Christopher Hitchens: Tribute

Christopher Hitchens, the undefinable essayist critic author rhetoritician contrarian smoker-drinker brilliant world's-most-famous-atheist unapologist known for taking on both liberals and Mother Teresa and (quite famously) his own body hair, died last night from pneumonia outlying from esophageal cancer.

I have a hard time recalling any recent public figure more feted in life or in death -- a man who seemed to win respect even from those he decimated.

Reading the tributes today, and rereading many of his recent essays, I as a writer have, too, succumbed to the desire to highlight this larger-than-life icon .... even if he would have smote me dead for using such a cliched phrase to describe him.  It was this article, just weeks after his all-encompassing cancer diagnosis last summer, that cemented my respect:

Vanity Fair (CH - from September 2010):  "The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application in my case. In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity. Of course my book hit the best-seller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the tarmac? To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?"

Thanks for your indulgence and for reading the tributes of others.... words tend to fail me when presented with such a work ethic, such practicality, and someone who most excellently lived his life his way.

The New Yorker (Jane Mayer):   "Hitch lived so large, and so beyond the rules, that his mortality seems especially hard to accept. I remember the day some eighteen months ago when he told me that he was mortally ill. He had missed a few stops on his book tour, which wasn’t like him, so I called to see if he was all right. 'No,' he said frankly. 'I’m not. I have cancer.' I was so stricken for the next few days that I couldn’t get much work done. Then I noticed that during the time that I was using his illness as an excuse to procrastinate, he had himself authored a handful of brilliant pieces. I couldn’t work, but he couldn’t stop working. He was a born writer, whose irrepressible talent and verve put most of the rest of us journeymen to shame."

The New Yorker (Christopher Buckley):   "When we made a date for a meal over the phone, he’d say, 'It will be a feast of reason and a flow of soul.'  I never doubted that this rococo phraseology was an original coinage, until I chanced on it, one day, in the pages of P. G. Wodehouse, the writer Christopher perhaps esteemed above all others. Wodehouse was the Master. When we met for another lunch, one that lasted only five hours, he was all a-grin with pride as he handed me a newly minted paperback reissue of Wodehouse with 'Introduction by Christopher Hitchens.' 'Doesn’t get much better than that,' he said, and who could not agree? ..... Everything he said was brilliant. It was a feast of reason and a flow of soul, and, if the author of ‘God Is Not Great’ did not himself believe in the concept of soul, he sure had one, and it was a great soul.”

Vanity Fair (Graydon Carter):  "He wrote often—constantly, in fact, and right up to the end—and he wrote fast; frequently without the benefit of a second draft or even corrections. I can recall a lunch in 1991, when I was editing The New York Observer, and he and Aimée Bell, his longtime editor, and I got together for a quick bite at a restaurant on Madison, no longer there. Christopher’s copy was due early that afternoon. Pre-lunch canisters of scotch were followed by a couple of glasses of wine during the meal and a similar quantity of post-meal cognac. That was just his intake. After stumbling back to the office, we set him up at a rickety table and with an old Olivetti, and in a symphony of clacking he produced a 1,000-word column of near perfection in under half an hour."

The New York Times (Ian McEwan):  "The place where Christopher Hitchens spent his last few weeks was hardly bookish, but he made it his own. Close to downtown Houston is the Medical Center, a cluster of high-rises like La Défense of Paris, or London’s City, a financial district of a sort, where the common currency is illness ..... No man was ever as easy to visit in the hospital. He didn’t want flowers and grapes, he wanted conversation, and presence. All silences were useful. He liked to find you still there when he woke from his frequent morphine-induced dozes. He wasn’t interested in being ill. He didn’t want to talk about it .... And so this was how it would go: talk about books and politics, then he dozed while I read or wrote, then more talk, then we both read. The intensive care unit room was crammed with flickering machines and sustaining tubes, but they seemed almost decorative. Books, journalism, the ideas behind both, conquered the sterile space, or warmed it, they raised it to the condition of a good university library ....  at Christopher’s request, Alexander and I set up a desk for him under a window. We helped him and his pole with its feed-lines across the room, arranged pillows on his chair, adjusted the height of his laptop. Talking and dozing were all very well, but Christopher had only a few days to produce 3,000 words on Ian Ker’s biography of Chesterton. Whenever people talk of Christopher’s journalism, I will always think of this moment.   Consider the mix.  Constant pain, weak as a kitten, morphine dragging him down, then the tangle of Reformation theology and politics, Chesterton’s romantic, imagined England suffused with the kind of Catholicism that mediated his brush with fascism and his taste for paradox, which Christopher wanted to debunk. At intervals, Christopher’s head would droop, his eyes close, then with superhuman effort he would drag himself awake to type another line. His long memory served him well, for he didn’t have the usual books on hand for this kind of thing. When it’s available, read the review. His unworldly fluency never deserted him, his commitment was passionate, and he never deserted his trade. He was the consummate writer, the brilliant friend. In Walter Pater’s famous phrase, he burned “with this hard gem-like flame.” Right to the end.

Thoughts on focus and practice

I've already said this a couple times (here and here), but I'm struggling to write much meaningful in the face of momentous occasions and a steamer trunk's worth of conflicting emotions about them. 

It's not just the blog.  Focus on any task feels taxing:  suitcase still open and full of last week's clothes, and now I've started throwing this week's clothes into it;  paperwork at work I swore I'd do Tuesday and today don't know how and where it'll fit; wanting to blow off steam by playing piano but without the energy to set up my keyboard, resting on its end in the living room where I left it 3 weeks ago after transporting it back from a concert.  Three weeks ago.  I'm becoming frustrated at this scatteredness. Been on this earth awhile, have accomplished some things, and know I know how to focus. I don't know where this knowledge has seeped to.  

(Come back, dear friend....)

When starting this entry, about 2 sentences in, I said to myself, "Girlfriend, people do not read this blog to hear more of this low-level negativity and the same lack of focus issues we all face in moments.  It is 60 degrees on November 10 and the end of the tunnel is showing at work and you had a solid sleep last night and tomorrow is Happy Nigel Tufnel Day.  Chin up!"

But truthfully, I'm not in the mood to censor myself.  Today I just want to write about lack of focus.  The end.  And, I'm deciding I'm going to stop apologizing for it.

Presciently, a friend yesterday alerted me to a piece on the blog of novelist Steven Pressfield, regarding the so-called "10,000 Rule": 

"The rule says that in order for an individual to master any complex skill, be it brain surgery or playing the cello, she must put in 10,000 hours of focused practice. Since a thousand hours seems to be more or less the maximum we humans can handle in one year, ten thousand hours equals ten years."

I've been writing this blog for 3-and-a-half, although I've probably spent at least 20,000 hours in my life writing something; very little of it has been focussed, though.  Using that calculus, I've probably got 25 years of blogging to go before mastery. Sobering. However, the resonance of this piece was less about that and more about what he spoke of next -- which is that the time and practice of a skill allows the self-censoring to fall away and the individuality to emerge. 

To wit:

"How does the actor get past his own excruciating self-consciousness? How does the entrepreneur come up with an idea that’s really new? The answer is they both beat their heads against the wall over and over and over until finally, from pure exhaustion, they can’t “try” any more and they just “do.” The writer says f*** it and writes a sentence in a way he would never imagine himself writing a sentence, and to his amazement that sentence is the first real sentence he’s ever written."

And:

"To speak in one’s own voice means to let go of all the other voices in our heads. Whose voices? The voices of what is expected of us. Yes, that means the voices of our parents, teachers, mentors. But it means something more elusive too. It means our own expectations of what we should be doing or ought to be thinking—what is “normal” or “right” or “the way it ought to be.”

"The price of achieving that breakthrough is time. Time and effort. Ten thousand hours if you’re lucky, more if you’re not. The gods are watching for those ten thousand hours, like instructors at Navy SEALs training. They can tell when we’re faking and they can tell when we’re for real. They can pick out those of us who really want it from those who are only pretending.

"In the end those ten thousand hours must be their own reward—which is the way it ought to be, don’t you think?"

Which is the way this blog has and, hopefully will continue, to resonate with both you and me. Despite the occasional scattered times where I'm trying to find my brains and my gut and my legs and the next steps I can take forward even if all aren't quite intact.

Anyway. Getting today's blog entry off my plate.....it is leaving me the time to focus on work.  Really.

(Go.)

Mulling singleness, longevity

Have I told y'all that before moving to Boston in 1999, I worked 4 years as the features reporter for the Pipestone County Star, in the small town of the same name in southwest Minnesota?   (Using the term y'all gives me away as a Midwesterner, right...?!) 

I'm sure I have.

My main beat at the Star was covering the robust performing arts scene, community organizations, dairy and pork and corn-n-soybean farmers, and the non-stop activities and recognitions at 3 elementaries and 1 high school.   Took endless photos of kids standing in rows, the community chorus with open mouths and hands outstretched, the Chamber of Commerce director shaking hands with new business owners.  Made lots of trips into barns for photos of pigs and cows.  One spring when the Star was down a sports reporter, I documented the track, tennis and golf teams' exploits and wickedly improved my skills as a sports-action photographer and writer.   It's where I began a personal column, Thinking Aloud, which started me writing in the stream-of-consciousness style that presaged the tack I'd eventually take in this blog.

I loved what I did in Pipestone, except for the ulcer-inducing school board meetings to raise taxes for a new facility, and I loved my life there.   But it was during the 3rd time through the same annual cycle of activities -- Homecoming, Christmas tree lightings, blizzard photos, Prom, the Watertower Festival, the Hiawatha Pageant features -- that I realized it might be time to explore different horizons.

And look where exploring got me.

This morning over my coffee, I came across a New York Times article titled, "In a Married World, Singles Struggle for Attention":

"Here’s a September celebration you probably didn’t know about: It’s National Single and Unmarried Americans Week."

I knew it sounded familiar, then realized it's because I, naturally, documented this week's occasion in September 2010.  It was a relief to find that I hadn't also documented it in 2008 and 2009.

Funny, when I saw the Times article this morning, the intent was to delve into the content of that blog entry by Tara Parker-Pope.  Specifically, how true these paragraphs rang:

"'There is this push for marriage in the straight community and in the gay community, essentially assuming that if you don’t get married there is something wrong with you,' says Naomi Gerstel, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst who has published a number of papers comparing the married and unmarried.

"'But a huge proportion of the population is unmarried, and the single population is only going to grow. At the same time, all the movement nationally is to offer benefits to those who are married, and that leaves single people dry.'


"Yet as she and other experts note, single people often contribute more to the community — because once people marry, they tend to put their energy and focus into their partners and their own families at the expense of friendships, community ties and extended families."

And these:

"The unmarried also tend to be more connected with siblings, nieces and nephews. And while married people have high rates of volunteerism when it comes to taking part in their children’s activities, unmarried people often are more connected to the community as a whole. About 1 in 5 unmarried people take part in volunteer work like teaching, coaching other people’s children, raising money for charities and distributing or serving food.

"Unmarried people are more likely to visit with neighbors. And never-married women are more likely than married women to sign petitions and go to political gatherings, according to Dr. Gerstel."

And these:

"The pressure to marry is particularly strong for women. A 2009 study by researchers at the University of Missouri and Texas Tech University carried the title “I’m a Loser, I’m Not Married, Let’s Just All Look at Me.” The researchers conducted 32 interviews with middle-class women in their 30s who felt stigmatized by the fact that they had never married.

" 'These were very successful women in their careers and their lives, yet almost all of them felt bad about not being married, like they were letting someone down,' said Lawrence Ganong, a chairman of human development and family studies at the University of Missouri.

"'If a person is happy being single,' he said, 'then we should support that as well."

Anyway. I'm pretty OK with being single in the city ... it has its benefits.  Other than my wistful 93-y-old Grandma, no one is pressuring me to get married.  I'll probably still go to political gatherings this season as long as my quease-factor stays in check.  And it's a good article (thank you, Tara, who is also a marathon runner).   Since I've now just quoted about half of it, feel free to decide, without my input, how you might feel about the conclusions.

I, on the other hand, have been freshly reminded of the time I have put into this blog -- 870 posts and 3.5 spins through the news cycle -- and am seriously wondering if it is time to explore different horizons.

Early anniversary

Tonight over happy hour cocktails, I asked my manager if he thought the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks would cause the financial markets to panic (like they did, screamingly, again today, natch) and he suggested most likely not because a) the markets of recent years have not been reacting to terrorist activity like they used to and b) the markets already have enough to be panicky about (or think they do, anyway), but by bringing up the topic I was reminded I'll be returning to BOS via an AirTran flight from MSP on that anniversary, which caused me to declare in a beer voice that I was not going to fall into the trap of thinking bad thoughts about doing so, which led him to tell me what it was like to be in midtown Manhattan at a conference on that morning in 2001 and watch Broadway go empty and traffic cease and ash-covered people stumble past his hotel and how no one could reach him because cell phone service was overloaded and how his hotel wouldn't let him leave town until the next day because the roads were closed down, and I was reminded of that same day in the town the planes came from, of walking through the Back Bay only to encounter Copley Square doing the same as Times Square and getting to work only to get sent home and sitting on a bench in the deserted Common under the bluest (and most deserted) sky ever and hearing the birds chirp because cars had deserted the city and that it was that silence I can't forget, more than the potential panic of not being able to imagine what was going to happen next, and as we were discussing these things I realized these kinds of stories are going to fill the air for the next 24 days, and that I found it a relief to get my reminiscing out of the way early so I can get on to enjoying the rest of my summer without fear.

Midnight rain

Just walked home from the Broadway T station in the rain.  Totally not dressed for the occasion, free of umbrella or jacket or even a shirt with sleeves, but it was only that wispy rain that lands rather quietly on hair and skin and clothes and creates a layer so fine that the wetness doesn't really register until I'm standing at home in the entryway, making a puddle on the rug while sorting through mail. Walked with glasses pushed up on my head because it was easier to walk blind than to walk uphill without windshield wipers. Only certain nights feel this kind of necessary, getting wet and cold and weary at an hour later than it should be. It was part the bourbon, mint and ginger beer mash-up (on the rocks) drank over salmon and duck confit and conversation in Davis Square. Part the quiet that is a summer Tuesday at midnight, and the minor awe felt when it actually IS quiet in this city, when the Southie teenagers are either at home or on some other street, and patio windows of bars are closed, and the squeak of sandals can't be heard over the hum of water as it lands rather quietly, not only on hair and skin and clothes, but on the sidewalks and the street lamps and the parked cars and the other people walking towards me, heads down, hoods up, and respecting their choice to go about it that way, even as I couldn't help but walk with head up, bare arms out, glasses off, water in the eyes, breathing.

He who can't be loved.

My friend Student Driver has been writing about a man she calls Type Geek for as long as I've known her writing.   This morning she wrote about him again in a post titled "One Last Time."  Because after 14 months of pushing and pulling, he's pushed her away again because he feels he has to, and this time is the (ostensibly) true end.

"We had an intensely passionate last few hours, we held each other tightly afterwards and slept for an hour, curled into each other, hands touching. In my hallway, we hugged. Longer and tighter and with more emotion than I have ever felt from him. He thanked me for everything. I told him that while I knew he wouldn’t, he knew where to find me, if ever…   Last night was the most senseless loss I have ever experienced. All because one little boy grew up thinking he was inherently not worth loving."

I'm sad for him ... that he knows that he holds people at length and can't get around it.  I'm sad for her more -- because she had to acknowledge that she was capable of loving someone unconditionally but that doesn't mean he's capable of loving back. 

I give Student Driver props; she's taken nothing about this situation lightly. Or for granted. For 14 months she's lived it from all angles -- as the aggressor, as the patient one, as caretaker and lover and sounding board and compatriot and in the end, the heartbroken one. 

And she writes so eloquently about her heartbreak it's difficult to not be heartbroken for her, especially as she walks away with grace.

20-Minute Monday

One of the homework assignments for the BHI class this week was to spend a flat 20 minutes per day, 4 days straight, doing focussed, uninterrupted writing about situations of feeling "wronged." 

The purpose is to get on paper those circular thoughts pinging around in my head, distracting with their negativity. It's thought that if released and articulated, they do less harm and leave room in the head for something cleaner. Perhaps even a sense of resolution.

On Saturday, from my perch at Thomas Park, I went on a tear about how C-2 took our friendship to a new level, and then away, and then kinda-sorta-back and then away, and why I can't let go of him even when recognizing all this. 

On Sunday, I sat on the grass behind Castle Island, jets from Logan taking off overhead, and parsed out my resentment at yet another guy friend I once dated -- whose criticisms about my personality flaws wounded me when he made them and, months later, they still linger.

This deliberate stream-of-consciousness writing -- by hand and pen, for author's eyes only -- was a frequent exercise in writing classes of yore. The time limit cuts down on constant self-censoring. The quick-edit function of typing is banished.  Limiting the audience means limiting the thoughts of how the writing will be perceived.

My hand hurt when I finished, and I can't say I necessarily felt better griping on paper rather than just to my own consciousness. But it was true: seeing circular, persistent thoughts in word form does remove some of the abstract hopelessness they can carry.  Doing this the last 2 days, despite my resentment of the subjects, indeed did bring some sense of joy.

Cool.

So, starting next Monday and continuing on subsequent Mondays until I lose steam, I will do just that for this blog - take 20 minutes and handwrite some aspect of the weekend -- positive or negative, depending -- then transcribe it for the screen.

Unedited, I promise.

(I'm also toying with the idea of asking if readers want to join me in this exercise and perhaps contribute for publication in this space. Let me know if this sounds plausible, feasible, or crazy.)

Etc. Etc. Etc.

I knew Bill wasn't going to be satisfied with a cryptic and über-crusty Guinness photo as the only description of my weekend:

Bill: What was up with the blog entry? Did that guy no show?

Karin: Nah. It’s a more involved story ... We hung out both Saturday and Sunday. Didn’t end well last night at 12:30 and I was pissed so I drove over to Foley’s to unwind with a Guinness. Surprisingly, just doing that rather than going home and going to bed being angry was a good approach. I e-mailed him today and apologized – he was a bit of a quirky guy in person and the fallout came because of my frustration with that, which is hardly his fault. He doesn’t seem aggrieved and said he’d write more later. Which is fine. It was good for us to hang out. We’re definitely not worth dating or even romantic involvement, but we do have a lot of shared interests and I’d like to stay in touch.

B: Sorry it didn’t work out so well. Sure this guy is really worth your time?

K: Well, yeah, enough so. Considering our level of interaction the last 3 months, I don’t want to make an enemy and don’t want it to end badly. Even if we just get square and then the relationship trails off because there’s nothing romantic going on….so be it. Better that. Interesting guy, smart guy, definitely eccentric – which, again, is something not entirely apparent until you hang out. Kind of like what happened with C-2, I’m glad to have erased ambiguity. Frustrated to have wasted time on a level, but it’s all a learning experience and this taught me something about me too.

B: Well, what’s wrong with cutting ties now? If you’re going through the motions just to “not make an enemy”, it just doesn’t sound right. Don’t waste more time if there is no potential, your time is too valuable.

K: We’ll see. I’d like to end it on a good note if nothing else. I’m a bad person when it comes to regrets.

B: Well, you probably regret too much in general. You’re a good person that way in that you care about how you treat others, sometime regardless of how they treat you.

K: I know. He didn’t treat me badly. He didn’t misrepresent himself. It just took meeting him to understand that him being quirky made for great e-mail exchanges but less chemistry in person. I didn’t have the patience for his real-life persona. So I don’t have to. I think we’ll just go back to swapping YouTube videos.

Actually, I did that last night, sending along this link of the great mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing Handel. It closed the loop on our brunch at the Algiers Coffee House, where we sat for 2 hours on Sunday afternoon dissecting the text and origin of the Bach cantatas playing in the background. Which, again, seems like the kind of relationship he and I should and could have. Those 2 hours of Bach minutiae, in that (speaking of quirky) Harvard Square relic, were easily the best 2 hours of the weekend.

Lesson learned.

(The regret comment probably requires reflection and a separate entry at a later date.  As does my curiosity about whether or not he thought I was an eccentric, too ....)

Meanwhile, The New Yorker yesterday revealed this 10,000-word essay by Nick Paumgarten on online dating, with a heavy focus on OKCupid -- interviews with and discussions of the dating lives of its creators and all.

Well, it's about time .... 2 of my most regular reading habits in one handy location! (Highbrow and lowbrow meeting in the middle, perhaps?) Mr. Paumgarten is gifted and clever and did a mountain of research. I particularly enjoyed learning about the Technical Automated Compatibility Testing (TACT), the first known "computer-penpal" service that originated around the time of the 1964 World's Fair. Nonetheless, that everything (but TACT) sounds like something I've heard before, even in a piece of this length, is a testament to both my well-documented history and the over-ripeness of still writing about it.

Mr. Paumgarten is married. For research purposes, rather than creating an fake online profile, he made coffee dates with women who had OKC histories. His conclusion rings of accuracy .... particularly the highlighted line at the end...

"I talked to men, too, of course, but there is something simultaneously reductive and disingenuous in most men’s assessments of their requirements and conquests. Some research has suggested that it is men, more than women, who yearn for marriage, but this may be merely a case of stated preference. Men want someone who will take care of them, make them look good, and have sex with them—not necessarily in that order. It may be that this is all that women really want, too, but they are better at disguising or obscuring it. They deal in calculus, while men, for the most part, traffic in simple sums.

"A common observation, about both the Internet dating world and the world at large, is that there is an apparent surplus of available women, especially in their thirties and beyond, and a shortage of recommendable men. The explanation for this asymmetry, which isn’t exactly news, is that men can and usually do pursue younger women, and that often the men who are single are exactly the ones who prefer them. For women surveying a landscape of banished husbands or perpetual boys, the biological rationale offers little solace. Neither does the Internet. "

And here's a take on a gender issue:

"Good writing on Internet dating sites may be rare because males know that the best way to get laid is to send messages to as many females as possible. To be efficient, they put very little work into each message and therefore pay scant attention to each woman’s profile. The come-on becomes spam and gums up the works, or scares women away, which in turn can lead to a different kind of gender disparity: a room full of dudes. “There is a fundamental imbalance in the social dynamic,” Harj Taggar, the investor at Y Combinator, told me. “The most valuable asset is attractive females. As soon as you get them, you get loads of creepy guys.”

Finally, this story was my favorite: a woman in her 70s, with a PhD, married and divorced twice and who lives ... outside of Boston. She's in her 70s, I'm in my 30s, we're both internet dating, we're having similar experiences.

"She met a mathematician who lived in Amsterdam, and flew over to meet him but discovered within minutes that he suffered from full-blown O.C.D. She drove up to New Hampshire in the rain for lunch with a man with whom she’d been carrying on a promising e-mail and telephone correspondence for a few days, but he told her that he found her unattractive. She met a financier on Yahoo’s dating site. They got together for coffee at Café Pamplona, in Cambridge. (K: Just down the street from the Algiers, of course!) He was handsome, charming, and bright. He was also, as a friend’s follow-up Google search revealed, a felon, and had served time in prison in a RICO case. “I did see him again,” she said. “And then I realized how crazy he was. He wasn’t nice, either.” For two years, she has had an off-and-on affair with a forty-seven-year-old man she met on Yahoo, and she recently met a man on Match.com who showed up for their first date wearing a woman’s sun hat, slippers, and three purses. He invited her to accompany him to Norway to meet the Queen.

“You have to learn the rules,” she said. “But there are no rules.” More often than not, she initiates contact. “At my age, I have to.” She also feels that, in her profile, she has to shave a few years from her age and leave out the fact that she has a doctoral degree, having concluded that men are often scared off by it. She has gone online as a man, just to survey the terrain, and estimates that in her age range women outnumber men ten to one. “Men my age are grabbed up immediately by friends,” she said. “Or else they believe that younger women are more interested in sex.

“I’ve learned, forget about writing,” she said. “Meet a person as soon as you can. Anyway, the profiles you read, they’re like bathtubs. There’s no variation.”

The card's in the mail ....

....or at least I hope it will be soon.

The Christmas letter I'm promising myself I'll get together this year and send the old-fashioned way.

Like I have every year for the last 17. Except for last year.  When I somehow thought I'd exempted myself.  Because having a personal blog and a Facebook account seemed like a lot of personal sharing already.  Because after several unproductive Decembers in a row, I acknowledged I might be losing my ability (maybe my willingness?) to tie up loose ends from both a logistical and emotional perspective.

(This worried many folks who are used to hearing from me in postal-service fashion at the holidays. This worries me, generally.)

This year I have again begun to feel the same.  That familiar unproductive December dread creeping in.  Felt it last night at the company holiday party, being reminded I do OK in my achievements while still looking at all my colleagues and thinking how much more they achieved (and, perhaps, earned).  Knowing I've created my own worry by not having the family presents ready to mail to Minnesota until the USPS's arrive-by-Christmas deadline date....and that Sunday and Monday will contain an expected Nor'easter.  Admitting I have bought iced coffee from Dunkin' Donuts nearly every day in the last 17, which would mean having to admit The Year of Making Coffee was indeed not one of my 2010 accomplishments.

Yet, I'm fighting the dread.  So far it's been pushed back.  As of December 17, the project is still in process.  Last week I recruited Claudia over to my workplace to help with the photo-shoot component .... in which I would stand outside the Hancock and pretend to be Mary Tyler Moore throwing my hat up in ecstasy.

Throwing a hat in the air and catching it is quite a bit harder than Mary makes it look.  Especially in a wind tunnel.  It is even harder to capture it in a photo.

Although I'm coming to appreciate this shot (one of many Claudia made, my favorite) more for the way it actually illustrates my current state:  hurrying, disorganized, dropping, underdressed, high-heeled, balancing, recouping, trying to smile because if I don't in this season, I'm going to start worrying folks, and also because I know I need to laugh at my personal chaos so I don't start worrying myself.

Mid-(delayed)flight journal

Tonight I sat at the only bar in General Mitchell Airport in Milwaukee for a stretch, awaiting a 7:40 flight to Boston that I found, upon arriving at the gate to make my connection from Minneapolis, would not be leaving until 9:29.

(Thanks, Logan Air Traffic Control! Blessings, low cloud ceilings!
Disclaimer:  I wrote this entry before my 1:10 a.m. arrival at Logan .... along with, evidently, tens of thousands of other travelers also delayed. All needing taxis. Since I waited 15 minutes for said taxi. Paid $30 to go 4.3 miles in it. And got out at home to find my long-tended basil plant shredded and dead on the patio, knocked over by the same storm that kept me in Milwaukee. Still smiling. It's all good.)

My default in past flight delays is to take the Times, find an empty stool, find a full wineglass, get mellow. Tonight there was time enough for 2 glasses, sipped over 2 hours.

Not sure why the edge-removing buzz never materialized.

(Should be sad that I’m too old for this particular strategy?)

It would follow, then, that by the time I actually got on the flight, the chardonnay would have dulled into a dry throb behind both ears. The nap I took on the first flight would have banished sleepiness. The length of delay would have ensured that I read the Times from front to back ..... even the sections most often skipped, like the mid-A-section analysis of conditions in the Gaza Strip .... leaving me free of planned reading material. My checked luggage would contain my Advil stash.

And the 2 girls (mid-20s, first-job-ambitious-young-professional types, I’d guess) seated 2 rows behind would choose to start talking before takeoff. And talk through the ascent and the beverage distribution and the Midwest Airlines chocolate-chip cookies. We’ve been together in this space for 108 minutes now and there has been no break. It’s a hum without end. As if the coveted wine buzz skipped me entirely and hijacked their vocal chords. One is doing most of the talking, in a dull roar as if mimicking our plane’s engines; the second is also talking, but responding at regular intervals with a Beavis & Butthead laugh. (Heh-heh! Heh-heh! Heh-heh-heh!)

 Each of them also has a special love affair with the word “like.”

Girl 1:  “Like, you know, she was only like, you know, like not old enough to like, you know, know any better and, like, totally suspicious and like her boyfriend was, totally ....”

Girl 2:  “Heh-heh! Heh-heh! Heh-heh-heh!”

I can’t be the cranky lady who summons the flight attendant to request that she ask my neighbors to use their post-midnight “indoor” voices, can I?

Maybe I am. How did I not bring earphones? A novel? Tolerance of conversation? A sense of humor?

Hm.

Am glad, however, for this MacBook Pro and its vaunted 8-hour battery life. When writing gets in the groove, even the loudest thought and situational chaos can backseat.

I'm glad, too, for this $5 copy of Time magazine -- paid for in some desperation, running to the gate. Lev Grossman did a lengthy profile of (perhaps my favorite living) American writer, Jonathan Franzen, and did it superbly. So superbly, that reading it is what inspired me to get out my computer and turn off the bitching in my head.

I wanted to go into more analytical detail of some of Franzen's better quotes, but come now -- not at 30,000 feet and a wine headache. You can read the link yourself. But I will share this one that spoke to me, as much as it contradicted the specific situation in which it did the talking:

“The place of stillness that you have to go to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.”

Regret

of silly things said

on a Sunday,

some Mondays,

grips like a buttoned-up collar and

makes it hard

to enjoy the things

you force on yourself

(like singing Haydn's Mass in the Time of War at Old South,
on a whim)

because

maybe something whim-like will

blot some of it up,

but some Mondays

it still

cuts you off at the windpipe,

and at the same time

fuels even more memories of

wasted time,

and then you think

the next time

you won't waste your time.

But you did waste it

this time,

like you have in the past,

when you said you wouldn't

the next time.

Good times,

indeed.

Faith, fearlessness

Yesterday at work was ... a day.

The kind where you're doing your job the best you know how, all is well. 

Then at 4:30 something (out of your control, you might add) goes off-kilter, so someone in position of power who likes to yell decides to yell at you and demand action, so in frustration you make snide remarks across the file cabinet at the marketing rep, who gives it back as good as (if not better than) you, and by the time everyone chills it is 5:30 and the folks at Schwab have gone home and can't solve the problem anyway, and you're going to have to deal with it in the morning because you were the one who got yelled at in the first place.

I love waking up knowing the first thing I must do is solve the issue I didn't solve yesterday. It made me not want to get out of bed. In fact, I lay there an extra 15 minutes, praying for patience.
(Really. That's exactly what I prayed for. Perhaps God listens to whiners, because I eventually pried myself off the mattress.)

It was only as I stood in the shower, staring at the tile with deadened eyes, that the revelation came:

I'm decent at my job.  I've solved 100,000 problems while at it.  I must have faith that I will also solve this one. Neither my co-workers nor my clients need to see my fear.

(There's this great pose in yoga called Natarajasana, or dancer's pose, where you grab the foot of your back leg with one hand and lean forward so your back foot arches up over your head, while you thrust your front hand forward with fingers stretched.   In the class I currently take, the teacher works us into this pose and, as we're balancing and leaning, murmurs in a way that makes you want to giggle and lose it, "Natarajasana ... the pose of fearlessness!" Although I don't lose it.)

Well, that thought got me out of the shower, anyway.  It did also get me into the kitchen to make coffee.  And onto my bike alongside the dozens of UPS vans and MBTA buses heading full-speed into the Back Bay on East Berkeley .... another balancing act that requires some fearlessness.

And I realized I had that, too.

Let's see how these two qualities get me through this day.

Post #601: Walking

A pretty morning in Boston.

Decided to forego the zippiness of a bike commute.  Walked instead. 

(Even though I am kind of a zippy walker.)

In riding the 9 to work, I pretty much only notice how slow we roll and hear only the rumbling motor. When driving, I can only impatiently focus on the impatience of pedestrians who show no doubt as to their entitlement.  When biking, it's all about watching for potholes and avoiding death.

When walking, I find myself just listening and seeing.  Listening, mostly this morning, to motors -- of leaf blowers and electric hammers and (yes, you can't escape) buses accelerating through intersections. 

And walking up Berkeley, about to turn at Stuart Street, I saw a woman carrying a bookbag printed with this:

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History *

Which of course made me wonder why, as I am so poorly behaved with my late nights and cereal cravings and weakness of engaging online with college boys and their lousy come-ons ...  I am not more famous.

Although, maybe if I just go on with my bad self ** I will be?

* From Harvard historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, winner of the Pulitizer Prize.  Whose husband I sang with in a choral group, not knowing of  her prominence. 

** Happy 600-blogpost milestone to me, BTW. 

Post #553

Tuesday, May 4 came and went.

Gov. Patrick lifted the Great Boston Boil-Water Order of 2010.

Pamela Anderson was kicked off Dancing With the Stars.

The Times Square bomber was arrested.

I was working the first day of work after a 3-day weekend in Minnesota, and if I look back at my work e-mail from that day .... well, the day pretty much happened to suck lumps of used cat litter.

I recall being ridiculously tired.

To boot, I was feeling particularly lumpy that day after having eaten 8 servings of Reeses Pieces on the plane-ride home the night before, and thusly wrote a post about needing to achieve washboard abs while wearing a plaid Victoria's Secret bikini 6 weeks hence, and further declaring that Weight Watchers was going to start. Right. That. Moment.

It's unfortunate that in this world drama and world of self-drama, I skipped right over the most narcissistic reason I should have been writing that day.  Namely, what I had written in Post #277 365 days prior ..... and Post #1 730 days prior to that.

Yes.  I forgot my own 2-year anniversary of this blog.

In fact, I forgot it for 2 weeks. 

And only remembered it today at, seriously, about 2 p.m., while plowing down the Comm Ave Mall on my daily 2-Weight Watchers-Activity-Points power walk.

Maybe this is all a good excuse to drop everything and go for a beer.

Done (writing)

tonight.

I think

I wrote

200 e-mails

today

(that dealt with at least

100 issues

during the

11 hours

spent at the office,

most of those writing),

and while

such productivity

(and of course the need for it) is

good for business,

it's surely

bad for blogging,

because at this hour,

all I want to do is

drink my Guinness and

take an Advil and

sleep,

since

in not so many hours

I must get up

and write

200 more e-mails,

probably.

Cheers.

6 Minutes, 37 Seconds (and Brahms)

So it's Friday night and all my bills are paid and my 2010 census form mailed and I've got drinks plans later and lunch plans tomorrow and a new dresser (!) to assemble and a bike to buy (and new Asics and an Easter dress, too) and to find and a rehearsal to attend and some website edits to do for Mike's campaign websites and a Palm Sunday service at which to sing Bach, but no dates and no real pressure to do anything except for these tasks I've placed on myself, which is both a relief and a drag because I definitely do better with deadlines and I can see myself on Monday in self-flagellating mode because I haven't finished them ...

.... but, as you can tell, I don't have much else to blog about tonight, or else I wouldn't have challenged myself to list out these details all in the 6 minutes 37 seconds it took Martha Argerich to tear through the Brahms Rhapsody in G minor, the only piano piece I can perform from memory at a concert level because I learned it in 1994 for my junior recital and still play it hard every couple of weeks, and if I were truly ambitious, part of my weekend would include rehearsing this piece so that I, too, could put my version on YouTube, or other pieces, so that after 17 years I would indeed have something else to play.

Zen aspirations

Woke up this morning
before the alarm,
sweaty and aggravated,
still mentally in a dream
that felt so real and
still needing to be dealt with
(at a musical revue,
supposed to be in charge
but there was no program order and
no music to play from and
no one to tell me what any of it should be)
and
it took a couple minutes to realize that
indeed it was a dream and that
I'm usually smarter than my dreams
(and sometimes even more capable?)
and that dealing with
idiosyncracies at the office
and a
first stab at pilates
and a
friend's political campaign meeting
followed by
a beer out, again, with Southie Med
(this time at esteemable Quenchers Tavern on I Street)
are all going to be easier than
that dream
and that
it would probably behoove me to
just be
chill
about
them all.

Lazy writer's acrostic

Because sometimes you have days when
Every necessary task is
Hard and
Inevitably
Not
Doable, you might then

Obviously feel no guilt in using
Nifty poetic devices to try and

Explain how
Very
Easy it is to
Regret letting these tasks pile up in
Your brain and on your desk and in your laundry, and
That you can't remember how and when you seemed to
Have forgotten how to focus
In the
Necessary ways it takes to
Get through a day

!

Thankful (Redux) ...

.... for 69 degrees and sunny in December, even though simultaneously frightening ....

.... for Glenn Gould's existence and what he does to Bach's Bb Major Partita No 2 ....

.... for the no-news-is-good-news news from the doctor appointment yesterday ....

.... for Joy & Brian and Nick & Kelly and Lisa & Sam and Christine & Mark and your other (seemingly hundreds of) friends whose babies are being born healthy this month ...

.... for other friends who invite you for walks on lunch hours, others who invite you to their home for a Nepalese feast, for still others who agree to spend a Saturday baking Christmas cookies for homebound folks from church ....

.... for another friend who knows where all the last calls are and meets you at one, who buys you the $13 martini, then stands on the street in Brattle Square and listens to your historical litany of bad-romance-and oversexed-inconsiderate-male stories and laughs with you until 3:25 a.m. on a Friday morning, without himself acting the part of oversexed-inconsiderate male, then after making sure you get home OK, texts again at 3:55 to invite you back out for diner breakfast at IHOP ....

.... for the miraculous ability to function at work on 4 hours sleep, which only manifests when the lack of rest seems to have actually rejuvenated you ...

.... and for whatever inspires an attitude adjustment that allows you to balance out the cosmos and remedy the bad mood of a day before and enter the weekend with equanimity.

Thank you. Peace out.

Confidence (a.k.a 28)

It's a confidence kind of day when,
heading out to grab a late lunch,
a girl steps into an elevator with a man
in a button-down and top-siders who looks,
oh,
about 28 and well put-together
(but not too much so),
and rides down with him
while checking out his reflection in the mirrored doors,
not saying anything
in those 28 seconds it takes to go 28 floors
(in part because he really isn't her type),
(in part because who really ever talks to strangers in elevators
but in erotic literature or Aerosmith videos),
but believing that
if she had had a few more ounces of confidence and
he was indeed her type,
she indeed might have said something as easy as
"plans for the weekend?", and,
in part because
he was also checking out her reflection
(she could see),
he might have at least smiled at her chutzpah
before he stepped out.