8. If everyone gets lost except you, follow those who get lost
The Golden Rules of Ensemble Playing

[Via Joeri]

Do you ever hate someone you love? Someone you need or who needs you? I do. I always have, for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, I used to keep myself awake nights, punishing myself for whatever sin I’d committed during the day (usually beating up my little brother and then lying to my parents that he was crying because he’d fallen down) by telling myself my mother was sick, my mother was in the hospital, my mother was going to die. Basically, I think now, I was hating my mother and hiding it from myself that way, because hating your parents as a little kid – scary thing.

Where does this shit come from?

Is it the Id being bad? Or what?

Wherever it comes from, I respect Gamma when she tells me that she doesn’t love me; she says it when she’s mad, and she usually says, “I don’t love you right now” or “I’m not going to love you for a while.” Then she gets over it and we’re okay for a while again. I think it’s important to support her in this, being honest about her feelings. I used to lie about mine as a kid, and I still catch myself doing it, and it doesn’t help anything in the long run.

On the contrary.

For instance Gamma’s mother is away this week on business and Gamma’s unhappy (as unhappy as such a sunny little person can be, anyway). Gamma has headaches and other aches and pains because she misses her. Yesterday morning she told me her heart hurt. I’m sure it was emotional and it went away soon. But for an instant, I caught myself imagining the whole thing, just as I had with my mother as a little boy – Gamma going to the hospital, getting sick, dying, the funeral, life without her. Free time!

It’s awful. How could I think such a thing? Where does that come from? Do all parents do this? I suppose so. Usually I can shrug off the frustration and pressure with this “sitcom dad” thing, say “sheesh” or “ack” or “gah” or “feh” and joke and it’s okay. But people depending on you, people needing you, it’s as bad as needing people I guess. It’s not all sunshine. There are some creepy fish swimming around down deep in the ocean, where it’s dark.

I think something negative loses strength when you talk about it, and grows stronger the more secret it is. Parents kill their children every day, they gas them or shoot them or drown them in the tub or locked in a car they drive into a lake; this is to be avoided in my opinion. It is good, I think, to admit that it’s not always easy; that great love and resentment can co-exist, that this isn’t the devil telling you shit, it’s your Id.

Or is that the same thing? Maybe it is. Id, Superego and Ego; the bad guy, good guy and the face we show the world. Or something. What do I know?

(I was considering posting this to Raising Hell but thought I’d try it out here first…)

Perfect for Dads ‘n Grads! Now the Eurosnob Shopping Experience is only a click away! For a limited time, The Bug products are available in English at the new Feral Living store.

Update: The Bug products are now available in Dutch at the Dutch Store (thanks, Joeri), in French at the French Store (thanks Joeri’s brother Jonathan) and in Swedish at the Swedish Store (thanks Francis).

Zona Nuda attire and collectibles available at the ZONA NUDA shop.

Collect ‘em all!

Shop early and often! And tell your friends!

[Thanks to Joeri for organizing the translation. The Bug will soon be available in Swedish and Dutch as well. Any other translators out there? Esperanto, maybe?]

I don’t know about the rest of Europe, but here in Austria there is, at least among enlightened people, the general view that Americans are extremely hung-up about nudity. Have you any idea how crazy that looks, seen from the outside, this obsession with nudity being dirty?

Sometimes I think it is an American thing, but we ran around naked at my house when I was a kid. Except for my mom. I remember one winter when my mother accidentally locked my father outside, when he’d run out naked to write his name in the snow…

Only a pervert thinks nakedness is dirty. When we were visiting Seattle several years ago, Beta was playing in the sand by Greenlake and since she had no bathing suit with her and was about 5 at the time, we just let her run around naked like we did here. My Austrian in-laws were along for the trip, and my father-in-law took a bunch of pictures of her since he’d just gotten a new camera. A lifeguard came over and asked Beta if she knew this man. I don’t know what was creepier, the lifeguard sexualizing a naked little girl, or knowing that he probably had a good reason to. It was an interesting moment.

I’m not saying people run around naked all the time in Austria. They just don’t seem to be, in general, so uptight about it. (Although there does seem to be a trend – for decades – in the media to eroticize the body, of course, for advertising reasons). Maybe it really is part of the American puritan heritage. I mean, what the hell is so bad about running around naked? What exactly? What do you think?

To me, the bathroom is a refuge, a place where I can read the paper, or shave, in peace, still nearby and available should there be an emergency, yet apart and seperate in a space of my own.

Of course, there’s always an emergency so someone is always talking to me when I’m in the bathroom. If I’m lucky they leave the door closed when they do it. Even my mother-in-law got in on the act last night.

So when my wife leaves for a week on business, as she did yesterday, this is the silver lining, the single only good thing about her being gone – otherwise I miss her terribly. But, eh, 30% more peace in the bathroom.

So this morning, I was standing there taking a leak and my cell phone rang. Etc etc.

The title of this post refers not to any of this, but rather to the best review of Macbeth I’ve ever read, by Francis S. up in Sweden.

One thing there is no shortage of on the Internet, I have found, are people who tell you “that’s a great idea, go do it” when you tell them some hare-brained thing you just cooked up. Come to think of it, there’s no shortage of them anywhere; I remember saying that to my brother often. “Go do it, ‘it’ll be fun’,” I’d say, and he’d run out and break all the windows in the barn or something.

So my big blogger-body-image campaign, the Zona Nuda Naked Blogger Project, well. I was thinking of actually going through with it after receiving submissions from quite a few people (michele? the barstool one? that is not a “non-pornographic frontal nude”. D? I had no idea you could do that with a turtle.) but I came to the realization that nakedness in real life, or “in person”, i.e. actual, physical nakedness, which I think is a good thing, is fundamentally different from posting naked pictures on the Internet. Duh.

My main problem, though was simply the “fake” issue. How do you ensure that participants are over 18 or 21 or whatever? How do you ensure that the picture blogger X submits is actually them? Maybe it’s a fake picture. Or, even more problematic, it could be a genuine picture of blogger X, submitted by someone else pretending to be them, with a spoofed email or whatever.

So I’ve decided not to go through with this project. If anyone wants it, they’re welcome to it for a small fee and a link. Thanks to everyone who was so supportive, thanks to those of you who sent in pictures – I’ll be setting up a Cafepress store pretty soon and hopefully you’ll be able to buy yourself on a t-shirt very soon.