Ten days ago I treated myself to a new car. My wife and I have been sharing one car for over a year. We were reducing our debt load and having just one-car payment made sense. Our financial status is better now and we felt it was time to have a second car. Since I am self-employed we opted to lease the vehicle through my company. The benefit here is being able to write off a considerable portion of the car’s cost on my taxes each year.
The original deal was simple and straightforward. Give the dealer the first month’s payment and drive off the lot in the car. We were very pleased. It appeared everything was going the way we wanted.
Trouble started quickly however. The leasing company was sticky about establishing my income. I am an independent software consultant. Currently I am sub-contracting through a friend of mine. Since I don’t have a written contract with the client, only a verbal one with him, I had to work hard to establish my income level to the leasing company. This took 4 days and numerous phone calls and faxes.
For the past few days I had though everything was clear and done.
Today I got a call from the Audi dealer. The leasing company now wants a down payment. Because it is a “used” car they will only cover 90% of the value, I have to pony up the remainder. It seems we were misled in the original deal, either through deliberate omission or incompetence. Even though we can pay, money is no longer the issue.
The issue for me now is taking care of my self. I am starting to regret taking the car because every day I get a phone call about it, about me. People I don’t know, and wouldn’t care to know, are making me jump through hoop after hoop just because they can. All I wanted was something fun to drive back and forth to work. The fact that a lease allowed us to get a very nice vehicle, and write it off in the process, was icing on the cake. Only now the cake is starting to go stale, the icing is separating and coming off.
I have 4 days to decide what to do about this. Do I pony up the money and keep the car or do I use this change of circumstance to back out of the deal? If I am going to be bitter about this deal for the life of the lease then there is no point in keeping the car. If my wife, who is a part of our company, is going to have negative feelings about this deal, then we should return it now. Neither of us wants to have some thing because of the thing itself. For us it is about the emotions and feelings we associate with the thing. One car is exactly the same as the next until we add in our feelings about it. Until all the trouble with this car started I had very good feelings. Now that I’ve had my integrity questioned, repeatedly; now that the deal I agreed to is being unilaterally changed; now I don’t have very good feelings about the car and possessing it at all.
I know that as I write these words I am not in a space to make rational decisions. We are selling our former house in South Carolina tomorrow and that deal has been difficult from the start. If the close happens as planned we will be free from all the negative emotion and pain associated with that deal. Having another deal seemingly go sour at the same time is almost too much to bear.
I know that I need some distance from the fresh insult of a down payment. I also know that I needed to share it here so I could get some understanding before making the decision.
I heard a joke yesterday about a group of terrorists who take a large convention hall full of lawyers hostage. They threaten to release one lawyer an hour unless their demands are met. I’d like to add realtors to this joke. A relatively simple transaction, the sale of an item, has been made hugely complex and intimidating by the group of people we call realtors. My wife and I moved from South Carolina to Illinois last fall. Our house there has been for sale ever since. When we originally made the deal with the realtor she said that if she was the selling and buying agent she’d knock 1% off the commission. At some point after the original deal she informed us that she was going back to her previous broker. At the time I didn’t think to ask about how this switch would effect our deal. I mean, a deal is a deal? Right?
It appears that a deal isn’t a deal. The new broker won’t let the agent set her own percentages. This a $1200 additional cost to me. At one time in my life I would have been really angry and hurt about this. Now I understand that holding on to the negative emotion this brings up only hurts me. I said my piece to the realtor, now she has to deal with her end of it.
I believe in karma - what you do adds to your overall “score.” Positive actions help your score and negative actions hurt your score. My realtor isn’t being positive about honoring her agreement with me. I have let go of the need to force the issue. I free her from any obligation to me. However, I cannot free her from the larger reckoning that awaits her at the end of this life. She has built karma about this, and she will have to pay for that karma.
This list is pure ego gratification. I have finally reached a point in my emotional growth and understanding that I no longer feel the need to take care of what I imagine the feelings of others to be. If this list is seen in a particular light by anyone reading it then they should understand that the light is shinning on them, and not on me.
1984 Pontiac Fiero
1988 Honda Prelude
1992 Mazda Navajo
1994 BMW 318i
1992 Lexus ES300
1999 Nissan Altima
Currently our stable contains these two beauties.
2000 Lexus ES300
2001 Audi TT Coupé
And if that isn’t enough, here are the motorcycles I’ve owned.
1986 Yamaha Riva 180
1988 Yamaha Radian 600
1988 Suzuki Katana 1100F
Life is good.
Tonight I became an uncle. My brother and his wife had their first child together. Riley Lynn Nichols. Born at 4:55 pm, she weighed 8 lbs 4 ounces and was 21 inches long. Even though I know that this lifetime isn’t about children for me it was hard to see them and all the attention they are getting. Society places such a high level of approval on parents that one almost feels criminal by not joining in. My wife and I have talked many times about children and the many options open to us should we want to be parents. The truth for us is that we aren’t destined to be parents in this lifetime. The lessons we need to learn are in other areas.
Having said that… I’m jealous. Rightly or wrongly I had always viewed myself as the favored son. Now I realize that this position has shifted to my brother. He has provided my parents with a grandchild. He is doing all the things that a good son should do. I am living my life as close to my truth as possible and yet I remain an outsider.
I would not trade my life or make other choices if I had it to live it over. I am content with who I am and what my life is, and yet… I would be lying to myself if I didn’t admit having the very human emotions of jealousy and sadness, along with my feelings of joy and love.
Live your life to its fullest, Riley. Have the courage to stand up for yourself and find your truth. The world wants you to toe a line, look inside yourself and find your own line. I know it will be hard, and sometimes the rewards seem slim, but in the end all you really have is your self.
2 stalks of celery finely chopped 1 med to large onion coarsely chopped ½ green pepper finely chopped 1 clove garlic, minced 1 clove elephant garlic, minced 1 pound ground beef 1 can diced tomatoes (28 oz) 1 can tomato sauce (28 oz) 1 small can tomato paste
olive oil
chili powder cumin cayenne (red pepper) powder anise seed salt pepper sugar Worcestershire sauce
Heat a couple of tablespoons of oil in a large stew pot. Once it’s hot add the onions, green pepper and celery. Season with salt and pepper. Stir occasionally until the vegetable start to soften. Remove them from the pot and add the ground beef. Brown the beef and crumble. Season with salt and pepper. Once the meat is brown re-add the vegetables.
Add the tomato sauce, diced tomatoes and tomato paste. Stir to mix well. Re-season with more salt and pepper. Also add a pinch of sugar to cut the acid taste of the tomatoes.
I season without measuring so the following are just estimates. Experiment on your own until it tastes the way you want. Be careful tho… it will take a while for the hot flavors to become apparent, if you don’t wait a while after adding spice to taste test you can make it too hot to eat.
I generally start with a couple of tablespoons of chili powder. I almost always end up adding more later.
I put several good shakes of Worcestershire in, maybe a tablespoon.
A couple, three shakes of cayenne and cumin. Add a dozen or so anise seeds. Sometimes I toss a bay leaf in for grins.
Mix well and bring to a boil. Then reduce the heat and simmer with the lid on for several hours. Once your mouth is watering and you can’t wait any longer serve and eat.
Today was a singularly frustrating day. I?m in charge of two major projects, and heavily involved in at least two more. This in and of itself isn’t bad. Having more to do is better than having nothing to fill up the day. However, when you are constantly interrupted it is difficult to accomplish anything.
I think the lesson for me here is about control. I am torn between staying focused on my own task and responding to the need presented by whoever is interrupting me. When someone asks me a question or stops by my cubical I want to help them immediately. What I need to learn to do is take care of myself first. If I don’t take care of me, then any assistance I offer will be tainted by my upset. Not my upset at being interrupted, but rather my upset at ignoring my needs in the moment.
I’m currently reading a great book about programming. In the section about estimating the authors make a great point. They claim the best response to the question. “When will you be done?” is to say, “Let me get back to you on that.” The idea here is to take the time to assess the question and take care of your self before committing to an answer. In my present situation I need to learn to hear the person and their request, and then take the time to take care of myself before responding.
This may mean putting them off for a few minutes while I complete my current task. Or it might mean asking them to send me e-mail so I can take more time to formulate a response. In any event if I want to avoid the frustration of day like today, I need to focus on my needs first and foremost. And only when I have met them should I attempt to respond to the wants of others.
Today I learned what orthogonal means. Aren’t you impressed? You shouldn’t be. My industry (information technology) is filled with $5 words for $.10 items. The currently hot term at my client is persistence. Persistence is the activity of permanently storing objects so that they are available the next time your application runs. After a while you can get into saying things like, ?We?re going to persist this data to the DB2 database, whereas the rest is going to flat-files.?
Persistence is easy to spell and say. Always a good thing if you are inventing new technology meanings for previously existing words. Orthogonal is impossible to say, and just as hard to spell on the fly.
It’s stolen from geometry. The lines that make up the X and Y axes on a graph are orthogonal. They head in different directions. In the IT world the mean is slightly different. (Naturally.) An orthogonal design is one where changes to one component do not effect any other component. As a system, helicopters are very orthogonal. Change the pressure on one control and you must counter it with a different change on another control.
With computer system design you aim for interchangeable components. Ideally you should be able to swap the aging user interface with a newer one without completely re-writing the underlying system. Unfortunately, this rarely happens in the wild.
Maybe if it was easier to say orthogonal we’d be more persistent at making it our goal.
I’m very moody this evening. Michele and I had a fantastic weekend but the reality that is Monday has struck once again. I wish I could say that I’m happy everyday, but I’m not. I’m human and sometimes I’m down.
I know that we are all creatures of balance. When our balance is out of true, our emotions follow. Lately I have been struggling with my physical self. My mental image of my physical reality and me are different. As I approach my 40th birthday it is increasingly hard to ignore the physical reality. So I am physically out of balance.
Work is great these days. I am faced with new challenges and I am growing to meet them. Intellectually I am pleased with my self. The balance here shifts quite rapidly but on the whole I think I am well centered in my intellect.
For the past several years I have been searching for spiritual understanding. I have discovered a joy and satisfaction in expressing my spirit openly. Together with Michele I have explored and learned and grown. However we are both feeling the constraints of just two in our quest. It is time to open up to others and expand our journey. Without exposing our spiritual sides we cannot continue to grow. So there is imbalance here too.
If you are fortunate enough to be part of a couple do you ever think what it will be like when your companion dies? I’m not trying to be morbid here, just realistic. In my case my partner is older than I. We’ve talked and we both understand that she will in all likelihood precede me in death. This bothers both of us for different reasons.
I don’t like it for all the obvious reasons and a few that aren’t so clear. She hates it because she doesn’t want me to have to face her passing alone. Its ironic that the greatest tragedy I will face in my lifetime is one that takes away the one person I would turn to for support.
I know that I love my wife dearly. At no time is this more painfully clear than when I am afraid for her. Thoughts of her hurt or sick wound me deeply. Thoughts of her death leave me almost incapacitated. I know that death is a part of this life. I believe that my life, this time, is about growth. Facing her death and overcoming my grief and sorrow will require tremendous growth. More so as I will face that challenge alone. Her lifetime is about acceptance this time. She has to accept that her passing before me is the necessary order of events.
Part of me looks forward to that time when she dies. The hurts and demons that have plagued her throughout her life will be gone. The beautiful little girl inside her will be free forever to walk soft and touch the moon.
I feel hugely guilty when I think this thought, but I know that death isn’t forever. The essence that is my beautiful companion will return to a high plane. Until it is time for the next lesson, the next lifetime.
The rest of me is filled with sorrow at the thought of being alone in the world again.
Christmas has come and gone again. This year marked a decided change in my approach to this most difficult and wondrous of holidays.
Losing my sister on this day 27 years ago has scarred the day forever. In the past Christmas was a time to pick at the old scab and reopen the wound. My family doesn’t discuss this at all so the whole season has a repressed feeling of anger, sadness and hurt about it.
The last two years my wife and I have lived apart from the rest of my family and I was able to avoid their portion of the Christmas malaise. However, I wasn’t able to enjoy the season. I came to the realization that I had to accept responsibility for my part of this family tragedy.
In the past couple of years I have done tremendous work in letting go of the quilt, sorrow, and anger I’ve had about Amy’s death. I felt guilty since I had lived and she had not. I was only 12 when she died and therefore I wasn’t able to separate out the complex emotions that her dying created within me. For most of the past 27 years I have felt that I should have been the one to die. She was better in school than I. She would have made my parents prouder. All the silly sounding little things that a kid would feel. Left unchecked these thoughts built into a survivor’s quilt that crippled me in my dealings with my family.
I was sorrowful for obvious reasons. My sister had died and left me. I lost my playmate, my friend. I could see the hurt and sorrow this loss visited upon my family, my brother and my parents. I wanted to protect them from ever being that sad again. I tried to modify who I was and how I behaved so as not to upset them at all. Since these modifications weren’t my truth, and since they didn’t work anyway, I had been living a lie for many years. I was saddened by who I had become and how I was living. The despair was so great that I nearly ended it all just to get away from the pain.
I was angry at her for dying, and for dying on Christmas. As an adult I know she didn’t do this deliberately, but the little boy who was so lost and alone in the days and months that followed her death didn’t know and couldn’t understand. This childish anger was left unchecked and over the years it developed into a toxic, corrosive emotion within me.
Into this miserable thicket of darkness, fear, hurt, and anger came a ray of sunshine, the woman who is now my beautiful wife. She heard the pain in my voice and honored the process of grief that my inner child had to complete. Through her love she gave me a safe place to fall. A place where I could come apart at the seams and empty the enormous vat of emotions that I had carefully stored all these years. She never stopped me or judged me in what I was doing. She just loved me and held me through the terrible venting my soul needed to heal.
I was able to cry tears of sorrow and rage. I vented all the feelings that and been compressed inside me for so long. The process was brutally hard and often left me shattered and empty. My fear was that all I was and all I could be was contained in these feelings. If I opened myself up and let go of all these feelings what would I have left? Who would I be? Would I lose myself once and for all in the maelstrom I was unleashing?
I have discovered that when you let go of the anger, sorrow and guilt you recover. You get back the emotions of elation, love, and belonging that were hidden by the hotter emotions. I am now able to think of my sister and remember fondly the things we shared. I am at peace with her passing. I still morn her loss, but I can also celebrate the joy and laughter that was our time together.
This year I was able to honor her and my need for Christmas in a way that I’ve never done before. The holiday was no longer a sham of happiness. I felt like I was finally free to have fun and joy.
I owe so much to my wife. She has supported me throughout this process. I know from being her safe place to fall that the hardest thing in the world to do is stand by while your soul-mate is agonizing through a difficult lesson. The urge to step in and shoulder the burden for them is overpowering. I have also discovered that the true power of love is being the solid, unshakeable rock they stand upon while fighting their demons. I am truly privileged to be the rock for my Michele. And I am honored that she chooses to be the rock for me.