A Night Unremembered
13 years ago
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Turning inward, we find...?
I know that most of you think I am humble and self-effacing but I often like to brag about some things. In that vein (or should I say "vain"?), I want to boast about crossword puzzling.
There are a few crossword puzzles I do on a regular basis [link]. One of these is from The Puzzle Society and which can be found here [link]. The puzzle has a menu which contains a link to a history of your best times. My best times are all under 5 minutes, 20 seconds. My average time is probably around 7.5 minutes. I will acknowledge that these are fairly easy puzzles to solve. They are definitely not of the Sunday New York Times level of difficulty. But they are great ego boosters.
Egos are terrible things, are they not? They remind me of not well trained Doberman Pinschers. Beautiful and very dangerous. And we all have them. And they must be fed. In my case, it seems, constantly.
I view my Ego as a guard dog, keeping me from getting too close to my Id and Superego. That's probably a poor metaphor and Freud would chuckle quietly while mumbling "hmmmm" as I related this. However, he's dead so I don't much care what he thinks.
I have never undergone psychiatric analysis. I am not rich enough to feed my ego in that way. I have spent some sessions with a psychologist back in the day, though. But it was free to me and didn't provide much in the way of insight. About the only thing I learned about myself was that I could understand myself much better than the psychologist could. Or maybe I was just fooling myself into believing that.
Therein lies one of the problems of dealing with our minds.
My father felt that psychiatry and psychology was quackery. He didn't voice this feeling but it was clear enough when you heard him snort or grumble when the subjects were referenced. This just made things worse for me growing up. I was intensely curious about how my mind worked and thought psychology was interesting and useful as a tool. Talk about conflict and father issues.
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2 comments:
You were lucky. My parents were loving but had "reverse" rolls in our household; it was Mom who taught me how to play sports and box to defend myself. All of my "father" issues had to be worked out with my mother. I'm one screwed-up puppy!
Lucky? Perhaps. But my father taught me nothing except by example. And it took me many years to recognize the lessons. He didn't play sports and had little interest in them (exceptions: bowling and car races), he never played catch with me and we never watched baseball, football, basketball, hockey, or golf on TV. My mother encouraged us if we took an interest but it was very mild encouragement. My father never sat and talked with us kids or showed much affection for us. We saw very little of him because he worked... a lot. At his bicycle shop when we lived in New York and then as a salesman who traveled one week out of four after we moved to Florida. We could probably commiserate together pretty well.
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