ehowton ◾ ◾ Haiku

Correction: My cat Daisy was not sleeping on my head while I was gaming. I apologize for the missunderstanding. In my last post, I stated,

Gamed until 2300. Daisy slept on my head.

That is, I meant to suggest, that these two events occurred sequentially. I apologize for the confusion.

Entry Begins: Slept on my 600-thread count sheets last night. It was like a dream. Perfect and unending. Until the phone woke me at 0400. Another outage at work. Fortunately, my on-call guy was onsite and the issue resolved with no customer impact.

I've been....well, emotional lately. And it dawned on me I've been doling out advice here lately without time in between to stop and ponder things in my own life; to take a little of advice I so freely give. So, here is my haiku:

Even keel and calm
On the inside
Chaotic

Someone else took my advice and posted the lyrics to the song, Smile by Nat King Cole. Let me tell you, reading those lyrics in that circumstance made me ache, and it was much easier to say what I said, than to read someone else's perspective on it. What a bitter pill we sometimes are forced to swallow.

My life is never dull (though I consider myself somewhat boring) though I wish it were. There is always so much going on around me, that sometimes I can't simultaneously assimilate it all at once. I have to have a priority ticketing system in my head. And when people's feelings are at stake, they don't always like being prioritized. That doesn't always work out for them. And lastly, my newest reply to someone's post. I really don't feel that I am qualified to give advice, so what I usually end up doing is sharing how I feel in hopes that something positive can be gleaned from it:

I'm sorry you hurt, but I cannot speak on these things. There is no advice I am qualified to give, despite my personal feelings concerning your post.

What I can do, is relate how I, a married, full-blooded American male, deal in my own household under similar conditions hoping perhaps you get a glimpse of the male psyche:

Whenever my wife brings an issue to me, even if its just a slight annoyance mentioned in passing, I feel, as head-of-household, that I must fix it. If she's just in a bad mood and brings up the fact that she's in a bad mood and there's nothing I can do about it, I fret for a solution because that's what we do. I feel one of my primary responsibilities is to make her happy, because when she's not happy, no one is.

Yelling rarely solves anything, however, I find myself guilty of this as well. When I state something, and she takes it the wrong way, or misunderstands, I usually first try to rephrase. When that fails, I ultimately raise my voice because in my small, right-thinking brain, she must not have heard me, else the issue would be at a conclusion. Alas, this usually doesn't work. You'd think I'd learn. I usually don't.

Us men don't take our women's frustration well. As men, we assume there's a root cause to the underlying frustration, and it's our job to dig it out, find it, and destroy it. That usually doesn't work either, but it doesn't stop us from trying, usually aggravating the situation in the process. When our womenfolk tell us they don't want to talk about it, we see it as a cry for help, and our assistance in uncovering the true source of the frustration - which of course is usually not the case. In a surprising turn of events, it turns out that what that means is you really don't want to talk about it! Perplexing to men, but true. And one day, I feel that all men will master that understanding. But not today.

I tell my wife, "If you have a suggestion to a problem, bring me your idea, or ask me for mine, but please don't just bitch." Running a family like you would a business is first nature to us, but doesn't always work, nor is it the most effective means to an end. Centuries from now, perhaps, men of that age will laugh at the foolishness of this thought. But right now, its all we have.

When faced with the statement that I've hurt my wife's feelings, my canned statement of apology is, "I'm sorry your feelings were hurt." Alleviating me of any responsibility of said hurt feelings. Occasionally, when I am at fault of hurting her feelings, I will apologize properly, but if her feelings get hurt during a discussion on feelings and nothing more tangible, men have a difficult time wrapping their smallish, logically-minded brains.

In conclusion, sometimes a woman is just frustrated and there's nothing we can do about it. It just doesn't make any sense to us, so we make it worse.

Sorry.

In other news, Solaris-admin turned SSDM comes to teh rescue on an Sun Netra X1 box being used as an (passive) Intrusion Detection System which did not come up after the power-outage due to an corrupt file system. It was the most exciting thing that happened to me all week.

I leave for an emergency trip to Wichita and will be out of the office all week. I'll post when I can, and as always, I look forward to the comments you leave on this site, as I enjoy posting comments on yours.

Take care.