“What do you have planned for your weekend?”
“I try very hard not to.”
During the week, every minute is accounted for. Everything from the 43 minutes it takes to bike to work to the :19 second ramp on the Gotye song.
And so, when you don’t have to watch the clock, suddenly the day stretches. You can wait to get up until its light and still get the house clean. You can go for a walk and take a nap. You can cook and make tortilla chips count as “lunch.”
You can have a perfectly lovely day, without even planning to.
Wonka lied. All you had to do was follow him and you’d be “in a world of pure imagination”? Apologies to the snozz berries, but we don’t all come equipped.
I don’t think I have any. None imaginations.
I am kind of creative — but that’s different from having imagination. I can come up with nonsense — but oh looky, science says that just makes you a liar.
Not only do naturally creative people cheat more than uncreative people, subjects cajoled into thinking outside of the box become cheaters, too. This suggests that the creative process isn’t just tied to dishonest behavior; it actually enables it.
Well, sure. If you can come up with a scheme, should it just go to waste? Let’s be reasonable.
What I cannot do, the imagining bit, is picture stuff. Sports radio might as well be in another language, I cannot make a scene in my head out of those words to save my life, and it’s not just because sports, BORING, I just can’t do it. I can’t read a fight scene and make sense of it either. My eyes blur and who hit who what now? That happened in The Hunger Games yesterday. (Book #12, finished in a day because who could put it down? Now on to the second in the series which seems to have a sophomore slump and too much romantical stuff, but.. I’m still in.)
The point is, Wonka better show me the money, or I’m sunk. No imagination.
And if science is right, he probably would have dumped me down the shoot with the bad eggs.
This is why we don’t involve ourselves in strangers’ lives — no good can come of getting emotionally involved in someone’s existence you can’t just get a hold of when something seems weird.
I have a waving stranger. The old man who watches out his window every evening from five until supper. I ride past him every night, streamers flapping, and wave.
Monday, his window was empty. “Huh. Maybe I’m early.”
Tuesday, the same. Curtain parted, but no waving man. “Okaaay. Maybe his family took him on a nice trip!”
Wednesday, I rode my approach to the window cautiously, peering from further back than usual. Around the corner and…
No one.
Streamers sinking, I started to think worse than a nice trip. This is why we don’t get involved in fiction and strangers. It NEVER ends well.
Riding home today, no gloves against the almost spring, I started thinking about him five miles out. See, the deal is you’re THERE, and I WAVE. This is what we do. I pedaled and thought and expected the same dark window and the same dark thought.
Today, he was back.
I waved harder than usual, got my nod in return and grinned as I rolled by. You can’t just stop showing up places. You might think you’re an island, but in the end, we’re all someone’s window stranger.
I thought for a moment I had “outgrown” blogging. I have toyed with the notion of the purpose it fills in my life before, and more lately it’s seemed like everything there is to say, either goes somewhere else (out loud to a continent four hours a day) can’t/isn’t my style to talk about (work/relationships) or it’s been posted (or isn’t spectacularly in need of being so.)
I mean, there are whole successful blogs that exist to chronicle what someone packs for lunch, but salad and tofu and oatmeal in Tupperware isn’t something that I can make exciting.
Nope. Still just lettuce. I work a lot, I work out in the time that’s left, and do regular stuff like order tags for my step cats. (OMG. “Petunia Pong” and “HRH Ping Haraschak” [of the Ping Dynasty] are going to be so stylish.)
And if it’s not tofu and cat tags, everything else I create is for work.
And then it hit me. In the middle of the second day of a two-day, remote broadcast, putting everyone from 8 year olds to nurses for wounded warriors on the air, that I spend my day telling stories that aren’t about me. It’s the exact opposite of what this space usually holds, and it’s precisely the reason I signed up. To move away from a plot of “Me, I, Mine and Me” and to just be the storyteller.
Perhaps I haven’t outgrown it — it’s just grown in to exactly what it’s supposed to be.
Judging others is easy. The distance of perspective makes it instinctual. You can spot mistakes and missteps instantly by standing back, like looking at a crooked picture.
Turning that scrutiny on yourself is impossible. You can see the same deeds, but it’s somehow reflected back to you all backwards and funhouse. Is it good or not? Do I like it irrationality, or hate it unfairly?
Mirthful Grisham chortles at your folly. He knows one can never stand in judgment of oneself. You can be an effective creator or an efficient editor, and never at the same time.
I’ve spent the past week looking at everything I’ve made in the past year, trying to pick the best. That part in The Pelican Brief (the book duh*) where the gal is changing her hair color for the fifth time hurrying before the door gets broken down? That “what am I looking at, is this the right choice, will it be enough?” It’s not dissimilar.
If “we’re our own worst critics,” I don’t think they mean harshest. They mean worst.
Next time I’m turning it all over to a Runaway Jury. Or Twelve Angry Men? Either.
*I went through a large Grisham phase in high school. Judge not…
It’s a state that seems both merely adequate and madly unachievable — especially this time of year.
Enough.
When is the shopping and worrying and rushing and baking and working and wrapping ever going to be that? Ever going to be enough? Because whatever’s been done, suddenly becomes the new expectation. The waterline continuously rises, demanding more and more just to reach that plateau of acceptable.
Whatever was, will always need more just to pass. Just to be enough.
Unless you decide, in a coup of revelation, to take it back. You take it back, the phrase, the state, the word — and just say it.
“Enough.”
“That is a picture of a person I don’t know…”
Somewhere in the past ten years, I went from San Francisco theatre stagehand to soldier. From Republican voter (the last four presidential elections at least) to… vegan who drives a Smart Car? (It’s a long story that involves a terrible driver and extreme sadness on the side of the autostrada.)
I want to believe in stereotypes, I do. They’re so useful. But I need to find one that means, “You can recite both the Five Fs of Field Sanitation and reference *A Chorus Line.”
Demographic confusion aside, in the past two months I got a new partner, a new job, a new title, a new town and some step cats.
That’s a lot of new 8-counts to learn all at once. But maybe if it feels like you’re lost, you’re probably just dancing in a circle.
My new duty station has a theatre — the comedy and tragedy masks on the sign are wearing uniform berets. They’re having auditions for Oklahoma! next month… I said I was retired from the stage, but who knows. Wherever you go, there you are and all that.
Jazz hands.
I navigate by impermanent landmarks. Landsmudges, really.
“You pass the fence with the red bows and turn by the apartment for rent.” This could be why I’m so hopeless behind the wheel, but still capable of using the Orange House as a sign for the bridge even though it hasn’t actually been orange since 1983. (How this translates to my one superpower, “Being Able to Get You Out of a Department Store With No Exit in Sight,” that you will have to take up with my spirit guide.)
I suppose it’s the very nature of impermanence that makes it noticeable. If you see the same things day after day, you become immune. Your head is only turned by the new and unfamiliar. We mark our life memories that way too — highlights that are novel and still destined to change.
Driving home yesterday, one of my impermanent landmarks had an addition: the first Buono Feste sign I’ve seen this year. The declaration of the first two words in Italian I ever spoke, in all their seasonal mutability, means that if I’m navigating by the temporary, I’ve been in this country a year.
There’s a lot of that temporary in this life. A whole new compass rose every few months. Next Buono Feste, I’ll be somewhere else.
I suppose then, in the “You Are Here” of your life, when the Orange House isn’t even orange anymore, the only constant, is you.
Supposedly nice, soothing things that have the precise opposite affect on normal people. That is to say people like me.
I do try to stay positive in my musings. And I am here as well! Positive that I just can’t see the point of…
Yoga
You might as well put on workout clothes and go sit on your couch. You’ll be less antsy, burn as many calories, and no one will tell you to center yourself on your practice. You can center yourself on an episode of Gilmore Girls instead. I wish I could Yog. But unfortunately, I have an attention span.
Garrison Keillor
He’s so folksy and down-homesy and aw shucksy that I immediately need to stab myself with an aw forksy just to feel something again.
Reggae
There is a speed that people that listen to reggae vibrate at. And then there’s me. If it were a 33 and you could spin it at the speed of a 45? Then maybe. Otherwise move it along, mon.
Fun Ship Freddy. They forgot quotation marks in there somewheres.
Zen desktop rock garden things
Right. So a box of dirt clutter on your desk is supposed to be relaxing? Dirt and clutter are the foremost enemies of relaxation, if I know my chores.
Whistling a happy tune
Whistling is the sound the devil makes when the wind blows through him. It’s either that, or the sound that will make me whip around immediately to find what hole it’s blowing out of and stuff something in it.
Surprises
The best part of an exciting event is the anticipation leading up to it. Surprise someone, and you’re robbing them of 98% of the point. Plus also, what if you’re not DRESSED? And then of course you have to do the dog-and-pony “Oh! I’m so surprised!” show. Nah.
Tea
All apologies to my people, but so you make a mug of something hot that has no real properties of wakefulness nor winefulness, so you can sit still and stare at it until it is cool enough to drink at which point you realize, tea tastes dumb.
Cruises
Yes, I will have to say that this list making inspired a rereading of “Shipping Out,” (PDF warno) David Foster Wallace’s piece on luxury cruising from Harper’s, January 1996, and that was an actual nice thing.
It’s a little unfair to add cruises to the list as I’ve never actually done it, but I feel as though this research needs no repetition.
“They’re meant to represent the Calvinist triumph of capital and industry over the primal decaying action of the sea.”
I like that primal decay. It’s the best part of a beach town. Weathered, bleached shutters and sleepy scuffed restaurants.
And there it is, the real kicker in footnote 6, page 36 (page 4 in the PDF):
“Constant references to ‘friends’ in the brochure’s text; part of this promise of escape from dread is that no cruiser is ever alone.”
Screaming on the inside. I feel claustrophobic-forced small talk and I am solidly on shore. No. Can’t. No.
But I will totally wave my hanky at you, should you want to go. I’ll even make you a playlist of Prairie Home Companion.
If at the end,
When your life flashes before you,
You only get to pick one day,
If that one was this one,
It would be a happy ending.
There is a lot of hyperbole in this world. It’s the best or it’s apocalyptic. It’s presented as perfect to lure envy, it’s presented as horror to bait attention.
This is not that.
This is snapshots of a life. A life where for one afternoon was breeze and book; a simple calm at the end of effort. Worthy of note, a memory to collect, and a reflection to appreciate again.
