Gainful Employment

[greenstorm]

So there we go. That was a week-and-a-half job search has got me a place with a super-awesome landscape maintenance/design company, a small one, that's both organic and has a leaning towards permaculture. In fact, she has the word permaculture in her brochure.

It's in North Van, but I think I'll learn a lot from her. This is better than just working outdoors. This is doing something close to what I wanna be doing right now.

I start either Friday or next week, so today is a Wreck Beach day for sure.

I'm slowly peeling people off the need-to-talk-to list. It feels good. I think I'm down to six calls or so I need to make.

It's hot and sticky. I didn't get anywhere near enough sleep-- I went to visit Eva and Ryan after the unexpectedly long interview last night, and had missed my skytrain home by the time I got my bike to Drew's door. It was *really* good to see people, even if angst seems to be the word of the day. I will nap at the beach today with Mike and Eva and my internet stalker, do feel free to join us.

Man, I wish I had my drum to take down. I need to get a travel djembe, but first I need to make my rent for next month. Lesigh.

I missed my bike. Tomorrow maybe I'll head out on it. I was gonna bike to Wreck, but the watermelon makes that unwieldy.

The album of the day is still Barenaked Ladies' Gordon.

I've been thinking a lot about hurting people in relationships. It's been a super-recurring theme for me, both in my life and also in the last couple of weeks especially. Way back at the beginning of all this, I didn't believe it was ever okay to do anything to cause someone you loved pain. As the years march on I realise that is an impossible goal, and the line sort of fuzzes out: deliberate unwanted pain is not cool, totally unintentional pain there's not much you can do about, but what about things you do from ignorance, stupidity, or necessity? How much of that sort of thing is okay? How much is causing someone pain an okay side-effect? Anyhow, I know this keeps coming up for me because I can't really work through it-- I still haven't really accepted that it happens at all.

This tends to make me a really crappy girlfriend because I'm so shocked and appalled by my hurting someone that I totally suck at comforting and/or fixing things, I just get distracted. That, at least, I'm getting a handle on.

I made a kickass sourdough bread pudding. Thanks, Tim, for the bread. I should go eat breakfast, maybe nap before the beach, and get off this introspective trip. I haven't had enough sleep to make it very effective.

Comments

[estrellada.livejournal.com]

At this point on the merry-go-round of various types of hurting and being hurt, I think that just as important as 'the WHYs of pain' is the 'taking responsability for pain" - what I mean is:

I will hurt people, and when I do I have to accept:
-they might not trust me
-they might be angry, hurt, distant
-they might remove themselves from my life, or remove themselves from a relationship

The thing that has always angered me the most is when someone hurts me, and then acts as if my reactions to the hurt are irrational, and won't accept that the simple act of hurting someone, intentional or unintentional, for rational or irrational, avoidable or unavoidable reasons WILL and DOES affect future interactions.

[greenstorm.livejournal.com]

Thank you, that's really helpful.

That's why I need to accept that it happens, so I can accept that it has happened, I guess.

[estrellada.livejournal.com]

and deal with the consequences...I've been looking at all of that in the past few years, trying to deal with my own 'slash and burn' relationships of my early years and WHY I couldn't talk to certain people..and with my most recent Big Bad and WHY I couldn't deal with the other party.

It's hard work, and not always rewarding, being responsable, but I think if we're going to NOT slash and burn, but try to have relationships (small r, including post-capital R relationship friendships) we can continue returning to, responsability's a big part of that.

[eva00.livejournal.com]

For some reason, this simple little list make all the sense in the world that long, complex conversations about this sort of thing never seem too. Cool.

[greenstorm.livejournal.com]

There are lots of reasons I love Tillie.

ignorance, stupidity, or necessity

[saxifrage00.livejournal.com]

The first two are genuine mistakes, but they're forgivable. We protect ourselves from people when we fear that they'll repeat something they did in the past, but if the ignorance or stupidity involved has since been fixed, then it's not likely to happen for those reasons again and we've nothing to fear. That makes those easy to forgive, and in turn makes them less frightening for the person who has/might cause that pain: it's not irreversible.

When it's from necessity, it has to be weighed against the other stuff that makes it necessary. For example, if not doing this painful thing would just set people up for even more pain in the future, and doing this painful thing would spare them that future pain, it's clearly a better thing to cause them less pain overall. Similarly if causing the pain eventually leads to more happiness, and so on. We put ourselves through painful stuff in order to reap rewards all the time, so it's not such a strange thing that pain from outside of people can also be understood and accepted as necessary for future benefit.

Causing pain to someone out of necessity is much riskier, because very often they won't understand why it's necessary when it happens. Communication helps a lot, but sometimes the difficult choice to trust to fate just has to be made. This is the more frightening case for the person who might cause pain, because there's no control to grab.

Re: ignorance, stupidity, or necessity

[(Anonymous)]

Necessity also becomes nebulous because you come into the question of WHO it's necessary for, and in whose eyes, as well as individual rights in certain cases.

A parent disciplining (not beating, but disciplining) a child because they've stolen something or mistreated someone is necessary pain, to bring that child into an understanding that there are consequences of doing the wrong thing. A doctor giving an innoculation may also be a necessary pain, to protect them from something much worse in a disease. Both are examples of something that's necessary for the interests of the person being hurt.

With the doctor, however, we hit the question of rights. A parent has the right, as a parent, to determine that the child will or will not be innoculated. A doctor, on the other hand, does not have the right to make that decision. He has not only a right but a DUTY to advise that it be done if he feels the child needs it, but he doesn't have the authority to compel it to be done. It's not his child.

Putting someone in jail for murder can be painful for them, but is a necessary step not only for their good, to correct/punish their behavior, but especially for society's good, to remove a dangerous person from the ability to harm others. A government has the right to do this, as well as the responsibility to. An individual citizen, however, does not have the authority to jail someone, only to report them to those who do (with the excpetion of restraining someone caught in the act till the authorities get there).

Those are both examples of causing pain to someone for the good of them or others. Sometimes, you have to cause someone else pain to protect yourself. I have a friend who had to cut off contact with a parent who was abusive, for instance, for her own safety. It's never an easy choice, but the real threat there made it necessary. At the same time, we have to be careful of the dividing line between hurting someone as a necessity to protect ourselves from harm vs hurting someone for our own *gain*. The dividing line can be difficult to measure at times. And there has a to be a consideration, even when protecting, whether you're protecting something good. Framing someone to avoid taking the consequences of something you've done would be an example of a wrong application of protecting yourself by harming an innocent.

Re: ignorance, stupidity, or necessity

[greenstorm.livejournal.com]

Hi there.

Just from your examples, I'm thinking you're not someone who runs in my circles a whole lot, RL? Jus' curious.

Of course it's all about the lines. I don't think that anyone would argue that there are clearly bad things to do, and good things to do, which is where words like necessity break down into words like choice, I suppose. It's finding one's way through more ambiguous and generally emotional rather than physical situations that's harder (if it will hurt my boyfriend for me to break up with him, I should still break up with him if I want to because prolonging things will cause more pain in the long term-- but what if his father's just died, do I owe it to him to be supportive and wait till he's got over it some even if that will make me feel drained and bitchy until it's over?).

What really made me want to respond to your comment, though, was a memory I have from adminning on an online RPG. I screened applications there, and some of them went along the lines of: [applicant]'s father beat him every day which made him the best fighter in the world. Before he left home he thanked his father for toughening him up (I guess Johnny Cash's A Boy Named Sue covers a variant of this theme). Meanwhile, I just got back from a family reunion, where my mom's siblings (in the sixty to forty age range) were talking with a certain amount of approval about being spanked, and then of course there's the current situation socially where spanking is more-or-less totally unacceptable. So the action of physical discipline, which is a pretty clear thing that you can point a finger at, is variously bad to necessary depending on context.

Re: ignorance, stupidity, or necessity

[greenstorm.livejournal.com]

What about willful ignorance, where you've done something, and then do it again because you haven't learned from it. Now, if you haven't learned from it because you're lazy about learning your lessons and didn't feel like doing the necessary work, is that different than if you just had too much coming at you to take it in?

I mean, obviously nothing is this clear in real life.

And what happens when it's a pretty clear 1/1 stack between your happiness and someone else's?

And obviously, because we can't see the future, doing something for future happiness is a risky business.

Re: ignorance, stupidity, or necessity

[saxifrage00.livejournal.com]

I don't think I'd call that willful ignorance. Ignorance from being unwilling, somewhere deep in the back of the head, to improve oneself is willful ignorance: ignorance that is chosen. Being ignorant of a way one can improve just because one had no resources to capture the lesson on its way through one's life isn't willful, just an unfortunate accident.

Unwillful ignorance is what forgiveness is for, for oneself and for others when they do it. It can't last, either, because we're perceptive creatures and we'll notice that something's wrong at some point. If we then choose to bury our heads when we notice, then we're doing harm; but if we choose to tackle the painful process of figuring out what's wrong and what to do about it, we are taking the first step to improving.

I suppose what sort of solutions one contemplates for fixing things matters, too. My rule of thumb is that the more a solution would create a harmonious atmosphere, the more of a good choice that solution is. I'm sure there are other rules of thumb, but I suspect they all amount to about the same conclusions about good and bad solutions.

When there's a perfect 1:1 choice between your and someone else's happiness, it sucks. However, making yourself unhappy merely for the sake of another rarely actually means it's a 1:1 correspondence: you get resentful, increasingly broken, and more harmful to bystanders and loved ones. By contrast, the unhappiness that one could cause to them is something that, in the end, they can choose to take or not. If they've chosen to pin their happiness on your sacrifice, then maybe they've made a bad choice about how to get to happiness? Changing their mind about what constitutes their happiness may be the only way for them to get it. Of course, the same reasoning applies to oneself...

Doing something for future happiness is risky, yeah. We can make some pretty broad predictions about what sort of circumstances are likely to increase or decrease the net happiness, though. Choosing the path of greatest overall happiness is like kayaking down a river: you don't choose where to go, only where in the stream to shift to next so that it can carry you forward. Making small and large choices well adds up, making the difference between gliding through the rapids or getting snarled on rocks.