Dear Sarah,

First of all, I wanted to thank you for “For Thou Art With Us.” Like all your readers, I’m so relieved that you’re safe and still writing.

And actually that provides a perfect transition to my problem. I don’t need to tell you that the horrendous events of September 11 have terrified everyone in the U.S., and probably everyone in the world as well. But my friend and co-worker “Bob” is really (in my humble opinion) taking it well over the top. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there’s any particular “right” way to feel about the attacks and I understand it’ll take some people longer to get over them than others, but considering Bob’s particular circumstances, I don’t really get exactly what’s motivating these operatic displays of grief. What are Bob’s particular circumstances? I’m glad you asked.

1. Bob didn’t know anyone in New York who was lost or in imminent danger. That goes for Washington and Pennsylvania, too, as well as all four of the hijacked planes.

2. Bob doesn’t know anyone in New York or Washington at all, actually.

3. Bob and I don’t live anywhere near New York, Washington, or any other major city that might conceivably be a terrorist target. Well, I guess anywhere could be a terrorist target. But we live in the plains states.

4. Bob doesn’t know anyone in the military who could be in immediate danger.

I really don’t want to act like Bob’s feelings aren’t valid. But given the above, I kind of feel like his reaction is more of an overreaction. Last Tuesday and Wednesday, pretty much no one was in our office for obvious reasons. Bob didn’t come in — fine. But he took personal days for the whole rest of last week because he said he was “too upset to focus.” At the same time, he called me every night to talk about how upset he was. This week, he’s come in to work, but he just sort of droops around, basically (if you ask me) making sure everyone sees how grief-stricken he is and how much he cares about the city of New York even though he’s never even been there. He doesn’t really do much work — just surfs the web looking for news stories about various atrocities that have happened in the aftermath of the attack and then forwards the URLs around the office to remind us how upset he is and to show how much he cares. Then he leaves at about three and goes home to droop around the house, and then calls me at night to talk about how upset he is some more.

I know how cold this sounds. I know it seems like I’m unfeeling and callous. I’m really not. I have donated blood and money already in my community, and before any of this happened I was already volunteering my time as a Big Brother. I don’t think I’m a bad person. But I was not personally
affected by this tragedy — horrible though it was — so this week I’ve started to kind of get back to work. It’s not easy, but I’m just putting one foot in front of the other and getting on with the business of living my life, trying to find the positives wherever I can. Bob is in the same boat I am, but the difference is that he isn’t trying to go on with his life. He’s mired in this — well, really, he’s miring himself in this by wallowing in the tragedy. It’s like whenever he thinks he might be in kind of a good mood again, he goes searching for another story of another burned mosque — and I know it’s horrible that that’s happening, but I just don’t know what Bob is getting out of keeping himself hyper-aware, around the clock, of how horrible our world can be. Especially at work, with the URLs of the news reports, it’s like he’s trying so hard to be more-empathetic-than-thou, and I really wish I could snap him out of it, because his aggressive grief is starting to wear sort of thin.Any suggestions?

I swear I’m really not Mr. Freeze

Dear Freeze,

It’s difficult for me to address this question, because in the same way that you and Bob can’t really know how it felt for us here, I can’t really know what it’s like for you and Bob out there.I imagine that he’s sad, and frightened, and horrified, and disgusted with humanity, just like the rest of us.But I imagine also that he’s frustrated at the distance, that he feels powerless so far away, that he doesn’t quite know what to do with the inchoate grief and horror he feels, even though — and perhaps especially though — he’s not directly affected by the tragedy.

Everyone deals with these situations in different ways, and I don’t want to tell anyone how to feel either.

But.(And you knew it was coming.)

Some people, at times like this, tend to make a big old show of how grief-stricken they feel, or how terribly sad the whole thing makes them, or whatever.High-school girls are particularly prone to the aggressive-grief thing.But it’s not that they’re not genuinely grief-stricken or sad. It’s that you get the uncomfortable feeling they want to make sure you know how grief-stricken and sad they are — as if they expect some sort of commendation for their sensitivity, or extra attention for having such visible emotions about it.

I would liken it — warily, because it’s not on the same scale at all, but I trust the readership to understand that I’m not drawing a direct comparison between these events — to the death of Kurt Cobain.If I recall correctly, and I think I do because I almost pulled a muscle rolling my eyes at the time, Cobain’s untimely demise occasioned a great deal of weeping and wailing and candle-lighting by certain people on campus who didn’t know Cobain personally or know much about him, didn’t listen to Nirvana, and generally seemed more interested having their emotions validated than in actually having the emotions themselves.Like, they felt sad, but they weren’t sure they had the “right to” feel sad, so they exaggerated their sadness to ridiculous levels, and in turn took comfort not from the comfort they received per se, but from the fact that they’d “earned” the comfort.I mean, I felt sad about it too at the time.It’s a sad thing when a young man kills himself and leaves a family behind.But I didn’t walk around for three days, sniffling dramatically during lectures every time the professor paused, so that others could notice and participate in my grief, either.I didn’t want to judge anyone who legitimately felt devastated, and besides, though it’s not my way to cry where anyone can see me, not everyone has the same issues with showing weakness that I do…but a lot of it seemed like attention-mongering to me.Like, if you want to cry, cry, but that’s your own lookout; leave everyone else out of it.

All of that sounds awfully mean and judgmental, but what I’m trying to get at here is that, sometimes, people don’t know what to do with the sadness they feel about events that don’t touch them directly.It’s perfectly natural to feel that sadness, but somewhere inside, they don’t feel that it is, and they distort it until it consumes them and until they feel justified in feeling it.And then, when the sadness begins to pass, they feel guilty about that, so they rip the scab off again and flagellate themselves, and they make sure to have witnesses, and it does get very, very annoying after awhile.

Again, I don’t want to dictate how people feel about this, or imply that I know how they should feel about this, or what the proper timeline is for getting on with things — I barely know how I feel about it from minute to minute, and that keeps me busy enough in my mind that I don’t mind so much if other people are getting a little melodramatic about it.But I have noticed the Bob Phenomenon on a few bulletin boards I frequent, and I have to say that, ten days after the fact, some of the hand-wringing and reports of uncontrollable sobbing and “I can’t even brush my teeth in the face of this awful tragedy” has begun to feel a bit…contrived, maybe?Or, somehow, overly…performance-oriented?As I said before, I think a lot of it has to do with not knowing how to manage an event of this magnitude emotionally, not knowing what’s expected of them.But it’s starting to feel a little competitive — “no, I feel worse than you do.No, I feel this more deeply than you do.See how bad I feel, how deeply deeply bad?[Honks into tissue.]”There’s more than enough grief to go around here, after all.Nobody’s contesting anyone else’s right to feel sad.We believe you.But this isn’t about having an audience.

It’s okay and normal for Bob to feel sad and shocked.We all do.It’s okay and normal for Bob to obsess over the news cycle.We’ve all done that.It’s okay and normal for Bob to pause a couple of times a day and feel the weight of what’s happened to this country.We’re all doing that, every day, all the time, trying to shoulder the weight, whether we saw the towers fall from the street or on TV, whether we knew someone on one of the flights or not, whether we live in New York or Washington or Des Plaines or Santa Cruz.And not to belabor the metaphor, but now we’ve all got to shoulder the weight.Bob needs to bend over, pick it up, and start walking with the rest of us.It’s time.

I know it’s hard to feel so useless in grief.Sitting here in Toronto, far away from my family and many of my friends, far away from my home, I feel kind of useless too.But Bob needs to start getting back to his life.That way, he can begin to put things into context, to occupy a meaningful and worthwhile existence in his time on earth.We all have to start doing that, because that’s the only thing that will save us, as a nation, as a race of human beings.

We all got our hearts broken by this thing.Everything has changed, and for the next while, that’s the only thing that’s going to stay the same.But we all have to move forward somehow, find hope and purpose somewhere, even if it’s difficult and we cry a lot, even if it doesn’t seem to mean much, even if we don’t see why we should, or how — to give more to worthy causes, to spend more and better time with our families and friends, to make some changes in the way we live our lives and the way we treat people — to do whatever we have to do to move on from the tragedy, and to learn from it, and to try, somehow, to wring some good out of it.

As Andy says, and Red later repeats, in The Shawshank Redemption, “Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’.”We don’t need any more dyin’, I don’t think, so let’s all try to do our best with the livin’ part.

Dear Sars,

I’m a high school senior, so I still live at home. The problem is my dad’s friend: he’s an asshole and he’s creeping me out.

I’m very, um, well-endowed, and I hate it when my dad’s friend (“G”) stares at my chest. It’s disgusting; the man is almost 50 and he has a girlfriend (who he treats like shit). The worst was when he literally tried to touch my boob. Um, Hugh Hefner you’re not. He’s smarmy and turns everything into a sex joke. I’m afraid to wear a tank top around him.

I’m really creeped out by this guy. I told my mom that I will under no circumstances go anywhere that G will be, but he still comes over to the house a lot, mostly uninvited so I have no time to get out of the house.

So how do I get this damned creep away?

Unwanted Attention

Dear Unwanted,

Ew.

And furthermore, EW.

I cannot imagine that your parents would continue to associate with Grope-along Cassidy after you tell them what he’s gotten up to, but if they do and he keeps coming over, steel yourself for a confrontation.He makes a sex joke; you say loudly, “I don’t think that’s any way to talk to the DAUGHTER of a FRIEND, and it’s not funny.”He stares at your chest; wave your hand in front of your boobs and say loudly, “Please stop staring at my breasts.”He gets too close; you say loudly, “Please stop touching me.”And I mean LOUDLY.Embarrassingly loudly.Loudly enough to get your parents’ attention.”I TOLD YOU TO STOP TOUCHING ME.”G is a lout, so he’s going to say stuff like “you have no sense of humor” or “it’s just a misunderstanding” or “don’t flatter yourself, I wouldn’t look at your tits.”Stare him down.Inform him that you know exactly what he did, ACTUALLY, and you want him to KNOCK IT OFF.Slap his hand away if you have to.

But you should really impress upon your parents that you don’t want G around, at all.I don’t get why they even know this douchebag, much less why they haven’t caught onto his Humbert Humbert act and barred him from the house, because I’ll tell you what would have happened in my house.In my house, I’d have told my parents about G’s icky antics, and the next time G tried to come over, my father would have answered the door, but before he’d have had a chance to tell G to get bent, my mother would have come charging out of the den carrying her gigantic Webster’s Second International edition of the dictionary, shoved my dad out of the way, and started whaling on G’s head with it and calling him a disgusting hog while my brother and I (and probably my dad) laughed hysterically.

Seriously, though.I can’t just send my mom out like Batman with her reference book of vengeance to avenge gropings throughout the world (can I?…Ma?), so all of you women out there, young and old, big and small, need to learn the following phrase.You need to practice saying it REALLY LOUDLY so that it feels familiar and safe instead of noisy and scary, and the next time some icky guy is fondling you in a bar, or on the train, or shoving up against you at a club, or whatever, you need to bust it out.It goes like this: “DON’T TOUCH ME, ASSHOLE.”We don’t like to draw attention to ourselves, because in our minds, once people start staring and whispering, that officially makes it A Bad Scene, but it’s a bad scene anyway, so rehearse saying it so that it’s ready if you need it.Other handy phrases include “GET AWAY FROM ME, NOW,””STOP IT, NOW,” and “BACK OFF, DICKSMACK.”Another personal favorite of mine from my riding-the-crowded-1/9-train days: “WHY IS THERE A HAND ON MY ASS?”I’ve never used it myself, but I heard another woman bellow it one morning on the uptown express train and I was like, “Okay, that’s awesome.”

Fuckwads like G count on you keeping quiet because you’re squicked out and embarrassed.Don’t let him do that to you.Ask him, at the top of your lungs, WHY HIS HAND IS ON YOUR BOOB, and don’t shut up until you get an answer or until he’s escorted off the property by your dad.

[9/21/01]

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