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The Bright Side of This Election

A lot of people are depressed or elated about last night’s election results. I’m neither, because I’ve learned a few things about politics I didn’t understand in my youth.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t43VgJ4U9_Q&fs=1&hl=en_US]

For me, the fate of the world always seemed to hang on the next election. In 1994, when I was a lot more liberal than I am today, I felt devastated and depressed when the GOP swept both chambers of Congress. Two years before that, when Bill Clinton was elected president, I thought all would be right with the world. A lot of people had the same emotional jolt two years ago when Obama was elected.

But, you see, I’ve found in more recent years that my personal happiness has absolutely nothing to do with which way the political winds are blowing. What says it all are the lyrics from the Avett Brothers song I started this post with:

When nothing is owed, deserved or expected

And you’re life doesn’t change by the man that’s elected

If your loved by someone you’re never rejected.

Decide what to be and go be it.

My life has taken turns for the better and worse regardless of who is in office. Government can’t change me. Only I can.

I touched on this a bit after health care reform was passed in March. At the time, some of my liberal friends  on Facebook hailed it as the Second Coming. My conservative friends cried treason. If anyone out there is wondering what the law may or may not do for those suffering from mental illness and addiction, I have an opinion. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the fine print of the law. All I’ll say about the law itself is that it’s not what either side thinks it is. It’ll probably do some good and cause unintended problems. That’s how it is with every law. Is this the end of bad behavior from insurance companies? To think so is to be naive.

Which brings me to this election. The important things in my life won’t change either way because the Republicans took the House. It sounds mighty apathetic of me, but that’s not the case. I used to be so keyed in when it came to politics. But I was beyond apathetic about the things I needed to do to be a better man.

I still care about politics. I vote every year without fail. And I always vote for both Republicans and Democrats. I’m moderate in my political views, which is to say I dislike extremes be it to the left or right. In the long run, Clinton having a Republican Congress to deal with worked for everyone, because nothing extreme was allowed to happen. Republicans who think the last two years were a disaster forget that when George W. Bush had a Republican-controlled House and Senate for nearly  six years of his presidency, pork-fueled spending went way out of control. That will always happen under one-party control, no matter who lives in The White House.

I’m not at all upset about the election results, because we’re back to the kind of divided government that can do the least harm.

And even if that weren’t the case, I know the results would have no bearing on what I need to do for me and my family.

Some of my indifference comes from my being a student of history. Mid-term elections come and go, but much bigger events usually define whether a president succeeds or fails in the eyes of history.

Had it not been for WW II, Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency would have gone down in history as a mixed bag. Had it not been for Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson might be a revered historical figure today. 

My own struggles have revealed a simple lesson:

Nothing the government does or does not do can help those who are out of their minds and slowly killing themselves with addictive behavior. Government funding for more addiction treatment centers? All well and good, but if you’re locked in your crazy head you’re not going to go to one. Making it illegal for insurers to deny coverage to someone with pre-existing conditions, including mental illness? Sounds great. But someone bent on self destruction isn’t going to be going to the doctor.  They’ll go to the emergency room when the chest pains and paranoia become too much or they’ve overdosed on something.

You’re not going to find God’s Grace at the local polling station. You’ll only find it in your own willingness to change and in the people who help you through it.

Those who love you and help you through your struggles are Republicans and Democrats. And they don’t care what you are as much as they care about who you are.

I didn’t stay up until the early-morning hours watching election returns on TV like I used to. Getting a full night’s sleep was more important.

I’m not going to spend the next several days in front of the TV listening to all the talking heads on CNN and Fox News.

That’s all just a bunch of noise that no longer has meaning for me.

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Cut the Drama, Rage Boy

My old friend Clarence liked the post I wrote about him awhile back and jokingly asked me to write another one. OK, buddy, but you’re not gonna like this one.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72rWAe0pUdQ&fs=1&hl=en_US]

Note: I’m keeping your true identity out of this, so your anonymity is preserved.

I meant everything I said in that post. In fact, I cherish your friendship a lot more than I did even then. But you have a special challenge I have a little experience with (a lot of experience, actually). I’ve tried to explain it to you in person and on the phone, but I’m not doing a very good job at it. So I’ll do what I always do in situations like that and put it in the written word.

You carry a lot of rage inside of you. An old priest I used to know described it as Irish Alzheimer’s Disease — you forget everything but the grudges.

You talk a lot about how this friend has betrayed you or that friend is driving you to the point where you want to “rip his f-ing head off.” You describe these verbal rages as “taking moral inventory.”

It’s good to take moral inventory. The problem is that your taking inventory of other people’s morals instead of your own.

Taking inventory is probably not the best way to describe it. I used to have to take inventory of shoes in my father’s warehouse and all it did was bore me and make me do stupid things like chainsmoke and talk trash about others.

I used to spend every waking hour stewing over everyone I felt had wronged me that day, week or year. I call it my angry years. Stewing is an exhausting activity, and nothing good comes of it. Build up enough resentment over time and it’ll eat you alive before you have time to feel the teeth going in.

I had one hell of a temper when I was younger. To call it a byproduct of OCD, depression and addiction would be a stretch, because I think the temper would have been there even without the mental illness.

Some of the more colorful examples of my temper:

– Hurling a fork or steak knife at my brother in a restaurant on New Years Eve 1979 because he made a joke I didn’t like. The more dramatic among my family members say it was a steak knife, though I’m pretty sure it was a fork.

– Lighting things on fire out of anger, including a collection of Star Wars action figures that would probably be worth a fortune today. I would pretend they were kids in school who were bullying me. Never mind that I bullied as much as I got bullied.

–Throwing rocks through windows, especially the condominium building that was built behind my house in the late 1980s.

–Yelling “mood swing!” before throwing things around the room at parties in my basement. It came off as comical, as I intended, and nobody got hurt. But there was definitely an underlying anger to it. I was acting out. 

– Road rage. Tons of it. I was a very angry driver. I would tailgate. I would speed. In the winters I would intentionally spin out my putrid-green 1983 Ford LTD station wagon in parking lots during snowstorms. While in college, I nearly hit another car and flipped off the other driver while my future in-laws sat in the back. Traffic jams would infuriate me. Getting lost would fill me with fear and, in turn, more anger.

I could go on, but you get the picture, Clarence.

You gotta drop the rage because it’ll never make you feel better. It certainly won’t help you deal with the relationships that give you the rage.

Focus on your own betterment instead. You ARE doing that and you’ve made a ton of progress.

But that rage will hold you back from your full potential as a human being, so cut the bullshit and move on.

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Happily Ever After Is Bullshit & That’s OK

Often, when depression slaps me upside the head, it’s on the heels of a prolonged period of good feelings and positive energy. Especially this time of year, when the daylight recedes early and returns late. These setbacks can be discouraging, but you can survive them with the right perspective.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/NqTuN-35580

It’s easy for people who fight mental illness and addictive behavior to go on an endless, futile search for the happily ever after, where you somehow find the magic bullet to murder your demons, thus beginning years of bliss and carefree existence.

I’m sorry to tell you this, folks: That line of thinking is bullshit.

There’s no such thing as happily ever after. If you want it that badly, go watch a Disney film.

I used to grope around for eternal happiness in religious conversion. But some of my hardest days came AFTER I was Baptized a Catholic. I eventually found my way to abstinence and sobriety and got a pretty good handle on the OCD. But there have been plenty of sucky days since then.

The slide back into depression this past weekend was an example.

I like to think of these setbacks as growing pains. We’re supposed to have bad days to test the better angels of our nature. We’re supposed to learn how to move forward despite the obstacles that used to make us hide and get junked up. When you can stay sober and keep your mental disorders in check despite a bad day, that’s REAL recovery.

This is where I consider myself lucky for having had Crohn’s Disease. That’s a chronic condition. It comes and goes. But you can reach a point where the flare ups are minimal.

It’s the same with mental illness and addiction. You can’t rid yourself of it completely. But you can reach a point — through a lot of hard work and leaps of Faith — where the episodes are minimal.

The depression flared up this weekend, just like the Crohn’s Disease used to. But I’m better now. And I didn’t have to take a drug like Prednisone to get there. I just needed a little extra sleep.

Prozac, therapy and the 12 Steps have helped me immensely. But they don’t take the deeper pain at your core away. These things just help you deal with the rough days without getting sucked back into the abyss.

The depression I experienced this weekend felt more like a flare up of arthritis than that desperate, mournful feeling I used to get. It was a nag, but it didn’t break me. It used to break me all the time.

That’s progress.

Maybe I’m not happy forever after, but that’s OK. My ability to separate the blessings from the bullshit has improved considerably in the last five years.

That’s good enough for me.

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Run Out of Town (Or Off Facebook, Twitter)

One of my security friends thinks she needs to delete her social network accounts because she lacks social skills. She tends to offend people sometimes, you see, and she wants to go away until she can learn to behave. Though admirable, it’s a bad idea for lots of reasons.

At the height of my mental illness and addictive behavior, social skills were alien to me. Isolating myself from the rest of the world was the better thing to do, so that’s what I did. There was no Facebook or Twitter back then, mind you. I sometimes wonder how I would have behaved on those sites if they were around at the time. My behavior probably would have been a hundred times worse than anything my security friend is worried about.

A few notes about this friend: Her posts are laced with sarcasm. She uses the word “fuck” a lot in the adjective form and she makes it plain that she is an atheist.

Of course, as I’ve discovered, sarcasm is a tricky skill that can get you into trouble. When you make comments about someone’s faith or the way they look, it’s almost always going to be negative. So you have to use it sparingly.

Can my friend do better with how she conducts herself on Facebook and Twitter? Sure. But then most of us can do better.

Consider the following:

–A ton of people on Facebook and Twitter use it as a political soapbox. If they’re Republican, almost every post is a tirade against “elitist socialistic liberals.” If they’re a Democrat, it’s the reverse. That stuff has offended me before. Not because they are expressing their beliefs. That’s something I respect. What annoys me is that they never have anything else to talk about, which makes them too one dimensional for my tastes.

–Too many people for my tastes pour their frustrations out on Facebook. If someone’s having a bad week, they complain about everything. Maybe their cat looked at them the wrong way. Maybe their job sucks. One of my friends constantly complains about her job on Facebook.

–Though I don’t set out to insult anyone, I know I do. I push out a lot of links that are relevant to my work in the information security community. If it’s something I wrote, be it a security article or something from this blog, up it goes. I know I’ve been “un-friended” for that. People don’t like their feeds dominated by one person. That person comes off as egotistical and full of himself. I’ve already confessed to that sin. I also write openly about my Faith. That friend at the focus of this post? She’s an atheist and I’m surprised she hasn’t un-friended me by now. And I’ll confess I was a little pissed off last Saturday — the anniversary of 9-11 — when she made a crack about how science flies us to the moon and faith flies us into buildings.

And yet I don’t think she should leave the social networking realm. Why? Because we all have our stuff to work on, and I’ve learned from experience that it’s better to do it out in the open than in isolation.

Hell, I’ve done far worse than being sarcastic on Facebook. I’ve lied to people in the past about my addictive behavior. I’ve hurt people along the way and have spent a lot of time lately trying to make amends to them. There are worse things in the world than being an ass on Facebook. Besides, as I’ve said, we are all asses on Facebook from time to time.

In the end, we all have the choice to disconnect from a connection we find offensive. I’ve un-friended people on Facebook or un-followed them on Twitter for annoying me. It’s like the old saying about how if you don’t like the music, turn to another station.

To this friend of mine who thinks she needs to drop from the world: Don’t be silly. People are connected to you because they want to be. We already knew of your sarcasm when we decided to connect to you on these sites. Some of us enjoy your posts for the sharp, edgy humor you provide.

You need more social skills? OK. But you can’t build those skills in isolation.

And if your friends aren’t willing to hang around as you work through that stuff, then they’re not really friends, are they?

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Sept. 11, 2001

Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing on Sept. 11, 2001. Here’s my own account.

Mood music:

I was assistant New Hampshire editor at The Eagle-Tribune and I arrived in the newsroom at 4:30 a.m. as usual. I was already in a depressed mood. It wasn’t a sense of dread over something bad about to happen. It was simply my state of mind at the time. I wasn’t liking myself and was playing a role that wasn’t me.

I was already headed toward one of my emotional breakdowns and the job was a catalyst at that point. By day’s end, I would be seriously reconsidering what I was doing with my life. But then everyone was doing that by day’s end.

I was absorbed in all my usual bullshit when the NH managing editor came in and, with a half-smile on his face, told me a plane hit the World Trade Center. At that point, like everyone else, I figured it was a small plane and that it was an accident. Then the second plane hit and we watched it as it happened on the newsroom TV.

I remember being scared to death. Not so much at the scene unfolding on the newsroom TV, but at the scene in the newsroom itself. Chaos was not unusual at The Eagle-Tribune, but this was a whole new level of madness. I can’t remember if my fear was that terrorists might fly a plane into the building we were in as their next act or if it was a fear of not being able to function amidst the chaos. It was probably some of each.

This was a huge story everywhere, but The Eagle-Tribune had a bigger stake in the coverage than most local dailies around the country because many of the victims on the planes that hit the towers were from the Merrimack Valley. There was someone from Methuen, Plaistow, N.H., Haverhill, Amesbury, Andover — all over our coverage area.

When the first World Trade Center tower collapsed on the TV screen mounted above Editor Steve Lambert’s office, he came out, stood on a desk and told everyone to collect themselves a minute, because this would be the most important story we ever covered.

Up to that point, it was. But I was so full of fear and anxiety that my ability to function was gone. I spent most of the next few days in the newsroom, but did nothing of importance. I was a shell. I stayed that way until I  left the paper in early 2004. In fact, I stayed that way for some time after that. I should note that the rest of the newsroom staff at the time did a hell of a job under very tough pressure that day. My friend Gretchen Putnam was still editor of features back then, but she and her staff helped gather the news with the same grit she would display later as metro editor.

I remember being touched by a column she wrote the next day. She described picking her son Jack up from school and telling him something bad happened in the world that day. His young response was something like this: “Something bad happens in the world every day.”

Sometimes, kids have a better perspective of the big picture than grown-ups do.

I got home very late that day and hugged Erin and Sean, who was about five months old at that point. I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of world he would grow up in.

In the days that followed, I walked around in a state of fear like everyone else. That fear made me do things I was ashamed of.

A week after the attacks, Erin and I were scheduled to fly to Arizona to attend a cousin’s wedding. The night before were were supposed to leave, I gave in to my terror at the prospect of getting on a plane and we didn’t go. It’s one of the biggest regrets of my life.

There are two types of head cases headed for a breakdown: There’s the type that tries hard to get him or herself killed through reckless behavior, and then there are those who cower in their room, terrified of what’s on the other side of that door. I fell into the latter category. I guess I tried to get myself killed along the way, but I did so in a much slower fashion. I started drinking copious amounts of wine to feel OK in my skin, and I went on a food binge that lasted about three months and resulted in a 30-pound weight gain.

A few months ago I found myself in lower Manhattan for a security event and I went to Ground Zero.

Gone were the rows of lit candles and personal notes that used to line the sidewalks around this place. To the naked eye it’s just another construction site people pass by in a hurry on their way to wherever.

I was pissed off at first. It wasn’t the thought of what happened here. My emotion there is one of sadness. No, this was anger. I was pissed that people seemed to be walking by without any thought of all the people who met their death here at the hands of terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001. It was almost as if the pictures of twisted metal, smoke and crushed bodies never existed.

As I started to process that fact, my mood shifted again.

I realized these people were doing something special. No matter where they were going or what they were thinking, they were moving — living — horrific memories be damned.

They were doing what we all should be doing, living each day to the full instead of cowering in fear in the corner.

Doing so honors the dead and says F-U to those who destroyed those towers and wish we would stay scared.

It reminded me of who I am and what I’ve been through. I didn’t run from the falling towers or get shot at in the mountains of Afghanistan or the streets of Baghdad. But the struggles with OCD and addiction burned scars into my insides all the same.

I was terrified when I was living my lowest lows. But somewhere along the way, I got better, healed and walked away. I exchanged my self hatred and fear for love of life I never thought possible.

It’s similar to what the survivors of Sept. 11 have gone through.

They reminded me of something important, and while some sadness lingers, I am grateful.

So here’s what I’ll be doing this weekend, the ninth anniversary of the attacks:

I’m getting on a plane and going to New York. CSO Magazine’s Security Standard event is Monday and Tuesday, and I’ll be there doing what I do best: Writing.

A few years ago I would have found a reason to stay home. Getting on a plane on the anniversary of 9-11? No way.

Today, nothing can keep me away.

In a twisted sort of way, I’m going to honor the dead by doing what they can’t do: Live.

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Fear of the Fat Man’s Pants

The Esquire Magazine Style Blog has a fascinating read on pant sizes that brings back a lot of fat guy memories. And though I’m not nearly as heavy as I was at the height of my binge-eating disorder, this tale of fat man’s pants still resonates.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q15a15LYYNg&fs=1&hl=en_US]

The author, Abram Sauer, recounts a painful moment when he tried on a size 36 pants and found them too tight. He did some digging and found that not all pants’ sizes are as advertised, and how it opens a can of worms in terms of a person’s perception of their own body and how they might act going forward.

fatman.jpg He writes:

I’ve never been slim — I played offensive line in high school — but I’m no cow either. (I’m happily a “Russell Crowe” body type.) So I immediately went across the street, bought a tailor’s measuring tape, and trudged from shop to shop, trying on various brands’ casual dress pants. It took just two hours to tear my self-esteem to smithereens and raise some serious questions about what I later learned is called “vanity sizing.”

The pants manufacturers are trying to flatter us. And this flattery works: Alfani’s 36-inch “Garrett” pant was 38.5 inches, just like the Calvin Klein “Dylan” pants — which I loved and purchased. A 39-inch pair from Haggar (a brand name that out-testosterones even “Garrett”) was incredibly comfortable. Dockers, meanwhile, teased “Leave yourself some wiggle room” with its “Individual Fit Waistline,” and they weren’t kidding: despite having a clear size listed, the 36-inchers were 39.5 inches. And part of the reason they were so comfy is that I felt good about myself, no matter whether I deserved it.

He concluded:

The mind-screw of broken pride aside — like Humpty Dumpty, it cannot be put back together, now that you know the truth — down-waisting is genuine cause for concern. A recent report published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that men with larger waists were twice at risk of death compared with their smaller-waist peers. Men whose waists measured 47 inches or larger were twice as likely to die. Yet, most men only know their waist size by their pants — so if those pants are up to five inches smaller than the reality, some men may be wrongly dismissing health dangers.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/mens-fashion/pants-size-chart-090710#ixzz0z1QCV5Ma

A few thoughts on this:

–I’ve always hated clothes shopping because of the blow the experience would inevitably land on my ego. My hips are always wider than my waist, no matter how thin I am. So the right waist size is still too tight in the hips and legs. Buying pants isn’t as traumatic now that I’m some 80 pounds lighter than I once was, but I’d still rather wear pants full of holes than buy a new pair.

–Finding the preferred size too tight never encouraged me to stop binge eating. In fact, the anger and shame led to more binge eating.

–Finding a pair of pants that were looser than advertised did indeed leave me with the false perception that I’d cheated the odds with my eating behavior. The result was more bad behavior because, well, I had cheated the odds.

–I don’t blame clothing manufacturers for taking liberty with the sizes. For one thing, their job is to sell pants and keep the customer happy. I doubt these guys ever met someone who was happy after peeling themselves from a too-tight pair of pants. If they are making so-called vanity sizes, it’s because the customer demands it.

–The measuring tape never lies. Pants may lie, but when you put the tape around the waist or hips, what you see is the truth.

In my case, I’ve learned not to let the fit of new pants get in the way of reality. The only thing I care about is what the food on my plate weighs. I use a small scale to determine that. If I keep weighing the portions, the smaller pants are going to fit. It’s stupidly simple.

Clothing manufacturers can play all the games they want with sizes.

If you have a binge-eating problem like I did, there’s no limit to the lies your brain will spin about your own body perception. I’ve looked in the mirror many times as a fat man and saw a thin man because that’s what I wanted to see. I’ve looked in the mirror as a much thinner man and saw a fat guy staring back at me because that’s how I felt that day.

Clothing companies may play games. Fast food restaurants may play games with the amount of fat and chemicles they stuff into their food.

But in the end, the real enemy is ourselves. We see what we want to see and believe what we want to believe.

And we are more than happy to have accomplices.

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Another Unsettling Truth About Facebook

My friend Linda noted that I changed the settings on my Facebook page to allow wall comments. It amused her because it was my birthday. She knows me well. Truth is, I wanted to see the birthday messages. Here’s the uncomfortable thing that says about me…

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxeFCaEx3w0&fs=1&hl=en_US]

I suffer from an inflated ego. It’s a side-effect of where I’ve been. I have this odd fear of being forgotten. And I didn’t want to be forgotten on my birthday. It sounds ridiculous. But there it is.

OCD types have big egos. Achieving big things is one of the ways we try to fill in that hole in our souls.  In my profession, getting access to the major power players of information security is a rush. I feel like I am somebody as a result. When I don’t make it to a big security conference, the wheels in my head start spinning. I start to worry that by not being there, I become irrelevant.

With this blog, when I write something that really connects with people, the ego grows a few sizes larger.

I’m somewhat ashamed about this. But I also think it’s a common thing among us. When people say they want their birthday to pass quietly without hearing from people, I don’t buy it.

Everyone wants some attention. That is exactly why Facebook took off. People suddenly found they had a way to project themselves in ways never before possible. Wannabe writers suddenly got to become “published” writers because they had a platform to do it with. For the most part, this has been a good thing, because a lot of those writers are very good.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how I worry every time I discover I’ve been “unfriended” on Facebook. I get itchy thinking about why someone decided to drop me.

I think the reason is because at the height of my mental illness and addictions, I was alone. In my adult years, I isolated myself because it was too painful to show my bloated face to the world. When I snapped out of it, I became a lot more social.

Some of the ego comes from the addict in me. Addicts truly believe EVERYTHING is about them. You wouldn’t believe how people like us manage to find ourselves in every situation real or imagined. When you’re at a party for someone else, you think about how much attention you may or may not be getting. The best description of this came from Alice Roosevelt Longworth, eldest daughter of one of my heroes, Teddy Roosevelt.

Of here father’s ego, Alice said, “He wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.”

I shuddered the first time I saw that quote, because I identified with it. And it made me feel shame.

If Facebook had been around in Teddy Roosevelt’s day, he would have been absolutely insufferable with it. He might have found that it was a grander “bully pulpit” than the presidency.

Maybe he would have wasted all his time on Facebook instead of going on his African safaris or journeying down the infamous River of Doubt in South America.

Who knows?

All I know is that I do have a big ego.

I suppose the first step of finding more humility is admitting it.

All that said, I’m grateful as hell for all the people in my life. I felt truly blessed to have so many friends and family yesterday. It made for a wonderful birthday. I felt loved. And we all want to feel loved, don’t we?

That is something I’m NOT ashamed of.

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Facebook ‘Un-friend’ Syndrome

My OCD has found something new to zero in on: The Facebook friend count. Ridiculous, you say? Of course. But having OCD is all about worrying about ridiculous things.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/LCidbyHPvyw

My current Facebook friend count is 1,169. (Author’s note: the current count is 2,016) That may seem like a freakishly high number, but it makes sense when you consider that those connections are a broad mix of family, friends, associates in the security industry and people who “friended” me simply because they read this blog.

Here’s the stupid part, though: It was 1,174 a few days ago. So now I’m worrying about who I might have offended. But I have so many connections that it’s pretty much impossible to go through the entire list to see who’s missing.

The reality is that this shouldn’t be about the number of friends you have. I see people on Facebook all the time who friend everyone in sight because they want to broaden that number. In my case, I just happen to know a lot of people.

If I remember someone from high school or from Revere, I friend them because I want to see how various lives have evolved in the last 25-30 years. On the security side, I’ve met a lot of people in six years and they’ve all taught me something valuable about the industry, so I want to stay connected.

I’ve imposed some rules on myself when it comes to using things like Facebook and Twitter:

–Don’t bitch about the little things. There’s a ton of drama on Facebook already, and there’s a lot of drama in this blog. I’m not going to complain about the little things on top of that.

–Never complain about work. I wouldn’t anyway because I love my job, but I see work grievances on Facebook all the time, and it’s just not smart when you consider that the boss is probably watching.

–Keep the sex life to yourself. The reasons for this are simple. I’m an ugly guy with a hairy back and a bald head. I’m not about to gross people out or scare them. Hell, I get scared and grossed out when thinking of myself in a romantic context. Yet there are folks out there who think people really want to know about their sex lives. I’m not talking about someone who shares their joy over a new romantic relationship or the sadness of a romance that dies. I’m talking about those who give the several-times-a-day, blow-by-blow account of the ups and downs. I’m happily married and my wife loves me despite the fact that I’m funny looking. That’s all anyone needs to know — or would ever want to know.

–Do you really care about what I ate for dinner? Well, given the nature of this blog and the fact that I focus a lot on my binge-eating addiction and the food plan I live by today, I guess you would care. But I’m also sure I’d piss you off if I mentioned what I was about to eat before each meal. I get annoyed when other people do it. My younger brother is a chef and he talks about it a lot. But that’s different, because cooking is his craft.

–Politics. I love to talk politics with people, especially those who really know what they’re talking about. But some folks will take their disdain for Democrats or Republicans too far. Being a moderate myself, I think both political parties are damaged beyond repair. But I try not to get mean, arrogant or hateful about my positions. I’ve un-friended people for being that way.

— Religion: I’m pretty sure people have un-friended me for sharing my Faith. I can’t get around it because my Faith is at the core of everything I do, especially when it comes to marriage, parenthood and my program of recovery. If someone has dropped me because they don’t believe in God and they think I’m an idiot, I don’t care. I’m not about to change on this one.

Here’s what I will continue to do on Facebook and Twitter:

–Share some of the things my kids say. Because my kids are pretty damn witty.

— Post my blog entries, three times a day. The blog is one of the things I have to offer people. It’s one of the things I’m on here to promote. I push out each entry three times a day, to ensure it’s seen by those who do most of their social networking in the morning, at lunchtime or in the evening.

–Post my security articles. This is my livelihood. Many of my connections are security people, so there’s no getting around this one. If someone un-friends me because they don’t want so much information about information security, I’m cool with that.

–Share family and travel pictures. Who doesn’t do this?

So with all this in mind, you would think I wouldn’t care to keep such careful track of my friend or follower count. But the truth is that I do. It’s definitely an OCD trigger.

I don’t care about the number itself, but what I do obsess over is why someone un-followed me.

Was I outright offensive?

Does someone think I’m stalking them?

I guess I just want to be sure that I was un-followed  — and that the connection was initiated in the first place — for the right reasons.

But what’s right to one person is wrong to another, so you can’t really measure this sort of thing.

I will also admit straightaway that some of these concerns are about ego. As I’ve mentioned before, OCD cases almost always have runaway egos. Especially me.

If you’ve un-friended me because I was being an asshole at some point, or you decided you didn’t know me as well as you thought, or you realized my writings aren’t for you, I understand.

If it’s because my religious beliefs are beneath you, I don’t care. I’m not about to change.

Social media can be a bitch for someone like me.

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High Drama: The New Normal

I’ve had a couple of high-drama days, as readers have figured out by now. The 14-hour drive across six states. The grilling by Secret Service cops in Washington D.C. I’m hoping for a lot less drama. But that may not be easy. Drama clings to my type of personality like a sweaty shirt.

Mood music: “You’re Crazy” by Guns N Roses:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM2KI0Fs-fI&hl=en_US&fs=1]

Here’s the thing: When you have a mental condition — OCD, in my case — and addictions as a byproduct of the former, it’s almost impossible not to turn the most mundane of situations into drama.

The TV station TNT thinks it knows drama and the commercials for its programming says so. But that’s just Hollywood drama. I know real drama.

The incidents of the last two days probably qualify as real drama in the dictionary. It’s not every day you have two Secret Service cops in your face, after all. But the fact that I was almost happy for the encounter because it gave me fresh material to write about? That, my friends, is drama. Maybe not in the perfect sense of the definition, but hear me out…

When a person has been through mental illness and addiction, situations small as well as large seem big and dramatic.

When your head isn’t screwed on straight, losing your keys can become a big, dramatic situation. Gearing up for a performance review at work can become a big, hairy situation. If you have OCD, the need to constantly check your laptop bag to make sure the computer is really in there is an intense situation.

Most commonly, the difficult relations in just about any family or circle of friends becomes a big, scary, daily drama.

I’m in recovery and I still see situations in my life as a drama. The financial pickle we were in last month, for example, felt like a major crisis.

I try to look at other people who have it a lot tougher than I do. One of my sponsees has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and spent the better half of the 1980s getting the tar beaten out of her by abusive boyfriends. Naturally, drugs and alcohol — and later food — became her source of comfort. She’s in recovery now, but because of where she’s been, little things still become huge dramas. If she finds a bag of chips and wants to eat them, it’s a big deal for her.

I’ve learned something about all this. Everyone has drama in their lives, no matter how “normal” they are. If you’re buying a house, there is inevitably conflict along the way. If you have kids, there’s drama aplenty — yours and theirs.

Sean and Duncan have their drama every day. If a piece breaks off one of Sean’s elaborate Lego sets, it becomes an intense situation for him. When Duncan feels the person he’s talking to isn’t listening, same thing.

I guess the point of this post is that we all have drama, so maybe, instead of going on about how you can’t handle this person or that person’s drama, you should take a breath. After all, by telling us you can’t handle their drama, you in turn are shoving your drama on us.

Of course, everybody loves a good drama, even when they say they don’t. Me included. So maybe you should just have at it.

By the way, I used the word drama approximately 23 times in this post.

If that’s not high drama (make that 24 times), I don’t know what is.

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The Pedophile

Some people deserve to spend life in a box. But even they have a shot at redemption.

As a dad, I have zero tolerance for anyone who hurts a child. So when I discovered someone I’ve known for many years spent a decade behind bars for pedophilia, It was like a knife in the gut. Further complicating matters is that as a recovering addict, I can’t help but feel bad for this guy. But only a little bit.

He’s addicted to sex and that addiction drew him to kids. He certainly got what he deserved: Hard jail time in the midst of hardened criminals who draw the line at crimes against children. People like that wouldn’t think twice about killing a pedophile in their midsts.

So this guy has been back on the streets for a year. He’s homeless, has found it nearly impossible to find a job and is constantly watching his back. He’s required by law to register as a sex offender, and to inform people living around him that he’s a convicted sex offender.

My first instinct was to tell him to fuck off when he contacted me. But after he described his evil instincts as an addiction, I paused. As I’ve said before, when someone is in the grip of addiction, sanity and logic no longer apply.

I had to hear the guy out.

He understands why people shun him. He doesn’t blame them. He’s been working hard at putting his life back together and curses the day he was born because he hates the side of himself that led to three convictions for assaulting a minor.

In talking to the guy, I found myself thankful as hell that my addiction took the form of binge eating. I think even a heroin addict is more fortunate than someone addicted to sex, pornography and especially pedophilia.

The latter addictions hit a person like any other addiction. You hate that side of you and want to change. But you find it impossible to stop unless you’re lucky enough to find recovery. And recovery is back-breaking, emotionally-draining work.

To have a sex addiction like that has to be sheer terror and hell for someone who isn’t evil at his core.

My Faith also tells me that no person who is sorry is beyond redemption. So you pray for them and hope for the best.

That’s where my sympathy ends.

I once had a debate with my friend Ken White about the death penalty. He’s for it, I’m against it. I argued that it’s hypocritical for the state to take a life. Ken argued back that some people don’t belong in society and have to go. That includes pedophiles. Maybe they’re not evil people, but their actions are evil and if they can’t function in society they shouldn’t be in society.

It was hard to argue back against that logic. Thing is, I tend to agree with him now.

Should this guy on the streets be back behind bars or dead? I’ll let others debate that. All I know is that I’m never, ever going to meet this guy in person or create a situation that lets him anywhere near my kids or anyone else’s.

Walking around with a big scarlet letter on his back must really suck, but it’s for the best. Even he knows that.

In the years following the Manson murders, the four who carried out Manson’s orders turned against him and turned to God. They completely renounced what they did and Charles “Tex” Watson even became a minister behind bars. They sought and received forgiveness from God. But they will never get out of prison.

They may have a right to forgiveness. Everyone does. But they did the crime and have to take the punishment. They gave up their right to live among the rest of us. That’s justice.

The pedophile now on the streets probably deserves a similar fate. But for whatever reason, they let him back out.

But he doesn’t have his freedom. He’ll always be watching his back. That too is justice, I suppose.

Writing about this was not comfortable. I wrestled with myself over whether to even tackle the subject. I decided I had to because I know the evil things addiction will make you do.

I saw this as a necessary tale of caution.

I’ll tell you what: I’m just extremely grateful that my addictions revolved around food and substances. People around me were hurt along the way, but it’s easier to receive forgiveness for those things.

It’s a bitch having to relate to someone who has done far worse than me.