck, most of us have witnessed the same sort of thing played out in real life or been part of the drama ourselves.

Experience teaches most males that showing fear is one of the best ways to encouraging a guy who wants to use violence to manipulate and control you.

Now that is not to say that you should be defiant or play the hero when you are surround by men with guns. The US military teaches its soldiers the to try to become “grey men” when they are captives. In other words, it trains them that they should try to act as if they have no fear, no defiance, no hope, no desire.

It is a difficult thing to describe with out writing a whole post on the subject. Best example I can think of that is familiar to everyone is how Jesus is portrayed as acting when he was a captive.

But the bottom line is that even when it is not smart to try to play the he-man, it still is not smart to play the coward. And I thought that this was a lesson most men learned at a very early age.