2000-06-30 letter to Tigger

Intro

The following is an unsent, handwritten letter to Tigger. I don't remember why I didn't send it; possibly it got set aside and temporarily lost, or possibly we ended up discussing the essence of it on the phone and actually sending it no longer seemed necessary, or perhaps I ended up rewriting most of it into another letter which was sent.

I've added some punctuation, formatting, and minor rewording for clarity.

Text

2000 06-03 08:16

Dear Tig,

Sesame Street has been brought to you today by the mood "irritation". It's an improvement over abject depression, but it too easily morphs into anger, which is bad and which itself can morph into self-anger and depression.

So let's ramble for a bit. I was thinking about what I said to you earlier (previous letter) about how I should write down all my complaints about L, rational or otherwise. I think what I was thinking was that I need to identify the ways in which her actions go against my expectations. 'Expectations' not as in I'm guessing how she's likely to react to a particular thing and she goes and does something else, but rather more something like expectations of the overall way in which a rational person would handle the various situations that we've had to deal with.

Not that I'm going to try to claim she acts irrationally; it's more like she just doesn't react to changes in the overall situation. Her coping strategy never adjusts, especially if the change is a positive one – she seems fairly willing to downscale her thinking, but never to take advantage of an opportunity to do better (not as in trying harder but as in earning more per effort, whether 'more' is money or some other life-improving thing like "time" or "a better living arrangement").

This also has to do with something I think I may have started to discuss on the phone. It goes like this: people with whom you're close have a large effect on your life in a lot of small ways. (They can also affect your life in large ways, but those are usually more obvious.) When you're coming to a decision point on some crucial issue, often just the smallest nudge from such a person can make the decision land on the other side from where it would have landed otherwise. Even if they're not there when you make the decision, your knowledge of their attitude towards the subject at hand (whatever it may be) and advice they may have given on similar decisions in the past will influence your thinking to the point where you may be looking at the issue from a completely different angle from the way you would ordinarily.

This can be quite helpful; indeed, I generally put such decisions out for discussion for exactly that reason. My expectation is that the input will enrich my view of the issue and give me a more complete understanding upon which to base the decision.

My feeling of late, though, is that L will consistently give that little nudge in completely the wrong direction. Perhaps right for her, but deathly wrong for me.

And when many of those little nudges are applied to the same idea over time, they add up to a giant whack.

In the past, I would take this at face value and decide "Oh well, I guess that wasn't a very good idea after all." But after experiencing this phenomenon over and over again with ideas that I thought were really good, I begin to think that it's not the ideas that are at fault.

I've learned what sorts of ideas she's likely to enthuse over. These generally involve money and real estate – spending the one on the other. So I can play to her expectations and get a positive reaction – but I have to limit very carefully the range and scope of my thinking. She can only think in terms of what we can do with the present level of income over a particular time interval – which is generally both inadequate to our needs and requiring more austerity than I'm willing to tolerate – rather than working on any of the countless opportunities we have right now to improve our income to the point where we could afford such things easily.

In other words, her response to a shortage is "tighten your belt" rather than "let's find more money".

* This word has been brought to you by m-w.com

This goes back as far as the early 90s, when I realized that the computer job I was looking for wasn't going to happen. I suggested a couple of times that I should probably go ahead and get a job bagging groceries or delivering pizzas, just so we'd have enough to keep up with the bills. Delivering pizzas was "too dangerous", and "no, you need to work on your computer stuff" to the grocery idea (which had the dual effect of making me feel like I was being mollycoddled* and that what I was doing was useless.

And now we've got more income opportunities than I can count (literally): dozens of sites for indy consultants to get high-paying programming contracts, people locally willing to pay $50/hour for computer service, the online store nearly ready for some serious traffic (and the money to buy the ads to get that traffic), fundable ideas pouring out of my head (entire companies have been started for less), people wanting to use the studio, Hawley going independent and wanting to contract out the Survey database work... and L's response is to go look for another $8/hr. job at UGA.

Am I justified in wanting to scream?

I suppose what I should do is take the time to write down specifics on all this, a concrete list of what I'd like for her to do: check out the following web sites & look for anything to do with VB or Access. Investigate credit card gateways. Get a quote on digging a hole under the road for the networks. Call MicroWarehouse and find out what's the cheapest way to connect 2 networks via fiber at 100mbps. Contact the following people who've asked about websites and see what their budgets are like.

And if she still wasn't interested, go hire someone at $8/hr. to do it.

But I don't have the time to type it up, unless I think she's likely to do it; I can't afford the time-risk right now. And I can't hire somebody unless there's someone I trust (e.g. L or Bubba) to watch over them and show them the ropes. Never mind that the Red House is a total mess and I can't really afford to spend another $160/week (20 hrs. x $8/hr.) right now.

So this weekend we're renting a post-hole digger so we can put in a dog yard for the Green House tenants (and their six dogs). This is a worthwhile thing, but I can't help feeling that there is a more efficient way we could have planned it, a way that wouldn't have bitten a huge chunk out of this holiday weekend. I need this holiday weekend. I needed the last one too, and it also got bitten away. Last Saturday was also devoured whole.

If she wants a baby, we need a bigger house. I've managed to get through on that. We need more money before we can build anything. If she wants me to spend more time at home, I need a network connection to Red House (and space to work in, eventually, though I can make do with what we have for now). I feel like I'm telling her "here's how to get what we both want", and she treats it like advice from a stranger.