I Don’t Understand Mysteries, And That Kinda Hurts My Writing Career

My Uncle Tommy loved mysteries as a kid.  I was more drawn to his science fiction collection.

Weirdly, that absence actually hurts me as a writer.

Because I never read any mysteries (and I never watched ’em), I never internalized the rhythms of mysteries, nor picked up on how to structure them.  I understand, vaguely, when a clue gets dropped, but I have never ever once in my entire life solved a mystery before the story ended, and that includes really dumb and easy-to-understand clues like the rogue taxi driver in the first episode of Sherlock.

Me reading mysteries is like a dog watching television: I’m entertained, but I can’t say I’m getting it.

And that’s actually kind of a hindrance when it comes to writing a long-running series with a small cast.  Mysteries are an excellent backbone plot to stick characters in, because the characters don’t have to change all that much; their concern is figuring out who the killer is and what they’re up to.   You can have lovely little character bits sprinkled through, but the motivating force is not something that the character is deciding to do because they need to change their lives, but instead is an external event that’s hampering their life.

Which is why mystery writers can write series that go on forever.  There’s a dab of character evolution in there, as everyone wants a character arc – the cold detective warms slightly to people, or the bumbling sidekick creeps towards competence, or there’s a background romance that inches forward – but 95% of the novel is Interesting People Investigating This Distressing Conundrum, and only 5% is based on the character making new decisions they would never have made before today.

And it’s not just Mysteries that use mysteries.  Most long-running urban fantasy series are mysteries in a magical wrapper.  House ran forever, and that was basically “medical mysteries.”  Harry Potter had a lot of characterization, but still, 60% of what drove the plot?  A mystery.

Whereas if you don’t have an external mystery to drive the plot, what you have left to move this story forward is  character arcs.  And those are dangerous.  Because if you don’t have a mystery, the character arcs become wide – if Batman isn’t investigating some string of Joker-crimes, then the impetus for events has to be that Batman’s philosophy is threatened in some way.  It’s not “Batman chases down the Riddler,” but instead “Batman’s forced to decide when killing is an appropriate response,” or “Batman must question whether the sacrifices he makes to save Gotham City is worth it,” or “Batman must choose between loyalty to family or loyalty to his life’s mission.”

And there’s only so many of those you can do before a) they become really repetitive (because if Batman keeps rejecting his personal life to save Gotham City, then the outcome’s never in question), or b) the decision creates a change that fundamentally alters the character so they don’t have the same appeal (as “The marital conflicts of Bruce Wayne, no-longer-adventuring-husband” are unlikely to appeal to teenaged boys).

I ran into this when I was writing my ‘Mancer series.  Without a mystery-of-the-week to drive the series, there were three stories I could realistically tell: Family of magicians comes together, family of magicians is driven apart by an evil force, family of magicians is driven apart by a good force.

And I’m proud of the ‘Mancer series, I am, but people keep asking me, “So what comes next?” and….I got nothing.  (Well, not nothing, I’ve got my new novel The Uploaded coming out in September, but that’s in an entirely different universe in an entirely different genre.  Although it’s also about families.  And yet I digress.)  In the ‘Mancer series, these characters have changed radically from their inception, and I can’t think of anything else they could do that would be as compelling.  I could go on to tell the stories of other ‘mancers in that universe (and might, some day), but that’s different from the bestselling urban fantasies that have fifteen novels on the continuing adventures of That Character You Love.

Because if I could write mysteries, it’d be fun to plop Valentine and Aliyah into the Mystery Machine and have them go around solving magically obsessive crimes.  But…. I’ve tried, and I never internalized the rhythms of how mysteries work.  I don’t think in mystery terms.  And that is a real handicap for a guy who already doesn’t know how to plot in advance.

Not that it’s a bad thing that I write novels with huge, sweeping character arcs.  It’s just a mild issue for my career as a writer, because even if by some miracle I wrote The Bestselling Novel, I couldn’t then spin out endless tales with that person at the center.  I’d tell three, maybe four stories and be done.

(Which isn’t to say that many famous writers haven’t done well off of that model – they have – but it’s sure nicer if you can Jim Butcher your way into a situation where every annual installment helps sell copies of the other 14 books in the series.)

I’ve pondered how to solve that, or even if it needs to be solved.  I’ve wondered whether I should do nothing but read a mystery book a week for a year, hoping that I might start to think in mystery ways.  I’ve read books on How To Write A Mystery, and they seem cold and distant to me.

And maybe it’s because, ultimately, the mystery isn’t that compelling to me.  Reason I’m writing this is because last night I picked up a mystery by an author who I really enjoyed, and the first three chapters left me cold.  It was a perfectly good book, and yet what was a really interesting take on a locked-room mystery still had me shrugging.

In the end, this may be like the appreciation I wish I had for jazz, or 80s rap; I’ve listened, I wish I was educated enough to find the joy that other people take in it, but I’ve tried and it doesn’t seem to work.  And maybe mainlining it for a year would give me that joy, or maybe it’d turn out that it’s just not for me no matter what I do.

Some days, I write essays that come to firm conclusions about how things should be.  This isn’t one of them.  It’s not like my writing career hinges on getting this down; it’s just a tool in the box that I lack.  And you can get by as a writer without possessing all the tools, as there’s plenty of writers who don’t really have the rhythm of traditional plotting or character arcs down, and they compensate with other strengths.

But it’d be nice to be able to write a story and not have it all hinge on the growth of the characters.  I’d like a little mystery in there to serve as the spring.

Maybe some day.

What’s In The Box? A Geeky Method For Coping With Polyamory

It sounds kinky, but one of the major problems in computer programming is deciding how much you need to expose.

The same is true of polyamory, but let’s start with the far less confusing topic of computer programming as an example.

Let’s say you have a program that calculates sales taxes: you hand it an order, and it tells you how much money you owe. Many programmers would argue that the ideal way to do this is a “black box” method – you hand the program an order, and it gives you a tax percentage.

How did it come to that conclusion? You don’t need to know how that program made that decision. What happens inside the program is a mystery.

But life is complex, and sometimes you need to peek inside the box – say, for example, if you need to know which tax code to apply to the order for accounting purposes. In which case, you might need your box of a program to return a little more data – say, a tax percentage and a tax code.

And in weird cases, maybe you need to get a breakdown from the box to know how it came to its conclusions – maybe you need to know which things you ordered were tax exempt so you can tell your customer, so you have to expose the box’s calculations to a much greater (and more complicated) extent.

So what’s the best way to program this tax-calculating device? Good programmers will trot out all sorts of theories to prove that you should always go with the simplest method, or the most flexible approach, or the most maintainable one.

Smart programmers, however, will answer: it depends what you need. Programming is not an absolute. There are solid, well-tested guidelines in programming, but every good programmer’s had to hold their nose because dammit, this clunky, inelegant solution is the best fix for this specific problem.

And that’s a lot like the way you process how your partners have sex with other people.

Right now, one of my partners is starting a new relationship with someone else. This is normally a time that provokes jealousy and insecurity.

For me, I need my partner’s sex to be a black box. I don’t need to know too much; I send a query going, “SEX GOOD?” and she replies with one of three answers:

• Great!
• Good
• Meh

And that is all I need to know to function. Any more information on what’s happening inside my sweetie’s sex-box would cause me to start comparing, and I’d start to wonder if they were way better in bed than I was, and of course if they were better in bed then my sweetie would of course have no reason to stay with me and I would freak the hell out.

So they just tell me, “I had a great time!” and that’s sufficiently abstracted that I can be appropriately happy (or concerned) for them.

Of course, that information would be too much for many poly people. For them, the black box is even more abstracted – they send a query that says, “WAS SEX PROTECTED?” and the answer is Y/N, aaaaaand that’s all they need to know. Good? Bad? Irrelevant. “Unlikely to serve as a staging ground for STIs” is the only answer they require from their sweetie’s sex-box.

Then again, some people would find that information stifling. Some poly couples have to get a good, solid look at the sex-box’s internals, walking through the sex moment-by-moment, sifting through the other sex for tips and tricks they might use on their own, getting turned on by the knowledge of their sweetie’s pleasure. That box is flexible, man.

And which box is best for your polyamory? Let’s ask the smart programmer:

It depends what you need.

Because defining that black box of your partner’s partner is a vital survival skill in polyamory – and it’s not just sex. Personally speaking, I don’t need to know the fine details of my sweetie’s sex life, but I do need to know their emotional details – are they falling in love? Are they getting along? What sorts of happy things do they geek out about?

Yet again, for other people, that box may be a little more encapsulated. For them, they have an emotional partner-of-partner box that asks, “RELATIONSHIP GOOD?” and they get the answer of:

• Great!
• Good
• Meh

And that is all they need to know to function. And that’s great!

(Or you can start exploring the VantaBlack box zone of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Relationships, where you literally are not even aware of who your sweetie is dating, but that risks some fatal miscommunications if you’re even slightly out of sync. Nothing wrong with DADT in the abstract – but if I were to describe it in programming terms, it’s known to be a very buggy approach.)

The point is, a lot of novices to polyamory freak out because their partners are either exposing too much or too little information about what’s happening in their other relationships. And part of learning to do polyamory comfortably lies in determining what sorts of feedback you want when you query the black box of your partner’s other relationships for information.

That answer may vary from partner to partner (I have a partner who’s a swinger, and I do love hearing about her sex parties), or topic to topic (as noted, I need way less information on sex than I do emotional realities). But framing it in terms of “What I need to know about how my partners are getting along with their partners” – even if that answer is, “I don’t” – is key to happily managing an active polyamorous network.

In the end, like programming, there’s no wrong answer. It lies in what you need…. And if it doesn’t work, you go back and refactor it! There isn’t a programmer in the world who hasn’t finished a perfect black-box tax calculator that hands back a single percentage, only to be told, “Oh, wait, we need the tax code too.” At which point they sigh, roll up their sleeves, and change the code.

Which is hard work. But like programming, things will go a lot better if you think things out in advance instead of just making everything up as you go.

I Need Your Recommendations! Podcasts, Books, And… Mirrors?

Okay, so I hate asking people for recommendations because it always, always goes like this:

“Whenever I see romantic comedies, I break out in blistered rashes and have to go to the hospital for three days. So do not recommend a romantic comedy.”

“Oh, but I love romantic comedies, and this romantic comedy is really different so you should watch…”

STOP.

DO NOT.

HALT YOURSELF.

(And also stop the not-quite-as-funny-as-you’d think joke of recommending a romantic comedy to me in the comments.  It’s also been done.)

What I’m looking for are very specific recommendations because I am a man with very specific needs.  So I’m gonna ask you to share your favorite books, podcasts, and morrors with me – but only if those wonderful books, podcasts, and mirrors match the criteria I’ve asked for!

(And if I sound exhausted, it’s because I’ve literally spent fifteen years saying, “Can someone recommend a band similar to  They Might Be Giants?” and having people hand me their favorite death metal band.  It’s great that you love death metal, or even this band!  But is it that hard to understand that This Thing You Love isn’t at all like what people are asking for?)

So!  Let’s try this!

Podcasts!
I have to find a thirty- to forty-minute podcast so I can exercise longer.   Currently, all my favorite podcasts (Planet Money, 99% Invisible, Writing Excuses, Revisionist History) clock in at around 20-25 minutes, and my doctor says I have to up my exercise game to keep my heart clean.

So I need a thirty to forty-minute nonfiction podcast that is an actual focused topic  – while I like the looser podcasts where two guys just ramble on for an hour, that’s not enough to keep my concentration during the agony of the elliptical.  If it’s a shorter podcast, or significantly longer, it literally won’t work for me.

Suggestions?

Books!
So I’ve been reading stressful books lately, which isn’t very fun given the stressful politics.   I need a light series of books to get me through that are a) short, b) fast-paced, and c) not urban fantasy.   Snappy patter and lovable characters a significant bonus.

(These do not have to be series.  A one-off, enjoyable book is just fine.)

…Mirrors? 
My mother has asked me to get her an “artistic” mirror for her living room.  She doesn’t have anything in mind, but wants to see cool mirrors with artistic frames and/or glass that are at least large enough to see her face in.  (Larger is better, up to a point.)  If you’re an artist or know someone who is an artist who works in this medium, point me to it!

(Warning: If you’re posting links on the LJ version of this entry, URLs are automatically screened thanks to Russian spammers filling up my text.  I’ll see ’em eventually, just not immediately.)

“You Can’t Hate A Villain Who Doesn’t Make You Question Your Life”

So my wife and I saw the Green Lantern movie in the theater.

The big twist was that the film ended when we weren’t expecting it to.

Which is to say that a final battle in an action movie should, ideally, bring in all the lessons that the protagonist has learned over the course of the story.  They’ve learned from their mistakes, they’re motivated more because the things they love are more in danger than they’ve ever been, and the villain’s philosophy is no longer compelling.

And Green Lantern had a big, knock-down battle that both Gini and I went, “Oh, this is the fight where Hal Jordan loses, and realizes why his strategy isn’t working, and limps away to come ba – oh, no, wait, the credits are rolling.”

Because a good story has a climax.  It’s a series of events that are amplitudes, slow shakes that build upon each other to create an earthquake.  That fight is not a fight – it’s the hero’s new mindset, weaponized.

Bad stories end with a fight.

And I’m thinking of that because I finished Watch Dogs 2 last night, which is an entertaining game and a terrible goddamned story.  Watch Dogs 2 features HIP MILLENNIAL JUSTICE HACKERS who make zany movie references and HACK FOR FREEDOM and wear millennial outfits.  They’re like a Saturday morning cartoon version of Anonymous.

The storyline is complete garbage because the story writers and the game play designers apparently lived on separate continents and never spoke to each other.  Watch Dogs 2’s story would have you believe that DedSec, the Millennial Champions Of Fair Play, are deeply concerned with the lives of Joe Average Sheeple, hacking into political servers not because they want to get rich, but because they are in search of Truth and Freedom.

Watch Dogs’ game has you carjacking random civilians before running them over in the street.

In fact, there’s one mission where some bad hacker outrages the noble compatriots of DedSec because he is – gasp – feeding the wrong addresses to SWAT teams and sending them crashing through the door of innocent civilians!  They take him down in the most humiliating way possible, because DedSec are heroes, and oh wait one of the standard powers you have at your disposal is literally pressing R1 to tag some poor random bastard as a false SWAT target and watching the cops Rodney King the fuck out of him.

Whoops.

So the game is a seesaw of characters protesting very loudly that they are good guys before beating up hookers and stealing their money.

But I beat the game last night, and I was like, “Wait, that’s the end?”  The only reason I wasn’t surprised by the end credits was because the game had, helpfully, thrown up a warning saying “HEY THIS MISSION IS THE FINAL MISSION U OKAY BRO?”

And again, Watch Dogs 2 had a fight, but not an emotional moment of catharsis.  The missions were not lessons in which the characters learned anything – they were excuses for DedSec to release a propaganda video decrying Modern Evils like hacked voting machines or the militarization of the police force.

People died, and it seemed random, because our hero Marcus didn’t learn anything from the death aside from “I want revenge upon the gang members who killed him for no good reason, and here’s a mission where I drop bombs on this person’s killers.”

A good action climax involves the character making hard decisions that affect their outcome.  Maybe they’re crawling through duct vents to save innocent civilians when the cops are doing their best to betray them.  Maybe they’re fighting computerized agents and they need to learn the certainty that love gives them before they can unleash their full power.   Maybe they’re a dark knight protecting their city, and they need to become comfortable becoming the scapegoat so their city can keep running.

There’s a philosophy driving that final fight.  It’s not just people punching each other – it’s the hero learning something they didn’t know before, and synthesizing that knowledge to help them win.  Sometimes, in the case of Die Hard, it’s a question of finding a new faith in that philosophy – or in the case of the Matrix, it’s discovering what a new philosophy gives you.

Or you have Watch Dogs, where the characters don’t learn because the writers have given them no challenge to their philosophy.  As a writer, DedSec should be an easy challenge – okay, these hackers believe in freedom at all costs, so much so that they’re all casually willing to die for it.  What happens when they stumble upon information that’s genuinely better kept secret?  Or what happens when, as actually happens during the game if not the story, they’re so certain of their morality that they become the evil they’re fighting?

None of that happened in Watch Dogs.  There was a lot of philosophy tossed about, but nothing about what the heroes believed was ever challenged.  Every threat DedSec faced was a straw man, so laughably evil that there was never a question that they might have a point.  DedSec never doubted their goals – they just doubted they could pull them off, which is very different than “Should I be doing this?”  Even when they died, it was like, “Welp, that person was devoted to the cause, pour a bottle, move on.”

So the end game was a surprise.  There was no buildup.  There could be no buildup. There was nothing to build up to, aside from endless setpieces and action montages.

You can’t hate a villain who doesn’t make you question your life.

And if you don’t hate the villain, doesn’t matter how big the final battle is, it’s just going to be a big ol’ “Oh, he’s gone?” before the end credits roll.  Just like Watch Dogs.  Just like Green Lantern.

Just like a hundred other stories you’ve already forgotten.  And if you’re a writer, “being forgotten” is always your real enemy.

The Distracting Sub-Argument, Or: How Not To Fuck Up Your Comments

What I thought I had written was an essay on how it’s okay to like different things than I do. What I’d actually written was a plea for everyone to debate the merits of Internet poetry.

Because in my essay, as an example of Things I Disliked That Other People Loved, I discussed
how
I didn’t think that
putting random
linebreaks
into an essay
made it poetry, man.

And I specifically said that it was cool that other people loved that style of poetry.  I told people in the essay that the point was that even though I didn’t like that poetry, it was great that other people did.

Yet my comments
section
became a huge
(blazing)
fight
on whether that sorta poetry
was cool, man.

The problem was that I’d used an example that was more controversial than the point I’d intended to make.  I could tell people all I liked that “Hey, this essay’s about freedom of choice” – but what their eyes focused on was “Ferrett raises the question on What Constitutes Good Poetry.”

Because honestly, that minor point about poetry was both more interesting and more debatable than the point I was trying to make.

Welcome to the Distracting Sub-Argument.  You didn’t mean for that brief aside you made to become your whole point  – but by introducing something more contentious than the point you were trying to make, that’s all that anyone will take away from your essay.

Which happens all the time in politics.  You’ll see someone, say, debating the merits of sex work, and they’ll say something like:

“I agree that sex work should be legal.  These poor women who have no better options should be protected.”

What that person meant to say was, “I am for sex work” – but they just also called every sex worker a) female, b) poverty-stricken, and implied that sex workers were c) so damaged someone had to look out for them.

As much as the author of that comment would like people to walk away going, “Wow, that person is for legalizing sex work!” they are instead going to have people debating the far more contentious point they didn’t actually mean to raise.

The problem with the Distracting Sub-Argument is that quite often it pops up as something you naturally assumed to be true, and didn’t realize it was debate-worthy – so you didn’t back it up with other arguments.  And then people will take umbrage at this controversial point you didn’t even realize was controversial – and the irony is, if you’d taken a moment to make your positions clear on the topic, most people would have agreed with you.

You see that in consent essays a lot.  People will have these heartfelt write-ups on Why No Should Mean No, and in the middle of it they’ll casually toss off some statement like “And you’re not obligated to tell anyone if they violated your consent” without backing it up.  And the entire comments section becomes people dragging that idea – “HOW CAN YOU EXPECT US TO LEARN IF YOU NEVER TELL US WHAT WE DID!”

Whereas if, instead, you’d put in a slightly better-defended subargument in, people would have gone “All right” and argued the topic you’d wanted them to argue.  If they’d said, something like, “Given that predators can often be abusive, and will actively work to get the community to shun you once you let them know you’re onto them, you’re not obligated to tell the person who violated your consent what happened” –

– well, there’d still be debate, but the Distracting Sub-Argument wouldn’t obscure the main point you were trying to make.

And it happens all the time.  I wrote a heartfelt essay on how “Be Yourself” isn’t necessarily the best advice for people, and what too many people took away was the inadvertent question of “Should teenaged Ferrett have paid more attention to his personal hygiene?”   I wrote an essay wondering whether sex is easier for men to get than people traditionally think it is, and what lots of people came away with is the question of “Is Ferrett shaming guys who can’t get laid?”

That’s not necessarily the fault of the audience.  If I hadn’t inadvertently introduced a more compelling sub-argument, folks would have had a better chance of getting the message I’d hoped to broadcast.

Learning that difference between what you’d intended to write, and what you actually wrote, is a survival skill for anyone writing on the Internet.  You should understand what parts of your essay and/or comment are going to be of the most interest to people – and if the most intriguing portion you’ve written isn’t your main point, then a) choose a less-distracting example or b) flesh out your sub-argument so it’s not standing alone with no logic to defend it.

Otherwise,
you’re just
starting
bad poetry debates

And no one
likes
that kind of
poetry,
man.

NOBODY.

My Weird Relationship With Pain

Six years ago, I went to a Rise Against concert and flung myself bodily into the mosh pit.  I was sweaty, beaten, and in pain.

What I didn’t know was that my appendix had burst.

How could I?  My body processes pain differently than most people, apparently.  I walked around with a belly ache for two more days before finally hauling myself to the doctor’s on Monday.  When he asked me what my pain level was, I infamously said, “Four, maybe five out of ten.”

“You should have been screaming,” he later told me.  Because sure enough, my body was flooded with poison, and though I didn’t know it at the time, I had only a 40% chance to live.

Whoops.

So about two years after that, when I was laying in bed on a sleepy Saturday morning, turning over because I had some chest discomfort that kept waking me from a thin rest, I stopped.  “This is a one out of ten,” I thought.  “Maybe a two.  But the last time I had a five, it nearly killed me, so maybe I should go the ER.”  And I got my daughter up, and griped that I was wasting $2,000 on some stupid ER visit but better to safe than sorry, and….

99% clogged in three arteries, including one known as “the Widowmaker.”  They cracked open my chest, gave me an emergency triple-bypass.

And it’s not like I’m insensate.   If I stub my toe, I will shout profanities to the high heavens.  When I got stung by bees back when we had a beehive, it hurt.  I just seem to have some upper limit to pain wherein literally life-threatening amounts of pain do not register.

So when I was in the cardiologist’s office yesterday after I failed my nuclear stress test – which is a totally badass name of a thing to fail – he asked, “Have you had any chest pains?”

Yes.  All along.

But I don’t know what they mean.

Because after you are diagnosed with a potentially-fatal heart condition, you feel chest pains all the time.  Because you are super-focused on that area that could, you know, kill you, and so any gas pains or random aches suddenly become this billboard-sized panic of “IS THIS THE END.”  I’ve talked with other heart patients, and it’s funny how many random twinges we all ignore right up until the time you can’t.

“Have you had any chest pains?”  And I don’t know how to answer that.  Yes.  No.  The last time I had chest pains they put me on a Holter monitor for three weeks where I wore EKG electrodes day and night, carrying around an electronic pack that registered by every heartbeat, and they found nothing even when I specifically said, “Yes, this hurts.”  On the other hand, I’ve specifically been in at least two situations where my pain should have been broadcasting “YOU ARE DYING, YOU ARE DYING,” and, welp, dying apparently wasn’t that bad.

So what do I tell him?

How do I know?

I literally have a body that doesn’t know what’s dangerous, and unfortunately there’s no easy way of calibrating it.  I’m going into the hospital next Tuesday where they’ll slither a tube up my arteries and literally poke into my heart like a tapeworm to see what’s going on, because I am incapable of self-diagnostics on any meaningful scale.

And that’s a low-grade fear I can’t get rid of.  Any time I feel any pain, I have to wonder, “Is this just your normal forty-year-old dude ache, or is this a harbinger of my impending demise?”  And that constant surveillance is exhausting.

Yet I don’t have a choice.  And maybe it’s better than the alternative; I mean, I didn’t want to be screaming in pain when my appendix burst.  But maybe I’d have had a lot nicer surgery if I had more finely-attuned sensors than these blunt-force nerves I had at my disposal.

As it is, I’m going in Tuesday to have them check out my heart.  Maybe it’s bad.  Maybe it’s not.

I have no way of knowing.

(Incidentally, here’s another thing that’ll kill me: repealing the ACA without a valid replacement for risky patients like me.  There’s no way I can actually afford the treatments I’ll need, and the preliminary rumblings from Republican Senators imply that the new laws might actually be more lenient in who they allow to be kicked off a plan – yes, even if I am gainfully employed – so calling your Senator to tell ’em the ACA should be retained, or at least the replacement should cover unlucky schmucks like me, is critical.  I wrote up an easy how-to manual to do it here.  You’d be doing me a solid if you did call.

(And no, plugging for the ACA {or at least a reasonable replacement} is not why I wrote this, but it’s sort of impossible in this day and age to write about my critical health conditions without pondering whether I’m, you know, going to be able to get coverage I can afford.)

Sometimes You Don’t Need Therapy, You Need Distance.

If you thought my wife and I couldn’t get into a fight about which TV show to watch next – for the record, “Star Wars: Rebels” vs “Mythbusters Search” – well, you’d be wrong.

Stupidly, we fought because we thought the other person cared more. I wasn’t really in the mood for Rebels, but I didn’t feel like making a fuss if that’s what the family wanted. But Gini, sensing my reluctance, immediately concluded that seeing Mythbusters was the height of my desire, and so we wound up in a brief shouting match of both of us screaming that THIS WASN’T FUCKING IMPORTANT TO US.

Dumber fights have been had. But not by much.

And I was really wrecked by this three-minute fight. I was con-dropped from being “on” all weekend for ConFusion, and I had my doctor’s appointment tomorrow (now today) to determine when I’d be going in for a heart catheterization, and when it was done I just slouched my way downstairs and fulminated. I felt awful, and sullen, and drained.

Thank God it wasn’t anyone’s fault.

Look, I’ve seen too many people who have to assign blame for every clash. Someone had to have screwed up to make me feel this bad – and that screw-up has to be addressed, now.

But no. Gini was coming down with the flu, and also peopled out from having presided over a wedding that weekend, and so she was as exhausted as I was. This wasn’t something that needed to be fixed, or apologized for – we were both punchy, communicating poorly, and we’d inadvertently smacked each other around in, ironically, an attempt to be courteous to each other.

Sometimes, you have fights because neither of you are in a good headspace. That’s not to excuse the hurt, of course – but I recognized that my wife was trying her best and failing for reasons that had little to do with her normal communication patterns, everything to do with the fact that I was more sensitive because my batteries were redlined, and this wasn’t A Problem To Be Fixed but A Bad Day We’d Rather Not Have Had.

Some days, if you’re in a good relationship, you write this off as a Mistakes Were Made, and retreat to your separate corners, and come back again when you’ve gotten over yourself.

That’s less satisfying, particularly to those of us who grew up going to therapists. You’re taught that you should come away from a fight with some sense of advancement, that you’ve learned something from this, that you’re smarter and braver and wiser for the conflict. You’re trained to sharpen your communicating skills so that you won’t have the same fights over and over again…

But the truth is, no matter how good you have become at honing your discussion skills, some days you’re just not up to the task. Even the best hairstylist has a bad hair day.

On those days, you can tear yourself to pieces trying to improve the situation, or you can just accept that today’s a write-off, hug it out, and hope you feel better tomorrow.

We hugged it out.

It’s tomorrow.

Let’s hope this day works better.