Cranberry Juice by Wineglass

Many months since the last post. This winter has surpassed the last two for anxiety, with work on the Gulf coming to a close and nothing closer to home to replace it, except for a nighttime phone-sales gig. That work is less than fascinating, focusing as it does on a few simple things:

(1) Know the product sales script and basic info;
(2) Identify the caller’s individual reason for wanting the product, and pitch the product toward that reason before revealing the price (this process is known as “building value”);
(3) Ask, as often as necessary, for the customer’s credit card number (i.e. close);
(4) Rebut 3 times any series of excuses the caller gives for not wanting to buy (no credit card; needs to check with the spouse; needs more time to think; not sure the product is right for them).

Friendly pressure, or sometimes just plain pressure, is the method. Depending on the product and the clientele, the pitch can become contentious. Very often TV infomercials deliberately avoid pricing information, or worse, toss out a deceptive first payment which in fact represents only a small fraction (maybe 10%) of the cost. The word “free” is used frequently with borderline fraudulence, when it applies only to a limited portion of the advertised product, but the customer is left to infer that it means much more. It’s hard to fault many people being tricked—the trick is intentional, to induce them to call.

Some buyers are cheerful and rightly assume that nothing is cheap; some are skeptical, if not of the worth of the product, then at least of the incomplete pricing information; others start out angry, and grow steadily angrier during the call. A significant fraction of callers—particularly for some of the self-help programs—seem confused that a credit card should be necessary, and why we aren’t able to deliver C.O.D., or else they just mail in a check when they decide they like it. But those are still only the normal folks.

Then there are the weirdos.

Toward the end of one 9 PM to 5 AM shift—probably around 4:30—I took a call for a space heater, from a man with a strong drawl and a lot of energy.

-Hello, thank you for calling, my name is Michael. May I have your name, please?

-Hello, Michael, my name is Willie, and I’ve been drinking!

-How may I help you with regard to our heater?

-Oh, I just saw your commercial, so I gave you a call, and I’ve been drinking!

-Do you have any interest in buying one this evening?

-No, I don’t care at all about those, but I’ve…(click)

On the call cancellation form I checked that one off as “Crank caller”.

Frequently, and especially for self-help programs, people call up with very intense personal stories, in desperation to talk to someone. Depending on my patience level and overall state of mind, I might consider them poignant, humorous or simply moronic. One man called me up and talked about his time in prison, and how it was harder being back out. He was so drunk he couldn’t remember his zip code. And that was one of the better conversations I had all night.

So satisfaction is hard to come by on this job, especially when the job is an hour away, pays $10 an hour and I work overnights. It’s come to this while I await news from the doctorate program I’m seeking to transfer to, and as I hope for anything else—temporary or full-time—to come back from the rafts of applications I’ve sent out. Few times in my life have I felt so impotent and angry—maybe never. I lived my 20’s with no clear purpose, and only during my 30’s have I been chipping away at the shape of a career in earth science, steadily eliminating options and gathering knowledge and forming goals.

So now I find myself 40 years old, in a career situation many people much younger than I are in: having limited prospects during an historically bad downturn due to a brief track record in their present line of work. I’m frequently furious with myself over this, but I also have my life to go on living, and a wife and daughter to support (though Kate’s making most of the money right now. But I do shovel the driveway and wash the dishes).

Fear, bitterness and anger have been regularly occurring emotions of mine for months now, especially at holidays when family gathers. I look at this as paying my emotional dues, heading for an ambitious career again after taking nearly a decade of my life off, and coping with the challenges and my built-up feelings of inadequacy. If I’m to prove equal to my hopes, then I have to let the fear, bitterness and anger go—feel them, know their causes, and let their energy bleed away to zero. As I do this, and as I gain the skills and experience to work at a very high level, I feel the weight of failed potential falling from my shoulders, relieved by the lightness of accomplishment. That process is incomplete, at times moving along very slowly—right now, virtually not at all.

Many nights I’ve lain awake watching the digital clock count the minutes toward dawn—though that’s not my problem now that I stay awake until dawn anyway. If only the YMCA were open 24 hours a day, I’d be golden—in the best shape of my life. As it is, I rip off a few laps in the pool (up to 7, after several years off—hey hey) before returning the car to Kate for her to skedaddle up to work in the morning. She leaves with Eva, and I go to sleep.

That’s our life right now. Although I do like swimming in the morning, I’m not fond of the night shift.

I’ve been dealing with colitis since May—obviously, before then as well, but unknowingly, and without medication—and it continues to be an annoyance. Chronic diseases in general are unpleasant socially, particularly digestive disorders, and above all those which, like colitis, have largely unknown causes.

Anyone who’s experienced cancer in the family, and has done any reading on alternative therapies, knows that there are many theories behind the disease which focus on a compromised immune system. Hospital physicians will not necessarily concur. A similar situation exists within the field of Crohn’s disease/colitis/celiac disease, three digestive disorders which result in diarrhea and sometimes bowel punctures. Surgeons and diagnosticians will tell you the causes for each are unclear.

Off-the-shelf books will tell you that they are due to microbial infestations of the gut, frequently resulting from repeated courses of antibiotics which wipe out white blood cells and the ordinary populations of benign gut bugs and allow room for the invaders to take over. These new, unfriendly bugs interfere with the gut’s operation, causing damage and impeding digestion. Several drugs, of varying strength and severity, are available to manage the symptoms. I’m currently on the second tier out of three, in terms of severity. Beyond tier three is surgical removal of the colon.

However, the books will tell you that a road to cure—outright cure—lies through starving out the invading bugs, by eating no carbohydrates and only extremely limited forms of sugar (fructose and galactose—absolutely not table sugar, sucrose, or lactose, which is found in milk and dairy products). Two years or so of never eating these things should be enough to starve the bad bugs out and let the gut recover.

Sounds great, and I began it after Thanksgiving, but I’ve let myself go. I did lose 20 pounds in about 3 weeks—this “specific carb diet”, as it’s called, is basically the Atkins diet plus no dairy products—but once I began working this overnight job, my state of mind plummeted even further. I felt that in order to make it through an annoying job assignment, I’d need some comfort food—frozen pizza.

So I’m breaking the rules, selectively. Grains and some foods with sugar—like jelly, tomato soup, the occasional soda—are back in. But pure sugar and the dairy are still out. Maybe that’s like committing only a little treason, but I also don’t want to get back into all my old habits when I know that I hope soon to have a day job again and not need the comfort food as a crutch.

Even so, one of our phone products is this juice derived from the fruit of the nopal cactus—prickly pear juice, it’s often called. (I won’t be posting the brand name online.) We pitch it as an anti-inflammatory pain reducer, the juice naturally full of antioxidants which remove toxins from individual cells and ultimately reduce muscular, pulmonary and cardiovascular swelling. Sounds great—maybe not so great at $40 a quart, but still, the testimonials are impressive.

Then do a little online hunting. The nopal fruit—prickly pear—is simply one of a group of fruits with antioxidant properties, generally dark berry fruits. Nopal, açai berry, blueberry, cranberry and pomegranate are on the list. So you can buy the prickly pear juice over the phone for $40 a quart, or you can go to a store and buy some pure cranberry juice for $4 a quart, and probably feel the same bodily effects over time. The prickly pear juice might work very well, and live up to its billing, but it costs ten times as much. In that comparison you can find my contempt for phone marketing.

Still, Kate has become concerned with her own intestinal health, and has looked into antioxidants as a means of furthering her and my health, and wanted to try cranberry juice. Of course she found the most expensive, fruity fruit brand at the natural foods store (albeit still 8 to 10 times cheaper than the phone stuff), but I went for a cheaper, slightly cut-rate (but still no sugar added!) supermarket brand. She’s disgusted with the juice I bought as being too sweet. She wants the sour stuff, the straight cran.

Reminds me of a story I read about the great Confederate general, Stonewall Jackson. He’d been a heavy drinker in his youth, but later quit. While marauding with his army all over the battlefields of the Civil War, he was well-known for sucking on lemon slices. A fellow officer asked him one day why he sucked on the lemons.

“Because I hate them,” was the answer.

Sounds a bit like my little bengal.

Of course whenever I do anything I like it a bit ceremonial. I like my windows big and church-like, my living room like a sanctuary. I want the formality of a library room. I like a long dining table with candlesticks and a centerpiece. I go for tuxedoes and long, swooping waltzes. Big concerts and crowded halls full of formally-dressed people make me feel tingly. Not that I want my life to be stuffy—anything but—but I take comfort in grandiosity and a certain amount of ritual, enough for people to slow down and appreciate themselves and each other. Don’t ask why—it’s just who I am. I’m 40, and that part of me isn’t changing.

So even when it comes to cranberry juice, I like to dress it up a bit. Include the fact that we’ve dropped TV and internet service and keep our house at barely 60 degrees in order to eke our money through the winter, and putting a bit of ceremony into dinner where there was none is another big mental placebo. So the cranberry juice goes into wineglasses. Kate didn’t object. (To the wineglasses, that is—she certainly objects to the juice I bought.)

All the while Kate’s been carrying on with her work as a job coach for deaf students at a local school. She’s a natural teacher and has told me plenty of the frustrations and satisfactions of educating teenagers—specifically, deaf teenagers, who don’t have the same sensibilities about communication as hearing folks have—on how to hold a job and deal respectfully with the people around them. It’s hard work, educating adolescents who are surrounded by people (the hearing—frequently including their own families) who can’t communicate effectively with them, since very few know sign language (I still know barely any. It’s fair to say that Eva knows more than I do. Kate’s been very polite not to throw this in my face).

I’m not here to tell Kate’s story, just enough to explain that she finds herself weary from work many days as well, though for different reasons than I do. Kate’s a born teacher, and she takes being a role model and an instructor with real seriousness. So when the difficulties recur, and kids don’t respond, she brings the fatigue and frustration home. (Besides, she hates driving vans, especially in the city.)

Not that I blame her for bringing the frustration home. I wear my disgust for phone sales on my face regularly. When I think of that line—by Rudyard Kipling, I think, though I won’t look it up now—about “treating those impostors, failure and success, just the same”, I think of another line from a less profound but very fun poet, Robert Service, talking about fur traders and gold-prospecting sourdoughs in Canada and Alaska, ranging alone through the forested wilderness, often “dying with curses in [their] mouth”. I feel more kinship with the second line, and not just because I’m altogether too given to swearing.

Rather because I believe determination and effort don’t need to be pretty. Of course, the two snippets from the two different poets are not mutually exclusive. You can be a profane coot who maintains a healthy philosophical distance from events. But really, when you commit yourself to something—when you invest time and effort to bring that thing about—to be indifferent to the results is to emotionally renounce your own life. That I will not do.

I can understand Michael Jordan’s saying—hardly original, but he did say it—“I can accept failure. I cannot accept not trying.” I’ve failed plenty of times in the past several years. Failed to hold down jobs, especially. In some cases I was marginally qualified and did my best but didn’t make the cut. In other cases, I was very raw and had a lot to learn about being a professional. Even now, with a job even the thought of which drags down my mood, my reasons for working there are clear: to keep my family fed and sheltered. If there’s nothing else I can do, I’ll do that. I can be proud of that alone.

However, I won’t pretend to be happy about it, and I won’t adjust my desire to work as a writer and an ocean mapper. Surrender in times of difficulty and frustration is foolishness. Changing tactics and adjusting to the situation is necessary—but outright surrender, never. So perhaps I am merging the different sayings—the Jordanesque, Kiplingesque detachment from the results, in that, failure might be bitter, but there is some peace to be found in an honest effort. (Besides, Kipling doesn’t advise the reader to feel the same in triumph or defeat; only to act with the same demeanor.) However, my effort might be Service-like in its crudeness. So be it. I use my temper, and at times it does come in handy. A bit of a berserker rage can plow through the toughest part of a tough job. (At other times, it can lead me to do useless things like smash the remote—though I’ve only done that once.)

I might add a big Eva update here, but she’s just a baby and I don’t want to splash all kinds of details of her life on the internet. Though I will say, that at 16 months she’s got a vocabulary of maybe a dozen or two words, and easily twice that many signs. She shows startling feats of memory, like Kate’s favorite: my nephew Alex likes to stick his index finger in his mouth and pop his cheek. Over Thanksgiving he did this several times. Lately, Eva saw a picture of Alex and immediately did the finger-pop herself. She remembered him for it.

Also, she taught herself to snap. Her fingers are still very short and weak, so it’s barely audible, but she gets a definite, quiet snap out of her right hand.

She’s also showing more affection than ever, and the other night (as she often is) she was my rose for the day. (Kate and I have a game called Roses and Thorns. We each describe one thing we enjoyed about the day, the rose; and one thing we disliked, the thorn.) That night’s particular rose was Eva resting on my chest as I reclined on the couch, and placing the side of her head gently on my shoulder. Every ten seconds or so she’d lift her head and say, “Da-da,” and then place her head on my shoulder again.

I have no memory of what I was like as a baby—I’ve heard a couple of stories, but that’s it—so I wonder what kind of heartwarming moments I gave my parents. (The stories I’ve heard about myself weren’t the heartwarming kind of moments.) Every kid gives the parents some of them, and Eva’s becoming communicative enough that they’re coming more often than ever.

Of course, that means the frustrating moments are getting more frequent too. Meals are becoming more and more of a playtime for her, particularly when she doesn’t like the food—itself an increasingly big issue. She’s not so much the kind of baby to wind up wearing her meal, but she might deposit most of it on the floor. If she’s not hungry for it, she’ll simply take a handful, swing her arm out over the side of her high chair, and let it go with a deliberate “euh” remark. She put half a taco on the kitchen floor the other night this way. We might need to remove the rug if she keeps this up.

In short, she’s a growing baby. I think the fact that I spent several weeks this fall, while I was looking after her during the day, practicing my voice has really impacted our ability to get through to her. Specifically, volume doesn’t bother her a bit. Eva would mill around the room while I belted out scales, drills and actual pieces, often at rather high volume. She wasn’t fazed, at all. Every now and then she’d even join in, and squeal out a high note for several seconds.

So now, if she’s getting into something (like the garbage, or the mail), and I yell, “Eva! No!” she’ll just kind of lazily look over at me, and either carry on or else calmly go somewhere else. Or else she’ll just ignore me altogether. I’ve already conditioned my kid to tolerate shouting. Call her a sourdough baby, I suppose.