Archive for category A muse
The fix
I meant to write here to say that I found my fix, my change-junkie fix. I switched up my career again, back to journalism, which given macro trends is pretty counter to, well, everything.
And the job is great. And I could, if I was noble enough, write an earnest post about how thankful I am to be back in journalism at this crucial time with an opportunity to take a run at a new business model. All that is great.
But what really motivated me to write is @fightingfinn. She wrote recently about her One and Only. It was heartfelt and lovely and I could so relate.
I am sitting next to my own One and Only right now. He’s watching the Charlie Brown Christmas Special for the second time this season and keeps laughing his head off.
My husband is going to come home from walking the dog and be mad at me for paying another the $2.99 to Comcast to view this very ’70s, vaguely religious show for the second time. But Judson is laughing so hard he can’t even sit still. Belly laughs. Repeating every line with his own spin.
And as much as I always say I don’t want to be a mommy blogger, it’s this kid that keeps rising to the top of my priority and interest list.
Now that I work downtown I have occasion to pick Judson up at school on foot and walk with him to the bus stop to catch the bus home. Both of us enjoy it more than the exercise warrants. (I’ve always liked public transportation. I know, it’s odd.)
Tonight we barely missed a bus and Judson cried real tears, inconsolable, taking it personally that the bus hadn’t waited for us. A few minutes later another bus showed up and he was squealing with delight. “IT’S A FOURTEEN!” he shouted. A weary commuter smiled and said, “I feel the same way.”
Experiencing the highs and lows of the everyday is probably more painful than it needs to be but I’d rather feel more than not at all.
Also: If I could make my ringtone the sound of my kid’s belly laugh? I’d totally do it.
Regret
I don’t have many regrets.
That may sound trite but it’s true. First, I am more likely to regret something I have done than regret something I haven’t. When I’m in doubt about whether or not to do something I usually do it. Second, I don’t usually regret the maybe-less-than-optimal decisions I’ve made because I tend to believe that all the flubs and mis-steps got me here, and here ain’t bad. Sort of like that Poi Dog Pondering song, “Thanksgiving.”
But I was thinking about this the other night, trying to come up with some things I regret not doing and I landed on a few.
The first is easy. In the mid-90s I was living in San Francisco with an office job and roommates and a boyfriend. A typical mid-20s existence that I desperately wanted to escape. I wanted to be a real writer, a journalist, an adventurer — really anything that had to do with exotic locations and the romance of words.
So one day I received in the mail an amateurish type-written flier inviting me to join a group of writers, rogues and literary-types for heavy drinking and a Liar’s Dice tournament in North Beach. It was something close to those exact words.
I held it in my hands, it was printed on sea foam green copy paper. I was fascinated: not only did I dream of hanging out with writers, rogues and literary-types, but I adored Liar’s Dice. I was good at it. I all but looked over my shoulder as I read the invitation again. Who was it from? How did they get my name, my address? There wasn’t a clue.
The thing I loved most about living in San Francisco was the possibility that anything could happen on any given day. It was foggy and expensive and, granted, I’ve never lived in New York, but San Fransico had glamor lurking on every block, legends both established and emerging and just enough intimacy to throw people together in unexpected ways.
The Liar’s Dice invite vibrated with potential. I pictured a clubby dive bar packed with all the best writers in town, dice rattling and pints draining.
And I didn’t go.
I didn’t even go.
Stinson
The lagoon at Stinson Beach was glassy, reflecting the perfect sky. Robed in fog one morning, but clear the rest. Rambling modern houses crowded its bank, dipping docks into the water, trailing canoes and kayacks.
We sat, lounging on well-worn outdoor furniture or stretching out on its padding on the weathered deck, and talked. For four days straight.
It’s what we do. Friends since the furniture was new. Or at least newer.
We met early in our 20s, some of us even earlier: awkward teenagers finding our way in dorm-life college. Over the decades we have fought and forgiven. We cheer each other’s strenghts and make jokes of our own weaknesses.
It isn’t therapy, these days at the beach. We’re as likely to gossip about celebrities as we are to mention our own lives. We pick up conversation threads from when we last spoke, though now the interim has been filled in some with online updates.
We watch paddlers and fishing pelicans.
We don’t tell each other everything. But there is a comfort in knowing that we could.
New realities
I was at a conference last month.
I’ve spent many hours of the last decade in conferences of one sort or another. Mostly as a journalist where sometimes I was there to get a story and sometimes just there to learn about what the next story might be. I remember spending a day at a conference at the Wharton School of Business and coming home feeling like my head had literally expanded because I had learned so much there.
Other times I’ve sat in conferences and let the spoken words wash over me as I used the time to do other things. Sort ideas, plan logistics, imagine romantic conversations, scan the room for familiar faces.
But at this last conference I went to, I realized those days are gone. I sat in the back with my laptop, catching up on some email, grateful for the wi-fi access. When I finally looked up, I marveled at all the bent heads. Was anyone paying attention to the lecture? Doing more than glancing at the images on the screen between squinting at the one on their Blackberry?
Even during the break it seemed different than the, well, old days. Sure there was still glad-handing, still obligatory hello’s when you bumped into someone at the coffee urn. But smart phones are also wielded like security blankets: Don’t talk to me right now, please, I’m picking up an urgent message, I’m needed elsewhere. I actually had a guy sit next to me at lunch chiming in boisterously on a conference call while he polished off his salad and started in on the chicken.
It strikes me as odd.
Then something else happened. My husband was laid off from his job. It was a wrenching event for our family but nothing unusual. All of us are staring down economic uncertainty in one way or another.
But the upheaval has introduced a certain amount of uncertainty — which, I have to admit, I find ridiculously exciting in some ways. For example, there is a job possibility for M. in an exotic, far-away city and me, being the change junkie, I’m all for it.
So I of course get all ahead of myself and start poking around online and find the blog of a mother of a toddler who has moved to that city from the Western United States for her husband’s job.
And I start reading. And I keep going until I have read all of the posts. And I’ve developed strong opinions about this person. I have agreed with her and disagreed. I have met her friends and gotten to know intimate details about her family. I have judged her adaptation to this new life and considered how I might do things differently. I have conjured up advice I might give her (but never left a comment on her pages) and considered whether we might be friends if we became neighbors despite our many differences.
While the potential job has receded into the rear view mirror as a crazy idea we once tossed around. I still find myself checking this woman’s blog. I feel sad that one day I’ll probably stop reading. I think I might miss her.
And that strikes me as odd.
Obsolescence
chirp
The first time you hear it, you’re never sure. Is that what I think it is? I am, of course awake, listening to the winter wind and rain pound the side of the house, wishing I could sleep. My mind, wanders aimlessly as I wait.
chirp
Yes. Yes it is. The smoke alarm. The one in the hallway. That ridiculous relic of 1970′s-era technology. Why do we still need smoke alarms?
I remember my childhood best friend, a spunky redhead named Sharon Sue, solemnly showing me a a collapsible ladder she kept under the bed of her second-floor room. Its box had a picture of a blond woman in her quilted bathrobe, clutching a toddler and climbing down the ladder from a window with flames shooting out of it, a fireman with sideburns waiting for her on the ground below.
The danger of fire somehow seemed real then in a way it doesn’t now. Especially in soggy Portland where everyone in my house (except occasionally the dog) sleeps on the ground floor within inches of a window.
chirp
Nice. Not quite loud enough to wake my sleeping husband but just enough to keep me from drifting off, back to sleep.
I know. One is supposed to replace the batteries of these ridiculous smoke alarms every year. But it seems wasteful to change out a battery before it’s done and, frankly, I’m lazy.
It’s only a matter of time before smoke alarms will seem quaint. Soon we’ll all live in smart houses with brilliant appliances and high-speed everything. The house won’t need a fire alarm because it will know better than to actually catch on fire.
chirp
I mean, I downloaded the new Firefox today and found the whole process rather cumbersome even though the download was snappy and the install painless. I mean shouldn’t my laptop just know there’s a new version of my browser and do all that on it’s own?
Then I start thinking about shrink-wrapped boxes of software on the shelves of stores like CompUSA. Yes, smoke detectors are going the way of shrink wrap. Yes, the way, as they say, of the poor, flightless Dodo.
chirp!
Is it getting more insistent. And annoying.
I picture getting up, dragging a chair over to the floor beneath my bane and reaching up to wrench it off the ceiling, opening the back door and tossing it outside. Yes, I suppose I could just replace the battery, but the chances of me figuring out how to take out the old one, let alone locating the proper replacement battery somewhere in the house are about equal with the odds of me, oh I don’t know, becoming a celebrated opera singer.
But I have to do something. So I wake up Mike. He gets up, pees, and stands listening in the middle of the room. For at least a minute.
The chirping, it seems, has stopped on its own.
Endings
I didn’t even consider how apropos it is to write about endings this time of year until I just typed that title. So please don’t think I’m cheesy.
Endings are the most difficult part of every story. It’s much easier to wrap up a story with an “And that’s my story,” or “Tah-dah,” or even “The End” than it is to think of a true ending.
But it’s reflective of life isn’t it? The endings are never so clear cut. The calendar may say January 1 but the load of laundry I put in the drier last year will stay there until I take it out and fold it, I still need to lose 15 pounds, my desktop is still a mess and I’m still a mom, wife, friend, employee of the same cast of characters. Where’s the ending?
Relationships do end. But they seldom have a well-defined ending. Any breakup I’ve ever been a party to has happened in fits and starts. Despite the declarative statements there is often breakup sex and more often tearful phone calls. The shorter the entanglement the easier the clean break. But the longer the plot line of the relationship the harder it is to write a suitable kicker.
As a newspaper reporter, the easiest way I found to close a story was to give someone the last word. I’d dig through my notebook and find a suitably pithy, summing-up quote and I’d use it as the final words of the story. It was a crutch that I resolved one year to abandon, so I pushed deadlines to the limit trying to write my own suitable closing lines, which were so often, well, bad. When I had copy editors calling me at home at night to suggest changing my endings to close with a quote instead, I abandoned my quest.
Who knows, maybe it’s just me who finds endings tricky, arduous and elusive. After all in my first year as a flack, the loss of my first account brought me to breakup-worthy tears (the been-jilted kind).
For example, right now I’m struggling with how to end this post. This post that few will read and fewer will remember. Because it seems to me I had a point to make when I started here or at least thought I’d find my way to one by the time I got here.
Tah-dah?