More Q&As–Who has DEEP Questions to Ask Me?

More Q&As–Who has DEEP Questions to Ask Me?

 

Going forward, I’m looking specifically for deep-diving questions that expose my psyche and behaviors (even when what you discover about me isn’t praiseworthy).

 

The first four of these are from my dedicated friend Hannah McCrane.

The rest are from me to give you an idea of what I mean by “deeper” questions.

 

What was your favorite holiday tradition as a child?  

 

Getting up on Christmas morning to see what kind of presents Santa had left the night before. One Christmas when I was about seven or eight, Santa actually delivered two live horses. They were “parked” right outside our sliding glass door until we opened the rest of our gifts, which were cowboy boots, cowboy clothes, cowboy hats… the whole nine yards EXCEPT the horses.  But I didn’t catch onto the “theme” until they threw the curtains open and revealed Stormy and Sugar Babe, our first horses. I practically launched myself onto Sugar Babe; the wrangler, Larry Kirkwood, had to say, “Wait a minute! Let me tighten her cinch first!” (He shoulda thought of THAT before they opened the curtains! HA HA HA HA HA)

 

Ketchup or mustard?

 

Both on hamburgers and hotdogs (plus sweet relish). But I put ketchup on more things than mustard.

 

Lake or ocean?

 

Toss up. I love them both, for different reasons. I feel safer in a lake (no undertow, sharks or jellyfish to mess with my amygdala) but the enormity of the ocean, and the sound of crashing waves on the shore, always leaves me in awe… and I like to see whales and dolphins and sea birds going by.

 

If you could turn into any animal at will, what would it be?

 

A cat or a goat, probably, although I’d love to be able to fly, too. But cats and goats really know how to have fun.

 

 

Do you have any regrets you’re willing to share as lessons for the rest of us?

 

Yes. A couple of them pop up immediately.

 

My first regret is not listening almost exclusively to my yaysayers (as mentioned in an earlier Q&A session). My naysayers made me more afraid than I should have been, so I waited thirty years to go whole hog for what I really wanted to do for a living (write!) so I wasted a lot of time fulfilling other peoples’ prophecies for me instead of my yaysayers and my own. I regret that deeply. The one good thing I got out of it was a small pension and perhaps (although not certainly) a larger Social Security check, but I tend to doubt that!  I only earned $26K to $30k annually for about six years (when I worked at Warner Bros. as an executive secretary), the other years I made far less in other pursuits. I think I’d have done better had I gone all out for writing as a young adult instead of when I was 55. BUT, then again, cable TV, the Internet and The Information Age didn’t come along until I was in my 50’s, so a  writing career would have been a much tougher row to hoe back then)!!!  I shoulda listened to Alpha Rossetti, Walter Dobbs, Ted Crail and DeForest Kelley decades sooner and just gone for it!  (Alas!)

 

BOTTOM LINE: LISTEN TO YOUR YAYSAYERS, NOT YOUR NAYSAYERS! (But be sure to get my book to learn what a yay-sayer IS and ISN’T!!!!)

 

The second regret is trying to “rescue” friends who had no intention of being rescued. 

 

As an empathetic giver, I have been deluded into believing that most of my friends are very much like I am.  That is, if/when I need help or assistance, it’s usually for a span of time, during which I work like mad to make sure my need for their help is as limited and short-term as possible.

 

I’m a great rescuer!  I am NOT great at looking the other way when the folks I rescue stop trying to make it on their own in the shortest possible span of time. 

 

In two instances, I rescued friends and their responses to my help severed our friendship

(at their end, not mine)

 

The first friend said she only needed to remove herself from the drug culture in her southern California environment so she could get her life back. So, I invited her to the Pacific NW to live with me until she found a job and was self-sufficient here (a transition period that I figured might take up to six months).

 

But as soon as she got up here and landed a job (for which I lent her my car to get back and forth to until she could afford a heap of her own), she found the drug culture up here and started coming home drugged, sullen and pouty, expecting me to understand that it would “take a while” for her to get clean!

 

Nope! I didn’t understand, she was no longer welcome to drive my car (HORRORS!). We parted company soon after.

 

In another instance, I befriended a fellow Star Trek fan who wanted a divorce from her husband. Figuring she was the quintessential effervescent livewire that she portrayed herself to be at Star Trek conventions, I figured she’d hit the ground running in a new environment, grab a job, and be on her own long before I even wanted her to go.  (I prefer living alone. Inviting someone into my home isn’t something I do lightly, ever! But she was such a hoot at conventions that I figured we’d laugh all the way until she could afford to move out anyway, so it didn’t feel much like a deal breaker me.)

 

Wrong!  Outside conventions, she was a fearful, sullen, negative-talking human being who acted very much, from Day One, like an assault survivor. She answered the phone as if she was expecting the police to be calling for her report on an assault against her.

 

Even DeForest Kelley noticed this and specifically mentioned it to me: “She sounds like a battered wife until she realizes it’s me, and then she lights right up!”  I told him that I had finally forbidden her to answer my phone (to get her own line) because I didn’t want anyone from work (or anywhere else) calling me and hearing whimpering at the other end. It was such a turnoff.

 

She didn’t like any of her earlier jobs (working at Sears, etc.) so she went to interviews expressly, I believe, to lose the opportunity to get rehired in a new location. (I went along and listened from outside the room; she was a lousy interviewee. Monotone, zero energy, no effort to impress at all.)

 

And she utterly refused to accept the free additional training that was offered to her on the multiple occasions when she temped and was kept by the same employer for any length of time.

 

I quickly learned that she had a welfare-based upbringing (I recognized her as a carbon copy of her mother psychologically the moment I heard her mother on the phone) and I realized it would take her time to get her feet underneath her, but she stopped even trying to do that. She felt safe and comfortable as my housemate; she didn’t want to move.

 

To make a painfully long (four-year) story short, I finally realized I hadn’t rescued a down-on-her-luck friend but a sea lamprey, someone determined to stay stuck to me for as long as I’d allow it because it was working for her just fine.

 

I knew it would end the friendship (which I cherished), but I had to shake her loose and force her to fly on her own or find someone else willing to have a sea lamprey as a housemate.

 

Again, I’m good at short-term rescues when the people I rescue are hellbent on relying on me for as short a time as possible, but I’m not good at becoming co-dependent on undependable housemates.  I draw the line right there.

 

Because of these two awful experiences, I have only risked it once since. The most recent experience worked out fine and we’re best friends forever and ever because her ethic regarding sort term rescues matches mine.

 

BOTTOM LINE:

Rescuing able-bodied human beings should be short-term. 

That’s why they’re deemed “rescues” and not marriages of sorts!

I suggest getting a contract outlining your expectations before you risk doing this.

(I didn’t ask for one in any of these instances, and I didn’t need one in the last instance.) 

 

 

Those are probably my two biggest regrets.  I would like to have remained friends with the two I lost, but they deemed me a turncoat for (finally!) taking better care of myself than I took of them.  (I can live with that, but not happily or without the keenest of regrets.)

 

 

I also regret being less patient in the past than I have become since growing older. I had a tendency to react like a shaken can of Coke when frustrated by inconveniences and conversations (machines that don’t work, tasks that are pains in the butt, people whose politics underscore their bigotries, etc.)

 

I have to practice patience: it doesn’t come naturally to me. 

I wish it did.

I’m getting better at it every year.

 

I’m being VERY patient with COVID!

I am sooo tired it’s still here despite my best efforts to help starve it of victims!

 

UPDATE: Here are a couple more DEEP questions from Hannah, the friend who just keeps on giving. Thank you!

 

If you could relive one day with the Kelleys, which would it be? 

 

This is a tough one!  Just one?

 

I guess the one where they surprised me by paying for my little red Mazda after telling me they’d loan me the money (“with NO INTEREST!”) just so I’d go get it before having to commit myself to paying the credit union for a car loan.

 

I’d relive this day not because of the gift itself, but because of their reactions to MY reaction to their gift. They looked like kids in a candy store; like surprising me in this unexpected way made their month and maybe even their year.

 

I LOVED seeing their DELIGHT!!

 

If you could have a do-over at anything in life, what would it be (think carefully, because this one thing could change your future today)?

 

I’d go, again, with believing in my yaysayers because it would change my life to the way I wanted it sooner.  And I would still have met De and Carolyn and maybe gotten to know them better even sooner than I did. That would have been heaven on earth!!!  I could have written screenplays that starred De!!!