Jennifer Sey

I just discovered my husband keeps a blog. It isn’t well-populated. A few short entries, more poems than standard essays or narratives really. Snippets of self-deprecating and original thought, not your standard haiku or iambic pentameter. Ironic, a bit twisted, hilarious, at least to me. The wit, contradictory nature and ambivalence I love him for are keenly present. A faux dictionary entry is illustrative of his clashing irony and earnestness:

Defining Myself
winslow (winz-lo)
v. intr.
1. To be inhabited by multiple personalities, each one more anti-social than the last.
2. To be out of place or distinctly different in a disquieting way.
3. To appear wistful.4. To be both overly humble and obnoxiously arrogant.

v. intr.
1. To make harmfully truthful statements at inopportune times in inappropriate places.
e.g. “Sally winslowed everyone at the party last night.”

n. A slender stick used to prop open a window.

One more snippet, from a piece called Father’s Day, articulating what he likes about fatherhood. Not your standard, sappy Hallmark fare:

that time when wyatt was like,“virgil, come to the bathroom and look at daddy’s huge penis” i don’t actually have a huge penis, i know this because when I asked my wife she said
she’d handled bigger. But I couldn’t resist dialing up images of jen, Big — wrangler, with her Levi’s jeans and Prada bag.

He also mentions that he likes being able to hold someone’s hand and not have it feel corny and that he’s proud he’s taught them all the best dirty word combos. I love the contradictions. Sweet and gross, all in one. My kind of guy.

But how could I not know this about him - that he writes and posts it for others to see? That he aspires to put his thoughts – which I’ve always known were unfailingly insightful and yes, a bit contorted and darkly bent – out in the world for others to peruse?

Do we have a bad marriage? Are we hopelessly uncommunicative?

After much pondering, I answered my own question with a resounding NO. Though the actual writing of this blog was unbeknownst to me, its artfulness and unconventionality were precisely what I’d expect from Winslow. And nothing he said was surprising, as far as the content goes. If I’d discovered that his thoughts were utterly unfamiliar to me, I’d likely have answered this question differently. But what I saw on my laptop screen was unequivocally the voice of my husband, a voice filled with the humor in self-loathing that I have come to rely upon over the years to keep me sane. The mere fact that I wasn’t aware that he took the time to write these things down was incidental.

We’ve always been very independent. I look at some of my friends’ marriages or relationships in which they do absolutely everything together and I think, “There’s something wrong with us.” But then I remember if we were like that I’d probably feel like I was suffocating. Though sometimes, I’ll admit, I’m a bit envious. “We tried that new restaurant last night. We went hiking on Sunday! We went wine tasting! We bicycled through Vietnam on our summer vacation!!” Really? My husband and I don’t generally do these types of couple things. We don’t go on vacation. We rarely go on a date. In fact, togetherness is not our modus operandi. We’re both, apparently, too busy tap-tapping on our key boards to take a break, fly to Southeast Asia and pedal around the countryside. We can be a tad non-traditional in that we don’t DO a whole lot together.

But, we do share most everything. We talk. We make stuff together. We’ve written, shot and edited two short films. We raise our children with a consistent and even hand. We support each other’s artistic endeavors. He reads my essays, rough drafts of my book. I brainstorm ways to get his art seen though I’m not sure what to do about the installation piece made of cat food cans that spans about six feet in either direction.

While we don’t share the normal fondness for recreational activities that many of our friends do, we share a love for work. And a passion for working at those things we find worthwhile. And it so happens, that most of the things we work on are solitary endeavors. Hence, we are often apart. He’s got his tall, slender body hunched over the cat food tins in our urban excuse for a backyard while I’m pounding on my keyboard. At home together, but apart. In our own heads.

In many ways we are opposites, which is perhaps why we don’t enjoy the same recreational activities. When I’m not working or writing, I’m social, outgoing, a bit of a big mouth in a crowd. He’s an introvert, feels uncomfortable around lots of people. I can be frivolous. He never is. I don’t mind spending money to have some fun. He finds it wasteful. I like visiting new places. He’s terrified to fly.

I go to work everyday in corporate America. He stays home with our kids – walks them to and from school, makes dinner every night, cleans the house – while taking on contracts as a web designer and software engineer. I can handle the rough and tumble world of the corporation. I like the multi-tasking, the fast pace, if not the politics, which I steel myself against and move fluidly through, without delighting in. If I’m not moving, I feel like I might die. He is cowed by these things, but never gets impatient or bored being at home with young children. He is flexible, zen-like in his tolerant calmness. Walking a five year old 8 blocks can take 45 minutes. My husband doesn’t mind. It makes me crazy. “We’re going to be late! Step it up!” Five year olds don’t care about late. My chop chop attitude is generally less effective with little ones than those that work for me. But, lest you think I’m a disastrous mommy, I always remember to keep my boys in clean underwear without holes, sign them up for baseball and attend every game, hug them with abandon that sometimes hurts (them) and I sit with them every night to do their homework. I’m not completely useless on the homestead.

With so much difference between us, you’d think we couldn’t make it work but we’re rounding the corner towards 15 years of being together, 10 years of marriage. I admire him more than any person I’ve ever known; I’m awed by his critical thinking abilities not to mention his Mr. Fix-It MacGyver-ness. I may be able to throw together a mean power point presentation and wow the Board of Directors and CEO with my moxie but he can make a compass in the woods from a leaf and a sewing needle. He can fix our car with duct tape and ingenuity. He could, if called upon to do so, lead us out of the woods if we were lost and had no water. I can barely get us from our house to a Marin County birthday party just 17 miles away, even with a google map. Sense of direction is just not my thing. My striver’s skills get me pretty far in today’s go-go external world; his are more fundamental, more valuable in the long haul, in a crunch.

In the end, I’d say we are a perfect match. I don’t get jealous that he pursues things without telling me, like his blog. He has friends I don’t know very well as I have some he’s never met. But I know what and how he thinks. And he understands me like no one else. He doesn’t mind that I’m the breadwinner and I don’t mind that he isn’t. We aren’t peas in a pod, sometimes we’re more oil and water than anything else. But we are, in the long run, the perfect complement. Two slightly off people, whose off-ness, when combined, creates a bit of ‘on’.

Check Winslow out: www.sfactions.com

I recently went to a memorial service for the father of my friend Belle. Belle’s sister, Brady, spoke at the service. She talked at length about how much her father loved animals and she even went so far as to say that he believed a love of animals was a sign of a person’s capacity for compassion. She joked that some people thought her father loved his animals more than his kids. She said it lightheartedly, with a toss of the head; but there was a sad truth to it.

He was an angry man, unkind at times. He was most committed to taking it out on Belle’s brother, the oldest child, Robert. Poor Robert bore the brunt of his dad’s frustration derived from a life lived without any breaks. Despite his cantankerousness, Mr. L felt a kinship with dogs, cats, all animals. He talked to them about his life, he told them his story at the end of his days. He confided in his pets and sought forgiveness, Brady told the gathered crowd.

I hate animals. I don’t hate them. That’s an exaggeration. But I don’t really like them. I don’t want to hurt them. But I don’t really want to be around them either. Unfortunately, I have a cat. His name is The Brain. My husband and I re named him that (his original name was Lenny) when we realized he wasn’t very bright. Aren’t we ironic? We often joke that our cat is an asshole. He’s everywhere you don’t want him to be. When I want to work, he sits on my keyboard and bites my hands. When I want to sleep in on the weekend, he sits on my chest and screams in my face until I feed him. When I want to read, he positions himself between my eyes and the page, biting my wrists with significant vigor. He pees on the bath mat instead of in his litter box, he vomits to get my attention so I’ll feed him. See what I mean? Asshole!

All of that being said, I would never hurt him. I spend about $3 a day on cat food so that he gets the fancy canned food he likes. He sits on my belly while I watch Project Runway and we fall asleep together mid-way through. He’s lived with me for 14 years, a gift from my husband after a fight early in our relationship. Some gift. A cantankerous cat that squawks in my face all the time, wakes me up at 4 a.m. and leaves excrement in the bathroom because for some reason, the litter just isn’t fine enough for him.

So I don’t hate animals. I just don’t LOVE them. I’m familiar with all the studies that say that animals make people happier, prevent depression, keep old people from withering away and falling into abiding sadness, giving up on life. But this whole angle that Mr. L maintained that a person’s treatment of animals is indicative of their true character, their innate humaneness, is a crock, if you ask me. These people that were heartbroken during Hurricane Katrina because dogs were stranded, but were completely immune to the human suffering are a conundrum to me. Why would the dog stuck on the roof cause a person to pick up the phone and give money but a woman stuck inside her home, would not? I know I’m offending the animal lovers out there. But before you skewer me…consider this:

I believe empathy towards your own family comes first. Then friends. Then humans. Then animals. If a father is persistently unkind to his children, he’s a not a good father and I’d go so far as to say, he just might not be a good man. All people have good and bad in them; no one is all bad. An unkind moment doesn’t make someone evil. But a life spent yelling at one’s children, disparaging them at every turn, dispensing violence in frustration, is a life spent inhumanely, without compassion. No matter how kind you are to animals.

I’m not implying that we should be dismissive or unkind or abusive to animals. Not even close. But lets measure compassion by how we extend it to our own children, our spouses, our loves ones, our species, first and foremost. We can give the love leftovers to our pets.

I’ve been perusing everything there is to read about Sarah Palin looking for support, for a reasoned rationale for my intense gut level disdain for this first ever, Republican, female Vice Presidential candidate. As if I need more reasons than those plastered all over CNN and the New York Times, not to mention US Magazine, within the first few days of her nomination. She’s for everything I’m vehemently opposed to. She’s ‘for’ censorship and book banning at public libraries, freewheeling gun-toting NRA-style shoot ‘em ups, pre-emptive war, pro-life policies even in the most extreme cases of rape and incest. Do I need more reasons to feel nausea and disgust? Do I really need further support points to justify my fiercely profound contempt?

I want to be pleased that a woman can potentially reach the executive office. I want to be delighted that the glass ceiling in politics has seemingly been shattered. But I’m not. This is not what I had in mind, I’ll admit.

I’d hoped for a female candidate that was actually pro-woman. Pro-anyone who maybe hasn’t had a fair shake. For instance, those tired and huddled masses that I’m pretty certain she wants to keep from entering our fair land. For gays who’d like the same rights in a long term relationship as their heterosexual counterparts. I’d also hoped for a female candidate that was anti-war - aren’t women tired of sending their sons and husbands off to battle? And how about a candidate that brought to bear her shrewd mothering skills as an influencer/negotiator to build bridges.

Not bridges to nowhere – which Ms. Palin claims she kaboshed, when truth be told, she was for, until it was no longer expedient. “I told Congress, thanks but no thanks on that bridge to nowhere!” Palin misleadingly told the cheering crowd after the announcement of her nomination by Senator McCain. In point of fact, when she was running for Governor of Alaska, Palin supported the 15 million dollar initiative, to be funded by Congressional earmarks, intended to connect the small island of Gravina to the mainland. But when earmarks became evil in the public eye, being against them became a meaningful platform on which to run. And Ms. Palin conveniently said no to the bridge.

I don’t really care about this bridge. But I was hoping for someone who built metaphorical bridges between people who are politically, religiously and socially on the opposite ends of the spectrum. Based on her record as Governor of Alaska, it seems her only interest is in firing those that disagree with her and hiring all of her high school buddies. McCain is the self-proclaimed party-bridger, working both sides of the Congressional aisle. How does he justify Ms. Palin’s actions in Alaska, firing the public safety commissioner who refused to fire Palin’s former brother-in-law after a nasty divorce from her sister? And what about the fact that she engineered the firing of the city’s attorney after one of Palin’s supporters informed her that the attorney had put a stop work order on his housing project? And what about the fact that she hired her high school pal, Franci Havemeister, to direct the State Division of Agriculture, when Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a primary qualification? Palin is also known for calling anyone who opposes her a ‘hater’. It’s abundantly clear that these behaviors are in no way consistent with using understanding to build coalitions amongst parties with differing points of view.

But after all my reading and all my culling together of support points, I finally realized something. I dislike her intensely for reasons far more personal than politics. A new friend recently said to me: “If you don’t like someone, it is probably because they reflect back to you something about yourself that you don’t like.” I’d heard this before. This pycho-babble, Oprah-style, introspective, self-help sentiment wasn’t new to me. But I always seem to forget it when I’m deep in the throes of hating on someone. I pondered new friend’s words. And about an hour later it hit me.

I loathe Ms. Palin because she actually believes she’s qualified to do this job with a year and half of governing a sparsely populated state under her belt. Having built an ice rink in Wasilla and said no to an earmarked bridge, she actually believes she has the know-how to rebuild our economy and war us out of trouble.

As a woman, I’ve always been measured in my approach to my career. I’ve never pushed for a promotion until I was absolutely positive I could do the job expertly on the very first day. Men pushed ahead with reckless abandon, generating a kind of fearless momentum that I interpreted as irresponsible. Often times these men pushed so fast and so far ahead of their own capabilities that they floundered in their new roles. Sometimes even getting fired. But they took with them the higher title into the work world, no doubt parlaying that into an even higher titled and salaried position somewhere else. I always dismissed this behavior as impulsive, self-satisfied and negligent.

I’m not claiming to be a selfless do-gooder. I work in corporate America. As we’ve all witnessed through the rampant corporate malfeasance in recent years and months, it is quite easy to become disconnected from the fact that the money one spends in the corporate world, that one takes for doing a job, is expected to generate a long term return for the people that own the company. But I’ve always considered this point very seriously. When I spend money on a marketing campaign, I’m very concerned that that money belongs to someone else and they expect to get it back and then some. It is not just cash that dropped from the sky. So I better be darned sure that I know what I’m doing when I take money for myself as well as those business endeavors I’ve been entrusted to carry out.

I’ve watched others, more aggressive, pass me by. But I’ve always felt right and confident in the jobs I’ve held. I could’ve pushed harder, faster, climbed the ladder more quickly. But I’m patient and, more pressingly, in need of the approval of others before pushing on to the next level. I’m a woman, and as such, a pleaser at heart. Ms. Palin, as she stated so straightforwardly, is basically a pitbull with lipstick. I assume that means she’s not an approval seeker. Of this, I’m envious because it points out my own cautiousness, my own need for others to give me the nod. This does not, however, translate into Palin appreciation.

Through analyzing my disgust with Ms. Palin, I’ve realized the personal really is political. I dislike her politics. I mistrust her person. I’d want her to not just be confident in her ability to do the job, but to have shown some evidence that that confidence is warranted. Seeing Russia from Alaska doesn’t count. Simply being from a small town doesn’t count either. It’s reckless, self indulgent and downright negligent to assume that these are qualifying factors.

I’m working towards gratitude that a woman could achieve this level of success in the political arena. She may indeed be the first ever female Vice President. Admittedly, I’m not quite there on the road to celebrating her achievement. I’m really nowhere near half way there, in fact. Perhaps, when women are broadly represented on the national political stage, I’ll be able to accept a range of views and ideologies. But for now, I’m wanting a gal that reflects an underdog-friendly point of view and has the resume to prove she’s viable. I guess, in the end, my personal politics dictate that I want a candidate just a tad more like me.