My Time as a Human

My friend “Wikki” was feeling that most bitter of sorrows last night: the desire for a mate. There’s something about having someone to cuddle and rant at that makes the rest of life easier to live. I can’t say that I’m not dealing with a bit of the same thing. When the weather is beautiful there is nothing better than feeling the soft touch of a hand to hold, and the way a simple squeeze shivers up my arm and into my chest. At the same time, I know that soon I’ll have to get back to work and my energy will be dispersed enough to leave that same hand waiting, empty, far too often. Wikki knows this too but she couldn’t imagine finding anything that would fill this genetically engineered hole in her heart. Here’s where I’ve learned at least one way to hold off this forever distracting desire.

Rob Hanczar was the crazy kid all through Jr. High. He wrote absolutely brilliant short fiction in our writing class, but was known to fail any class he didn’t care about. At one point he decided that sloths were particularly funny and became an encyclopedia of sloth knowledge, just to get in as many obscure sloth references as possible. Late into High School, when I had just started playing guitar, I found out that he had been playing electric bass. I know instantly that he was going to be an amazing and completely out of the box creative musician and I jumped to form a band with him that lasted well through college.

One night I remember sitting with Rob, drinking a cheap beer and discussing life. We were talking about how much we loved playing music and he said to me, “You know, sometimes when I think about having to choose between sex and playing my bass…”

Most people put sex, and through implication, relationships, highest on their lists. Unlike Wikki, however, I’ve found some experiences in life that rival it. My friend Jonathan March was being indoctrinated into a corporate culture, and the new recruits were each told to share an emotionally intense moment. He started describing the time he played acoustic bass with an orchestra in a particular hall and as he recalled the event, tears began streaming down his face until he couldn’t speak.

After playing blues guitar live I was often accosted by women who appeared to have been overpowered by a mysterious force, their eyes melting and their brains bent on seduction. It was baffling to me, but my girlfriend at the time, Lisa Kvasnika, told me, “You are so intense and focused when you play. You’re putting so much energy into the guitar, that I want more than anything to be that guitar in your hands.”

When I’m improvising a solo, or even a whole piece with a group, I start to get lost in it. I revert almost entirely to the right brain, feeling out where each moment will take me next. I’m not thinking about the fact that as I stretch up into a bend the drums are dropping just enough to make that note want to sing a little longer before sliding down into a whisper, but I’m feeling all of that happen. As my fingers play through a range of gentle to intense the strings tremble, snap and shiver in response. I don’t think I have to push this analogy very far. The rise and fall of intensity. The rush of adrenaline.

Of course there are other intense experiences that give me similar feedback. When I’m rocketing down a hill feeling every twitch and shift of my body turn the snowboard into a knife carving snow I feel it. I aim for a pocket of moguls and hammer them, leaping into the air and flexing the board on the hard turns as I land, my heart dropping as I catch long air, landing with a fwap before cutting smooth arcs again, my legs vibrating over the rough spots.

But when the lonely nights arrive, my nylon guitar is the old friend that has always seen me through. I can spend hours working out a new piece of music or crafting lyrics that, when sung, carry the emotion I feel up a level, from my chest and out into the room. I think it’s telling that I’ve rarely, if ever, played the songs I’ve written this way for anyone else. I think they are written more to feel that emotional connection with the universe, something outside myself, than a way to get attention or respect. Cuddling with the universe, as it were!

I encouraged Wikki to find something that would feel this way for her. I’ve tried to encourage many people throughout my life to explore these other options. Ultimately, the desire to love and be loved is probably too great but at the same time humans are just too unreliable to depend on for all of these needs. Finding a passion outside of human relationships has made me a stronger, more independent person and I think that, ultimately, this is the best foundation for any real loving relationship.

click on the image to see the photographer’s page on flickr

Our driver met his wife one night when driving a client home. He had several suitors at the time, as he was an attractive guy with a car and a job that paid well. When he pulled up to the house he saw this girl and said, “that’s her.” “I didn’t care about caste, money, or anything,” he said. “I knew instantly that she was the one.” He went on to explain that he knew, too, that he wanted to marry a simple village girl. He didn’t think the educated city girls would ever put up with his schedule as a driver. “They would complain and get upset about my coming home at 2:00 in the morning. My wife, she doesn’t mind at all.”

Despite the limited set of requirements he’d used to select his bride, they were actually quite a cute couple. He went home early whenever he could and couldn’t wait to see her. We all went out to dinner a number of times and they were forever telling in-jokes and pausing to giggle with each other. I started thinking again about arranged marriage.

Zeet and Zameet, our fearless director and producer, were also a couple. They were married quite young during a mad sequence of events wherein he started teaching a youth group just to get a chance to talk to her, she was almost killed in a car wreck, and in a groggy haze of pain meds at the hospital she said, “Why are you here? You hardly know me! If you’re so in love with me, fine, marry me.” He of course replied, “yes” immediately and, dumbstruck, she responded with, “Wait, what just happened?” He spent the next year helping her learn to walk again, a feat the doctors didn’t believe was possible. Of course, they didn’t think she would live either. She now runs for exercise and they’ve been happily married all of their adult lives.

Of course, that’s a great story. But the fairy tale version isn’t the most interesting, it’s what happened next. They began fighting, having various issues that are naturally born of close proximity to in-laws and the limited relationship toolset of youth. Things got so bad that she moved out. Despite this, they each knew that they had to stick by their vows. They weren’t going to quit the marriage they had agreed to. They struggled though, learned from the process, and today are like chocolate and peanut butter.

These two examples confirmed something for me that I’ve been wondering for a long time. How much does it really matter who we choose to marry? I’m beginning to believe that, given a resolve to work things out, people are capable of crafting relationships that evolve and merge because they have to. Perhaps our ability to pick and choose, along with the relative ease of divorce, is actually hampering us and making life more difficult. (This, of course, discounts abuse, addiction, and other such factors.)

Barry Schwartz and Dan Gilbert both have excellent TED talk videos (and, I believe, books) that discuss the counterintuitive reality of choice. Humans are actually happier given fewer options, or when they are stuck with a choice they’ve made.

I’ve almost married several times, once going so far as to be engaged to a wonderful woman. I think my exes are much better off without me but that doesn’t mean I don’t still love them dearly. One of the big factors in the eventual breakups was my unwillingness to be ready to have children. While the idea of having to focus on children horrifies me now, I know deep down that if I were forced to have them I would find my own happiness in that world. I know myself well enough to know that I can find ways to be happy in almost any environment. Would I be as happy driving rush hour traffic to bring a toddler to school as I am running through fields in India? Right now I don’t think so, but of course I’ve made myself happy in my current life already, and the hormones that kick in during child rearing aren’t in effect. Maybe I would be.

As a human I am naturally endowed by my creator with certain unquenchable desires and primary directives, among these are the quest for food, safety, and reproduction (both sex and co-nurture of young). Additionally my particular model has some kind of a novelty and artistic creation directive that can be quite insistent and will, at times, overpower other basic survival directives like food and sleep.

In order for our society to develop and advance, we have learned that we must band together and combine resources, often necessitating the use of extreme measures to overcome our primary objectives. These stiflings come in the form of religious or governmental laws that tell us not to reproduce every time, and with every one, we can get our hands on. They also tell us not to kill anyone who tries to spread their genes in our place, or who cuts in front of us when waiting in line for a Wii. Some even restrict eating, perhaps as a way of training and “keeping in shape” for the resisting of sex.

Now that I have been single again for a while, I am reminded of the many ways the primary directives are compromised by the limited ability of our primal brains to understand the bigger picture. When single, the most powerful motivating force in my known universe is cute women. They are like curvaceous chunks of P-238, and when I get near one I start bouncing and wriggling with all of the extra energy. I write more creatively. Music pours out of me in my isolated moments. What I’ve learned, however, is that for me they often have a great deal more potential energy than kinetic energy. Unrequited love produces far more artistic output than a stable isotope. This means that my directive to produce art is in conflict with my directive to maintain a stable relationship (stable relationships being necessary for the care of young).

As it turns out, this works out in a practical manner as well. Through experimentation, I’ve learned that there is a cycle of response to a lengthy absence during a long term relationship, typically taking place in the span of a month:

• Week 1: “This such a great opportunity for you. I’m so excited for you! Have a great trip!”
• Week 2: “Wow, I really, really miss you!”
• Week 3: “You know, now that I have more time I’ve really been exploring more of myself, discovering who I am and what I want out of life. I feel like I’m really growing as a person.”
• Week 4: “Who are you and how did I let you ruin my life?!”

Now, it’s useful to have a few humans with this novelty directive in your gene pool, because they’re the types to hop out into the cold without a towel, jog over the next hill, and find out that there’s a hot tub over there. They also provide amusing sounds when everyone is back in the pool again. You just don’t want to have too many of them, or let them mate with your daughters, potentially leading to unstable offspring.

So I’ll keep poking my head over nearby hills, bouncing up and down when girls get near, and try as I might to avoid it, end up in some form of relationship again. But it gets rough being built like a pinball machine, designed to bounce back and forth forever. At some point the magnets will refuse to fire, the lights will flicker, and the last ball will trickle through the unresponsive flippers and rattle into the pocket for the end of my game. I can only hope that at that point I, and everyone around me, had some fun along the way.