Ramani Durvasula's Blog, page 5

Gentleman’s Club

I had dinner tonight with a gay couple – we meet every 6-8 weeks and catch up on life, work, stuff. I LOVE their relationship. And I don’t like relationships. It is loving, honest, open, supportive, collaborative, respectful, intimate, and joyful. It is everything I want. I have seen them raise a son together, traverse financial crises, deal with family illnesses, ex-partners, and career issues and manage these transitions with grace and love.

Last night I had dinner with another gay couple – same adjectives. I love being with them – when I leave, I actually start to become a believer. I watched them and it was so easy. I start to think in terms of heresy – perhaps a relationship could ENHANCE my life, could be a place of GROWTH and COLLABORATION. Did I really say that?

During dinner, gay couple after couple came into my mind as ideals of what I want. In all cases, I love being in their space together – there is so much love and support that I leave feeling buoyed, and I see relationships not as a space of hurt and regret, but rather as a place of joy.

Sadly, I was unable to come up with any heterosexual couples that made me feel the same way. Not one. By and large, after an evening with heterosexual couple(s), I leave moderately bereft, and grateful I am single. I don’t spend that much time with heterosexual couples. Don’t get me wrong – I have lots of male-female couple friends. But, they never invite me out to dinner, something about being a single female out to dinner with a married or committed heterosexual couple doesn’t work. What is that about? Fear? Loathing? Discomfort? A portal to an alternative lifestyle of being alone?

My friends and I at dinner speculated about this. We were not naïve. There are TONS of gay couples that are a hot mess too. But when it came to the couples that inspired me – they were all gay. So what is it?

One of our explanations was that many of the gay couples don’t have children. Research has documented that marital satisfaction drops to its lowest level when people have young children. Children are a funny paradox – a sort of relationship nuclear reactor core meltdown. They are often responsible for destroying the core of the relationship while keeping it together far past its shelf date for reasons of guilt, obligation, laziness, or financial tethers (people too lazy to end relationships try to be heroes and claim they are staying together “for the children”). So the core melts while the structures remain. Without that stress and strain – many of the childless gay couples are freed from a big relationship killer. If they do decide it is not working, childless couples can walk away with far greater ease. But enough of the gay couples did have kids that the kid theory wasn’t enough. And I know lots of heterosexual couples without kids and it isn’t much more pleasant to be with them as the ones with kids.

Another theory was power imbalance – society has pretty strong scripts for male and female gender roles and like lemmings we go with them. So that power imbalance can calcify over time and lead to some pretty calcified misery. While gay relationships are characterized by gendered roles and power differentials, these roles are not as socially entrenched as traditional male/female roles. But that still didn’t seem to capture all of it.

Is it possible that something that is hard won is more appreciated? The gay couples I know waited long and fought hard for marriage. They have withstood hatred and hurts. They have witnessed and experienced bias. They don’t have the same legal protections. Most of these men have been around the block – have had other relationships, and when lightning finally struck, they were better prepared to understand it. Perhaps the absence of a “biological clock” allowed them to take the time they needed, rather than frantically rushing things along. And I get that, I have waited a long lifetime to get it right. I hope that when my time comes – that I treat that man and our relationship like the treasure it is.

At the end of the night we still hadn’t figured it out. I did know that the only reason that after nearly 3 interesting, magical, tumultuous, and at times lonely years of being single after a divorce, that I would even consider tossing my hat back into the relational ring is the relationships of the gay men I know. And it also makes me nervous – if I ever did manage to enter a relationship again, am I doomed by the heterosexual curse? Or could I take the lessons I learned from these men’s relationships – to cultivate and grow something characterized by love, respect, growth, space, cooperation, authenticity, shared and divergent goals, sex, and happiness – and make them my own?

So Eric, Eric, Bryan, Miguel, Perry, Bobby, Steve, Rafael – and anyone else I left off – thank you. If that right man and I make it work – I tip my hat to you for showing me what is possible.

This is one Gentleman’s Club I am happy to enter.

Penguins and Pickles

Shanti asked me if we could go to Antarctica.

She is 7.

I told her I would look into it, and my preliminary research revealed that the cost of the trip was about $10000 each. I told her that.

She looked at me, and said, “Well, that means twenty thousand dollars for two people, we better start getting our money together.”

She went to her room and pulled out coins and bills – birthday money, money earned from doing her chores, bits and pieces. She retrieved an empty pickle jar from the kitchen and placed the crumpled up bills and coins in the jar.

It added up to about $41 and change.

She placed the jar on my desk, she plans to write “Antarctica” on it with a sharpie.

And she sat on the couch in my home office and asked questions…..”Mama, how many penguins are we going to see?.”, “Do you think they will slide on their bellies?”, “Did you know that daddy penguins take care of the babies?”, “Will be too cold for you?”

A day later she found a few more bucks and stuck them in the jar – we are up to about $44. And she was happy because “we are closer to going mama.” And then she set aside a few sweaters next to my backpack – so we could start packing.

Shanti is convinced we are going.

Her conviction and hope are poignant and affecting. I asked her to leave the jar on my desk, not for safekeeping, but because I need to look at that jar to understand the crystalline clarity of a little girl’s heart that can see $44 becoming $20,000, and the certainty that she and I would steer around Cape Horn, and be standing at the shores of the Ross Sea staring at ice shelf and communing with penguins.

I look at that jar on my desk to remind me that the hopes I harbor today that currently focus around: my daughters’ happiness, a person I love, a friend’s health, a book I am writing, research I am conducting, a trip I am planning, TV shows I am pitching – WILL be realized. Not MIGHT. WILL.

And if they don’t? I guess I will be ok. Broken hearts heal. Disappointment fades. Losses are mourned. New opportunities arise.

Shanti showed me that hope and conviction are everything. And you can’t fake it. Perhaps the reason it is so difficult to put voice to hope is because the corollary – that the hope will be dashed – is too devastating. And fear often blocks the maintenance of the hope, because it means taking leaps away from societal scripts, reality, or security. I am not talking about blind faith – I am too old and bruised for that. I am talking about circumspect faith.

I look at the $44 next to me. $44 will somehow become $20K. Someday – perhaps 10 years from now, perhaps 25, an adult daughter and her older, likely slower, mother will stand on the deck of a ship, smile at the penguins, and hike on the ice. We will reflect on the blessing of having children. At a life well lived. At journeys made. Mountains climbed. At loves found and lost. At difficult choices, and the fortitude to make them.

Maybe everyone should put a pickle jar on his or her desk, and write something on it with a sharpie. It doesn’t have to be a material thing or an adventure. It may be your memoir, it may be that college degree you didn’t finish, it may be sky diving, or it may be a call to a long lost love or a newly found one. Maybe you don’t put money in it. But let it remind you to put down fear, realize possibility, give life a chance, and remain confident that it will happen.

Rilke put it best when he said that “deep on the inside everyone is like a church, and the walls are adorned with festive frescoes………Some people advance quite far into and through life without suspecting the original magnificence underneath the sober poverty. But blessed is he who senses, finds and secretly recovers it. He presents himself with a gift. And he will return home to himself.”

Seven year olds know they have those frescoes inside. And they fill pickle jars with dreams. Here’s hoping the rest of us can dust off those frescoes and find an empty jar.

From Libya to Hollywood……. What do Charlie Sheen and Qaddafi have in common?

Thank god for narcissists – without them, there would be no news.

Because they are our world leaders, our movie stars, our sports heroes and our reality stars.

I am beginning to wonder if it is even possible to make it on a large stage without being one.

As I read about the rants of Charlie Sheen and the madness of Qaddafi – the commonalities are clear – a complete and utter lack of empathy and insight, an unprecedented level of entitlement, and a blazing trail of self-destruction.

The characters change, but the story remains the same.

In the case of Charlie Sheen – we watch with the same fascination that a child watches another child having a temper tantrum – “wow, is he really going to get away with that?”

And there’s the rub. He is.

Sadly – in his case, the substance abuse is a red herring. It is obviously causing some of his wackier behavior, but at the end of the day, it can be managed (though I am not sure there is a rehab center that will help him detox from the drug called “Charlie Sheen”). Until the underlying personality disorder is addressed, his drug addiction becomes an almost unfixable problem – because like most narcissists he is made of Teflon and views this “as the other guy’s problem.”

His narcissism is a whole different animal – because that is not going anywhere until he gets some VERY good mental health services. It is who he is, and he was wise enough to fall into an industry where not only is his narcissism rewarded, it is celebrated. Much like being the dictator of a Northern African nation.

Because narcissists have little insight into their actions, often don’t care what others think, and feel the rules do not apply to them – they can easily waltz through porn stars, ex-wives, current wives, crumbling nations, and public rants – with little concern about the impact. And they can surround themselves with handlers – producers, advisors, therapists, psychics, girlfriends, nurses – who play into their delusions of grandeur.

Sheen, Qaddafi, real housewives from all the major metros – they are our modern vaudevilleans – and we can’t wait to catch the second act. Watching their lack of insight and brazen entitlement is a way for us to channel our own frustrations – us suckers who play by the rules, care what others think, and actually censor ourselves.

Sadly, while Sheen’s rants are only making him look bad, the narcissistic sociopathy of folks like Qaddafi result in tragic consequences. There is a cautionary tale in there somewhere.

But until we stop allowing narcissistic traits to become a fast track to success and actually start valuing things like consistency, empathy, public deportment, and common sense – plan on more madness filling the airwaves, and changing the course of histories.

Eat Less

The US Department of Agriculture a recommendation that stated that “Americans need to eat less”.

Really.

That’s the best the government could come up with? Eat less?

Newsflash to the policy folks who probably wrote 100 drafts of this recommendation before they came to this conclusion – the American people already know this. Kids as young as 5 and as old as 90 know EXACTLY what to eat, and may even know how much of it to eat. However, when placed in front of a bowl of Doritos and a bowl of carrots – needless to say, for most of us, that orange around our mouths isn’t going to be carrot juice.

I suppose it is the government’s job to turn common sense into policy statement – but this is a bit too simplistic.

It’s no different than taking a client out of rehab and saying – “drink less” while giving him a gift card to a beverage warehouse.

Or perhaps like asking a heroin addict to “use less” – while installing him in a halfway house next to a drug dealer’s operation and handing him a quiver full of needles.

Our country and media have become what Yale’s Kelly Brownell terms a “toxic food environment.” While the government and the Public Service Announcements softly and gently tell us to eat less, and watch our sugar, the far sexier food companies feature pounding ads with $2 hamburgers, buxom blonds hawking pizza, and catchy jingles (the broccoli lobby may want to invest in a new publicist). It’s like trying to sell abstinence in Vegas. We tell kids one thing (eat veggies), but when is the last time your child’s sweet potato came with a miniature Tonka truck?

If the government really wants us to “eat less” – then it needs to man up and start taking on the food lobby and the restaurant industry. We have incentivized the production of cheap, non-nutritive, sugar, fat and sodium rich food. And most of us actually think it tastes good – the ultimate quick fix. The LA Times astutely points out just as this Eat Less policy statement comes out – serving sizes at fast food restaurants are getting bigger all the time. It costs them pennies to supersize these meals – and these pennies are adding to billions of dollars in health care costs for all of us.

I teach at an urban university where many of my students make it on a creative combination of no time, tight incomes and financial aid. It’s tough to argue with them about eating right or less or whatever – when the burger special for $3 that they can eat in the car will fill them up.

Word to the government – tell me something I don’t know. Or better yet – step up, let’s see if Obama’s new policy on school meals takes flight (as of now, research suggests that kids who eat hot lunch at school tend to be more obese than the kids who bring it from home), bring vegetables on an comparable cost basis with unhealthy options, consider a junk food tax – it worked well in California with cigarettes. And make no mistake – the net effect of obesity as we see it now will have health effects much like cigarettes – we are starting to see the net effect of all of that unchecked smoking prior to the Surgeon General’s warning – in 30 years we may start shaking our heads about why we couldn’t see how this bad food thing was going to play out. And I will hear it from all the folks that say – what I eat isn’t the government’s business – I suppose maybe it’s not – but Americans are notoriously undisciplined – and this time – the thing that we are trying to fix isn’t booze, drugs, sex, or cigarettes – it is something kids have to consume. It’s a different game this time.

We all know what a healthy meal looks like. We also know we should avoid smoking, drink in moderation, use sunscreen, use condoms, and floss daily. And you see how well we are doing with all of that.

Knowledge is the booby prize. Knowing isn’t doing. It’s all about making a change. And sometimes we need a little help with that. If the true cost of eating junk food were calculated into our food bills –well… that $75 dollar burger wouldn’t look so tempting.