The Deeds Counter, Unbalanced

How do you know if you're a bad person? I'm asking this seriously.

I mean, I don't believe in moral absolutes, because I think they point to lazy thinking and dangerous certainty on the part of the person assigning labels-- judge not lest ye be judged, and all that-- but what if there were something like a Good Deeds and Bad Deeds bar chart floating around above all our heads that kept a running tally of our current totals? And what if your Bad Deeds bar started a winning streak? And further, what if you were a prolific dreamer/sufferer of nightmares and you woke up from a startlingly realistic one to confront the certainty that you have a very good chance of frightening any children you might have?

Part of me wants to think that people who are dangerously ahead in their Bad Deeds category kind of sense the hopelessness of evening the score, and hence don't even worry about it. That would make my current fretting evidence that my situation is reversible, that Good Deeds can come out on top again through a program of conscious action in some areas and restraint in others. I think for many years I thought of myself as significantly ahead in the Good category, even to the point where I let myself off the hook for several things I'd been classing as Bad Deeds. Like getting kicked out of high school, for example, which I have since rendered in so many shades of gray that it falls into nether category and is instead something that I measure on a separate graph altogether, one called Experiences Which Allow Me Greater Empathy for Others.

But lately I've been noticing some definite accretions in the Bad category. I know they're bad because they tend to come up in this curious moral vacuum, where the why/why not question seems equally pointless on either side, and it's only after I go ahead and do them that I realize, "Yes, that was bad." I hate being elliptical, but I also hate being overly confessional because I suspect I describe my own bad deeds with a bias sometimes that's meant to encourage others to exonerate me, so let it suffice to say that alcohol plays a stupidly central role in all of this. My Bad Deeds column, which I imagine (uncreatively) as red against Good Deeds' blue, becomes a flaming pillar sometimes when I drink. I forget peoples' names, I gossip, I perform ridiculous stunts to cope with the fact that I'm bored and uncomfortable and really just want to leave. On one hand, I think using alcohol as a social crutch is pretty common for a lot of people, and that doesn't necessarily mean they're actively doing Bad Deeds. On the other hand, I think I'm often prone to waving that crutch around and smashing things instead of just leaning on it.

The obvious fix here would seem to be to just stop drinking for a while and wait for Good Deeds to catch up and overtake Bad, and I've done this periodically in my past. I guess I just wonder about the outside chance that I'm wrong, and there is such thing as moral absolutism and I happen to be Bad--Period. and all this shades-of-gray, deeds-counter business is the real crutch. And if I'm Bad--Period. then what about the possibility of truly fucking up my children?

I suspect there's a gaping hole, or five, in pretty much all of the logic I just used, and that the past century of Western philosophy has been devoted to clearing it all up and I just stopped taking notes that day in college, but it feels like the past couple of months have been leading up to the question that hit me like a lightning bolt last night at 3:37 in the morning. "What if I'm a bad person? What if I frighten my children?" And it was scary enough to make me burst into tears and wake up my husband and our pets.

Escape Hatch

Tonight I'm going to my last night class for graduate school. This has me more freaked out than I would have imagined. The road from here on out to graduation in May is a long, lonely uphill trek wherein I'm supposed to complete a bunch of independent reading hours, put together my thesis, and then complete some giant how-much-do-you-know-about-the-history-of-your-genre exam, while still somehow dealing with the current realities of my job and trying to figure out some future money-making endeavor. When I think too long on any one part of that last sentence, it makes me sick to my stomach. Without dwelling too long on the point, let's just say I get it now, the wistful deus ex machina logic some women employ when they light on sudden pregnancy as an answer in the face of inevitable uncertainty. Luckily, though, I'm just tasked with the one life to muddle through right now.

ANXIETY-INDUCED CHANGE OF SUBJECT

So it's the beginning of the Really Cold Days, officially, and to mark the occasion I'm wearing my ass-busting boots. They got their name one cold rainy day in Texas, remarkably similar to this Fresno morning, when I went charging through the UT Student Union on a mission for waffle fries and felt the damp slate floor skid from beneath my turning heel and the entire world came shooting up from the perpendicular to the parallel, and my elbow, shoulder, and head hit the floor in rapid succession. The fall was so bad someone else screamed. Days later, assessing the injury list beyond the mild concussion and terribly bruised ego, I found that my sweater had somehow left its own waffle-knit print bruised onto my elbow. I'm still not sure how that's possible, but it was the prettiest bruise I've ever had.

And somehow this leads me to thinking about our upcoming winter trek. Pants and I have established the tradition of abandoning both our families (sorry!) during the Most Wonderful Time of the Year to blunder selfishly off in search of icy adventures in the American West. Last year took us through Arizona and Nevada to Utah and this year we're hitting up the Redwoods and southern Oregon. This year we actually plan to camp for four days in the snow, even though it's well-known by now that cold makes me homicidal. Fortunately, it's also well-known that I have no pride when it comes to staying warm. My dad has this ridiculous suit-thing that his company hooked him up with when it looked like he was going to go work in the Arctic Circle, as in, the no-shit, abandon-all-hope cold, and then when it looked like the deal was off for a while, he sent me this ridiculous suit-thing, and oh how I rejoiced. It's bright blue and has a massive, nubbly-lined hood and a big stripe of reflective tape across the back, and when it's on, I look like a six-foot-tall starfish and walk with the stubby gait of an Ewok. I'm most definitely bringing it to Oregon, and if I have to get it out and put it on, it will be a shaming statement for Pants, who will have to acknowledge to passersby that he actually married this thing, and that yes, underneath all that, it is female.

In other news, I went to a wedding this weekend ended up on the roof of the squadron's short bus, which was remodeled on the inside to have black leather bench seating and a wet bar. It was cold, but the reception was outdoors and the space heaters few and far between. Consequently, the only option for warmth was vigorous activity, and the music wasn't working for me. Hence, bus-climbing. I know how it must have looked, not only to wedding guests but also to the legions of rehabbers whose half-way houses ringed the B&B on all sides, but sometimes you get an idea, and then you get bored listening to two hours of child-rearing conversations, and then the DJ plays "Achey Breaky Heart" more than once, and suddenly you're stacking coolers on top of each other and busting out the escape hatch. Plus, the view was nice.