A few random thoughts

It's been a long time since I was here, and now I've got a collection of things to say. In no particular order:

Hitting the Mark
I was recently talking to my friend R, who lives in New York. While discussing our plentiful personal problems, I remarked that my consistent problem seems to be that I constantly either overestimating or underestimating my abilities. I am certain I can do something, and then it goes poorly. Or I'm thinking "I could never do that" at the same time someone else is saying to me "You'd be perfect for this!"

I could hear R thinking for a minute and then she said, "Well, that is really sort of the purpose of life, isn't it? We're just sort of trying to figure out things, and we tend to overshoot or undershoot. I mean, it's really hard to hit the mark every time, isn't it?"

Yes. It is really hard to hit the mark every time, or even consistently. We give trophies and gold medals and prizes and talk shows and lots of money to people who can consistently hit the mark. Tiger Woods and Barry Bonds - they can consistently swing and hit those balls in the right way....and it's not some fluke. LOTS of other people try all the time to do it, and they can't. Stephen Colbert is pretty much always funny when he's speaking off the cuff - I've seen it, live, on more than one occasion and it's damn impressive. In fact, he had Tom Hanks on a while ago, and Tom's mantra was this: "I hit my mark, and tell the truth." Professionals can hit their marks, consistently.

Me? I tend to flounder. Sometimes I sing so well I can't believe it's me, and sometimes I sing so poorly, I can't believe it's me. Well, I'm working on it.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
Speaking of Tiger Woods & Barry Bonds....I recently saw this great documentary, The King of Kong, about a real class of totally unsung competitive performers: classic arcade gamers. Apparently, there's a whole structure of competition, with world's records and live events....where you can, you know, sit around and watch someone else play Donkey Kong. Should you want to do that.

Which, at one point, I couldn't even imagine anyone wanting to, but after seeing this movie, I'm very open to the idea. I mean, I still don't want to do that myself, but the documentary - which was essentially about the world Donkey Kong champ and the contender for the title, as they duke it out (well, they send videos of their games to an arbiter for viewing, so not so much duking out, really) - the film was unexpectedly gripping. "You want to watch this?" my partner had asked, telling me the subject. "I'm not against watching it, but I am not interested per se," was my lukewarm and uninformed reply. Halfway through the movie, I was totally absorbed in the story and by the end, I was absolutely involved - oh, the politics! ah, the humanity! the cruelty, the nobility, the classic and eternal fight between good and evil! I tell you, it was all in this movie about the highest Donkey Kong score. Just trust me. Rent the film.

Showering
Who else has trouble dropping things in the shower? Is it just me? Soap, we all know, is slippery; my small hands combined with these giant slabs of hand-cut soap (I get free samples from work - why do they make foufy soap like giant bricks? To justify the cost?) only spells trouble - and the THUNK when they fall! I think I'm going to wake up all my roommates.

The other day I had this particularly clumsy shower. Like many older houses, there's no storage built in, so we suffer with one of those wire "tension" poles that have rickety shelves. A recently departed (moved out, not dead) roommate vacated one of the more coveted level shelves, which I promptly moved everything of mine to, but my stuff still tends to slide to the edge and then right off. I was picking up bottles and tubes only to have more fall when I put things back. I think I had about 10 - 15 objects fall in one shower. What the hell?

You Decide Your Own Level of Involvement
The issue of EGO had recently come up - a fellow volunteer with a singing group we collectively run decided he wanted less involvement, which is fine. But he cited ego among the collective members as a reason. Our weird ego trips.

Now, I thought a lot about this and talked to a few people; it's interesting. I don't think about my own ego very much, or really anyone else's either, and so, like we all seem to do these days, I looked it up on Wikipedia:

In modern English, ego has many meanings. It could mean one’s self-esteem, an inflated sense of self-worth, or in philosophical terms, one’s self. However, according to Freud, the ego is the part of the mind that contains the consciousness. Originally, Freud used the word ego to mean a sense of self, but later revised it to mean a set of psychic functions such as judgment, tolerance, reality-testing, control, planning, defense, synthesis of information, intellectual functioning, and memory.

These functions all seem crucial and neutral. So when did the ego get such a bad rap? The line between self-esteem and inflated self-worth seems fairly fuzzy. One friend suggested that motive had a lot to do with it (and I'm paraphrasing her here): IF you are jumping up, taking control of a situation, because 1) you can and 2) you are good at it and/or 3) no one else is doing it, and IF you are doing it with the idea of service, that is one thing. If you are taking control when others want it too, or doing it with the idea that last time the praise felt so good and don't you want that again....well, then it's not a waste of your time to keep an eye on it for possible abuse.

It's a sticky point. Especially in self-made, self-regulated, unstructured volunteer groups - and the Bay Area is chock full of them - this issue of who does what and who controls what seems to be a perennial focus. Personally, I'd be glad if other people ran the organization and I could just show up to enjoy it, but they don't. Most people just want to have the fun and not do the work. As one member of the group said, often those who build the playground don't get to play. This is understandable, and even okay. Like Fight Club, you decide your own level of involvement.

But then - and I notice this from the workplace to families to almost any group - the people with less power will complain. They will say, I want to do more. Well, every so often, some force is preventing you from doing more, but in many cases, the way to do more is to - well, actually DO more. Decisions are made by those who show up.

This is not to say that is the solution. I feel I've developed a healthy sense of confidence and self-esteem, but not everyone has. How do you get the people who haven't done that to do more, to overcome whatever issues and participate more? Assuming they want to, which they do, because that is what they mean when they say they want to decide more. No one likes to be run over.

We come back to the original question, of balance, of hitting the mark. I have no answers for these last few questions, only the questions, although I find asking the right questions seems to often be, in itself, an answer.