Holding Pattern.

At the beginning of the year, I decided that 2012 was going to be about Letting Go. I was going to sell some things that were taking up both physical and emotional space; let go of the past, let go of the future. I gathered up some items, made lists, visited resellers, filled out charitable donation slips, (very) slowly winnowed away the memorabilia trove at my parents'.

I cancelled my subscription to Elle.

It wasn't a conscious decision to let go of this blog, but well, it looks like I did.

I don't know whether the fact that I haven't been motivated to post to this blog could be considered progress (dwelling less on the little things) or deterioration (it's not like I'm busy penning the Great American Novel instead), but there's no point in forcing things.

There's no point in forcing an artificial goodbye either, and I can't seem to pull the trigger on a farewell post. Instead I will just say thank you if you are reading this, and hope to conjure some entertainment for you, if not here then in a future venue soon.

Waiting.

The waiting room at the dentist this morning was quiet.

I've been going to this dentist in Gaithersburg for about 35 years. My hygienist today is someone I nicknamed "The Crusher" (inspired by the Warner Bros. cartoon featuring Bugs Bunny) at around 10 years old. I'm not sure whether my gums have gotten tougher or whether she's gotten gentler, but I don't think of her as The Crusher anymore. She even called me Christina, instead of the usual Christine.

It was a little disturbing to notice how close I was to enjoying the "oldies" that were being pumped through the loudspeaker. It was mostly '70s and early '80s stuff: "99" by Toto, "Ramblin Man" by the Allman Brothers. As a kid, the "oldies" were '50s and '60s songs that mostly were not of interest. It won't be long before I'm bopping to some '80s "oldie" and some kid is staring at me like I'm crazy. (I hope when that moment comes, it's a Prince song.)

The woman at the desk, Mary, has also been there for years and years. She always helps me pay for dental work that I vaguely cannot afford and she always asks me about my brother, usually managing to make a link to the fact that he is way more financially successful than I am and might step in if I ever need help with payment.

Today I walked in and gave Mary a smile. "Hi," I said.

"Hi," she said, and gave me a look that said, "What the hell do you want?"

She didn't recognize me? She didn't recognize me. She didn't?

"I'm here for my 11 a.m. appointment," I said, feeling embarrassed to say my name after all this time. In a moment, she seemed to realize who I was, or at least realize that she was supposed to realize who I was, and softened a little bit.

"OK," she said, and started to complain about the computer system freezing up.

Not sure what to do, I smiled uneasily and turned to the waiting room. I had recently read an article about some dude who analyzes speech patterns and noticed that people who are depressed use "I" more often than others. "I'M here for MY appointment," I had said. Shouldn't it be that people who use "I" are more self-centered? Where was that light box when I needed it? I I I.

Another person entered the office as I got settled. "I have an appointment but it's not until 12:00," he said. It was five of 11.

The receptionist said that was fine. "I'm sorry, I have to get here when MetroAccess says I can get here," the man said, pushing his walker in front of him. He had a sunny disposition that pushed ahead of him into the room.

"Make yourself comfortable," the receptionist said.

"I'm accustomed to waiting," he said, as assurance that he would make no trouble. He gave me a smile as he went by, and then sat down and ... well, he waited.

I was sort of stunned that anyone could get anywhere in Gaithersburg using public transportation, so that was the first thing that awed me about this man. The second thing was the way he waited. He just sat there placidly staring out the window with a vague smile on his face. No compulsive smartphone checking (like me). No magazine. No screens. Just being.

Accustomed to waiting.

Music: "Midnight City"

Digressions for 2012

- Rutabaga puts the soily, undesirable "root" into root vegetables, and I don't like it. I am adding that to my list of vegetables from which I am MovingOn.org, which includes green beans, lima beans and beets.

- Is that person truly boring, or have I just failed to access his or her interestingness?

- I am keeping the Christmas lights up too long, just because.

- The gym and yoga studio are super crowded right now. The yoga teacher said this happens every year and we should expect it to thin out by March. These people obviously don't know how to coast on workouts and feel guilty about that instead.

- Which of these establishments actually exists in St. Michaels, Md., and which is fake?

A. Frivolous Fibers

B. Critters and Crinolines

C. The Medicine Shoppe

D. What's This, What's That?

E. Diamonds in the Ruff (pet grooming)

F. A Wish Called Wanda

Answer: Only B is fake. The rest are real.


Music: "Super Bass"

So Crazy Right Now.

A friend writes to me the other day:

"so i am so addled and ridiculous and old school that i look at your
photo on fb and then GET ONTO EMAIL to send you a note."

A colleague says to me today something along the lines of:

"Here's how crazed and tired I am. I saw your IM from 10AM this morning saying you were going to call me for our meeting and I thought it was from you just now at 5:30 and that's why I'm calling."

And me? I just began scooping my dinner into my drinking glass instead of my pasta bowl.

Does it seem like every other conversation you have these days is about how "crazy" everything is? How busy everyone is? How there is no time? It kind of makes me sad that so many of us are feeling this way--out of touch, behind. Or "spread too thin," as my boss described his own situation to me today.

A long-ago acquaintance posted to Facebook:

"Several of my friends seem to have decided that a Facebook message, tweet, or e-mail is as good as picking up the phone for a bit of actual human contact. I do not approve."

Well, this seemed a bit harsh. And you could argue that if you really feel that way about a friend, then you should express it by picking up the phone instead of broadcasting it on Facebook. But, both intentionally and unintentionally, this message signalled that same -- what is it? Weariness.

Of course, being busy has its charms: less boredom, fewer chances to wallow, feeling engaged with something that presumably you decided at one point was important (say, kids). Ideally, you're sacrificing for a cause.

"I like being at battle stations" at work, one of my friends likes to say. He likes feeling like he's putting out fires.

I like feeling busy at work too, especially when I like my job, as I do now. I do not like feeling like I can't sleep, can't wind down, can't unplug from the screens and the lists, can't connect to the humans and the big picture.

How crazy are you right now?

Music: "Crazy in Love"

The Other Side.

Have you ever been able to reveal the weakest, most morally questionable aspects of yourself to someone, and never have it come back to bite you in the ass?

I didn't think so.

There's a window in a relationship when you can intimate that these flaws exist within your soul. This window usually lasts, oh, a few hours in the aggregate. It's a delightful time: The time when you feel you have found true empathy in another human being, the time when you feel loved no matter what; the time when you can open up and accept that your dearest beloved is not perfect, because you love him or her so, and if they had a reason to be imperfect, surely it was a very good one. Usually this reason involves parents.

Speaking of parents, this is also that moment of unconditional love: The feeling you spend a lifetime hoping to recapture, if you're lucky enough to capture it even once. From a parent.

This is why many of us find Lost in Translation so enchanting: it represents that stage of intimacy where all (or many) flaws are revealed and all flaws are Deep and Charming, and yet Not a Relentless Feature of One's Daily Reality. It is the ultimate union of flawed individuals, but it never really happens in reality, which emphasizes my point.

Most of us fear being rejected if we reveal our true selves, but not with our significant other, because we have already been through that fire and it is Okay. But then, disconcertingly, it is suddenly Not Okay. The foible that was considered cute for the purposes of dating is now considered questionable for the purposes of a real relationship. The vulnerability that was once the seat of true love becomes a wearisome liability in the business of caring, day in and day out.

Be very careful when you start in on such a foible with your loved one: It usually involves some aspect of yourself.

I think about this all the time: What could I really say, or should I really say, regarding the lesser aspects of my self, history, present and future? If I do, when or how will I be punished? Will it be like last time? And am I capable of being a trustee of everything I know about a person I love, without ever using it to punish?

And then I think, man: I could really use a karaoke session right now.

Music: "More Than This"

PS. The bf and I dressed up per above for Halloween. It went well. We are not like Bob and Charlotte. But we do have a karaoke history, and despite the post above, he's a pretty understanding guy.

When Autumn Leaves...

Fall used to be my favorite season.

I loved the change in the air, the colors, and most of all the smells: smoke, cinnamon, warming dough, pumpkin, cider, dried vegetation. The crisp wind also signaled new prospects. The school year always brought another chance to be better, to stand out in some previously unimaginable way, even though the reality was that every move I made at school was oriented toward not standing out.

Several things have slowly chipped away at my welcoming attitude toward fall as an adult. During a particularly bad season, I learned from Kay Redfield Jamison's Night Falls Fast (you know, just some LIGHT READING) that the likelihood of suicide peaks in the fall.

I never forgot that tidbit as I walked through the ensuing banks of dying leaves and cheerless Halloween displays, hardening myself against the deepening chill and becoming fearful of how the darkness encroaching on daytime would eventually obscure whatever brightness survived inside me.

The last fall that I remember enjoying involved a corn maze and small towns and colorful drives. After that came a series of autumnless years in San Francisco, then a fall spent preparing for and recuperating from a surgery, then a fall spent driving to and from a job I utterly loathed. I did find love during an October, but it was disconnected from the colors and smells of the season.

By the time this past August rolled around, I was trying to ignore the rising sense of dread at summer ending. Hurricane Irene buzzsawed through my attempt to bid summer a proper farewell by the sea. The first day after Labor Day dawned cold and cloudy.

Now it's October, and I walk through the streets looking at my phone half the time, maybe turning my face to the sun a couple of times before going to soak up the rays in front of some glowing rectangle at the office or at home.

Ironically, I started thinking about maybe going on some kind of tech fast directly after reading a few obituaries about Steve Jobs (on my iPhone, natch). Taking a break from the screen on the train, I switched to magazines and read "Personal Best," an article in The New Yorker about coaching written by the surgeon Atul Gawande.

"Surgery is, at least, a relatively late-peaking career," Gawande writes. "It's not like mathematics or baseball or pop music, where your best work is often behind you by the time you're thirty. Jobs that involve the complexities of people or nature seem to take the longest to master: the average age at which the S&P 500 chief executive officers are hired is fifty-two, and the age of maximum productivity for geologists, one study estimated, is around fifty-four."

I felt a surge of hope reading Gawande's career analysis, thinking of all the late-blooming authors in the world and the idea that there was still time to become one of them. After all, writing (and, contrary to Gawande's analysis, pop music) does involve the complexities of people and nature. But then I thought of all the early-peaking authors and wondered if writing belonged with pop music in some ineffable space where you get a glimpse of human feeling and a brief chance to capture it, and then you're washed up.

Either way, what have I been doing to master writing -- or anything? To be honest, precious little. I've been screwing around and trying to avoid failure. Here I was reading about two people -- Jobs and Gawande -- who have arrived at significant contributions to society by being willing to fail and by engaging with the world (the one not on the screen). I have derived major personal benefits from these contributions to technology and medicine.

Of course, on the technological front, there are downsides. Here are a few things I do less since the iWeb became a daily fixture in my life:

- handwriting
- any writing
- listening to albums
- daydreaming
- watching people
- reading books
- doing crosswords
- socializing
- calling my mom
- looking long and hard at anything
- staring out the window

Technology is not to blame for this -- it's just an accessory. It does reduce the ability to pay attention to the real world, to the things that matter. The tool that makes life easier becomes a substitute for your actual life. The network that connects you to people also erodes the need for their presence. Distractions become distractions from distractions.

And now it's fall. The swirling leaves are as incontrovertible as the gathering lines around my eyes. It's a do-or-die kind of season. And it's not too late to master something, even if it is only turning my face to the sun. It's not too late to love fall again.

Music: "Autumn Leaves"

Radio Silence.

"I dunno if you were following the hearings about Google yesterday," someone typed to me today. I was not.

I also did not watch the Emmys. Or the MTV Awards. I reasoned out of reading the entirety of last week's New Yorker except for the T.S. Eliot essay by telling myself, "All of these pieces will end up in some book at some point. You can read them then, if you're really interested." I only half-watched The Jobs Speech.

I haven't vacuumed. I haven't finished any good non-Twilight books that I can remember. "Seen any good ...?" No.

And, oh yeah, I obviously haven't been blogging either.

Which led me to ask myself today: What the hell have I been doing?

I've been exploding my brain on seemingly simple work-related blog posts such as this one.

I've been attending energy conferences in Aspen and fleeing Hurricane Irene instead of enjoying a long weekend at the Delmarva beaches.



I've been doing more listening and less talking, not necessarily because I want to, but because it seems like that's what's called for lately.

I've been worrying.

I've been getting some deals.

What the hell have I been doing?

I've been trying to Eat Right, which means spending amazing amounts of time chopping things for labor-intensive (but delicious) recipes like this one.

I've been deciding, some nights when I have a thought about posting here, that maybe I'm better off not sitting at the computer and plugging into my neuroses.

Then I've been going to bed and having epic, bizarre dreams fueled by said neuroses, nocturnal UncMos that involve rats, labyrinthine airports, and forgetting to check my phone with disastrous results.

I've been watching/reading things that I enjoy but that are completely irrelevant to the current culture: Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List and a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami published in 2006.

I've been running about four to five years behind on most things.

In my time off from Eating Right, I have been Eating Wrong. This includes receiving instruction on making (and in the process consuming several) macarons.


I've been wondering what radio silence actually means, anyway, and looking it up.

I've been perfecting my losing streak in Scrabble.

I've been staring at my iPhone.

I've been taking in more and more info, but feeling like I know less and less.

I've been continuing to wade through the neverending sea of stuff that I have stored at my parents', finding chestnuts such as this in the process:


I've been realizing that I will probably never connect with my coworkers now the way I did in my 20s and part of my 30s and wondering whether this is just my own experience, or one of those many things about getting old that you have to figure out for yourself because no one tells you.

I've been blasting the knot in my shoulder with various healing techniques that, thus far, have not worked.

I've been meaning to answer that email.

I've been listening to this, this and this and I don't know what else. I've been wishing I could fall in love with an album like I used to, while acknowledging that I haven't really tried to.

I've been wondering what you've been up to and how it's become so long since we've been in touch.

What have you doing (or not)?

Grandfathered In.

Saw an old friend from an old job today after, I don't know, 10-odd years of living our lives and trading the occasional email. In the old days, we'd sit in the crappy Irish pub after work sometimes, drinking whiskey sours and talking about fiction-writing.

Today, we sat in a middling hotel restaurant at lunchtime talking about real life -- kids, jobs, real estate, book promotion (not that I have any kids or real estate or a book to promote) -- and yet, in a weird way, it was like no time had passed and we were still in the crappy Irish pub.

We talked about all the people we'd known and befriended from our old workplace. "The thing is," I said, "I don't really hang out with anybody at my job now. At The Old Network, I felt like I made real friends. Now, I'm not as interested. I don't go to happy hours as much as I should. I just don't care as much. There's a baseball game outing this month..."

"But it's all a lot of effort," J said.

"Exactly," I said. "It's like, I have enough of a hard time keeping up with my relationship, my family, and the friends that I already have. I don't want to meet any new people."

"Yeah, I don't want to meet any new people either," J said. He's married with two kids and lives by the beach in a lovely house in Connecticut, the lucky bastard.

"Maybe it's the stage of life we're in."

"It's the stage of life. It reminds me of this Sinbad routine where he says, you only need two people in your life: one to look in the window to make sure you're still breathing, and one to call 911." A Sinbad reference: impressive.

I laughed. "Yeah. Or, did you watch Six Feet Under? There's a scene where Brenda says, 'I always thought that as I got older, I'd have more people around me.'"

The actual scene I was trying to conjure goes like this (with thanks to this blog):

brenda: i always thought that i would have more people in my life as time went on.

billy: hmmph… doesn't work that way.

brenda: yeah. i’m starting to realize that.

billy: its almost like as we get older, the number of people who completely get us shrinks.

I've met my share of people who "get" me, along with my share of people who don't get me (or whom I do not get) but are grandfathered in because we met at a time of life when shared experiences, a certain sensibility and sheer availability threw us together.

I like to think that maybe (maybe?) there are a few more of both types of people in my future. They're just fewer and farther between.

Music: "Another Day"

Pound Foolish.

"Hey, can I interrupt for one second?" Coworker 1 approaches my desk, where I am sitting down and showing Coworker 2 something on my computer.

Coworker 1 wants to thank me for the help I gave her in setting up a hub for some space shuttle launch coverage.

"Oh sure, no problem. I hardly did anything," I said.

"No but you gave me the foundation for understanding the code and everything, which was hugely helpful," she said. "So, thank you so much."

She is about to turn and leave, but as she does so, she reaches out her hand (which also has a lace glove on it). She is loosely making a fist. I sit there and stare. I do not know this person very well, and would not have pegged her as the fist-bump type, but then she's wearing lace gloves, so she's already a game-changer here. Or maybe she's going for a "gimme five"?

I am terrible at interpreting gestures. Unless you're flipping me the bird or attempting to start a round of clapsies, there's only a 40 percent chance that I'm going to understand your meaning. High-five attempts terrify me. I can even mess up handshakes. Rather than express this in the moment -- pause, ask for clarification, offer a quizzical look -- I try to play along and inevitably err on the side of being embarrassing.

So despite the fact that I have no idea what's going on here, especially with the gloves partly obscuring her hands, I decide to be game and return what I deem to be a fist-bump. "No!" she says, shaking her hand and opening her fingers, and I realize that she actually has something in her hand that she is trying to give me. It's a souvenir from the shuttle launch.

So I have done two things: I have assaulted her with an unwanted fist-pound, and I also suggested that *I* am a fist-pound type, which I am NOT. And I did this in full view of a witness.

God that was awkward. That is going to haunt my Monday.

Update: I have been informed that this gesture is also called a dap. There are also other definitions of "dap" on the Urban Dictionary page for it that are similarly unappealing.

Too Much?

So, for the last 24 hours or so, I've been intermittently listening to a podcast called The Lavender Hour, which is basically what happens when two people say, OMG our conversations are so entertaining, we should just tape them and put them on the Internets, only instead of just talking about it, they actually do it.

I found it because I had just watched Duncan Trussell in Drunk History Vol. 6 and was curious about who he is. The Internet didn't really have an answer for this question, but it did have the Lavender Hour, which Trussell co-hosts with his comedian friend.

Do you ever find yourself mesmerized by a piece of entertainment without even knowing why? Like, I'm not really laughing out loud here, and I'm not sure I even get where these people are coming from at all, but this speaks to me on some unfathomable level (or, alternatively, I just need more of a life), so I am just listening to it anyway. It's like... company. That's how I feel about the show Portlandia: There are a few sequences that I find hilarious, and then the rest of it I just sort of watch because I just inexplicably want to be there.

So but the thing about Lavender Hour episode that I listened to was that at times, I had to skip through because they were working so blue that I couldn't take it. Like, jokes about malls and dad-wear and the Cheesecake Factory, of course. But jokes about rape and anal sex...oh my delicate ears.

It was my own fault that I turned from this to the show Louie in search of something a bit lighter. And once again I found myself alternately amused and nauseated. I hit "pause" at about the point where someone was talking about rubbing a "smelly little cock" all over a woman's "depressing tits."

This experience -- of going from amused to perplexed to outright disgusted/traumatized and back again -- seems to be much more common now than it used to be. Remember when Eddie Murphy was edgy? It reminds of the moment at 1:28 in this interview with Charlie Sheen where he has just spewed out some craziness and breaks the frame for a moment to ask, "Too much?" It was such a genius wink at the audience in a time where everyone was just loving Crazy Charlie Sheen. But ultimately, yes, it was too much. Who wants to watch an id in overdrive for more than five minutes?

I don't know. It's not that I want everything to be squeaky clean. I would just like people to err on the side of restraint and be more creative rather than going for the shocking laugh, because these people are talented enough that they don't need it. But the real UncMo here is not the comedy itself but that a) I can't make this point in a sharper way right now and b) I sound like Grandma (or Bill Cosby). But I mean does anyone share my dismay?