More Ghostly Annoyances

The wife and I have become enamoured of a new TV show on Netflix. It's scary without a lot of jump scares and occasionally funny as hell. It's called "Paranormal", which really cuts to the chase. Our protagonist is Mr. Refaat, a quiet, somewhat mousy college professor who's a scientist and a very by the book guy about reality and life. The thing is, he's A. being haunted by a demon, and B. has become the reluctant go-to guy for paranormal disturbances in his suburban Cairo (Egypt) neighborhood. If that's not complicated enough, he's also C. deeply in love, though not with the woman he's about to marry. It's in Arabic with subtitles and in case you did not know this, Muslims are just as superstitious about otherworldly beings as Christians are. Maybe more so. They did, for example, bring us the djinn, among other things. 

So in my last blog post, I talked about ghosts, and that I don't see them, or maybe I do see them and I just don't pay enough f_____ attention to know that I'm seeing them. I talked about this with a friend and she pointed out that I've been hanging with a gang of Buddhists since 2006 and meditating quite a lot, and that she thought I could probably use that focus to notice when stuff like that happens. And I thought, wow, applying a religious principle to real life. How novel.

Aside: I hung around with a bunch of Lutherans in San Diego for about 10 years. Tricky, since I didn't believe in God for most of that time, but I grew up in the Lutheran Church and these guys really walked the walk. (First Lutheran Church of San Diego, https://www.firstlutheransd.org/, and if you stop by, tell them I said hi.) Fed meals to the homeless in violation of local laws, set up a free medical clinic, had a lawyer who came in pro bono once a week to help people apply for Social Security or veterans' benefits (I helped), stuff like that. Oh, and they had this church over here, too, and if you came by on a Sunday you could hear some good music and maybe learn something. If more Christians were like that, then those other Christians would be too ashamed to rant about being demonized for being Christian and maybe realize we demonize them because they are assholes.

But yeah, seriously, apply meditation principles to paying attention to small things (since most ghost encounters are quite brief, a second or two, a single sound, etc., and if you're not paying attention, you will miss it). I have that whole ADHD thing about not being able to focus and also being able to hyperfocus, which makes no sense and drives other people crazy but makes Perfect Sense To Me. So I can do that. Just, you know, not all the time and often not when I want to.

Anyway, this brings us to the Office Ghost.

I dunno if the Office Ghost is a common phenomenon, but I've been told by more than one person that our office, at least, has a ghost. People talk of seeing a big shadow going down the hall by itself, and one lady told me about a human-shaped blob of light that came out of somebody's office and went into the copy room, then disappeared. Since I have never seen one, despite being many haunted places, I just figured I was never going to see it anyway and so it did not matter if our office had a ghost or not. At least until yesterday.

(Foreshadowing. Your sign of quality blog posts.)

So I have a small office that's across from a vacant office, and the office to the right is also vacant. The room to the left is the server room, and people rarely go in there, so it's pretty quiet in my neck of the woods. I face the back wall so I can't generally see people coming (except with my little rear view mirror), but I can hear them about halfway down the hall, and I've gotten pretty good at knowing who matches what stride cadence and breath sounds. In particular there's one lawyer named Tom who has a very distinct sound. He often comes up the hall to talk to his paralegal, whose office is a little farther on.

Yesterday I heard him coming and was glad, because I had to ask him something. As he got about even with my office I said, "Hey, Tom, come here a sec." I waited for him to stop and stick his head in my door and say, "What's up, Trouble?" like he usually does. Only he didn't. Which was odd. I looked at my little rear view mirror and I thought I saw him, so I turned around. And, uh, he was not there.

I got up and looked out into the hallway. No Tom. No anybody, for that matter. Now I'm thinking maybe he just didn't hear me and went on by, so I went back to my desk and waited for him to go back the other way. After about ten minutes I thought maybe I just missed him. So I got up and went down to his office and--he was not there. Furthermore, it didn't look like he'd been there all day. His light was off and none of his stuff was there.

Very puzzled, I went back to my office. I had only been back there a minute or two when the phone rang. It was Tom! "Hey, where are you?" "I'm in Colorado. Why?" Uh, that kind of threw me. "Oh, I thought I heard you go by." "No, I just landed in Colorado. I was in Nevada yesterday." And by the end of the conversation I figured out that he hadn't been in the office since Friday and there was no way he could have walked past my office.

And while I was pondering the weirdness of that, I realized that about a week previously, I was at a restaurant getting take-out. The order wasn't ready so I was sitting down, and somebody suddenly whispered "Hey!" in my ear. I was sitting next to a wall, so it's not like that was really possible. And besides hearing "Hey!", I felt the breath against my ear. I turned and looked, but of course there was no one in, uh, the wall. And I mostly forgot about this because they called my order and I got up to get it.

So, maybe I don't see ghosts. But, maybe I've been hearing them all along and I just didn't realize it. I still don't have a logical explanation for what walked past my office yesterday. My wife thought maybe Tom fell asleep on the plane and accidentally astrally projected himself back to the office because he needed to talk to me. Which I guess is possible. But, uh, it's also possible that whatever is haunting our office can impersonate living people.

And I'll be sleeping with the lights on tonight. Cheers!

Ghostly Annoyances

So I am a big fan of ghost shows. Not horror movies (though I like supernatural horror movies too) but fact-based shows like Ghost Hunters and Ghost Nation. And Paranormal Caught on Camera, though in that instance mostly so I can yell "It's a bug!" or "It's a drone!" at the screen. And I may have mentioned on this site before that ghosts don't seem to like me. I've been in plenty of haunted places and never seen or felt a darn thing. Which is frustrating but also kind of a relief.

For the record, tho, it's not a question of whether I "believe" in ghosts. I have no reason to doubt people who see ghosts, though, because I've met some pretty together people who have very interesting ghost stories, and I don't think they're all lying. Some even have impressive video footage to back it up. What I've come to believe about this is, not all of us can do everything. Some people can run a 4 minute mile. Some can solve impressive algebra equations. Some can, I dunno, swim ridiculous distances while fat. Some people can see ghosts or maybe even talk to them. I just can't, is all.

I feel much the same way about God. I say I don't believe in God, which is basically true, but kind of simplistic. It's more like, some people can talk to God, but if God exists, and I highly doubt that, he doesn't know that I exist. We can't talk to each other. Hell, I can't even tune into the right radio station. Still, when something happens, like when I was stuck in the hospital and our cat Grayson got out, I ask the Threads community (@J3ninDallas) or friends or whomever to intercede with whatever divine beings they can talk to and ask if they can help. Because it can't hurt, right? (Grayson was back inside in a couple of hours, thanks in no small part to our friend Kellum. Thanks, Kellum!)

Last week I saw a documentary called "74 minutes." Check it out if you can find it. It's about a ghost hunter, Chad Calek, who went through something like 30 years of footage from ghost hunting and edited out everything that had a potential explanation. What was left was 74 minutes' worth of all the stuff he had no way to explain. The footage is interesting and, yeah, scary. But the best part at the end was when Calek went into What I Have Learned. He said he'd figured out, first of all, that he thinks what he documented is future science. We don't know what's going on vis a vis ghosts, yet, but we will in the future. Second thing, he doesn't think there's any way to "prove" ghosts exist or not. Science will not investigate paranormal stuff, because "proving" it absolutely would not leave any room for faith, and as human beings, we need room for faith.

But thirdly, and most interesting, Calek said that whether or not you see ghosts seems to be largely a matter of what you believe. If you don't think ghosts exist, you're not likely to ever see one. As an example, he had some footage of a friend of his, Ryan Buell, confronting a "demonic entity" with the Prayer of St. Michael. It was filmed though a heat-seeking camera and as Ryan got to the climax of the prayer that banned demons from the world, darned if the heat signature on the camera didn't go way, way up. Then faded out. Calek commented that if he had been there and reciting the Prayer of St. Michael, he doesn't think anything would have happened because he is not Catholic and the prayer does not have any special meaning for him.

So maybe I never see ghosts because I don't expect to? I guess that is one possibility. The other one, which I don't like as much, is that I don't see ghosts because I'm not f_____ paying attention. It does seem like a lot of this stuff is corner of your eye or brief glimpse types of things. Given my remarkably scattered brain, I bet I could walk all the way through the Conjuring House, pass like five or six demonic entities shaking angry fists at me, and the whole time be saying to myself, "I know I left my cell phone here somewhere."

Anyway, back in the land of the living: I am a fan of the advice columns. All of them. Dear Abby, Carolyn Hax, Asking Eric, Ask Amy (gone but not forgotten), etc. I'm not sure why. My suspicion is that I like knowing what other people think about, what worries them, and stuff like that. My darker suspicion is that the advice columns make me feel NORMAL. That I read them and say to myself, "Hey, I'm a mess, but I'm not as much of a mess as THAT guy."

Friday at noon most weeks is Carolyn Hax's live chat. This is a bonus column because a whole bunch of people send in (relatively) short questions and she answers them in brief. It's like getting three or four extra columns. I greatly look forward to it and I hate it when she takes a holiday. (Yes, I know, we all need holidays.)

This week, there was a live chat, and what a live chat it was. The first letter was from a lady who was mad because her husband didn't want to travel with her to see her family members. She thought he should just suck it up and come with because it was Important To Her. Next there was a letter from a lady who had a friend with a chronic illness who had to cancel at the last minute a lot because, well, she had a chronic illness, and her friend was getting cranky and resentful. Then we had a letter from a guy who frequently got invited to barbecues that started at 6pm. No problem there, but apparently the host didn't serve the food until about 10. He wanted the host to start serving the food earlier.

There were a couple of other interesting letters, but there seemed to be a theme. The theme was, "I want another person to do something that they're not going to do, how do I make them do it?" And while I can think of other ways to pound your head against the wall, I can't imagine that there are too many others that are this bad for you and at the same time, bad for all of your fellow passengers.

I hate to tell you guys this, but the one and only person you have any control over whatsoever is you. Not your parents, not your spouse, not your minor children (yes, you can pick them up until they're about three or so, but after that, lots of luck). More importantly, you have control over your EXPECTATIONS. If you keep expecting that someone's going to do something that they've made it abundantly clear they aren't going to do, then who's the idiot? What's more, what do you stand to gain? Yes, you can feel selfrighteous because so and so isn't Doing What's Expected. And you get to feel like a victim, which some people like, I guess. But selfrighteousness lasts for about 5 seconds, I don't personally like feeling like a victim and if you keep expecting something that's not happening, what you get is a truckload of disappointment and resentment.

I mean, examples abound, but here are a few just from people I've known:

• "My ex husband pays child support but never shows up for his kids."

• "My medical patients don't make decisions based on logic and what's good for them."

• "My teenager is having sex and he/she shouldn't because he/she is too young."

• "The Orange Shitgibbon said something appalling."

For the record one, the first thing is very common. Lots of men (and some women) seem to think getting divorced is a good reason to forget they have the first batch of kids and just go start another family with someone else. For all of me, they only pay child support because they're legally forced to.

For the record two, the second thing is because people make decisions for reasons other than the Best Medical Outcome. People refuse surgery because they can't afford it, can't spare the time off work, or their insurance won't cover it. People don't have cancer treatment because they'd rather spend three months on the beach in Belize vs. six months horribly sick from chemo and six more months in a hospital bed gasping for air before they die anyway. I personally take meds for bipolar disorder that are notoriously toxic. They will probably shorten my life and may cause any number of horrible diseases, but am I gonna stop taking them? No way in hell. When it comes to the body vs the brain, the brain is gonna win every time. If I'm not sane enough to know what's going on, there's no reason for me to hang around anyway.

For the record three, we have excellent documentation dating back to ancient history that they always have and they always will. Shakespeare even wrote a play about it. Which is why it's so important to have The Birth Control Talk with your kid when he/she is YOUNG, like by 13 or so, and then GET THEM SOME so they'll have it on hand when they need it. Which, statistically, they will, and probably well before college. Also talk about Plan B. There's a word for people that ignore this advice. It is "grandparent."

For the record four, he has always done that and he always will. He mocked a disabled reporter on camera, for God's sake. I get the outrage, I do, but why are you so surprised?

(Apologies to actual gibbons, who are not at all related.)

So why do it? Why not look, instead, at the other person and just -- accept them the way that they are? Expect them to do stuff they are going to do, and that you know they're going to do, because they have done it many times. And if that doesn't work for you, ie, if you entered a relationship contingent on your husband accompanying you to visit your family, maybe re-evaluate your relationship and not the content of your husband's character.

My friend Tera once said that if you're having a problem with a friend or a sweetie or--pretty much anybody, really--you would be wise to ask yourself four questions:

1. What do I need out of this relationship?

2. Is it reasonable to expect that the other person will provide that to me, based on their past behavior?

3. What does this person need out of me?

4. Am I reasonably able to provide that to this person?

If the answer to No. 2 is no, you have the option to get what you need elsewhere. If you must, absolutely must have That Thing from This Person and This Person can't provide it, well then, the relationship is doomed. Likewise, if the answer to No. 4 is no, is there anything you can do to help the person get what they need from someone other than you? If not, the relationship is also doomed. You can't do what you can't or are obviously unwilling to do. And you can't expect other people to do what they can't or are obviously unwilling to do.

To sum up (too late), we human beings need to do a much better job of letting other people be who they are. We get mad as hell when people expect us to do things we're not going to do and give us a hard time about it. Why not extend that same grace to other people? Less frustration, less head pounding, better relationships and a kinder world. You're welcome.

And watch out for ghosts.